Here are some gems of British literary biography, excellent reading whether or not you subscribe to the heresy that it’s often more interesting to read about an author’s life than to read what he or she wrote.

The romantic lives (and early deaths, each before the age of forty) of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë have certainly affected the way we think about their literary output. Two good antidotes to any of those misconceptions are Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. Barker also edited The Brontës: A Life in Letters, which makes a good companion read to her biography.

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According to one of his contemporaries, the nineteenth-century poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge “did everything he shouldn’t and nothing that he should.” You can read all about him in Richard Holmes’s excellent two-volume survey, Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772–1804 and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834. Holmes also wrote about the wild life and beautiful writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Shelley: The Pursuit.


One of the great “better than fiction” love stories of the nineteenth century is that of the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Margaret Forster in Elizabeth Barrett Browning tells their whole romantic story—tyrannical father, lifelong illness, passionate love affair—with gusto and grace.





Lord Byron, who was described by his contemporary Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” had a life defined by his omnivorous sexuality. Needless to say, then, Benita Eisler’s Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame limns a life that far surpassed anything Byron could (legally) say in print.

The writing lives of a mother and daughter also make for fascinating reading. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the influential feminist essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was resolutely opposed to the institution of marriage, and made a career for herself as a journalist until she died shortly after giving birth to her daughter. Janet Todd reveals all in Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. Her daughter, who would become the author of Frankenstein, lived an equally unconventional life, movingly told in Miranda Seymour’s Mary Shelley.