Ann Jefferson. Biography and the Question of Literature in France.(Book review)

Ann Jefferson. Biography and the Question of Literature in France (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007). XII, 425 p.

Ann Jefferson's aim is to bring out the link between biography and literature in France, which is explained in a fairly long and dense introduction, where she indicates that the question necessarily implies a definition of literature. She is not so much concerned by biography as a separate genre, as by the possible impact it may have exerted on literary creation. She claims that her enterprise is going against the grain of the major contemporary trends (illustrated by Proust, Valery or Sartre) viewing the biographical element as an obstacle to literature. She remarks that "biography" and "literature," in their modern sense, only appeared in the eighteenth centuries, a consequence of the emergence of professional writers and of new aesthetic conceptions. She adopts a pragmatic and historical approach showing that creative writing, though part of a wider intellectual and sociological process, has a real specificity, and is the result of successive definitions ceaselessly questioning and sometimes refuting one another. This view largely challenges the classical conception posing the Ancients as ultimate models and privileges a more organic and evolutionary vision of literature.

The book provides valuable information about French literary history. To that effect, it hints at many texts and authors generally ignored by the general public, which are replaced within their historical context; for instance, it brings out the elusive relationship between Baumgarten's Reflexions and Rousseau's Confessions (46-47), and also highlights how the latter's conception of selfhood affected his conception of literature. Such comments are profitably shored up by exact background information: the genesis of Nerval's Les Illumines (185-86); the importance of biographies in dictionaries and the press in the nineteenth century (84-86). Jefferson discusses Baudelaire's comparatively neglected biographical works on Poe and Delacroix (166), as well as Saint-Beuve's fictitious biography Joseph Delorme (118-22). She gives precise summary of essential texts, such as, among many others, Madame de Stael's De la Litterature, Hugo's Preface de Cromwell or sections of Les Illumines ("Le Roi de Bicetre,' "Les Confidences de Nicolas" 196-99).

Jefferson generally expresses very discerning and innovative views about the works discussed. Accordingly, swimming against the intellectual tide, she replaces Sainte-Beuve's criticism in its cultural context, commending, in particular, his insistence on considering the biography of a given author in the evaluation of his works. Similarly, she links Madame de Stael's conception of literature, as expounded in De l'Allemagne, as the expression of a national culture, to the evolution of an organism. Jefferson underscores how, in spite of opposite social destinies, Baudelaire and Hugo universalize sometimes extremely painful personal experiences. Her comparison between their theories of verse, as evidenced in their respective handling of biography in Les Fleurs du Mal and Les Contemplations, is based on an accurate and thorough examination of the themes, structure and style of each collection, which she opposes to the impersonality adopted by the Parnassians (137). She points out Proust's interest in the biographies of artists and felicitously examines his views on Sainte-Beuve ...