Biography

What are the stakes of literary biography? Sam Twyford-Moore poses this question in reviewing two recent books on Frank Moorhouse, addressing issues ranging from the ethics of disclosure to the intersections between biography and cultural history.

In a review of Frances Peters-Little’s new biography, musician and historian Toby Martin follows the exemplary career of Jimmy Little, whose life and work attest to popular music’s power to shift cultural and political attitudes.

In a review of John Kean’s study of the Papunya Tula art movement, Martin Edmond examines the intricate negotiations between aesthetic intention and ritual restriction that made the artists’ work possible.

With so much material available for an author who remains a notable figure in Australian literature, what is the task of a biography of Prichard today?

Why was Elizabeth von Arnim so quickly and thoroughly forgotten? I wonder if the answer instead lies in the honesty with which she writes about women, the double standards to which they are habitually subjected, and the men whose unthinking or appalling behaviour so often shapes their life trajectories.

Rees is open about her personal connection to her parents’ papers, which does complicate the book.

The point being there is something incongruous about a biography that looks for answers in the past of a person who, herself, believed she was always in a state of becoming.

Only now do we have a full-length biography of Gwen Harwood. And what a work of love and scholarship it is.

Born in 1890, the second youngest of eight children, Alexander Hugh Chisholm grew up in Maryborough in the goldfields region north-west of Melbourne. He was unhappy at school and often cut classes, to follow, as he put it, the lure of the bush. At first he had no books and no adequate language for the charm of birds, their colours and shapes, their vocal range, nests and eggs, and he invented his own names for them.

Biographies juxtapose competing views of particular events, moments and aspects of Plath’s life. Red Comet, over a thousand pages, takes in all the other Plath biographies before it. Scholarship is meant to work like this, as is legal precedent. Biography is like a party game where each person adds to a story, repeating and elaborating on what has come before.