Private scandals and public actions

the politics of reputation in the career of Brian Penton

Patrick Buckridge

pp. 313-319

in: Warwick Gould, Thomas F. Staley (eds), Writing the lives of writers, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

Janet Malcolm observes, in her absorbing meta-biography of Sylvia Plath-and-Ted Hughes, that "the transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged", and comments, somewhat mischievously, that "the voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity".¹