Fiction versus biography
There's been brouhaha about fake memoirs, again, a long tradition of people making stuff up. Helpfully, there's a whole type of writing where you can just make stuff up, it's called fiction. I've been reading some biographies recently and got more lined up. Some group biographies also, which I really enjoy.
Some cool biographies:
- The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf, about Alexander von Humboldt
- Magnificent Rebels also by Andrea Wulf, about the Jena Set
- Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon, about Mary Wollstonecroft and Mary Shelley
- Super Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
- William Blake vs The World by John Higgs
- The Immortal Evening by Stanley Plumly, about a dinner with John Keats, William Wordsworth, and friends
- Looking for Theophrastus by Laura Beatty
A fun little offshoot is fictional biographies. There's a bit of ambiguity about the genre so I don't mean like I Claudius or a fill-in-the-blanks plausible deniability historical thing, nor do I mean fake memoirs, nor do I mean creative nonfiction (what is creative nonfiction?) but fully presented biographies of fictional people.
- Orlando (sort of?) by Virginia Woolf
- Nat Tate by William Boyd
I'd like to read, on the fictional biography side:
- Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
- Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
- The Wold Newton universe featuring biographies of Tarzan and a superhero
Also! Autobiographies written by someone else. Not ghostwriters. Generally, according to this list, wives:
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein
- Rosa Bonheur: The Artist's (Auto)biography by Anna Klumpke
I'm a particular fan of how Gertrude Stein makes herself the main character of someone else's autobiography.
Sitting on the TBR:
- Sylvia Townsend Warner by Claire Harman
- some Diana Souhamis
- The Last Man Who Knew Everything by Andrew Robinson, about polymath Thomas Young
- Samuel Pepys by Claire Tomalin