Mark Bostridge on biographies
More than half a century after it was first published,
Mary, Queen of Scots
by Antonia Fraser (1969) is still the best biography of the ill-fated Scottish queen. It is vivid, dramatic, explosive (literally, of course, with the murder of Darnley at Kirk o’ Field) and leads inexorably to that tragic end on the block. Fraser has an eye for Mary’s adversarial strengths and flamboyant miscalculations. Countless biographers, historians and dramatists have portrayed the rivalry between Mary and Elizabeth I, but this interpretation remains the most compelling and convincing.
Victor Hugo by Graham Robb (1998) is a magnificent tour de force. Conveyed in Robb’s inimitable style, it’s full of wit, irony and unflagging energy. Any biographer of Hugo needs as much energy as they can muster to chart the life of a prodigious character who was not only the most famous writer of his age, but also a revolutionary, politician, campaigner, and visionary. The contradictions of his successive political positions are laid bare, from the militant monarchist of the July Monarchy to the revolutionary socialist in the Paris Commune era. And for the first time, an unflinching eye is turned on Hugo’s manifold sexual misdemeanours, a man who notched up each conquest, from grand ladies to servant girls, in his notebooks.
I would also nominate Fiona MacCarthy’s
William Morris: A Life for Our Time
(1994). MacCarthy, who died earlier this year, was the outstanding modern biographical writer about the visual arts. Her subjects ranged from Eric Gill to Edward BurneJones, and, most triumphantly, William Morris, the greatest artist-craftsman of the Victorian age. If you want to understand how Morris’s Romantic anti
industrialism produced all those beautiful fabrics and textiles, then this book is for you. Morris emerges from MacCarthy’s weaving together of the multiple threads of his life as a pioneer of socialism. He was an inspiration to generations of Labour politicians in Britain, not least to the 1945 Labour government. Clement Attlee spoke of the influence of Morris’s idea of ‘fellowship’ in the building of the welfare state.
Another extraordinary biography I would recommend is The Immortal Life of
Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2010). It uses careful detective work to tell the story of a woman and of the cells removed from her body without her permission, which became one of the most significant tools in the development of modern medicine. In 1951 Lacks, a poor African-American, was dying of cancer. Skloot describes Lacks’ life; the story of the ‘HeLa’ cells, as they were called, bought and sold by the billions; and the fate of Lacks’ family, who can’t afford health insurance for the drugs that her cells helped to make.
Mark Bostridge’s books include biographies of Vera Brittain and Florence Nightingale