Evelyn Juers is an art and literary critic, essayist, Brontë and biography scholar, and the author of House of Exile (2008), The Recluse (2012) and The Dancer (2021).
MORE THAN OTHER GENRES, biography defies methodology. So how do we read it? Compliantly, absorbing psychological insights, historical context, for entertainment, to discover how a life was lived? Or pushing back, interpretively, digressively, reading between lines, working with but also against the subject, the author, the biographical imperative? This is an essay on the second ‘method’, hardly a method at all, rather a walk on some biographical byways, a personalised itinerary.
Asking ‘How should one read a book?’ in The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf advises relatively, that even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to…