omething should be done,” George Eliot wrote to her publisher in 1874, “in the matter of literary biography.” She had read John Forster’s life of Charles Dickens and found it a troubling experience. “Is it not odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk is raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public is printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to reread his books?” The genre is “a disgrace to us all”, the literary equivalent of “the uncovering of the dead Byron’s club-foot”.
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