Part I. The History of Literary Biography -- The Emergence of Literary Biography -- Lasting First Impressions: On the Origins of Ambivalent Attitudes to the Lake Poets, Cockney Keats, and Satanic Shelley -- How to Be an Author: Victorian Literary Biography c. 1830-1880 -- Un/making the Victorians: Literary Biography, 1880-1930 -- "Aerial Creations of the Poets"? New Biography and the BBC in the 1930s -- Literary biography in the twentieth century -- Part II. Issues, Theories, and Methodologies -- Ethics and literary biography -- Concerns about facts and form in literary biography -- Women with a theory: feminism and biography -- The role of diaries in the development of literary biography -- Blurred Boundaries: Literary Biography, Literary Autobiography, and Evidence -- Reading and Interpreting: The Archival Legacies of Canadian Women Writers -- Johnny and Bess: Life Writing and Gender -- "The Man's Life in the Letters of the Man": Larkin, Letters, and Literary Biography -- J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Style in Autobiography -- The Experience of Archives: Richmal Crompton and Others -- Disappearing into the Front Page: The Case of Salman Rushdie and the Postmodern Memoir -- Evidence and invention: the materials of literary biography -- Mustabeens and mightabeens: the unknowability of English Renaissance playwrights -- Literary biography, literary studies, and theory: an uneasy relationship -- Estate management: Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark -- Part III. Classic cases -- Chaucer -- Writing Shakespeare's Life -- John Donne -- Jonathan Swift -- Life and death in the literary biographies of Pope and his circle -- Richardson and Fielding -- Biography as myth-making: obfuscation and invention in Victorian and Post-Victorian literary biography -- Dickens, Tennyson, Kipling -- Would the real Mr. Eliot please stand up? -- After Ellmann: the state of Joyce biography -- Literary biography and the de-canonization of Amy Lowell -- Reviewing the lives and works of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis.