Writing Early Medieval Biography

Abstract

Biography is an ancient genre. You've only to think of Plutarch and Suetonius, and the collections 'On Illustrious Men' and even 'On Illustrious Women'. Christianity had its own particular form in hagiography. All these works described exemplary lives. When Leslie Stephen conceived the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. 1 came out in 1885), he had in mind something similarly monumental. What he assembled, after huge labours (he wrote a great many of the entries himself), were public lives, suitably censored, mostly reverential, as exemplary, in their Victorian way, as Plutarch's. In Eminent Victorians (1918), using biography to expose the private, Lytton Strachey was reacting in self-conscious modernity against the DNB. Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen's daughter, called biography 'a bastard, an impure art'. She unerringly identified the biographer's dilemma, in doing 'two incompatible things'.