My love affair with biography began aged nine, when my subscription book club sent me a compendium of “true life” adventure stories. It is a passion I have carried into adulthood: before moving to the great biographer and diarist James Boswell’s home county of Ayrshire and founding a festival in his name, I had enjoyed commissioning biography, memoir and travel writing – all genres at which Boswell excelled – as a senior editor at the renowned publisher John Murray. It was then still housed in the family’s London mansion in Albemarle Street, where one of the great lost memoirs in literature, Lord Byron’s, had been burnt in the drawing-room grate.
Visiting Boswell’s burial place for the first time, in the churchyard in Auchinleck, a former mining village in Ayrshire, I was shocked to discover that Boswell’s literary legacy had also seemingly been laid to rest. His exquisite neoclassical mausoleum stood derelict, with not even a sign to mark his last resting place. I immediately determined to launch a book festival of biography.
We love to catch a glimpse of the lives of others, and literary lives are no exception. An admiration for a writer instinctively makes readers curious about them. Ideally, the written portrait will convey, through style and language, the voice of the subject as though they are talking to you from the page. Ultimately, though, their work has to be judged on its own terms. Biographers often disappoint by failing to explain the subject’s core achievement – and the very reason they are being written about in the first place – through critical analysis.
Boswell’s own, brilliant The Life of Samuel Johnson was published 232 years ago this month and has never been out of print – meaning that he has been trumped, if not eclipsed in the public mind, by his subject. But shouldn’t that be the goal of all biographers? Miranda Seymour’s life of Jean Rhys, featuring at this year’s festival, borrows Boswell’s cradle-to-grave template of literary biography. Seymour’s practice is grounded in painstaking research and eyewitness accounts, written with all the tautness of a thriller, bringing to life this important, neglected writer.
However, as Andrew Lownie, founder of the Biographers’ Club network of writers, points out: “Biography has become harder to sell unless a household name is involved.” It’s no coincidence that books on Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Churchill – with 45 books connected to his life currently on sale – Hitler, Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath and Agatha Christie are published regularly.
Previous establishment pillars of the biography, such as Elizabeth Longford (Queen Victoria and Wellington) and Philip Magnus (Edward VII) expected to have “the final say” on their subjects, but that is no longer possible. New angles – psychological and reputational – are constantly being explored.
Still, if the “doorstop” biography is struggling in the market, it is more than compensated for at the tills by the current boom in memoir, especially by celebrities such as Miriam Margolyes, Billy Connolly and Jeremy Clarkson. One magisterial biographer described that phenomenon – heavily curated rather than “warts and all” – as akin to “biography as a handshake”.
One can equally liken a good memoir to being hugged. By taking a much more informal approach, a writer’s honesty at exposing aspects of their own story can offer both inspiration and consolation in, for example, how to survive the death of a loved one.
They can also provide an invaluable gateway into the experiences of previously ignored people; witness Lee Lawrence’s superb The Louder I Will Sing, an account of his battle for justice over the shooting of his mother, which sparked the Brixton riots in 1985. Another door is opened into the lives of a minority family in Mohsin Zaidi’s A Dutiful Boy, about growing up gay in a devout Muslim household.
There is also a burgeoning market for “quest biography”, the prototype being Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, published in 1985, subtitled Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. At this year’s festival, the Dutch historian Pieter van Os will be retracing the steps of a Polish Holocaust survivor, who under the guise of being Catholic, was taken in by a Nazi family. Travel and questing go hand in hand, giving fresh energy to travel writing, which recently has shown signs of running out of puff since the golden age of the likes of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dervla Murphy and Eric Newby (vintage John Murray authors). Our festival was created for Boswell’s sake, but also, through an educational and conservation charity, the Boswell Trust, to assist in the regeneration of local communities devastated by the closure of the mines. Our first festival venue, in 2011, was Boswell’s Georgian seat, Auchinleck House, owned by the Landmark Trust. Staging such an event with no track record in a “forgotten” corner of Britain relied on favours from contacts and friends. Writers such as Diana Athill, Selina Hastings and Candia McWilliam signed up, as did actor Bill Paterson and highly respected war reporter Kate Adie. Over the following three years, audiences gathered apace until we outgrew Auchinleck; we moved to neighbouring Dumfries House, which had been saved for the nation in 2007 when the now King Charles III raised £45m to fulfil his vision for heritage-led regeneration in the district.
Recently, I attended a dinner in Edinburgh hosted by book festival and literary sponsor Baillie Gifford, which celebrated the Winner of Winners from 25 years of the UK’s most prestigious prize for non-fiction. Their strapline was “All the Best Stories are True”. Boswell, whose art was rooted in the unvarnished truth about himself and his subjects, would have readily agreed.
Caroline Knox is director of the Boswell Book festival. The Boswell book festival will take place at Dumfries House, Ayrshire, from 12 to 14 May 2023, with a children’s festival taking place at the same time
