Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography

We live in the great age of literary biography. But how much should a biographer tell? How much should an executor suppress? Does the public's right to know override an individual's right to privacy?
To answer these questions, Ian Hamilton presents a probing and far-reaching account of literary estate management and mismanagement through the centuries from Donne and Shakespeare to Plath and Larkin. In a gripping series of case studies, he recounts the battles between the protective and the curious, between the keepers of the sacred flame and those who might seek to snuff it out.
Hamilton offers a violent, lurid and hugely entertaining history of broken promises and mismanaged wills, of reputations whitewashed or maligned, of scholars and crooks, of muddle, trickery, scandal and vendetta. He includes the burning of Byron's memoir, the deification of Shelley and Henry James' attempt to "fix" his own posthumous reputation as well as the more recent controversies surrounding the Plath and Larkin estates. Throughout, Hamilton presents an array of well-meaning acolytes - admirers, best friends, widows - whose task it was to keep the flame sacred.
Offering a compelling contribution to current debate on the moral issues of biography, Hamilton writes of the "greats" of English literature with an intimacy and a subversive wit that make this book a joy to read.

A surprisingly original study of the literary estates of many famed writers, and a look at the tangled relationship between estate management and biography. Hamilton wrote the strong Robert Lowell (1982) and the admirable In Search of J.D. Salinger (1988). Estates that Hamilton looks into include those of John Donne the Younger, Shakespeare, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Boswell, Robert Burns, Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Swinburne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Hardy, Kipling, Joyce, Eliot, and Sylvia Plath. John Donne made no mention of his poems in his will and, thinking them a young man's ``evaporations'' and ``vanities,'' would have preferred that these sins be destroyed. Following his death, Shakespeare's plays were edited by two fellow actors and ``set forth according to their first originals,'' as these friends put it, saving eighteen of Shakespeare's plays from oblivion (including King Lear, The Tempest, and Macbeth) and several others, according to Hamilton, from being handed down in ``irretrievably corrupt'' texts. While poets' posthumous papers gave rise to biography, Dr. Johnson wrote his hasty Lives of the Poets to consolidate publishers' copyrights on various posthumous materials. Meanwhile, Boswell took down Johnson's table talk for his monumental Life of Johnson (Macauley later damned Boswell as a drunkard, pipsqueak, and lickspittle), then left a hoard of journals and Boswelliana that engendered the great Boswell papers saga. Hamilton follows the styles of biography as one mode rises over the body of earlier modes: the Victorian biography, for instance, reflects the newly emerging Romantic concept of the artist. Dickens writes long letters to his future ``beeograffer,'' John Forster. Joyce appoints his benefactress Harriet Shaw Weaver as his literary executor; she also inherits his mad daughter. Eliot directed that there should be ``no biographies,'' and his estate will not go public until 2015. Ted Hughes' trial-by-gravestone bequeathed him by Sylvia Plath is quite moving. As a commentary on literary mortality, and on biography and trumpery, this is book is a treasure. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Hamilton here selects the lives of 12 literary giants through which to explore the question of what happens to an author's work and reputation after death. Although many writers leave instructions regarding posthumous publication and designate official biographers, conflicting interests between heirs and the public often overturn the expressed wishes of the deceased, shows Hamilton. His subjects span a historical gamut from the 16th century to the 20th and include John Donne, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Henry James and Sylvia Plath--and the keepers of their flames. Although Hamilton ( In Search of J. D. Salinger ) provides interesting information on emerging overwhelmed by an excess of gossipy detail about his subjects' sex lives and negative character traits and marred by poor organization of his material.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.