English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey

Alicia Kerfoot is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and
Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Such a wide and currently debated category as “biography”
immediately poses problems regarding history, fiction, politics, and
identity. In this study of biography in the 17th century, Allan
Pritchard acknowledges “the neglect of biography,” a neglect that
“stands in striking contrast to the intense modern study of such
literary developments of the period as the emergence of the novel.”
The author also emphasizes the strong connections between biography and
other fields— such as literary criticism and portraiture—that have
received much critical attention.

This attempt to demonstrate connections between genres alongside the
political and social importance of the rise of individuality into the
beginning of the 18th century is tactfully achieved when Pritchard’s
own analysis mimics the progress of biography throughout the 17th
century. He begins with a generic analysis of “The Growth of
Biographical Writing,” then contrasts this beginning with the more
individuated Izaak Walton’s lives; the lives of public figures and
individual poets; the “brief lives” published by Thomas Fuller,
Anthony Wood, and John Aubrey; family histories; and Roger North’s
Lives of the Norths.

In this way, Pritchard not only mimics the progression of biography
over the century through the organization of his own account, but also
demonstrates how religion, politics, science, poetry, and family can be
connected through history and through a changing biographical mode that
both uses and confuses fiction and narrative voice. The resulting
historical analysis of the way in which biography crosses political and
social boundaries captures a large socio-political picture and
simultaneously complicates that picture with individual voices and
identities across the 17th century.