How I do hate the ordinary sleek biography! I’d have every wart & pimple emphasised, every tricky trait or petty meanness brought out. The great writers are great enough to bear it.

This is Henry Handel Richardson writing to Nettie Palmer in 1932 about a biography of Charlotte Bronte. Michael Ackland takes this comment as the epigraph for his biography and demonstrates throughout that Richardson’s life and work can indeed sustain the kind of close scrutiny his subject advocates above.