The biography of an author can ruin their work for you. It can also illuminate it. The experience of reading Sylvia Plath's poetry before and after reading a full biography is a genuinely different experience — not better or worse, but different in ways that require you to decide consciously how much the life should color the reading.

I've been thinking about this because I recently read a biography of Jean Rhys that changed how I read her novels. Wide Sargasso Sea became a different book — more precisely observed, more controlled — when I understood more about Rhys's own relationship to the kind of displacement and self-erasure her protagonist experiences. The novel is not autobiography but it draws from autobiography in ways the biography makes visible.

My practice now is to read the author's work first and the biography after. The work shapes the life in my understanding rather than the life shaping the work.