Paul Baines is Professor of eighteenth‐century literature in the Department of English, University of Liverpool. Among his publications are: The House of Forgery in Eighteenth‐Century Britain (1999); The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (2000); Five Romantic Plays, 1768–1821 (edited with Edward Burns, 2000); Edmund Curll, Bookseller (with Pat Rogers, 2007); The Wiley‐Blackwell Encyclopedia of Eighteenth‐Century Writers and Writing, 1660–1789 (with Pat Rogers and Julian Ferraro, 2011); and The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton, 1756–1814 (2014).

John Batchelor is an Emeritus Professor of Newcastle University and a former Fellow of New College, Oxford. His earliest book was a brief life of the fantasist and illustrator Mervyn Peake, and his later books include biographies of Conrad, Ruskin, and Tennyson, and also of Ruskin’s closest woman friend, Pauline, Lady Trevelyan. He has also published monographs on Virginia Woolf and H.G. Wells, a literary history, The Edwardian Novelists, and an edited volume on The Art of Literary Biography. He lives in Oxford, where he continues his academic affiliation with New College.

Anna Beer is a biographer and literary critic. She was University Lecturer in Literature at the Department for Continuing Education, Oxford, between 2003 and 2010, and remains a Fellow of Kellogg College and Senior Course Tutor in Creative Writing at Oxford. She is the author of the first Life of the wife of Sir Walter Ralegh, Bess, and a biography of John Milton (Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot), both discussed in her chapter. More recently, she has written a feminist study of eight female composers written for non‐specialists. The book was given the title Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music by its publishers, much to its author’s dismay. She has just finished a new biography of Sir Walter Ralegh, which will not be called Walter.

Emily Bell specializes in Charles Dickens and life writing, having completed her PhD on “Changing Representations of Charles Dickens, 1857–1939” at the University of York in 2017. She has published on “A Lost Autobiographical Sketch” in Wilkie Collins Journal, 14 (2017) and on “The Dickens Family, the Boz Club and the Fellowship” in Dickensian, 502.113.3 (2017). She is editing Dickens After Dickens, a volume of collected essays on Dickens criticism and biography.

Richard Bradford is Research Professor at Ulster University. He has published more than 30 books, including trade‐published biographies of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Alan Sillitoe, Martin Amis, John Milton, and Ernest Hemingway. Prior to Ulster he held posts in Oxford, Wales, and Trinity College, Dublin. Presently he is Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon.

Jane Darcy was awarded a PhD from King’s College London in 2009 for her thesis on the interaction of melancholy and literary biography in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 2010 she received British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, moving to the English Department of University College where she now holds an honorary lectureship. Her monograph Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640–1816 was published by Palgrave in 2013. She has also written articles on Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, and Jane Austen. She is now a teaching fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at King’s College London and is currently writing a book on Jane Austen and melancholy.

Claire Davison is Professor of Modernist Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, where her teaching and research focus on intermedial borders and the boundaries of modernism: the translation and reception of Russian literature in the 1910s to 1920s; literary and musical modernism; modernist soundscapes and broadcasting. She is the author of Translation as Collaboration—Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and the co‐editor (with Gerri Kimber) of a number of recent volumes on literary modernism, including the fourth volume of The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, in Four Volumes (Edinburgh University Press, 2012–2016) and The Collected Poetry of Katherine Mansfield (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

Kevin De Ornellas lectures on English Renaissance literature at Ulster University. His acclaimed book, The Horse in Early Modern English Culture, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2014. He has published widely on many aspects of drama of Shakespeare’s period. He is the principal pre‐show speaker and a member of the Management Committee of the Riverside Theatre, Coleraine.

Rebecca Devine is a PhD student at the University of Hull. She is currently studying the work of Philip Larkin, focusing intensely on his private letters. She completed her BA and MA in English Literature at Ulster University.

Kay Ferres is Professor Emerita of literature and history at Griffith University, Australia. She has published on Australian writers, modernism, and biography. She is currently working on a group biography of the Australian writers Nettie Palmer and Katherine Susannah Prichard and their friend Hilda Esson, The Life of Houses.

Madelena Gonzalez is Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University of Avignon and head of the multidisciplinary research group ICTT. She has published widely on Anglophone literature and culture and is author of Fiction after the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe (Rodopi, 2004).

