The Biographer's Tale
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 First edition | |
| Author | A. S. Byatt |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Chatto & Windus |
| Publication date | 1 November 2001 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 376 pp |
| ISBN | 0-7540-1641-2 |
| OCLC | 47868714 |
The Biographer's Tale is a book by A. S. Byatt. The story is about a postgraduate student, Phineas G. Nanson, who decides to write a biography about an obscure biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes. During the course of his research he fails to learn much about the actual subject of his biography, but discovers a lot of Destry-Scholes' unpublished research about real historical figures Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen. In the book, Byatt combines facts with fiction when recounting the lives of the three latter figures.[1]
Byatt originally intended it as a short story titled "The Biography of a Biographer", based on her notion of a biographer's life in a library investigating another person's life.[2] This she developed into writing about a character called Phineas G. Nanson and his search.[2] Phineas Gilbert Nanson (to give him his full name) is called after an insect and is a near anagram of Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus, though Byatt said this was an "uncanny" coincidence which she did not realise until afterwards.[2]
References
[edit]- ↑ Aldea, Eva; Baker, Geoffrey (12 July 2010). Realism’s Others. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 277. ISBN 978-1-4438-2346-3.
- 1 2 3 Hensher, Philip (Fall 2001). "A. S. Byatt, The Art of Fiction No. 168". The Paris Review. Fall 2001 (159).
External links
[edit]- The Biographer's Tale — at The Complete Review
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