Biography is as old as the writing of history, as the biblical stories of Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Joseph attest. Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, Plutarch’s 46 Lives and Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars are still read today. Nevertheless, for centuries historians regarded biography as a trivial poor relation to the dignified pursuit of history. While the historian dealt with lofty surveys of wars and constitutions and the rise and fall of empires, the biographer was content with the threads of a single life. And while the Oxford Dictionary defines biography as “a branch of literature,” it has generally been considered a poor cousin there as well. I know of no department of literature or creative writing that offers courses on either the study or the writing of biography.

These days, biography flourishes despite the various new movements in social or political history (or cultural studies) that tend to diminish it. Many more readers are likely to turn to Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler than to narrative surveys of the Third Reich. Churchill biographies tower over in popularity over histories of Britain in World War II. It is not hard to understand why. Biography humanizes the past and at the same time enriches our own time by showing a vividness and expanse (and perhaps significance) that few of us experience in our own lives. “People read biography,” Albert Camus wrote, “because they envy the coherence that lives achieve when recorded.” In my own case my fascination is with origins, as in a current biography I am reading of Bach—what is the provenance of genius? I often abandon a biography once the subject has settled into their accomplished life.

The writing of biography is notoriously challenging and difficult. “Biography occasions a degree of trouble far beyond that of any other species of literary composition,” wrote Boswell, who surely knew. Lytton Strachey wrote that “it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as it is to live one.” “How,” exclaimed Virginia Woolf when she sat down to write the life of the critic Roger Fry, “can one make a life of six cardboard boxes full of tailor’s bills, love letters and old picture postcards?” The “how” lies in the storytelling. That book Woolf wrote is infused with her own luminous skill as well as with Fry’s own acumen: “Behind his glasses, beneath bushy black eyebrows, he had very luminous eyes with a curious power of observation in them as if, while he talked he looked, and considered what he saw.”

These examples lead us to conclude that biography is at heart a literary art. “Any author attempting it is challenged to call upon gifts of understanding and interpretation, of choosing and shaping, of style and colour to give life and truth to the subject. For this reason, the work of biography is never done, and new readings of individuals are inevitable over the years,” writes Frances Halpenny in her article Biography in English in The Canadian Encyclopedia. Also Biography in French.

If the chief requirement of a really good biography is that it recreate an individual and that it persuade us that he or she lived and that it explain why its subject was that kind of person, it seems that a great biography must be as complete as possible. What then to make of the “new biography,” those briefer sketches anticipated by Lytton Strachey’s masterful Eminent Victorians. They succeed in their “becoming brevity,” either by dazzling writing as in his case, or by carefully adhering to the first principles, for biography of any length: vividly re-creating character, presenting an unbiased record of events and placing the subject in historical context. (It is tempting to quote Strachey at the very mention of his name. This, from his Queen Victoria:

“The spring woods at Osborne, so full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield…Lord Pamerston’s queer clothes and high demeanor, and Albert’s face under the green lamp, and Albert’s first stag at Balmoral, and Albert in his blue and silver uniform, and the Baron coming in through a doorway, and Lord M. dreaming at Windsor with the rooks cawing in the elm tress and the Archbishop of Canterbury on his knees in the dawn, and the old king’s turkey-cock ejaculations, and Uncle Leopold’s soft voice at Claremont, and Lehzen with the globes, and her mother’s feathers sweeping down towards her….” (As André Maurois wrote of this passage “Here the biographer is on a level with the great musician and the great poet.”)

While the shorter forms inevitably lack depth, they can serve to lay bare the facts as the biographer found them. Do we really need, as Leon Edel wrote, a record of every last date in a subject’s datebook, a catalogue of gourmet dinners…and clouds of witnesses for every life? (Edel, who grew up in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, and attended McGill, considered his own five-volume biography of Henry James to be “one of the shortest biographies of our time.”) For Edel biography only soared when it became more than a recital of facts or description of an individual’s accomplishments and penetrates the inner myth we all create in order to live, “the myth that tells us we have some being, some selfhood, some goal, something to strive for beyond the fulfillment of food or sex or creature comforts.”

Biography has had its critics, of course. George Elliot called it a “disease of English literature.” Nabokov described it as “psycho-plagiarism.” For Auden it was always in “bad taste.” T.S. Elliot forbade his heirs to sanction a biography (it has not prevented them from being written). You can never draw a proper line, he said, “between curiosity which is legitimate and that which is merely harmless, and between that which is legitimate and that which is vulgarly impertinent.” But T.S. perhaps it is that very impertinence that is one of the appeals of biography!

So we conclude that biography is not a branch of history, for history is not just an accumulation of biographical sketches. History is a generalized narrative concerning events, movements, institutions and the interplay of personality with circumstance. And of course biography concerns a single life! After rereading Donald Creighton’s literate biography of Sir John A. Macdonald recently, I became persuaded all over again by the author that he was the chief and perhaps sole creator of Confederation, when I know better from reading history. No, the discipline of history as we know it is not just an accumulation of biography, but surely it benefits from understanding those single lives as signposts along the way.

To return to Lionel Edel, successful biography helps us to realize that “beyond the flesh and the legend there is an inner sense of self, an inner man or woman, who shapes and expresses, alters and clothes, the personality that is our subject and our art.” So biography may not strictly speaking be history but it is integral to something more fundamental in our sense of the past—in the words of Henry James it is witness to the "great observed adventures of mankind."