Intellectually, my journey into literary biography was not unproblematic. She completed her life of Charlotte Brontë in only two years. She used to sit at the dining-room table writing, while fielding domestic interruptions from, say, the cook, who wanted instructions as to what to make for the next family meal. Gaskell, when she was working on her Life of Charlotte Brontë in the 1850s. I sometimes think of the Victorian novelist and mother of four, Mrs. Of course, I’ve done all sorts of other stuff in the meanwhile: journalism, editing, teaching, not to mention bringing up children and keeping a house while my musician husband was on the road. Only obsession can explain what keeps the literary biographer going. My second book- L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”-has been nearly nine years in the making. My first book, The Brontë Myth, took about eight years from inception to publication-in fact more, because the idea had been simmering for some time before I begun. Ten is not unheard of, especially when the subject has not been “done” before. Researching the lives of dead novelists and poets can take years. Literary biographers are in it for the long haul.
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