ABSTRACT
The term ‘life writing’ usefully elides the sharp distinction made by and constitutive of the more familiar terms ‘biography’ and ‘autobiography’. A distinction often too sharp, for one who writes a biography has invested much of her or his own life in the writing: Boswell’s Life of Johnson is also Boswell’s life, as it would occupy years thereof, and not only in the writing but in the sharing and keeping of the Doctor’s company.1 And Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets are also Johnsonian lives, reflections on what a poet’s life might be, and should be. Every autobiography obviously tells of more lives than the writer’s alone; no less plainly, unlike a biography, it cannot aim to tell the whole life. Biography is often conditioned, not only for legal reasons, by the deed of closure represented in ‘last words’.
