A good biography is a well-staged illusion. It creates--on paper--a
vivid, rounded, and immediate sense of lived life. In contrast to purely
fictional forms, biography writing does not allow total freedom to the
biographer in the creative act. Ideally, a biography's backbone is
formed by accurate historical facts. But its soul lies elsewhere. Since
the concern is life, something more is needed: Nothing dry, cold or
dead, but a vibrant impression of life that is left in the air after one
turns over the last page. But how does a biographer do it? The way a
biographer creates a subject is largely dictated by the historical
distance between them. There are three types of distance in biographical
writing: First, where the biographer and the subject personally know one
another; second, where the biographer is a near contemporary of the
subject; and third, where biographer and subject are distinctly
separated, in some cases by hundreds of years. Tekcan explores how some
of the most accomplished biographers manage to "recreate life" across
time and space. She closely examines Samuel Johnson's "Life of Mr.
Richard Savage", James Boswell's "Life of Samuel Johnson", Lytton
Strachey's "Eminent Victorians", Michael Holroyd's "Lytton Strachey",
Park Honan's "Jane Austen", and Andrew Motion's "Keats".