Lives for Sale: Biographers' Tales

""Biography is a peculiarly British vice,"" writes Bostridge in the preface to this fascinating collection of essays on the experience of following in the tracks of another person. Lyndall Gordon, who has written about T.S. Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Henry James, leads off the contributions by invoking Janet Malcolm's judgment on journalists and declaring that the biographer's task is ""morally indefensible"" since ""the dead subject has no rights."" Antonia Fraser describes her ""optical research""--that is, her preference for seeing firsthand all the locations that were central to her subjects' lives, a practice that she says can often be more revelatory than all the documents she reads. Other British biographers describe the obstacles they encounter, the surprises they find and their sense of being on a treasure hunt--one in which the treasure often doesn't want to be found. (Patricia Highsmith, for one, left a curse for anyone peering into her private papers.) Readers who enjoy entering into the lives of others by reading biographies will find pleasurable anecdotes and insights here from those who make such careful snooping their profession.