Body Parts : Essays on Life-Writing

by Hermione Lee

As readers, we seem to be increasingly fascinated by studies of individual lives. In this timely, unusual and exhilarating collection Hermione Lee is concerned in different ways with approaches to 'life-writing': the relation of biography to fiction and history; the exploration of writers' lives in connection with their works; the new and changing ways in which biographies, memoirs, diaries and autobiographies can be discussed. As the title suggests, she also unravels the complex links between physical, sensual details and the 'body' of a work. 'Shelley's Heart and Pepys' Lobsters', for example, deals with myths, contested objects and things that go missing, while 'Jane Austen Faints' takes five varied accounts of the same dramatic moment to ask how biography deals with the private lives of famous women, a theme taken up in 'Virginia Woolf's Nose', on the way that the author's life-stories have been transformed into fiction and film. Other essays tease out different approaches, like that on Philip and Edmund Gosse, which enquires into the opposition between literary and scientific lives, or the fascinating 'Reading in Bed', which explores women's formative childhood reading, and how it enters into their adult writing. The subjects range from T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee, from May Sinclair and Rosamond Lehmann to Eudora Welty and Brian Moore. Rich, diverting and entertaining, these brilliant studies by a leading critic and internationally acclaimed biographer raise profound and intriguing issues about every aspect of writing, and reading, a life.

Genres: Essays, Biography, Writing, Nonfiction, Books About Books, Literary Criticism

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 6, 2005

About the author

Hermione Lee grew up in London and was educated at Oxford. She began her academic career as a lecturer at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va (Instructor, 1970-1971) and at Liverpool University (Lecturer, 1971-1977). She taught at the University of York from 1977, where over twenty years she was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of English Literature. From 1998-2008 she was the Goldsmiths' Chair of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. In 2008 Lee was elected President of Wolfson College, University of Oxford.

Lee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's and St Cross Colleges, Oxford. She has Honorary Doctorates from Liverpool and York Universities. In 2003 she was made a Commander of the British Empire for Services to Literature.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Less useful as a theoretical framework, but the volume contains interesting case studies on how authors from Jane Austen to J. M. Coetzee have written about lives at the intersection of autobiography, biography, memoir and autofiction.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could personally have skipped some of these on writers I didn't know a lot about.. but generally found it delightful. As someone who loves memoire and biography, I am always fascinated by how untrustworthy our own stories are and how hard it is to really know anyone else. Lee gives us a lot of concrete examples of how others have managed just those things.

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting academically on Virginia Woolf.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth it for the opening and closing chapters - marked just on those, this would have been a five-star.

The opening chapter, 'Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobster' is engrossing and entertaining. Lee opens with one of what seem to be the two central questions of 'life-writing' (the term she picks to agglomerate different kinds of biogrpahical writing) - the issue of 'facts':

Biographies are full of verifiable facts, but they are also full of things that aren't there: absences, gaps, missing evidence, knowledge or information that has been passed from person to person, losing credibility or shifting shape on the way. Biographies, like lives, are made up of contested objects - relics, testimonies, versions, correspondences, the unverifiable. What does biography do with the facts that can't be fixed, the things that go missing, the body parts that have turned into legends and myths?

Lee begins by looking at physical evidence that is kept away from biographers, either from exclusion or destruction. Then she takes her metaphor of trying 'to make a coherent narrative out of missing documents as well as existing ones; a whole figure out of body parts' and makes it literal, looking at saints relics and then more contemporary body parts that have been saved, lost, moved about and mythologised: Napoleon's penis, Yeat's bones, bits of Einstein's brain, and Shelley's heart.

Shelley drowned in Italy, with two companions. Ten days later, their bodies were washed ashore. Fearing disease, the bodies were immediately buried in quicklime. After getting permission from the authorities, more than a month later Shelley's friends - including Byron - met on the beach to exhume Shelley's body and burn it on a pyre.

Thirty-six years later, Edward Trelawney recounted watching Shelley's body burn:

The only portions that were not consumed were some fragment of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us most of all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace my heart was severely burnt; and had anyone seen me do the act I should have been put in quarantine.

