A suggestion by Leon Edel that attention ought to be paid to the way a biography is constructed—the way the life is told rather than the way the life was lived—first sparked my interest in a small group of biographers who also happened to be novelists. Later, reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, I was intrigued by Professor Alan Shelston’s notion that it was Gaskell’s training as a novelist that prompted her daringly frank account of the eccentricities of Brontë’s father, the Rev. Patrick Brontë, the excesses of her brother, Branwell Brontë, and the indiscretions of Branwell’s lover, Lydia Robinson. That seemed to me a sensible idea, and I wondered whether other novelists had followed Gaskell’s lead, despite the disastrous reception her book received.

Novelists have of course been making the transition between these genres with some regularity: Defoe, Scott, Cooper, Stevenson, James, Forster, Woolf, Maurois, Sartre, Waugh, and Nabokov all tried their hand at writing lives. But the fact that none of them (with the exception of Maurois, whose claims as a novelist are slight) has been remembered as a biographer suggests that the transition may not always be an easy or successful one. Could its difficulty be attributed to the novelist’s tendency to adapt the techniques of fiction to the writing of biography? That also seemed to me a sensible idea.

After taking a close look at biographies by Henry James, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf, as well as Gaskell’s, I found