Writing Lives

Introduction; 1. Reading life writing: The influence of early biographers: Plutarch, Izaak Walton, John Aubrey, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell; The Victorian approach; Bloomsbury; Autobiography; Life Writing and the Second World War; Women's autobiographical writing; Family memoirs; Biographical structure in the twentieth century and key writers; Ethics and biography; Assignments; 2. Approaching the texts: How biographers choose their subjects; Structuring a life; New approaches to biography; Other forms of life writing: letters and diaries, autobiographical fiction; Sources; Illustrations; Assignments; 3. Texts and extracts: Peter Ackroyd, from Dickens; Maya Angelou, from I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings; John Aubrey, from Brief Lives; JG Ballard, from Empire of the Sun and Miracles of Life; Vera Brittain, from Testament of Youth and Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War, Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends; Elizabeth Gaskell, from The Life of Charlotte Brontë; Brian Keenan, from An Evil Cradling; Doris Lessing, from Alfred and Emily; Primo Levi, from If This is a Man; Alison Light, from Mrs Woolf and the Servants, Janet Malcolm, from The Silent Woman; Sylvia Plath, 'Morning Song'; Plutarch, from Parallel Lives; James Shapiro, from 1599, A Year in the Live of William Shakespeare; Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan, from Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers; Virginia Woolf, from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume III, 1925–30; 4. Critical Approaches: The autobiographical writings of Doris Lessing; Alfred and Emily; Critical responses to Alfred and Emily; Assignments; 5. How to write about life writing: The writer and the reader; Different perspectives: comparing texts; The context of writing: facts and their emphasis; Your own and other readers' interpretations; Assignments; 6. Resources: Chronology; Further reading; Websites; Glossary; Index; Acknowledgements.