Biography

Some literary biographies are best known for their gestation – or malgestation. Some authors, we might go further, should have a big sign around their neck – noli me tangere. Muriel Spark is one of them. Her voluminous archive, lovingly tended all her life, is full of booby traps. Twice she went into battle with biographers: first Derek Stanford, a former lover; then Martin Stannard, whose biography of Evelyn Waugh she had admired. 

For seven years after her 1963 burial, Sylvia Plath lay in an unmarked grave near St Thomas the Apostle Church in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. The gravestone, when it came, bore her birth and married names, Sylvia Plath Hughes, the years of her birth and death, and a line from Wu Cheng-en’s sixteenth-century novel Monkey King:Journey to the West: ‘Even amidst fierce flames, the golden lotus can be planted.’

On weekday mornings in the 1950s a teenager called Geoffrey William Finch would ride his Malvern Star through Sydney’s Rookwood cemetery on the way to his carpentry job. Cutting across fields of headstones, he talked incessantly. When, several decades later, Katia Ariel asks who he was speaking to, Finch pauses, closes his eyes and then, ‘with a boyish smile playing on his bearded face’, explains that he was ‘talking to God’.

That Elizabeth Harrower should merit not one but two biographies would have both surprised and pleased her. That the biographies would be published within months of each other, by two Sydney writers and journalists, using much the same source material, would have intrigued her, as it did me. I don’t know Helen Trinca or Susan Wyndham, or who had the idea first, or anything of the anxiety they must have felt at being pipped at the post, or of any rivalry for sources and access to people or documents, but the two books arrived on my desk together.

The subject of this fine biography was my Doktorvater or postgraduate supervisor. He hailed from York, ancient capital of England’s northern counties. So did my biological father, Wilfred Prest (1907-1985). Both won university scholarships to study history. But their family backgrounds and life trajectories were very different.

Ron Chernow is a renowned journalist and bestselling biographer, whose best-known work is probably Alexander Hamilton (2004), the main inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American musical (2015). Chernow’s latest book joins several acclaimed biographies of Mark Twain that have appeared in recent decades, including Gary Scharnhorst’s three-volume Life (2018, 2019, and 2022). The complete Autobiography of Mark Twain, also in three volumes, was published in 2010, 2013, and 2015. Twain dictated much of this to Albert Bigelow Paine, his authorised biographer and literary executor. As Chernow reflects, ‘The challenge for Paine, as for all future Twain biographers, was that Twain was peerless at bending the truth.’

In literary careers, straightforward narrative arcs are less the rule than the exception. A writer can begin with a resounding debut, only to stumble at what in the music business is called the ‘difficult second album’. Authors can change genres and audiences; fail at achieving significant sales figures; succumb to hostile reviews, or simple indifference. Miles Franklin expressed it best in her novel title My Career Goes Bung (1946).

You Are What You Make Yourself To Be is the documented personal history of one Victorian Aboriginal family. The author’s story is interspersed with researched documented facts intended to authenticate and support the narrative but at times these lengthy italicized notes work against the continuity of the story.

Was Katharine Susannah Prichard one of those present at the first meetings of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), or not? Did she or didn’t she later pass intelligence to the Soviets, as charged by historians of ASIO Desmond Ball and David Horner? What difference would it have made to have had Lesbia Harford’s full queer oeuvre before the Australian public when it was written? Why didn’t Dymphna Cusack join the CPA if, as this book asserts, her politics were just as far left as Frank Hardy’s? How aware was Eleanor Dark of First Nations activism when writing The Timeless Land (1941)? Politics sit at the heart of Australian literary history, but a raft of questions remain for contemporary readers.

When teaching the history of medieval Europe it is hard to resist regaling students with lurid accounts of some of the extreme devotional practices performed by medieval women mystics. Saint Catherine of Siena, so it was claimed, drank the vomit of lepers to abase herself before God. Marie of Oignies, apparently, refused to eat anything but the consecrated host and died of starvation. Julian of Norwich lived in seclusion, inside a cell attached to a church, having renounced all things of the world including the opportunity to go outside. These women’s lives, in the retelling, can offer a visceral sense of the strangeness of medieval religious culture, and can also provide a sense of the particularity of gendered celebrity in pre-modernity. As a teacher, however, I am loathe to lean too heavily into the ostensible spiritual otherness of the Middle Ages. I worry that presenting these women as freaks risks alienating students from the historical work I am training them to do; to make sense of historical difference on its own terms.