I want to make the case for literary biography as a form that requires exactly the same qualities as good literary criticism: the ability to read closely, to synthesize across a large body of work, and to write well enough that your account of another writer's life illuminates rather than reduces.

The literary biographies I return to: Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, which is one of the great works of scholarship in the 20th century. Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, which is the standard against which all subsequent literary biographies are measured. And Hilary Spurling's Matisse biography, which is technically about a painter but reads as a study of what it costs to make beautiful things.

The best biography makes the work more alive rather than explaining it away. The worst biography reduces the work to the life — treats the novels as symptoms of the biography rather than achievements in their own right.