“Biographies generally are a disease of English literature,” George Eliot once wrote to a friend. “The best history of a writer is contained in his writing—these are his chief actions.” The disease would seem to be incurable. Literary biography not only still flourishes but now encroaches on memoir, autofiction, even self-help. We expect the subject to assist the biographer and ourselves in our ordinary quandaries. The smooth aperçus of Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) were too long-nineties to last, but many recent publications emulate its approach. Lara Feigel’s recent Look! We Have Come Through! (2022) might have been titled How D.H. Lawrence Can Change Your Life: it showed how comfortable but discontented metropolitan professionals could refresh themselves with doses of his furious primitivism. In John Kaag’s Hiking with Nietzsche (2018), the philosopher’s preoccupation with how to become what one is blurs in the mists of Sils Maria with the problems of being John Kaag. In such books, the biographer mines the life and work of a writer in the confident expectation that they record experiences with the power to help or transform us.
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