Tim Hancock is an English Lecturer at Ulster University. Recent publications include articles on T S Eliot, John Betjeman and Seamus Heaney; his most recent presentation was to the conference ‘’Sylvia Plath: Letters, Words and Fragments’’ (Belfast, November, 2017).

Craig Howes is Director of the Center for Biographical Rsearch, Co‐Editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He co‐edited Teaching Life Writing Texts (MLA, 2007, with Miriam Fuchs), and is the author of Voices of the Vietnam POWs (Oxford University Press, 1993).

Andrew James is a Professor in the School of Commerce at Meiji University in Tokyo. He completed a doctorate in English literature at the University of Ulster and has published essays on literary theory, Kingsley Amis, Graham Swift, and Frederick Philip Grove. His monograph, Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience (McGill‐Queen’s University Press), appeared in June 2013. He was the recipient of a three‐year Grant‐in‐Aid of Scholarly Research from the Japanese government in support of a project to study the manuscripts in the British Library’s Graham Swift Archive. Within the field of archival studies he has particular interest in the role of draft revisions in the creative process.

Jan Jędrzejewski is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Ulster. A specialist in Victorian literature, Irish literature in English, and Anglo‐Polish literary relations, he has published Thomas Hardy and the Church (Palgrave, 1996), George Eliot (Routledge, 2007), and critical editions of works by Le Fanu and Hardy.

Andrew Keanie is a lecturer at Ulster University. He has written books, articles, reviews, and book chapters on several of the writers of the English Romantic era. He is a poet and musician, and lives in Derry with his wife and near his grown‐up daughter.

Thomas Lockwood is Professor Emeritus of English and former department chair at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the editor of the drama volumes of the Oxford “Wesleyan” edition of the works of Henry Fielding and is completing a biography of Jonathan Swift for the Blackwell Critical Biographies series.

Paul K. Lyons is an independent journalist and writer. He is the creator and curator of three diary‐based websites: The Diary Review (articles on diaries and diarists); And so made significant … (an extensive online diary anthology); and The Diary Junction (a database of diarists). He is the author of Brighton in Diaries, and has kept a diary regularly since childhood.

John McCourt is Professor of English literature at the Università di Macerata, Italy. He is a specialist in Joyce Studies and in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Irish literature. The co‐founder of the Trieste Joyce School (1997), he is widely published and best known for James Joyce: A Passionate Exile (Orion Books, 2000) and The Years of Bloom: Joyce in Trieste 1904–1920 (Lilliput Press, 2000). His most recent book is Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Jane McVeigh is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English & Creative Writing, University of Roehampton, and Associate Lecturer for the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. Her publications include In Collaboration with British Literary Biography: Haunting Conversations (Palgrave, 2017).

Linda M. Morra is Professor of Canadian Literature and Canadian Studies at Bishop’s University. She served as the Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin (2016–2017) and as a Visiting Scholar at University of California, Berkeley (2016). Her book, Unarrested Archives (2014), was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English, and her edition of Jane Rule’s Taking My Life (2011) was a finalist for the LAMBDA prize (2012).

Julian North is Associate Professor in Nineteenth‐Century Literature in the Department of English, University of Leicester. She specializes in Romantic and Victorian life writing. She is the author of The Domestication of Genius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and one of the editors of The Works of Thomas De Quincey (Pickering & Chatto, 2000–2003, 21 vols.). She is currently working on literary portraiture in Victorian Britain.

Lois Potter, Ned B. Allen Professor Emerita of the University of Delaware, has taught at the Universities of Aberdeen, Leicester, Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Tsuda College, Tokyo. She has published on Milton, English Civil War literature, the theatrical history of Twelfth Night and Othello, and Robin Hood. She edited The Two Noble Kinsmen for the Arden Shakespeare and Pericles for the Norton Complete Works. Her most recent book is The Life of William Shakespeare (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2012).

Amber K. Regis is Lecturer in Nineteenth‐Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, and her research explores life writing across different media and genres. Recent publications include a critical edition of The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives (Manchester University Press, 2017, co‐edited with Deborah Wynne). The latter volume contains her essays on Brontë portraiture and 1930s biographical stage plays.

Carl Rollyson, Professor Emeritus of Journalism at Baruch College, CUNY, has published biographies of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, Jill Craigie, Michael Foot, Sylvia Plath, Amy Lowell, Dana Andrews, and Walter Brennan, and several studies of biography, including Confessions of a Serial Biographer (McFarland, 2016). He is at work on This Alarming Paradox: The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath.