After being plucked from the flames, Shelley's heart entered mythology. His friends on the beach that day told and re-told the story, each time a little - or a lot - differently. Then the fight over the heart itself, as three people - two of Shelley's friends, including Trelawney, and Mary Shelley - tussled for ownership. Ownership of the heart stood in for ownership of Shelley's life-story. Eventually Mary Shelley won, and the heart went into hiding. From Miranda Seymour's biography of MAry Shelley:

The heart was rediscovered after Mary Shelley's death. Wrapped in silk between the pages of Adonais, it had lain inside her travelling-desk for almost thirty years.

Those Romantics were really something, huh?

Lee's final chapter addresses the other central question of life-writing - the biographer's perspective. Appropriately for the end of the book, she ends with how biographers deal with their subjects' deaths, and the common desire to align the death with the life. In some cases, this will be a heroic death for a heroic figure, or inspirational last word from an oratorical figure. Or, as she observes, for a literary biography, a desire to match-up the death to the imaginative life of the writer, and their own accounts of death. Again, Lee looks at how different writers approach the same figure, their telling of the final chapter aligning with their overall approach.

These chapters are terrific. The material they bookend is less enthralling - a group of lectures, which had a strong post-graduate whiff to me, and a selection of reviews or short biographical statements, which were often interesting, but less colourful and less coherent than the opening and closing entries.

One chapter - about the somewhat priggish and evidently quite innocent Angela Thirkell, who in the 1920s-1950s wrote a bunch of old-fashioned novels set in an idealised England - had me laughing out loud, when Lee allowed herself a bit of fun by quoting from one of the novels to demonstrate 'Thirkell's blithe lack of awareness of the language of sexuality':

'I knew it was you on the ostrich,' she [Lydia] said to Delia ... 'I say, someone's on my cock.'
'It's only my cousin Hilary,' said Delia. 'He won't mind changing, will you, Hilary ...'
Mr Grant, really quite glad of an excuse to dismount, offered his cock to Lydia, who immediately flung a leg over it, explaining she had put on a frock with pleats on purpose, as she always felt sick if she rode sideways ...
... 'I know that once Lydia is on her cock nothing will get her off. I came here last year ... and she had thirteen rides.'

[Ineffablyschmoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a series of essays on life-writing, loosely held together by the organising metaphor of "body parts". They seem to be a collection of reflections on the challenges of biography, the boundary between biography, truth and fiction, and critical reviews of other writers' biographies of literary figures. Hermione Lee explores the lives of a number of literary figures and how they have been "versioned" by biographers, the dilemmas that arise from how to write death into the lives of authors, and how to reconcile the person with the life-work. She examines numerous times the hostility between authors and biographers, and how biographers seem to work against authors who resist the simplification of life-writing. She is good on discussing the prurient and sentimental tendencies that plague biographers - how we cannot resist poking the underbelly of people's innermost private thoughts and desires, and we cannot resist making meaning where life (and death) has simply occurred without rhyme or reasons. It is a fascinating set of essays for anyone who is interested in narrative, life stories, and literature.

One flaw might be that the book does read as a series of disconnected essays (here I go, looking for coherence and some sense of "summation" and "narrative"), which means that some aspects are repetitive and others are left unexplored - why this set of essays, together - where are her overarching thoughts? I feel this is likely deliberate on the author's part, as she may seek to model in her structure the resistance to (meaningless) coherence that she so often talks about in the book. Yet I would have liked a bit more of this, a bit more of the author's erudite and disarmingly personal thoughts on the topics she mentions.

One thing I really enjoyed was the personal nature of her engagement with the topics of each essay - she does not appeal to greater authority, but takes charge of her own responses, what each author means to her, which aspects of biographical writing she likes and dislikes, how she has herself faced the challenges of biography. She sometimes pronounces upon the quality and value of particular techniques, but always with an eye to knowing how transient biographical and literary fashion can be. This is an enjoyable book because it is a work of personal scholarship, which does not pretend to be the last word on the subject, but rather wishes to engage the reader in a friendly, astute conversation about the bits that make the subject most fascinating.

[Katharine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting collection, though the later essays seemed rather perfunctory in some cases. (Also, I'm just not as interested in late-c20 writers.) The pieces on biographical cruxes in Woolf and Austen's lives were neat.

[sisterimapoet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure I like Lee's style that much. But I like what she was trying to do here - and I feel I've gained a new understanding of certain authors, and a few new names to check out too.