Biography and

UNIT 1 BIOGRAPHY AND Autobiography: An

Introduction
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: AN
INTRODUCTION
Structure
1.0 Objectives
1.1 Introduction
1.2 What is Biography?
1.3 Origin and Development of Biography
1.4 Forms of Biography
1.5 Autobiography
1.6 Let Us Sum Up
1.7 Answers to Check Your Progress

1.0 OBJECTIVES
We shall discuss the characteristics of biography and autobiography in this Unit.
If you read this Unit carefully, you will be able to:
outline the various aspects of biography;
describe the origins and development of biography;
define the forms of biography and autobiography;
explain the features of autobiography:
describe the differences between biography and autobiography.

1.1 INTRODUCTION
We have already discussed some forms of prose in the previous Blocks. In this
Unit, we shall give you a brief introduction to biography and autobiography. We
shall discuss autobiography as a form of prose in some detail in the next two
Units by taking up passages from two-famous autobiographies. We will also
give you adequate exposure to a biography and will also highlight the differences
between the two.

Biographical literature is a very old form of human expression. It attempts to

recreate the life of an individual by drawing upon either memory, written or oral
evidence, or even pictures. While biography is the record of someone else’s life,
autobiography is the story of one’s own life written in the first person. In the
following sections you will find out more about the differences between the two
forms.

We expect you to read each section carefully and then attempt the exercises. You
can then turn to the end of the Unit to check if your answers are correct.

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Biography and Autobiography
1.2 WHAT IS BIOGRAPHY?
What is Biography?

We know that biography as a literary form is the written story of the life of an
individual. Is this story ‘true’ or ‘fictional’? Should it be written in prose or
verse? Are there any special methods by which this story can be written? Before
we examine these questions at some length, let us define biography. Broadly, it
may be defined as a truthful account of the life of an individual, written in prose.
A biography is the life of an individual as opposed to a group. While it may
depict several characters, these are depicted only in relation to the individual
whose life is being recreated. In short, the focus is always on the individual. A
biography must be a truthful account. But while a good biography must be factual
it must also be something more. It must have literary value. Now we might well
ask: in what does this literary value lie? We may locate it in the writer’s use of
language. Or in his/her imaginative selection and use of documentary evidence
so that the work emerges as a unified whole. Or in the writer’s use of literary
devices. However, we would like to point out that all these factors contribute to
the literary quality of a biography. To sum up, a biography must combine the
authenticity of history and the creativity of fiction.

Biography and History

Biography is closely related to history on the one hand and to fiction on the
other. It is related to history because like history, it deals with the past and it also
makes use of the same resources that a historian needs for research. Does that
mean that biography is a branch of history? No. The crucial difference lies in the
fact that history is a factual record of individuals and events. In biography, the
focus is not on the background but on the individual. The aim of the biographer
is not just to convey facts but to probe into the psyche of the individual and to
make him/her come alive. This imaginative rendering of personal experience
links biography to fiction. But fiction is primarily imaginative whereas biography
aims at truthful presentation of detail.

Biography and Fiction

Thus we see that the biographer needs to employ the methods of the historian as
well as of the writer of fiction. Biography uses the techniques of research to test
whether the material at hand is true or false. The biographer must also make a
selection of interesting and relevant incidents. By imposing a certain design on
the selected material the writer must transform the lifeless material into a living
experience. Thus biography has many aspects. It is historical, psychological and
aesthetic. It is historical because it provides a factual account of the life of an
individual. It is psychological because it probes into the mind of the individual.
And it is aesthetic because the writer imposes a certain design on his/her material
and renders it pleasing by his/her use of language and other literary devices. As
an art form, it not only aims to delight the reader but also to provide a certain
insight into the character of another individual. The reader is made to identify
with certain feelings and experiences of the characters who seem to come alive.