Dale Salwak is Professor of English Literature at Southern California’s Citrus College. His publications include The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions (Macmillan Press, 1996), Living with a Writer (Palgrave, 2004), Teaching Life: Letters from a Life in Literature (Iowa, 2008), Writers and Their Mothers (Palgrave, 2018), and studies of Kingsley Amis, John Braine, A.J. Cronin, Philip Larkin, Barbara Pym, Carl Sandburg, Anne Tyler, and John Wain. He is a recipient of Purdue University’s Distinguished Alumni Award as well as a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also a frequent contributor to the (London) Times Higher Education magazine and the Times Educational Supplement.

Martin Stannard is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Leicester. He has published extensively on Evelyn Waugh, following The Critical Heritage (1984) with a major biography in two volumes (1986 and 1992). His Norton Critical Edition of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier appeared in 1995 (revised 2011) and his biography of Muriel Spark in 2009. Currently he is Co‐Executive Editor of Oxford University Press’s 43‐volume scholarly edition of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, editing Vile Bodies for this (2017), and researching a new biography of Ford. Professor Stannard is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association.

Emanuela Tegla has a PhD in literature from the University of Ulster and has been working recently on autobiography and the question of identity. She is the author of J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Power. Unsettling Complicity, Complacency, and Confession (Brill/Rodopi, 2016) and of articles on various aspects of contemporary literature. Her main research interests include ethics, autobiography, postcolonial literature, and the globalization of literature.

Marion Turner is Associate Professor of English and Tutorial Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. She is the author of Chaucerian Conflict (OUP, 2007) and the editor of A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2013). Her biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer: A European Life, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2019.

James Underwood is Research Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Huddersfield, and a recipient of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award for 2017–2018. His research interests are in twentieth‐century poetry, writers’ letters, and literary biography, and he is currently completing a monograph on Early Larkin.

James Ward lectures in eighteenth‐century literature at Ulster University. He has published widely on this topic; Memory and Enlightenment is forthcoming from Palgrave.

Since its inception in the seventeenth century, literary biography in English has been treated with modest respect by the literary establishment and has enjoyed considerable popularity among the reading public. Its status within academia, however, is more problematic. On the one hand its presence is acknowledged as a necessary concomitant to the study of a particular author or their period. Many student reading lists will include the most respected biographies of major figures, and all university libraries stock lives of those writers who merit inclusion in the mainstream canon and its fashionable peripheries. At the same time, one senses that the genre in its own right is regarded as little more than a tolerable supplement to the proper enterprise of literary studies. The ‘elephant in the room’ is probably an exaggeration, yet it catches something of the uncomfortable relationship between biography and literary studies. Literary biography is by far the most popular form of writing about literature. Very few people outside the education system voluntarily purchase and read works of literary criticism, the one exception to this being the brief, disposable review sections of newspapers. One might therefore assume that biographies of writers would be an essential feature of the intensive study of literature in higher education. Surely academics should give attention to the self‐evident appetite among the reading public for a detailed intimate knowledge of the lives of writers whose works they respect and enjoy?

From the time when Matthew Arnold speculated on how studying literature would improve the spiritually and morally inadequate members of the public who seemed to have abandoned the church, there has been an inordinate emphasis on the text, the artwork, at the expense of the person who produced it.

The reasons for this are various. The New Critics did their best to implement in practical terms Arnold’s visionary manifesto, and throughout their work on the principles and methodology of critical practice they stress the dangers of speculating on or citing contextual material, specifically what we know or presume to know about the author and their world. By implication, they treated the literary studies student as someone who should be protected from the distractions of getting to know the person behind the work. Read Ransom’s “Criticism Inc.” (1937) and Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) and you are left with the impression of school‐masterly rigor, underpinned by the fear that their charges will allow an image of the author as real person with feelings and a private history to occlude their focus on the work as a linguistic and aesthetic object.

