ABSTRACT
For the biographer Virginia Woolf, choice and synthesis, accompanied by a sense of form – ‘shaping the whole,’ as she says ‘so that we perceive the outline’ (‘The Art of Biography’) – will reveal the ultimate truth about the personality of the subject. But as she is so clearly aware, the danger is that the truth of fiction will distort the truth of fact, and if we revert to those biographies by Lytton Strachey which prompted her theorizing it is easy to see how serious this distortion can become. Biographer Leon Edel’s acknowledgement of chronology equates to Virginia Woolf’s ‘truth of fact’; his consciousness of the demands made upon the biographer by such aspects as theme, coherence and form to her ‘truth of fiction’. The research biographer is not so different in the nature of his activities from the theorists of the earlier part of this century as external appearances would suggest.
