Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing

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Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing by Hermione Lee

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English prose literature -- History and criticism. Biography as a literary form. Target Audience Adult Summary "In this timely, unusual collection Hermione Lee is concerned in different ways with approaches to 'life-writing': These studies by a leading critic and internationally acclaimed biographer raise profound and intriguing issues about every aspect of writing, and reading, a life. Notes Includes bibliographical references and index. View online Borrow Buy Freely available Show 0 more links Set up My libraries How do I set up "My libraries"?

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Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing

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The heart was rediscovered after Mary Shelley's death. Wrapped in silk between the pages of Adonais , it had lain inside her travelling-desk for almost thirty years. Those Romantics were really something, huh?

Lee's final chapter addresses the other central question of life-writing - the biographer's perspective. Appropriately for the end of the book, she ends with how biographers deal with their subjects' deaths, and the common desire to align the death with the life. In some cases, this will be a heroic death for a heroic figure, or inspirational last word from an oratorical figure.

Or, as she observes, for a literary biography, a desire to match-up the death to the imaginative life of the writer, and their own accounts of death. Again, Lee looks at how different writers approach the same figure, their telling of the final chapter aligning with their overall approach. These chapters are terrific. The material they bookend is less enthralling - a group of lectures, which had a strong post-graduate whiff to me, and a selection of reviews or short biographical statements, which were often interesting, but less colourful and less coherent than the opening and closing entries.

One chapter - about the somewhat priggish and evidently quite innocent Angela Thirkell, who in the ss wrote a bunch of old-fashioned novels set in an idealised England - had me laughing out loud, when Lee allowed herself a bit of fun by quoting from one of the novels to demonstrate 'Thirkell's blithe lack of awareness of the language of sexuality': I came here last year Apr 14, Ineffablyschmoo rated it really liked it.

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This book is a series of essays on life-writing, loosely held together by the organising metaphor of "body parts". They seem to be a collection of reflections on the challenges of biography, the boundary between biography, truth and fiction, and critical reviews of other writers' biographies of literary figures.

body parts essays on life-writing

Hermione Lee explores the lives of a number of literary figures and how they have been "versioned" by biographers, the dilemmas that arise from how to write death into the lives of autho This book is a series of essays on life-writing, loosely held together by the organising metaphor of "body parts". Hermione Lee explores the lives of a number of literary figures and how they have been "versioned" by biographers, the dilemmas that arise from how to write death into the lives of authors, and how to reconcile the person with the life-work.

She examines numerous times the hostility between authors and biographers, and how biographers seem to work against authors who resist the simplification of life-writing. She is good on discussing the prurient and sentimental tendencies that plague biographers - how we cannot resist poking the underbelly of people's innermost private thoughts and desires, and we cannot resist making meaning where life and death has simply occurred without rhyme or reasons.

It is a fascinating set of essays for anyone who is interested in narrative, life stories, and literature. One flaw might be that the book does read as a series of disconnected essays here I go, looking for coherence and some sense of "summation" and "narrative" , which means that some aspects are repetitive and others are left unexplored - why this set of essays, together - where are her overarching thoughts? I feel this is likely deliberate on the author's part, as she may seek to model in her structure the resistance to meaningless coherence that she so often talks about in the book.

Yet I would have liked a bit more of this, a bit more of the author's erudite and disarmingly personal thoughts on the topics she mentions. One thing I really enjoyed was the personal nature of her engagement with the topics of each essay - she does not appeal to greater authority, but takes charge of her own responses, what each author means to her, which aspects of biographical writing she likes and dislikes, how she has herself faced the challenges of biography. She sometimes pronounces upon the quality and value of particular techniques, but always with an eye to knowing how transient biographical and literary fashion can be.

This is an enjoyable book because it is a work of personal scholarship, which does not pretend to be the last word on the subject, but rather wishes to engage the reader in a friendly, astute conversation about the bits that make the subject most fascinating. Jun 20, Katharine rated it liked it Shelves: Interesting collection, though the later essays seemed rather perfunctory in some cases.

Also, I'm just not as interested in late-c20 writers. The pieces on biographical cruxes in Woolf and Austen's lives were neat.

Life-Writing

Dec 24, sisterimapoet rated it liked it Shelves: Not sure I like Lee's style that much. But I like what she was trying to do here - and I feel I've gained a new understanding of certain authors, and a few new names to check out too. Audrey Neill rated it it was amazing Nov 23, Catherine Pope rated it it was amazing Jun 16, Rosemary rated it it was amazing Dec 26, Emma rated it did not like it Jan 09, Katie rated it liked it Jan 07, Jodi Gallagher rated it really liked it Dec 03, Alana Hb rated it it was amazing Mar 03, Inside Out Publishing Consignment rated it it was amazing Jun 13, Anne Wellman rated it really liked it Jun 15, Abigail Houseman rated it liked it Apr 30, Stephen rated it liked it Dec 06, Cory Hughes rated it it was amazing Oct 17, Martin Bremer rated it liked it Jan 15, Julianne rated it it was amazing Sep 26, Diarmid Sullivan rated it it was amazing Apr 12, Lucienne Boyce rated it liked it Feb 21, Rebecca Foster rated it liked it Jul 25, Marni rated it really liked it Jul 01, Indu Muralidharan rated it really liked it Jan 05, Nicci Obholzer rated it it was amazing Apr 03, Elizabeth rated it it was amazing Jun 11, Lani rated it it was amazing Dec 10, Kathlene rated it it was amazing Nov 20, CeciliaCe rated it liked it Sep 10,