Despite my previous attempts, Footsteps (1984) and Sidetracks (2000), autobiography has always seemed to me a perilous enterprise. So this book (the third in the trilogy) has grown slowly and tentatively out of many drafts and revisions. Most chapters began as separate lectures, short articles or introductions, but finally I took courage and transformed them into something more extended and much more personal. They are offered as an inside account of one particular biographer at work, but also include the experience (and the history) of many others that I have admired. In the end the book has become a sort of eulogy: a celebration of a form, an art, and a vocation that I have intensely loved over more than forty years, and which I still do not entirely understand.
I have deliberately let it unfold without preface or comment, as a series of linked – and frequently overlapping – biographer’s tales, which tell their own story but build towards a larger picture. Some are confessional, some scientific, some mischievous, some riskily pedagogic, some passionately concerned to restore or revalue controversial reputations. But all present reflections on the vital, elusive idea of biographical truth, and the many imaginative ways in which it can be pursued. The result I hope is a biographer’s declaration of faith: the pursuer pursued.
A first version of ‘Travelling’ was tried out as the 2014 Leon Levy Biography Lecture at the City University of New York, and later in the New York Review of Books. ‘Experimenting’ had a typically long gestation, beginning as a lecture for the Smithsonian Institution, Washington (2010); then expanded as a paper on ‘Romantic Knowledge’ for the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (2014); then partly published in The Era of Experiments and the Age of Wonder, edited by Lilla Vekerdy, Dibner Library and the Smithsonian Institution, Scholarly Press (2015); then rewritten again for this book.
‘Teaching’ began as a brief essay for Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, edited by Peter France and William St Clair, British Academy Press, Oxford University Press (2002). ‘Forgetting’ first appeared in Memory: An Anthology, edited by Harriet Harvey Wood and A.S. Byatt, Chatto & Windus (2008). ‘Ballooning’ was first launched as a brief essay for Intelligent Life, edited by Maggie Fergusson, The Economist (2013), but inflated and finally landed here.
‘Margaret Cavendish’ began as a short article on women and the Royal Society for the Guardian in 2010. ‘Zélide’, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ and ‘William Blake Rediscovered’ drew on the Introductions to my series ‘Classic Biographies’, HarperPerennial (2004 and 2005). Early drafts of three chapters appeared in the New York Review of Books as ‘Madame de Staël’, ‘John Keats’ and ‘William Blake’. ‘Mary Somerville’ began as a historical article on women and science in Nature, The International Weekly Journal of Science, Macmillan Publishers Ltd (2015).
‘Shelley Undrowned’ first appeared in Interrupted Lives, edited by Andrew Motion, National Portrait Gallery, London (2004). ‘Thomas Lawrence Revarnished’ began as an Introduction to Thomas Lawrence Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London (2010). ‘Coleridge Misremembered’ is adapted from an early lecture, ‘The Coleridge Experiment’, in The Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1998), and is about lecturing itself.
For all kinds of encouragement and advice I am hugely grateful to Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books; and also to Richard Cohen, author of Chasing the Sun (2010); and William St Clair, author of The Reading Nation (2004).
My warmest personal thanks go to Dan Frank, my editor at Pantheon, New York, especially for his discussion of confessions; to my dear friend and colleague Professor Jon Cook of the University of East Anglia and the Guardian Masterclasses; Professor Kathryn Hughes, my one-time fellow tutor on the UEA Life Writing MA; Dr Lara Feigel, director of the Centre for Life Writing Research, King’s College, London; Professor Hermione Lee, now President of Wolfson College, Oxford; Professor Christoph Bode of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Barbara Kiser, my editor at Nature; and David and Heather Godwin, my spirited supporters at DGA. Thanks also to Douglas Matthews, my heroic indexer.
Above all I am grateful for my marvellous, patient, faithful team at William Collins: Arabella Pike, to whom this book is most affectionately dedicated; and to Helen Ellis, Robert Lacey, Joe Zigmond and Becky Morrison. Finally to my beloved novelist Rose Tremain, who has made the whole pursuit worthwhile, I send my truly heartfelt thanks (as also for the loan of Sir Robert Merivel).