Antonia Fraser collects a CBE, awarded for services to literature, with her husband, the playwright Harold Pinter
© PA/EMPICS

Since then the biography genre has expanded in every direction. From the 1960s onwards, literary biography became a respected form, with Richard Ellman's works on WB Yeats, Oscar Wilde and James Joyce setting the standard, and the baton being picked up by Michael Holroyd writing on George Bernard Shaw, and Hilary Spurling on Ivy Compton-Burnett.

In the 1970s, readable biographies of historical figures began pouring into the bookshops. Antonia Fraser had a notable success with her life of Mary, Queen of Scots, and American author Robert K Massie's account of the last Russian royal family, Nicholas and Alexandra, became a film and an international bestseller. Royals have remained popular subjects ever since - some more than others. One of last year's most highly praised biographies was John Guy's My Heart is My Own, another book about Mary, Queen of Scots, re-evaluating her as a politician. Recent trends have seen biographers chronicling lesser-known historical figures, including many women: the wives, daughters and sisters of famous men.

Biographers have also experimented with technique, using fictional devices such as inventing dialogue or writing in the first person. Novelists have returned the compliment by putting real characters in their novels, and the line between novel and biography has become blurred. Works that balance teasingly on it include Peter Ackroyd's fictionalised biography of Charles Dickens, Margaret Forster's account of the marriage between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning from the imagined point of view of their maid, and The Master, Colm Toibin's recent novel about Henry James.

Biographers have experimented with content as well as form. Some write up their hunt for material as part of the book, making it a personal quest. The most famous example is AJA Symon's 1934 The Quest for Corvo, and this approach continues to be a popular option among writers of unauthorised biographies, who may struggle to get their hands on written records.

Top of page