Biography Today: A Commentary

Abstract

Are we living in a ‘golden age’ of biography? This extended commentary on biography today concludes that we probably are. Based on a selection of recent significant biographies, mostly Australian, a long association with the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and personal experience, it offers a perspective on the enhanced status of biography, highlights the widening scope and inclusiveness of the genre, and notes its increasingly porous boundaries. Problems of innovation are considered as well as achievements. Some current issues and expectations are also addressed. An awareness that the collapse of ‘grand narratives’ in the 1970s has created new opportunities for biography underpins the argument.

Notes

¹Jane Chance,‘Medieval Women’, in Companion to Women's Historical Writing, ed. Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys and Barbara Caine (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 341–2.

²Donald Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans, From 1800 to the Present (London: Harper Press, 2006), 491–6.

³A. M. Gibbs, Bernard Shaw, a one-volume biography published by UNSW Press, Sydney, in 2005, has the great merit from a local point of view of uncovering Shaw's Tasmanian connections.

⁴For some of many prior comments on Franklin's attitudes to sex and on religion, see Stella Miles Franklin. A Life (Pymble, NSW: Fourth Estate, 2008), 173 and Index, Christian Science.

⁵Geoffrey Blainey, ‘The Hancock Express’, Australian Literary Review (1 September 2010): 6–7, which rightly deems ‘A Three-Cornered Life … one of the very best Australian biographies of a mind at work’, regrets the years spent on South African biography. Brenda Niall, Life Class: The Education of a Biographer (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 2007), 169 ff. The findings of Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800–1975 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), have considerable bearing on the Australian experience.

⁶Patricia Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History, 1840–1918 (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, c. 2002), and Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia (Sydney, UNSW Press, 2005); Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997).

⁷ Stella Miles Franklin, 232–3, 42; Beverley Kingston,’ The Lady and the Australian Girl: Some thoughts on nationalism and class’, in Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives, eds. Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986), 27–41.

⁸ The Oxford Book of Australian Schooldays, eds. Brenda Niall and Ian Britain with Pamela Williams (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997). Recent theses of which I am personally aware include Robyn Arrowsmith, ‘Australian WWII war brides in America: Their memories and experiences’ (Macquarie University, 2010) and Jennifer A. Jones, ‘Old Age in a Young Colony: Image and Experience in South Australia in the Nineteenth Century’ (University of Adelaide, 2010).

⁹On Lord Beauchamp, see ADB, vol. 6/www.adbonline.anu.edu.au, also The Governors of New South Wales, eds. David Clune and Ken Turner (Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, 2009), chapter 20, by Graham Freudenberg; Chris Cunneen, ‘Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle’, ts. 18–19, in The ADB's Story (Canberra: ANU E-Press, Biography Series, 2011, in press, titles provisional), and pers. comm., 20 December 2010.

¹⁰Full lists for all contributors and their contributions to the ADB are available on-line.

¹¹Felicity Plunkett, ‘Busybodies? Voyeurs? Time to get a life’, Australian Literary Review (20 June 2010): 20–1.

¹²Anna Goldsworthy, Piano Lessons (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009), 3. I thank Mary Spongberg for making a copy of Biography and History available to me during the final stage of revision of this article.

¹³Sheila Fitzpatrick and Jill Roe in conversation, Gleebooks, Sydney, 19 August 2010.

¹⁴Susan Magarey and Kerrie Round, Roma the First: A Biography of Dame Roma Mitchell (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2007), 262–6.

¹⁵Sylvia Martin, Ida Leeson: A Life (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2006). The film ‘Citizen Kane’ opens with a death-bed scene/mystery; I thank Chris Cunneen for this example. See also Peter Read's approach to the life of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams in Tripping over Feathers: Scenes in the Life of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams: A Narrative of the Stolen Generation (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2009).

¹⁶Particular difficulties may arise with transnational biography, e.g. access to research materials, sources of publication, and readership.

¹⁷These matters are canvassed in the concluding chapter of Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Reading (London: Reaktion Books, 2003).

¹⁸National Biography Award website: Day of Discussion, F(f)ame and Glory, 23 March 2002.

¹⁹Susan Wyndham, Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) (4 December 2010): 31.

²⁰National Biography Award website: Day of Discussion, session 3.

²¹David Marr, ‘Patrick White's return from the pit’, SMH, 3 November 2006, 1; Veronica Brady, South of My Days: A biography of Judith Wright (Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1998), and Fiona Capp, ‘In the Garden’, The Monthly Essay, June 2009, and see My Blood's Country (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 4–5, 164–5.

²²Hermione Lee, Biography A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 63.

²³National Biography Award website, Day of Discussion, sessions 1–2, esp. Ashley Hay, Dorothy Rowe.

²⁴Niall, Life Class, xi.