Maybe I'm misreading you, but I don't think we're talking about quite the same phenomenon.
The frustration I felt was--I imagine--the same frustration any biographer feels (especially at 400 years' remove), when the primary sources simply don't CONTAIN certain kinds of information. And I respect Nelson for refusing to make stuff up in order to get a narrative that modern readers will find satisfying.
He could have created a pattern--could have given signposts about how he thought we ought to interpret Oxford's life. But he didn't. He presented the evidence and (sometimes) his own opinion--which was always very clearly his opinion and generally erupted around incidents like Oxford's claim that his wife's first child couldn't be his, because he wasn't sleeping with her twelve months before the baby's birth. (No, really.)
So my frustration was with history, not with the biographer. And having had the opposite frustration with wossname's biography of Henry James, in which great lavish wodges of Freudian interpretation are imposed on the hapless subject's life, I actually found it rather refreshing.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2006-09-12 04:10 pm (UTC)The frustration I felt was--I imagine--the same frustration any biographer feels (especially at 400 years' remove), when the primary sources simply don't CONTAIN certain kinds of information. And I respect Nelson for refusing to make stuff up in order to get a narrative that modern readers will find satisfying.
He could have created a pattern--could have given signposts about how he thought we ought to interpret Oxford's life. But he didn't. He presented the evidence and (sometimes) his own opinion--which was always very clearly his opinion and generally erupted around incidents like Oxford's claim that his wife's first child couldn't be his, because he wasn't sleeping with her twelve months before the baby's birth. (No, really.)
So my frustration was with history, not with the biographer. And having had the opposite frustration with wossname's biography of Henry James, in which great lavish wodges of Freudian interpretation are imposed on the hapless subject's life, I actually found it rather refreshing.