Biography as an Art Form

How can we distinguish between a well-composed and a sub-standard biography?
114 There are several ways in which a biography can be marred. Sometimes there is
an undue tendency to celebrate and praise the dead by suppressing unpalatable Biography and
Autobiography: An
facts. At other times, the author’s personality intrudes unnecessarily into the Introduction
narrative. At other times a biography suffers if the author starts with a certain
thesis or preconceived idea and bends facts to suit it.

On the other hand, a well-written biography, is an honest portrayal of historical

facts without suppressing any unpleasant truth. There are no unnecessary
digressions impeding the flow of the narrative and the events selected are apt
and to the point. A good biography is brief and gripping so that it might seem as
if one is reading an interesting novel. As Leon Edel puts it ‘The biographer may
be as imaginative as he pleases – the more imaginative the better – in the way in
which he brings his material together. But he must not imagine the materials. He
must read himself into the past, but then he must read that past into our present.
(Literary Biography. p.31) This clearly means that writing a biography involves
exhaustive research. But as a creative artist, the biographer must assimilate facts
and then present them in the most interesting manner possible.

Use of Time
Does a biography proceed in strict chronological sequence? This is a question
that you might well ask! As biography is not history it is not necessary to follow
the birth to death sequence. The biographer does not have to begin his/her account
of the individual’s life from the day s/he was born and conclude the narrative at
the death. The biographer can and often does use time in a flexible manner,
moving forward and backward in time. Thus an individual life is not portrayed
strictly by the clock. This method helps to make the person come alive, as Leon
Edel believes (Literary Biography, xvi).

Selection of Details
Lytton Strachey, an extremely successful practitioner of the form, suggests that a
biography must have ‘a brevity which excludes anything that is redundant and
nothing that is significant’ (Preface to Eminent Victorians). Does this mean that
a biography has to be brief? There are no hard and fast rules about the length of
a biography. It may run into hundreds of pages as we find in Boswell’s Life of
Johnson or it may be as brief as a character sketch. The idea is to make the
character come alive and to project an impression of unity in the work. The
length then becomes a matter of individual choice.

Why do we Read Biography?

Clearly different persons would have different reasons for selecting specific
reading material. Curiosity about the lives of others may be one reason for reading
biographies. However, the function of biography is not only to interest and delight
but also to stimulate our sympathy so that our understanding of the human
condition is enhanced and our sympathies extended. It is for this reason that
Lytton Strachey described biography as ‘the most delicate and humane of all the
branches of the art of writing’. H.W. Longfellow, the American poet has said:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime
And departing leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time
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Biography and Autobiography By reading about the lives of others, we can draw some lessons that have a
relevance to our own lives. This is the didactic aspect of biography.

Reading Biography
When we read a biography critically, we must keep the following aspects in
mind:
there must be no redundant details. Only the relevant details must be
carefully selected by the author to advance the narrative;
a biography must be brief and to the point with no unnecessary
explanations, digressions and comments;
it should neither be too complimentary nor too critical but must be an
objective and detached presentation of facts;
the events must be arranged in an interesting manner so that the reader’s
interest is sustained;
the language must be used artistically;
the character portrayed must come alive;
there must be an impression of unity and the interest must never deflect
from the main character.
Let us pause for a while and answer the following questions before we move on
to the section on the origins of biography and how this form developed over the
ages.
Check Your Progress 1
Read the following questions and write your answers in the space provided. If
you need to refer to the previous section, do so by all means. But do write your
answers in your own words.

i) Define biography in about 4-5 sentences.

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ii) How is biography different from history on the one hand and fiction on the
other? Give your answer in about 100 words.
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iii) Why do people read biography? Give your reasons in about 4-5 sentences Biography and
Autobiography: An
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(Check your answers with those given at the end of this Unit.)

