By: Caroline Knox / The Guardian (Original title: Why are biographies so popular? Because humans are enthralled by the lives of others)
Translation (partial) from: Telegrafi.com
My love affair with biography began at the age of nine, when my subscription book club sent me a collection of "real life" adventure stories. It's a passion I've carried into adulthood: before moving to the home county of the great biographer and chronicler James Boswell, Ayrshire, and founding a festival in his name, I enjoyed commissioning biographies, memoirs, and travelogues - all genres in which Boswell excelled - as an editor at the renowned publishing house. John murray. At that time it was still located in the family residence in London, Albërmal Street, where one of the greatest lost memories in literature, Lord Byron, was burned in the drawing room fireplace.
Visiting Boswell's burial site for the first time, in the churchyard of Oakenlake, a former mining village in Ayrshire, I was shocked to discover that Boswell's literary legacy had - apparently - been buried. His magnificent neoclassical mausoleum lay abandoned, with no sign to mark his final resting place. I immediately decided to start a book festival of the biography.
We love to capture a glimpse into the lives of others, and literary lives are no exception. Admiration for a writer instinctively makes readers curious about them. Ideally, the written portrait will convey, through style and language, the subject's voice as if speaking to you from the page. Ultimately, however, their work must be judged by the conditions in which they worked. Biographers often disappoint by failing to explain the essence of the subject - and the very reason for writing in the first place - through critical analysis.
Boswell's own brilliant book, The Life of Samuel Johnson, was published 232 years ago and has never been finished - which means he has dazzled, if not eclipsed, the public mind through his subject. But shouldn't that be the goal of all biographers? The Life of Jane Rhys by Miranda Seymour, which premiered at this year's festival, borrows the template of Boswell's cradle-to-grave literary biography. Seymour's practice draws on painstaking research and eyewitness accounts, written with the sharpness of a thriller, bringing this important and neglected writer to life.
However, as Andrew Lownie, founder of the Biographers Club writers' network, points out: "Biography has become harder to sell unless it involves a well-known name." It is no coincidence that books about Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Churchill - with 45 books currently on sale relating to his life - Hitler, Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath and Agatha Christie are published regularly.
Previous pillars of the biography, such as Elizabeth Longford (Queen Victoria and Wellington) and Philip Magnus (Edward VII) were expected to have the "final word" on the subjects they dealt with, but this is no longer possible. New angles - psychological and reputational - are constantly being explored.
Still, if biography is struggling in the marketplace, it is more than compensated for by the current boom in memoirs, particularly by celebrities like Miriam Margolyes, Billy Connolly and Jeremy Clarkson. One biographer described the phenomenon as similar to "biography, like a handshake."
One might as well compare a good memory to a hug. Taking a much more informal approach, a writer's honesty in presenting aspects of the story can provide inspiration and comfort, for example, how to survive the death of a loved one.
They can also provide an invaluable gateway to the experiences of previously ignored people; as the excellent testimony by Lee Lawrence, The louder I sing, an account of his fight for justice for his mother's murder, which sparked the Brixton riots in 1985. Another door opens into the life of a minority family, in Responsible boy by Mohsin Zaidi, about raising gay men in a devout Muslim family.
There is also a growing market for the "research biography", the prototype is Traces by Richard Holmes, published 1985, subtitled Adventures of a romantic biography. At this year's festival, Dutch historian Pieter van Os will retrace the steps of a Polish Holocaust survivor who, under the guise of being Catholic, was taken in by a Nazi family.
Recently, I attended a dinner in Edinburgh hosted by the book festival and literary sponsor Baillie Gifford, which marked the 25th anniversary of the UK's most prestigious literary prize. Their motto was "All the best stories are true." Boswell, whose art was rooted in unvarnished truth, about himself and his subjects, would have readily agreed. /Telegraph/
