Hermione Lee @ Edinburgh Book Festival, 20 Aug
Virginia Woolf, archivists, scurrilous gossip... it's all in a day's work for a biographer, as Hermione Lee tells us at the Edinburgh International Book Festival
"That was brilliant," someone said as we left the auditorium. "I want to spend the whole evening with her." Such is the power of Hermione Lee, delivering an absolutely sumptuous talk on the heart of literary biography. Picking three themes from her three big books, Lee explored a little of what a biographer does, and what makes her task such a peculiar one.
Peculiarity begins in the archives. Some archivists see biographers as intruders, and treat the material as their own; something to be fiercely protected. Others will bring to the biographer's desk – in reverent, gloved hands – one sheet of paper at a time, at an hourly rate. The enthusiastic ones will shower you with more material than you can possibly manage – and everything is undoubtedly in various state of disorder.
The first thing a biographer looks for: gossip. The subject, in this case? Virginia Woolf. Sifting through paper archives in search of her most cutting pronouncements on the Bloomsbury set throws up all sorts of cutting remarks, meticulously recorded and precise. Perhaps the most interesting letters are those between Virginia’s friends – showing how daunting she is, how visiting her for tea is like stepping into a novel, how her conversation is conducted in perfect literary sentences.
The second: pictures. For who, as Lee asks, doesn’t first turn to the pictures when they pick up a biography? And the pictures of Edith Wharton’s houses tell us a lot about her: vast mansions to which servants must be sent a week in advance, to open the windows and air the beds. Wharton is preoccupied with facades – and her houses, it seems, give us ways into her works.
The third: obscure drudgery. Penelope Fitzgerald, perhaps the hardest of all Lee’s subjects. Fitzgerald is in perpetual retreat from her work – always cutting herself out of the narratives she explores. She was an exceptional biographer in her own right – but to get to the heart of Fitgerald, Lee had to look to the materials that went into her work: notebooks, annotated teaching texts, essays. As Lee is keen to point out, however, it isn’t about finding the similarities between life and work – ‘Lady Y is Character X in this novel’ – but about finding the differences, the disguises, the distortions that these writers put into their fiction.
The heart of biography, it seems, is a search through a tangle of contradictions in a mess of lives, where the finest, sparkling details are to be found in the most unlikely places. Lee finishes as she began, with a quote from Fitzgerald: ‘If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching’. For many in the audience, that now means searching for more talks, and books, by Hermione Lee.
Hermione Lee was speaking at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 20 Aug