The Role of the Narrator in Literary Biography

"The Imperative of Narrative in Literary Biography": This essay discusses elements of creativity that distinguish literary biography as a literary genre in its own right—different from history, different from fiction, but one that requires the skills both of the researcher and of the artist to reach its full potential. Chiefly, Middlebrook argues, it requires the invention of a narrator who serves as a contemporary guide to the materials of the book, telling the life as a story. This narrator may be presented in the first person, or be entirely "transparent"; but either way, the narrator is a fully literary creation designed as a channel of subjectivity through which the historical materials of the biography are delivered to readers. Middlebrook draws her examples from Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft; Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell, A Biography; and Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey.