fACTS AND fiCTIONS IN ALL THREE GE RES
153
think women do read a man's life with a different eye. I'm curious
to
see
how Hilary feels about it. I certainly know that when I started out on my
biography of Sade, I noticed
to
my horror that those rather extraordi–
nary letters from his wife had seldom been mentioned by male biogra–
phers . They cast a huge light on Sade's character. He was much more
schizophrenic than I thought in the sense that there was a very kind, fam–
ily-loving side of the man which was always in a clash with the Dionysiac
impulse
to
break up the family by being the nomadic, sperm-scattering
male. He also had a great love for the nuclear family and the order it
imposed. So I do think that there's such a thing as gendered reading.
I
think a lot of male biographers of our time have been positively influ–
enced by feminist-oriented biography, and they've begun
to
notice more
carefully and pay more heed
to
the women in great men's lives.
Hilary Spurling:
When I first came
to
write about a man-Paul Scott, a
novelist-various people, and I myself, had wondered what difference
this would make. Before that, I had written about a woman. I didn't in
fact find that it made the slightest difft'rence, because of the reason
Denis mentioned: the fact that I was of a different sex from the person
I was writing about was the least of my problems. That is
to
say, what
is interesting about Scott, what is interesting about Matisse, is not pri–
marily the fact that they art' men; it is the fact that one was a truly extra–
ordinary novelist and the other was a major painter. I didn't find my
own sex making it impossible for me
to
consider these two artists.
That being said, there is a whole field of biography that has certainly
never been tackled by men, which was broached by Claire Tomalin in the
book Francine mentioned called
The Illvisible Woman.
In the lives of
practically all men, that is
to
say practically all biographies written
before, say, the last fifty years, there are nearly always crucial women
who receive relatively little attention. A good example is Victoria
Glendinning's life of Trollope. Glendinning was the first to attempt to do
any kind of justice to Mrs. Trollope, who remained married to her hus–
band for most of his life, and was crucially important to him. Without
her he clearly could not have led the life, nor produced the books he did.
It is difficult
to
write about these generations upon generations of invis–
ible women who have left so little trace. And what Glendinning did was
not really to create a Mrs. Trollope-this is to answer another point that
Denis made-that would have been impossible. There arc very few let–
ters, there are no accounts; Trollopt"s friends didn't discuss or describe
her. What Glendinning did was ingenious and original. It was to write
her biography with at the center of it, at its core, a kind of wife-shaped
