A novel approach

An interesting phenomenon of recent years is the novel about a real-life novelist. Of course, writers have often included fictitious members of their trade within their work — one thinks immediately of Thackeray’s Pendennis, Anthony Powell’s Nick Jenkins and Waugh’s Pinfold. Often, too, novelists have contrived extended tributes to favoured masters — Fielding features prominently in Kingsley Amis’s I Like It Here — without intruding into their social world.

But, until recently, the novel which openly entered into biographical territory, writing a romance about the private lives of classical novelists or other artists, was rarely taken very seriously. Carl Bechhofer Roberts’s This Side Idolatry on the life of Dickens is long forgotten. Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, about Michelangelo, and the works of specialists like Pierre La Mure (on Toulouse-Lautrec, Debussy and the Mendelssohns) seemed to be heading in the same direction.

Nevertheless, in recent years serious writers appear to be turning their hands to this small genre.