This book is about one person's reading and what has been learnt about how the lives of other
people particularly authors have been written in British literary biographies over the last
fifty years. It is less interested in what happened in the lives of the people described in
these biographies and more concerned with how these stories have been told. It aims to have a
conversation with British biographers particularly Michael Holroyd Richard Holmes Hermione
Lee and Claire Tomalin to make their voices heard to set them talking. It understands
biography as an ongoing collaboration not only between biographers and their subjects but
between biographers and their readers. This is also a study of haunting in which we haunt the
lives of others to help us come to a better understanding of our own.
