Repository | Book | Chapter
(1998) Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
I was once doing a crossword puzzle with some friends and read out the clue: "——is the spur". One of us said, immediately, "Fear". This slip makes a good joke for the biographer. Fame may be the spur, for biographers and their subjects. But fame and fear connect. Anne Stevenson's biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame (1989), came out of — and caused — as much fear as fame, the biographer's as well as her subject's. Fear, just as much as fame, could indeed be thought of as "the spur" for any biographer. It certainly plays its part in a biographer's motives and emotions.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-26548-0_16
Full citation:
Lee, H. (1998)., Am I afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in W. Gould & T. F. Staley (eds.), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 224-238.
This document is unfortunately not available for download at the moment.