Too Far for Comfort

The dynamic between the biographer and the subject is, perhaps, one of the most fascinating aspects of biography as a genre. How does the biographer stage the illusion that is the narrative life, the illusion that the subject assumes a living form through words? In contrast to purely fictional forms, biography writing does not allow total freedom to the biographer in this creative act. Ideally, a biography`s backbone is structured by accurate historical facts. But its spirit lies elsewhere. The way a biographer captures the spirit of a subject is intriguingly shaped by the historical distance between the two. We find three types of distance in biographical narrative: First, where the biographer and the subject personally know one another; second, where the biographer is a near contemporary of the subject; and third, where biographer and subject are distinctly separated; in some cases, by hundreds of years. In this revised and expanded edition, Rana Tekcan explores how some of the most accomplished biographers manage to recreate "e;life"e; across time and space. She looks at their illusionary art through the narrative strategies in Samuel Johnson`s Life of Savage, James Boswell`s Life of Johnson, Lytton Strachey`s Eminent Victorians, Michael Holroyd`s Lytton Strachey, Park Honan`s Jane Austen, and Andrew Motion`s Keats.