“The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that develops through the course of a life-story and that can be conclusively described, breaks down, to a great extent, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at a time… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
“Johnson argued that the most truthful life-writing is when ‘the writer tells his own story’, since only he knows the whole truth about himself. (He does not use the word ‘autobiography’, which only came into circulation in the early 19th century.) Those who write about another may want to over-praise him or ‘aggravate his infamy’; those who write about themselves,… — Hermione Lee Copy Share
“I lost count of the incidences of "We can imagine" or "It is safe to imagine" or "We can speculate" or "We can picture her" or — most revealingly — "I like to imagine": "Among all the letters that were destroyed, there was one, I like to imagine, that expressed Lucia’s gratitude to her father for persisting in his belief… — Hermione Lee Copy Share
“Biographers are not usually as explicit as philosophers such as Plato, Wittgenstein, Austin, or Moore on questions of the existence of an essential self, the extent to which a life can be lived according to a philosophical system, or the relation between acts and emotions. That is not their job – unless they are writing the Life of a philosopher.… — Hermione Lee Copy Share
Writing a biography is not a love affair. It’s not a marriage. It’s a job, it’s a piece of work. — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
“The belief in a definable, consistent self, an identity that develops through the course of a life-story and that can be conclusively described, breaks… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
“From Tudor to eighteenth-century England, there are many instances of women writers with no place or room of their own. The life-story of the… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as… — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
Some cynical biographer said to me, Make sure it's a good death. Make sure you're not picking someone who just declined. — Hermione Lee Copy Share Image
