Authors' Lives: On Literary Biography and the Arts of Language

by Park Honan

Honan (English, U. of Leeds), biographer of Jane Austen and Matthew Arnold, discusses practical theory as well as the English tradition of the genre; new approaches to Austen's life; and writers whose work he regards as quality biographical prose. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Leonard Hobart Park Honan (17 September 1928 – 27 September 2014) was an American academic and author who spent most of his career in the UK. He wrote widely on the lives of authors and poets and published important biographies of such writers as Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

Honan began his career specializing in Victorian literature but later broadened his scope, becoming an expert in the Elizabethan period. From 1959, he taught at Connecticut College and then Brown University before relocating permanently to England in 1968, where he taught at the University of Birmingham until becoming Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Leeds in 1984. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.