The dominance of modernist and avant-garde literature in the first decades of the twentieth century has directed attention away from certain texts and genres. Biography is a prime example of this process. While numerous histories of the biographical genre do exist, few critics have attempted to situate early twentieth-century biography in the broader literary and cultural arena. Those who focus on modernist experimentation rarely consider the ways in which biographers approached the new aesthetics, or address the extraordinary popularity and perceived significance of the genre in the period of ‘high modernism’. Yet the marked increase in the popularity of biography during this period – the 1920s and 1930s particularly – was closely connected to the new forms of, and experiments with, the genre. ‘It is the day of the biographer’, Hesketh Pearson wrote in 1930. The rise in popularity of biographies was linked to the perception that biography had been reinvented for the twentieth century, requiring a new level of critical self-awareness.

David Cecil, for example, writing in 1936, called biography ‘the only new form’ of modern literature. Its newness and its success were due, he suggested, to the fact that it was the genre most congenial to the ‘scientific’ modern age, and the one most allied to modern psychology and the study of ‘human character’. Biography is, he argued, on the side of science on the one hand, while, on the other, biographers approach their subjects with newly aesthetic aims, taking advantage of a ‘literary’ space made available by the mutual lack of sympathy between literature (particularly poetry) and scientific modernity. Cecil’s argument is clearly flawed (there is no evidence that poets and novelists in the 1920s and 1930s felt peculiarly threatened by science, and indeed many embraced its terms), but it is echoed in numerous discussions of the ‘new biography’, in which, as we shall see, the relationship between the literary and the scientific and the importance of the study of ‘character’ are two of the dominant themes.