Following the arrival of structuralism, post‐structuarlism, and their numerous ideological cousins, the author continued to be relegated to a secondary role in this new, theoretical, landscape of literary studies. Unlike the New Critics, who were concerned with the preservation of the novel or poem uncontaminated by the vagaries of the real world, the theorists treated both the author and the text as twin features of an exercise in self‐delusion. There was a general consensus that literature could not be defined as a form in its own right: it was, rather, a mutable element in a cocktail of linguistic discourses and non‐linguistic sign‐systems. As a consequence the author was not its originator but rather a participant in a discursive zone that minimized perhaps even eradicated individuality. Here, Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1967) is the exemplary essay, though whether he expected his apocalyptic scenario to be taken seriously is open to question.

Aside from there being little that resembles a pedagogic or theoretical template for the study of literary biography, there is a far more straightforward reason for its marginalization. Even the most flexible degree structures are held together by a nucleus of literary history, a chronology of major texts and authors which usually opens during the medieval period, concludes with the contemporary, and is studied in that order over a period of three or four years. The criteria for the selection of texts for the canon have been frequently debated, and some theorists have contended that the underpinning precept of some works as being aesthetically or intellectually more significant than others is a bourgeois fallacy. Nonetheless, this composition of books and authors has remained largely unchanged since the foundation of English as a university discipline.

The fact that it exists at all has more to do with exigency than pedagogic principle. Such a curricular narrative enables academics and students to consider factors such as cause and effect, involving who influenced whom and how the fabric of social and political factors underpinned a given novel or poem. This helps us to understand why literary biography, by its nature, has the potential to disrupt the orderly manner in which teaching and indeed research is routinely conducted. For example, while we can claim to have a secure, detailed knowledge of the society in which writers such as Chaucer, Sidney, and Shakespeare existed, our sense of what exactly each of them did and experienced varies greatly. Evidence on lives of individuals became an element of print culture toward the end of the seventeenth century, and alongside this the preservation of written documents such as correspondence, diaries, and anecdotal records improved, as did our perception of authors as real people with opinions and temperamental predispositions. Yet we regularly encounter inconsistencies in what we can hope or expect to know of the private lives of different authors, even those from roughly the same period.

The classic example is the acknowledged monarch of the canon, Shakespeare. Evidence as to who he was and what he did has increased hardly at all since Nicholas Rowe speculated on the man behind the plays in 1709 (see Potter, Chapter 23). At the same time his near‐contemporary John Donne left enough details of his actual presence and what he thought to enable us to conceive of him as a very real figure, a man whose state of mind is detectable within his artistic creations (see Hancock, Chapter 24). Even relative modernity does not secure for us a comprehensive knowledge of a given author. T.S. Eliot was so judiciously protective of his private life (see Keanie, Chapter 30) that we now know for more of his co‐participants in the project of modernism, such as Joyce (see McCourt, Chapter 31) and Pound, than we do of him.

If we were to treat biography as a significant collateral feature of critical assessment then we would face anomalies in terms of how it might be implemented. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to evolve a general methodology for students on the use of, say, letters, diaries, notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, anecdotes, and memoirs in a first year module on practical criticism. On its own, the latter possesses a secure disciplinary infrastructure, bulwarked by formal and generic markers, that enables us to compare one work with another in an analytical zone largely unrelated to context. But if we mix into this the information that enables us to bring a writer to life, problems arise. Texts either have certain things in common or they diverge radically in their manner and content, but the unshifting abstract paradigm of literature‐as‐literature enables us to stabilize a comparative focus. Once the presence of the author is introduced, this methodology is undermined by matters such as impressionistic empathy or revulsion—our attention to the text is distracted by a personal sense of enjoying, vicariously, an author’s company, sympathizing with their dilemmas or loathing them for what they believed in or did. Further problems arise when some authors announce themselves, through the evidence of their lives, as almost tangible figures, while others, by their own making or because of circumstance, exist only as vague, occluded ghosts and leave questions of who they were open to speculation. Variables, uncertainties, and private moments of empathy or alienation are endemic to biographies and biographical evidence, and it is therefore understandable that academia treats literary biography with caution.