1.3 ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF

BIOGRAPHY
Earliest Biographical Literature
The initial impulse towards biography can be found in the ancient sagas and
epics and elegies written to commemorate dead friends, relatives and public
figures. The first biography was written by the fifth century B.C. Greek poet, Ion
of Chios. He wrote brief sketches of his famous contemporaries such as Pericles
and Sophocles. The Church also began to record the lives of its early founders
and saints. This branch of biography is called hagiography or commemoration
of the lives of saints. At this point, another function was added to biography. At
the very beginning only the dead were commemorated, but now it became didactic
as well. The lives were recorded in order to provide ethical models of conduct
for others. While the history of biography is as old as human history, the word
biography was first used only in the seventeenth century to create an identity for
this kind of writing.

Development of Biography
Biography, as we now understand the term, began to appear in the sixteenth
century. Cardinal Morton’s Life of Richard III (circa 1513) and Cavendish’s Life
of Wolsey (1554-7) are two of the first biographies written. The more famous of
seventeenth century biographies are Bacon’s Life of Henry VIII (1612) and
Walton’s Lives (1640-78). Among the biographies written in the eighteenth
century, also known as the age of prose, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779-81)
and Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) established the form beyond doubt.
Johnson’s contribution to the form consists in insisting that only the undiluted
truth be told. Boswell broke the stiffness and formality of tone by speaking in his
natural voice. In the nineteenth century, primarily an age of the novel, there was
a decline in the form but the more famous biographies written are Lockhart’s
Life of Scott (1837-38) and Gilchrist’s Life of Blake (1863). In the Victorian age
the decline also occurred because of the undue tendency to eulogize.

Biography in the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century, however, has seen a flowering of the form. Lytton Strachey
found himself famous after the publication of Eminent Victorians (1918). This
set the trend for debunking or exposing the feet of clay of venerated public figures.
There was a change in point of view as well. The author was no longer the
admiring sympathetic underling in the service of the hero/heroine but an equal
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Biography and Autobiography who may admire or be critical according to his/her understanding of the situation.
The impulse to eulogize was replaced by the impulse to reconstruct the life as
vividly as possible. Instead of the tendency to praise or hero worship, the twentieth
century witnessed an increasing trend of presenting the characters in their human
dimension with all their positive and negative aspects. This Virginia Woolf termed
as the ‘new biography’. Another prominent example of this is Leon Edel’s
biography of the famous American novelist Henry James.

Another visible change in twentieth century biography was the reduced length.
Biography no longer ran into several volumes but was often the size of a novel.
The biographer was no longer a chronicler but an artist. Biography thus acquired
an aesthetic dimension. The biographer did not just portray the outer life of work
and activity but also the inner life of emotion and thought. There were no fixed
standards of morality to which the subject must conform. The interest was in the
individual as a human being with all his/her faults and idiosyncrasies. Biography
from its status as a hybrid form began to acquire an identity as a distinct genre.

Let us now examine some of the different forms of biography.

1.4 FORMS OF BIOGRAPHY

There are many kinds of biographies but let us broadly place them in two
categories – those compiled by first hand knowledge of the individual and those
compiled by research. Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) belongs to the first
category. Boswell was a friend and admirer of the great literary figure of his age,
Samuel Johnson. As such Boswell spent a lot of time with him observing him
and recording his conversations in his diaries. On the other hand, Lytton Strachey’s
Queen Victoria (1922) is a biography based on research. Also based on research
are reference biographies that we find in Encyclopaedias and dictionaries of
biographies. Their function is to provide factual information. However, we are
interested in biography as a literary form and will not discuss biographies used
purely for reference purposes.

Some biographies are written subjectively with the author’s personality intruding
upon the narrative while others are written objectively and with detachment. In
such cases, the author does not intrude with comments or explanations but recounts
the main events so that we have an effect of a life unfolding itself. This form of
biography is known as ‘standard’ biography. ‘Fictionalized’ biography, is another
form in which: conversations are imagined and materials invented without any
consideration for factual information. There is an attempt to fuse the appeal of
biography with the charm of the novel. Irving Stone’s Lust for Life (1959) is a
fictional account of the life of Van Gogh, the famous Dutch painter. Allied to this
form is fiction presented as biography – there is no attempt at authenticity. It is
simply a novel written as biography or autobiography. Somerset Maugham’s
The Moon and Sixpence (1919) does not attempt to project itself as a life. The
attempt is to evoke a life (the painter Gauguin’s in this instance) rather than to
recreate it.

In your course, you will find one passage from what we have just defined as
‘standard’ biographies. It is taken from Lytton Strachey’s famous work Queen
Victoria. We hope you will enjoy reading it.

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Check Your Progress 2 Biography and
Autobiography: An
Answer the following questions in your own words. Introduction

i) Describe the two main changes that took place in biography writing in the
twentieth century.
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ii) Name two famous biographies each from the eighteenth and twentieth
centuries.
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(Check your answers with those given at the end of this Unit.)

1.5 AUTOBIOGRAPHY
What is Autobiography?
Autobiography is a branch of biographical literature written in subjective prose.
It is unfinished as it is the story of a person who writes it him/herself. It is usually
written at a later stage in life. The events are recollected either in chronological
sequence or at random, moving back and forth in time. However, all
autobiographies are not written when the author is old. For example, Dom Moraes
wrote his autobiography entitled My Son’s Father when he was only twenty two!

An autobiography may appear biased which is justifiable because a personal

point of view is being presented. Details of personal experience are made
interesting so that regardless of the fame or obscurity of the writer, the reader’s
attention is engaged and curiosity aroused. Writers talk freely about themselves
making frequent use of the first person pronoun. The reader is expected to be
sympathetic rather than to sit on judgement. What is important in such a literary
form is not a rigid or strictly logical structure, but a spontaneous, easy and flexible
movement. Thus we cannot judge autobiography in the same way as we would
biography. In a biography, the objectivity of the writer is a major consideration
in judging its overall merit.

Informal Autobiography
Autobiographies can either be informal or formal. Informal autobiographies may
or may not be intended for publication. Letters, diaries and journals fall within 119
Biography and Autobiography this category. Letters of famous men like Byron are an index to their personalities
and therefore of great interest to the reader. The young Jewish girl Anne Frank’s
Diary created such an impact that it has often been staged as well as filmed.
Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals (1897) record her experiences providing us with
information about the little-known facts about her more famous brother, the poet
Wordsworth. All these books represent a self-conscious form of revelation. But
they are not important only for the information that they provide but are also
aesthetically pleasing. Memoirs are another form of informal autobiography. Here
the emphasis is on the events and experiences remembered rather than on the
personality of the person who remembers.

Formal Autobiography
Formal autobiography attempts to reconstruct a life through recollection. The
autobiographer has the advantage of first-hand experience of his/her own subject
i.e. him/herself. The problem that the author faces is that of striking a balance
between sounding too modest or too aggressive. What are the other types of
autobiographies? There are religious autobiographies like St. Augustine’s
Confessions (circa AD 397 to AD 401) and intellectual ones such as J.S. Mill’s
Autobiography (1873). (Mill’s autobiography was published posthumously).
Fictionalized autobiographies like James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young
Man (1916) transpose the actual experiences of the author onto a fictional plane
and as such do not come under the category of biography.

Autobiography and Memoir

An autobiography is distinct from a memoir. As Roy Pascal puts it, ‘In the
autobiography, proper attention is focused on the self, in the memoir or
reminiscence on others’ (Design and Truth in Autobiography RKP, 1960, p.5).
These two forms may be in the same book or even the same page. But the
difference lies in the focus. In an autobiography the emphasis is always on the
self. It is clear that the individual does not live outside society. And thus even in
an autobiography, it is essential to portray people and places. But in general the
interest remains mainly on the self.

Biography and Autobiography

We have discussed some different types of biography and autobiography. Let us
now look at the main differences between the two:

1) In autobiography, childhood is portrayed prominently. On the other hand,

in biography the author concentrates on the active period of the individual
especially his/her success.

