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Choosing a name: partiality and biographical writing

How do biographers choose what names they are going to call their subjects as they write about them? Do they use their full name, surname, first name, even a family nickname; or a mixture of all of these? Most biographers choose one name as their primary one, with variations according to context. The reader may not notice or think about it, but a choice is made, and through that choice biographers position themselves in a particular relationship to their subject. And through their positioning, so they position their readers.

Did I think about these questions when I embarked on my first biography – of the English writer and traveller Rose Macaulay – twenty or so years ago? I’m not sure. I don’t remember that the question of what to call her struck me then as particularly problematic.

But in biographical writing the representation of the subject is always affected by or mediated through fashion or ideology or indeed by the biographer’s projection of their own conscious or unconscious feelings. It starts with something as apparently simple as what name you call your subject as you’re writing about them.

As befitted the more formal social etiquette of the nineteenth century, the biographies of that period expressed on the whole a formal relationship between writer and subject. Formality expressed respect: the biographers of public figures – statesmen, politicians, writers – encouraged their readers to view those men (and they were usually men) with the same respect that they themselves felt for them. Thomas Carlyle, mid-century, declared that the history of the world is but the biography of great men. His lectures were published in book form under the title On Heroes, Hero-worship & the Heroic in History: his subjects included Dante and Shakespeare; Luther and Knox; Johnson and Rousseau; Cromwell and Napoleon. The alliterative title – all those Hs – is perhaps the most playful aspect of the whole collection; these are serious, dense, argumentative essays. The tone is very different from that of Samuel Johnson’s earlier biographer James Boswell, writing at the end of the eighteenth century. Boswell inserts himself into his text as Boswell, creating an impression of equality between himself and his subject, a close personal relationship which he invites his readers to share. Carlyle, trying to get at the symbolic, or essential, significance of his subjects, was himself antipathetic to the conventional respectful two-volume ‘Life and Letters’ that we most closely associate with Victorian biographical writing. To which of course there were exceptions: Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, in her 1857 Life of Charlotte Brontë, calls her subject Charlotte, and makes explicit their friendship.

Famously, the tradition of the respectful Victorian biography was undermined by Lytton Strachey in 1918 with his gleefully debunking collection of essays Eminent Victorians. His was a powerfully subjective, and radical vision. He had no truck with what he called the ‘two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead’. The first duty of the biographer, he claimed, was brevity, ‘a becoming brevity’ he called it, ‘which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant’. The second duty of the biographer was to maintain his own ‘freedom of spirit’, it not being his business to be respectful, or indeed complimentary.

In conformity with the times Strachey called his male subjects by their surnames or by their surnames with title: Manning for the Cardinal, Dr Arnold, Gordon or General Gordon, as they would have been known to their peers and to the public. He called his only female subject Miss Nightingale, as was the convention, or Florence Nightingale; just once, perhaps as an expression of his warm sympathy for her, Flo Nightingale. Her great enemy Lord Panmure, resister of all her plans for hospital reform, was known to his friends as ‘The Bison’; ‘the name fitted both his physical demeanour and his habit of mind,’ Strachey informed his readers: ‘That large low head seemed to have been created for butting rather than for anything else. There he stood, four-square and menacing, in the doorway of reform’. Thereafter Strachey too calls Panmure ‘The Bison’; thus labelled is he handed down to posterity.

In our more informal times, when we like to think that ranks and hierarchies have been smashed, and when Mr, Mrs or Miss sound distinctly old-fashioned, the tendency is for biographers to inscribe that informality into the names they call their subjects. Often the biographer is on first-name terms with the person they’re writing about.

At the beginning of my biography of Rose Macaulay, when I was giving an overview of her writing career, and when I was tracing her ancestry, I called her Rose Macaulay. But soon, increasingly, I started to call her Rose.

