Lives and Deaths of the Rich and Literary

I've just finished Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography, by Hermione Lee (2005). I read her biography of Virginia Woolf and liked it, so I thought I'd try this. It's a fun little book, not overly serious, about the pitfalls of biography writing, which mostly consist in being seduced by myths surrounding the subject, or just being generally melodramatic. She looks at a few death scenes and quotes some pretty funny passages in which the biographers guess at the interior monologue of the dying person, often trying to use words from the person's poetry or novels to describe their poignant feelings.

Lee writes interestingly on public perceptions of famous figures in different eras, looking particularly at the book The Hours and its film adaptation, which gave a popular, but distorted, image of Virginia Woolf's suicide and of her nose (which was made pretty ridiculous by its imitation in the form of a prosthetic on Nicole Kidman). She tells some good anecdotes and the book did make me think about how hard it must be to write biography, to create an orderly account of someone's life (usually dealing with large gaps of information) and to make it interesting without inventing meaning where none exists.