April 22, 2005

'Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography'

By NINA C. AYOUB

As an experienced biographer, Hermione Lee knows a hungry audience. "Readers of biography are greedy readers, with an insatiable appetite for detail and story," writes the British scholar, a professor of English literature at New College, University of Oxford. They are fed by the genre's mix of approaches, its blend of history, gossip, criticism, politics, psychology, sociology, and more. But in the messy process, she asks, what about gaps, absences, and unprovable stories?

Such

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