Old-Fashioned Biographical Novels

The last two novels I read were both published before 1960, and they were both biographical novels about people considered scandalous in their day.

The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton, published in 1958, is about a niece of John Winthrop, a founder and governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which sponsored the seventeenth century Puritan immigration to America. Elizabeth Fones married three times and got into numerous scrapes because she did not fit her pious community's ideal of an obedient, severely respectable woman. I read this novel when I was a teenager and was impressed and moved by it. I was happy to find that I enjoyed it just as much, if not more, when I re-read it this month.

Immortal Franz by Zsolt Harsanyi, published in the 1930s, is about the piano virtuoso and composer Franz Liszt, who was the romantic sensation of Europe in the nineteenth century. He never married, but had two long-term mistresses and numerous affairs, and his relationships with women are the primary focus of the novel. I had not read this before. I enjoyed the opening section, about his experiences as a child prodigy, more than the rest of the book, though the novel as a whole had some very interesting aspects.

One of the things that interests me about these books is that both are about sex, love and romance (three quite different things that are often confused), and both would probably have been written quite differently by a 21st century author: specifically, much more explicit bedroom scenes would have been included. For me, The Winthrop Woman worked better. Seton pulled me inside her main character's psyche more successfully, while I always felt somewhat distanced from Liszt's point of view in Immortal Franz. This might be due at least partly to the fact that I'm a woman and find it more natural to identify with a female character - but also the writing style in Immortal Franz often relied on explanations of what he was thinking and feeling rather than putting the reader deeply inside his point of view.

It seems to me that novelists don't often write true biographical novels any more. There are plenty of novels that portray incidents or certain time periods in the lives of historical people, but it seems rare for an author to portray a whole life, from childhood to death.

Do other group members have favorite biographical novels?

I am reading The Scarlet Letter right now (never read it in school) and quite enjoying it. The Winthrop Woman looks like a great follow up read (and comparison). I also like reading about books revisited years later, so your post is a two-fer.

Are there a lot of "true biographical novels" out there?

The Scarlet Letter and The Winthrop Woman would be a great comparison! They're both about women in Puritan communities who commit what their neighbors consider to be sexual sins. In both cases, the author disagrees with the harsh approach of the Puritans. But there are some significant differences.

SL is widely viewed as a classic, whereas WW was looked down on as a "romance" novel at the time it was published. SL is certainly an important work of literature. And yet I actually think WW has more rounded characters and a more thoughtful view of the Puritan movement, which recognizes both positive and negative aspects of the movement and its leaders. I'm eager to hear what you think of the two novels in comparison once you've read both!

I see that you have read Kristin Lavransdatter. Was that not a wonderful biographical novel? I also read a short novel by the same author, Sigrid Undsett, Gunnar's Daughter which was also about early Christianity in Norway, only much earlier in time, around the year 1000, I believe. Although short, I was fascinated with it.

Another wonderful (to me) historical novel was Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar.

I'll think some more about this. (I've read many biographies, however.)

Hadrian is amazing.

I used to enjoy Irving Stone 's biographical novels such as The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust for Life.

I also enjoyed Taylor Caldwell's fictional biographies of Biblical characters: Great Lion of God and I, Judas are two I remember.

A couple of recent, fairly substantial biographical novels with overlapping stories centered around the early days of the Fabian Society, are A.S. Byatt's The children's book and David Lodge's A man of parts. Byatt's story is obviously based on the life of E. Nesbit, but she uses fictional names for her characters and changes things around to suit the themes of the story; Lodge takes a pretty straight biographical approach to H.G. Wells and his various great love affairs, just using his novelist's licence occasionally to interpolate between the known facts.

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Yes, I too used to enjoy those novels a long time ago. I wonder what it would be like to pick up one again (not that I plan to). There's such better research behind those stories today.

Barbara Kingsolver's Lacuna was a fun read about Diego Rivera, Freda Kahlo and Leon Trotsky. Not quite a biographical novel, more a unique time and place that brought these 3 giants together in Coyaocon, Mexico City.

Another South American example could be Garcia Marquez's The General in his Labyrinth about the great Simon Bolivar as he fades into history.

Gore Vidal had some pretty interesting fictional historical character studies. I was thinking as well of Paul West's ghostly version of Claus Von Stauffenberg. That's a harrowing book. Anatoli Rybakov looks at another megalomaniacal dictator--Stalin--in Children of the Arbat and Fear. There are quite a number of others. Lately for me David Peace's Red or dead (for the football or Liverpool football fan) comes to mind. A great title as well.

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talking Stalin...
The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin by Richard Lourie was a masterpiece reminding me of Hannah Berendt's "banality of evil" concept.

also Robert Littell's, The Stalin Epigram was a fascinating read about Osip Mandelstam's encounters with the evil dictator.

(hi larry)

Both fictional biographies I've read recently were good ones: The Story of Edvard Munch and Night of the Amazons. (Neither 'old-fashioned', though; the biographical novels written before 1960 that first came to my mind were indeed Yourcenar's and Kristin Lavransdatter. (Do *not* get the 'old-fashioned' translation of the latter: it's apparently unfaithful & certainly for me it was unreadable.) Anyway, the OP set me wondering about the reactions I had to those 2 books. The novel about Munch seemed a very creative way of using primary documents to tell the story of a life; the Rosendorfer seemed to be first of all a work of fiction and only second an historical account. I don't know whether this is down to the approach & possibly the skill of the two authors or because I knew a bit about Munch'sl life but hadn't heard of Christian Weber or because Bjornstad's afterword implies that his book resulted from the documents, whereas Rosendorfer's tells in a less specific way of having researched the subject's life.