"Virginia Woolf's Nose"

[fiefoe]

This slight book by Hermione Lee raises good questions about the art of biography, but doesn't go much further than that. At least the quotes are nice.

[Henry James:]
The trouble with death, is that it "smooths the folds" of the person one loved. "The figure retained by the memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count; it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather than nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities."

[John Dryden:]
The pageantry of life is taken away; you see the poor reasonable animal, as naked as nature ever made him;

[Julian Barnes:]
You can define a net in one of two ways,... Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

[John Wiltshire:]
Biography's appeal to readers is inseparable from the dream of possession of, and union with, the subject.