In the Lake District, 1994.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews for our readers from our archive. This week, we’ve unlocked our interview with Hermione Lee, selected from the archive by Daisy Hildyard, whose story “Two Lives” appears in our recent Summer issue. Sign up for the Redux newsletter to receive these pieces to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Everybody dabbles in biography. If you have ever spoken at a funeral, rewritten your CV, or gossiped, you’ve had to deal with some of the questions that Hermione Lee discusses with Louisa Thomas in her Art of Biography interview. What is the shape of a life? What are the ingredients of an achievement? What specific person and what particular circumstances produced it? When something fails, do we have to find somebody to blame? Lee addresses these questions as matters of technique: the work of finding, or inventing, “a structure that is sympathetic to the subject.”

There is a kind of mise en abyme at play in her work, and in this interview about the life of somebody who writes the lives of those who captured something of life in their writing. Literary biography is an awkward pleasure. I like its strange textures and surprises. You catch James Joyce doing his impressions of a baby, or spend the summer with Tolstoy when he is on one of his horse yogurt diets. I believed I had a fair understanding of W. G. Sebald until I read his biography and saw the black-and-white snapshot of him as a young man standing thigh-deep in a river, topless in wet jeans with a deep tan, defined muscles, and a dagger in his hand. I also enjoy the genre for its practical insights. It’s useful to know how other writers chased their invoices, or when their children napped.

Lee’s biographies are exceptional for their integration of original research with illuminating interpretations of the authors’ works, and they last. I’ve read and reread her Penelope Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf; I’ve used the footnotes and followed her sources. I still have my mother’s twenty-nine-year-old Virago Press paperback Willa Cather. I can’t think of another writer, biographer or otherwise, who reads as closely as Lee, or with the same balance and imagination.

In their searching conversation, I was particularly interested in what Lee and Thomas have to say about the undisclosed elements of a life, including Lee’s own (she is reticent). They discuss lies and secrets. They also discuss inventiveness and hard work. The interview leaves me with a sense of how much it takes to make a sincere attempt to understand another person’s life.

The Art of Biography No. 4
Hermione Lee, interviewed by Louisa Thomas

INTERVIEWER

Do you find that you read biographies and think, This person is falling in love with his or her subject?

LEE

There are some figures, aren’t there, who seem to attract a certain kind of emotive treatment. Woolf is certainly one of them, Plath is another, Lawrence is another. Or, biography can be a form of rescue operation, special pleading. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot, by Carole Seymour-Jones, is a good example of that. It has to demonize T. S. Eliot in order to do its job of rescuing his first wife. Biography has so much to do with blame. It is not a neutral zone. So you will get biographies of Woolf where Leonard is blamed, or where her half brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, are blamed, or where her father, Leslie Stephen, is blamed. It’s as if you can’t tell a life story without someone having to be blamed. Named and shamed and blamed.

From issue no. 205 (Summer 2013)