Jonathan Bate weaves a memoir around madness in English literature

There is a trend for books in which academics write personally about their engagement with literature. Examples include Lara Feigel’s Free Woman, in which the author blends a memoir of her marriage break-up with a close reading of Doris Lessing’s fiction, and Sally Bayley’s Girl With Dove, which fuses an account of a traumatic childhood with sketches that focus on Bayley’s early love of books. Addressed to a wider readership, these works combine autobiography with literary criticism. They are carefully crafted, confessional and ask why literature matters. The advantage of this approach is that it avoids the pitfalls of the now highly professional discipline of English Literature, dominated in universities by grant applications and rather narrow models of what counts as research. In place of professionalism, these are books about human beings and the specialness of art.

Mad About Shakespeare follows this trend. Jonathan Bate tells us he wanted to write a memoir about his life with Shakespeare and a book about the effect of mental illness on a series of writers he has loved, including Samuel Johnson, Edward Thomas, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath.