On the way to visit Brian Moore at his house in Canada, Hermione Lee got lost and spent the night in a hotel. Or so it was reported in Patricia Craig's 2002 biography of the late novelist. But Lee, an Oxford literature professor and critic best known for her substantial biographies of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, has no memory of the incident.
A trivial matter, but enough to make Lee feel a pang of outrage at having lost control of her own story. Speaking in the resonant voice of a broadcaster, Lee, 60, recalls experiencing 'that frisson of alienation from your own life that you get when you suddenly see something that didn't happen, in a biography'.
In Body Parts, a collection of essays on life-writing just out in paperback, Lee sympathises with Woolf's quip in Orlando that 'a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand'. Lee's reviews explore the quandaries faced by biographers smoothing over the gaps and ambiguities in the record of a life.
Body Parts alludes to Lee's observation that the body has become increasingly important to biography over the past century. Illness, menstruation, masturbation and addictions are seen as permissible, even crucial, fodder for the biographer.
'The division that tended to be made in earlier biography between the life of the body and the life of the mind has been eroded,' Lee says.
She is suspicious of biographies which reduce people to their ailments. 'My anxiety comes when a figure like Virginia Woolf is treated always as a victim - a victim of mental illness, a victim probably of childhood sexual abuse, a victim of her bodily functions.'