There can be no immediate solution to the question of how literary biography can be integrated with literary studies, but this volume will, I hope, provide a reference point for those who wish to consider a way forward. Undergraduates searching for an original topic for their dissertation, postgraduates looking for an under‐researched field for their doctorate, and academics picking over new openings for teaching and publishing are usually well‐provisioned with guidebooks and agreed methodologies on how to deal with texts, contexts, and theoretical approaches to each. So much so that their apparent discovery of a genuinely unorthodox, non‐mainstream thesis usually turns out to be a contradiction in terms: if it exists someone is likely to have written about it. The exception is literary biography. Certainly, there are a number of substantial and important books on the topic by academics, such as Batchelor’s The Art of Literary Biography (ed., 1995) and Salwak’s The Literary Biography (1996). Both individuals are biographers—and contributors to this volume—but when they address themselves to the genre as a whole they generally find themselves looking through a window to a world beyond academe where literary biography is routinely written and read. Here, figures such as Richard Holmes in books such as This Long Pursuit. Reflections of a Romantic Biographer (2016) tell us a great deal about their travels, their evocative encounters with things touched by their subjects, rooms in which they lived, their sense of writing about writers as an emotional investment, a love story. It is an enchanting read, but works like this claiming to be literary criticism died out in the nineteenth century. There is a discernible gulf between literary biography as indulged by academia and its manifestation in the real world. This volume cannot hope to resolve it, but those willing to follow the numerous tracks charted by its contributors might find the potential for bridge‐building.

In the opening chapter in Part I, Darcy examines the birth of literary biography at the close of the seventeenth century and considers its expansion through the eighteenth. Romanticism saw the first instance of a landmark generation of literary writers who prompted accounts of how their lives interacted with the work; Keanie deals with this. North and Regis look at how peer‐on‐peer literary biography developed through the nineteenth century and note a growing tendency for writers—particularly Dickens and Hardy—to secure for themselves a biographical legacy significantly different from the truth. Davison looks at how, during the early twentieth century, the popularity of literary biography was reflected in its expansion within non‐print media, most significantly the wireless. Salwak’s chapter, on the genre’s development during the twentieth century, will open doors for later considerations of what modern and contemporary literary biography involves.

Part II will contain chapters that address the status and writing of literary biography from numerous perspectives. Some consider the ways in which the raw material of the biographer’s craft, such as letters (Devine), diaries (Lyons), and archived documents (McVeigh, Chapter 16, De Ornellas, and Morra) can be treated and made use of. Bell examines the tension between speculation and evidential material in biography, and McVeigh (Chapter 8) addresses the related question of whether the style and manner of a biographer can distort facts. Others look at how intrinsic elements of literary biography raise questions on issues such as gender (Beer and Ferres), ethics (Howes), what can and cannot be said (Stannard), and the ever‐present dilemma of whether literary texts can be regarded as autobiographical (Tegla and Underwood). Gonzalez, on Salman Rushdie, considers a unique instance of an author’s life becoming a real‐life narrative of violence and ideological polarization. Bradford conducts a survey of some of the key texts in academic criticism and theory and picks out an antipathy toward literary biography that is endemic to literary studies in universities.

The chapters in Part III, Classic Cases, examine the ways in which literary biography has played a role in our perception of writers in the mainstream of the English canon. It includes, in chronological order, pieces on: Chaucer (Turner); Shakespeare, (Potter); Donne (Hancock); Swift (Ward); Pope (Baines); Richardson and Fielding (Lockwood); Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Dickens, and Hardy (Jędrzejewski); Dickens, Tennyson, and Kipling (Batchelor); T.S. Eliot (Keanie); Joyce (McCourt); Lowell (Rollyson); Amis and Larkin (James). This Part completes and embodies the interactive character of the volume. Every chapter considers the historical progress of our perception of key authors and in this respect invites us to look back to Part I. In the latter, biographers were largely involved in lateral portraits, considering their peers, sometimes their friends, in terms of shared states of mind, and sometimes pressurized by what they were and were not allowed to say. History and the disclosure of controversial evidence altered these portraits and caused us to be aware that literary biography is an organic, hybrid form of writing, one that is almost literary—it inevitably involves speculation and a sense of narrative as its compelling attraction—yet which strives for the status of a scholarly, historical genre. At the same time, and most confusingly, alterations in our perception of authors as individuals swerve into, embrace, and often clash with our estimation of them as artists. Parts II and III involve a number of challenging interfaces, given that the chronological progress of biographies of specific authors, dealt with in the latter, is influenced, often impeded, and sometimes encouraged by the nature of evidence available and by the technique that a biographer feels is most appropriate to their subject, all of which feature as topics in Part II.

The three Parts of the volume will, I hope, create a productive friction, one that encourages readers to move between them, according to their objective or disposition. In a broader sense, this tripartite interface might spark a conversation, one that moves literary biography closer to the center of academic literary studies.