2) The biographer places special emphasis on the death of the individual while
in an autobiography, needless to say, death does not figure at all.

3) Autobiographies often feature the relationships with parents and

siblings, biographies, on the other hand, deal with relationships with friends
and colleagues who directly or indirectly contributed to the person’s success.

4) A biographer has to rely on external evidence. He may have a close

relationship with the subject. Or he may reconstruct his/her life by culling
evidence from documents, diaries or letters. An autobiographer does not
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 need to rely on such evidence. S/he can take recourse to his/her memory. Biography and
Autobiography: An
But that does not mean that the autobiographer does not make use of Introduction
documentary evidence. As you read on, you will discover that Bertrand
Russell made extensive use of letters in his Autobiography.

5) The main difference, as we know, lies in the point of view. In biography the
life is recreated by a third person narrator, who may or may not be objective.
In autobiography, the first person narrator is mainly subjective.

Why do we read Autobiographies?

The reasons for reading autobiography are as manifold as those for reading
biography. One reason could be curiosity and the other could be the desire to
gain insight into the lives of people like ourselves. Another could be simply
delight in the book as a work of art.

Autobiography, as you know is the most personal of literary forms. What are the
ways of reading autobiography? One can read it as a historical record or as a
work of art. A literary autobiography is read as a work of art. Here one would
keep in mind the idea behind the writing. For example, how does the writer
perceive his or her own nature and development and how does s/he give form to
this perception? To put it simply, how does s/he shape his/her material? Another
relevant question at this point would be: how effectively does s/he use language
to convey his/her experience to the reader?

You will read two passages taken from the autobiographies of Bertrand Russell
and Gandhi in this Block. You will notice the different styles, different experiences
and the different cultures from which they arise. They are fine specimens of the
autobiographic form and you will find that they make interesting reading.
Check Your Progress 3
Answer the following questions in about 100 words each.

i) What is autobiography? Name some forms of autobiography.

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ii) What are the differences between biography and autobiography?

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(Check your answers with those given at the end of the Unit.)
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Biography and Autobiography
1.6 LET US SUM UP
In this Unit, we have discussed:
biography as a truthful account of the life of an individual;
autobiography as a first-person unfinished account of the life of an
individual;
the differences between biography and autobiography;
the origin of biography in early sagas and epics;
the development of biography over the ages; and
different forms of biography and autobiography.

1.7 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

Check Your Progress 1
i) Biography is a truthful account of the life of an individual. It is written in
prose. While it is based on facts, a biographer uses his/her imagination to
present a lively and interesting picture of the person portrayed.

ii) History is a factual record of individuals and events while in biography the
focus is not on the background but on the individual. Fiction is independent
of facts and operates solely in the realm of the imagination. While a
biographer must be imaginative, s/he cannot lose sight of facts.

iii) Curiosity about the lives of others may be one reason. Another may be to
draw lessons that may have some relevance to our lives. By reading about
the lives of others, our understanding of the human condition is enhanced
and our sympathies extended.
Check Your Progress 2
i) In earlier times, there had been a tendency to praise the subject. In the
twentieth century, a ‘new’ biography developed wherein one can find that
the biographer is not an admiring subordinate but a critical equal who
examines the character from all angles – positive and negative. Biographies
also became almost as short as the novel. The interest shifted from a mere
depiction of outer events to the states of mind of the character.
ii) 18th century :
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
20th century :
Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria
Check Your Progress 3
i) An autobiography is a branch of biographical literature. It is the story of
the life of a person written in his/her own words. It is usually written at a
later stage in life and events are recollected either in chronological sequence
or at random. Autobiographies are either formal or informal.
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ii) A biographer has to rely solely on external evidence but an autobiographer Biography and
Autobiography: An
uses memory as a major source. The biographer also makes use of Introduction
documentary evidence. A biographer concentrates on the successful middle
years of a person’s life while in autobiography childhood is portrayed
extensively.

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