Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Harold Nicolson and the Aesthetics of the Subject in the New Biography

Abstract

The New Biography emerged in the 1920s and 1930s under the impulse of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Harold Nicolson. Although their appreciation of each other varied, these writers read and influenced each other’s work; they formulated similar conceptualisations of biography, giving strength to Woolf’s idea of a ‘new school of biographies’ (Woolf 1927, 475). In recent years, researchers such as Max Saunders and Laura Marcus have asserted the importance of the New Biography in understanding and reassessing the status of auto/biographical forms in modernist texts. This paper seeks to show that the New Biography developed a specific aesthetics of the biographical subject, contributing to the politics of the modernist self in the early twentieth century. I argue that this aesthetics is mainly motivated by the centrality of personality and the necessarily subjective perception of that personality. In these narratives, personality is the main plot device, driving the story forward, and providing a rationale for the life trajectory. It is a common practice to define the modernist self in terms of its de-centredness and its fragmented nature, and this clarifies why the New Biographers sought to find techniques that create oblique and blurred visualisations of their subjects. Visuality, in this paper, concerns perspective and the biographer’s staging of the performance of perception, as mirrored in the eyes of secondary subjects, and in those of the biographer him/herself. Anchoring my study to the theories of historian and philosopher Frank Ankersmit on the assessment of truth in historical representations, I argue that this mirror effect is used by the New Biographers to highlight the constructedness of all visions of the subject. This subsequently subverts the reliability of the narrative, but also accounts for the artistic dimension of the biography, and intensifies the complex interconnections between literature and historiography.