ABSTRACT
Opinion differs about the effect of Boswell on the biographers who followed him. Certainly The Life of Johnson achieved the kind of status that should have established once and for all the reputation not only of the work itself, but of biography as a literary form. In Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, Brontë was a private figure whose novels had made her a public property, while many of the events not only of her own life but of the lives of those around her were potentially dangerous to a biographer in Mrs Gaskell’s situation. The best commemorative biography capitalizes on its commitment to its subject, offering a personal viewpoint that no clinical analysis could obtain.