At the time, it seemed natural. But what is natural when it comes to writing? All writers, if not their readers, know that writing involves a series of choices. Looking back, I think that my choice illustrated a generalised shift in biographical writing towards increasing intimacy. I felt that I was, or that I wanted to be, Rose Macaulay’s friend, and I wanted my readers to be her friends too. Which is not to say that, as in most friendships, I didn’t at times feel frustrated, annoyed and impatient with her.

My next step took me even closer to her. My book Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal described not just the pursuit of a biographical subject back through time, through archives and libraries, letters, reminiscences, histories of the period in which she lived; it also described how I met Rose Macaulay – or Rose, as she was to me, and as she now appeared even in the title of my book – inside my own head, in my dreams.

Writing yourself into the biographical narrative – as is the current tendency – is a continuation of the process of biographical deconstruction that Lytton Strachey undertook a century ago.  He didn’t write himself into the process in the way that modern biographers so often do, but he questioned the heroic inviolability of the biographical subject and cleverly, entertainingly – and Eminent Victorians is a wonderfully entertaining read – he gave us his perspective, his subjectivity.

Recently I have begun to question whether my choice to call Rose Macaulay ‘Rose’ assumed an intimacy that I hadn’t earned. Perhaps it was too cosy. But there is something else, too. Biographical fashion has swung to the opposite pole from that of the mid-Victorians who kept their respectful distance from the objects of their scrutiny. Now, with our free-and-easy first-name terms, we fall into the very same danger that Strachey identified in those fat respectful tomes: of not being quite critical enough, of positioning ourselves too close to our subjects to allow ourselves to be uncomplimentary.

Let’s not forget there are practical issues too in this business of naming. It can sound awkward, or tedious, or long-winded to be always calling your subject by their full name, first, last and middle, especially if it’s a long or complicated one.

These various questions about how to name your subjects arose with some urgency in the biography I’ve recently been working on. The book concerns three writers, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Kingsley, and the focus is the year 1900. It wasn’t until I was working through the second or third draft of the book that I saw the discrepancies in the way I referred to them. I was following the conventions of the period by referring to the two men – mostly – by their surnames: Conan Doyle and Kipling would have been known by their surnames at school (Doyle rather than Conan Doyle: the given name of Conan was subsumed later into the surname), then by their work colleagues, by their acquaintances, and indeed very often by their close male friends. As writers, too, their surnames would have been acceptable shorthand for the reading public. The case was different, however, as regards Mary Kingsley. No-one in those days called her ‘Kingsley’ in the way they called the men ‘Kipling’ or ‘Doyle’ or ‘Conan Doyle’. She was always ‘Miss Kingsley’ even to close women friends and to trusted colleagues, while to readers of her books she was either ‘Miss Kingsley’ or ‘Mary Kingsley’. Yet I found that I was often calling her ‘Mary’, just as I had called Rose Macaulay ‘Rose’. Naming, I realised, can be a gendered act.

Why do I so often call her ‘Mary’?, I asked myself. For two main reasons, I believe. The first is that while I was writing about her I came to like her very much indeed, as I had come to like Rose Macaulay; it began to feel natural to address her as a friend – and in the twenty-first century we call our friends by their first names. I have to say I also grew to like the two men, more than I had thought I would. But I still didn’t quite so easily imagine myself on first-name terms with them, although at times, particularly when writing about them within their families, I do call them by their first names.

The second reason took more digging up. In conversation with my scientist daughter she told me she had noticed that when female scientists were interviewed on the radio or in the press, the interviewer would often call them by their first name; much more often, my daughter thought, than they would a male scientist. How interesting, I thought. Might this be generally true of women in the public eye? Had anybody written about it? Yes, was the answer to both questions. One study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America showed that, and I quote:

People were, on average, more than twice as likely to describe a male (vs. female) professional by surname in domains such as science, literature, and politics.

Much closer to home, and very recently, the academic chemist Dr Jennifer Rudd accused the BBC of sexism when she was repeatedly addressed by her first name in a radio interview while her male colleague was addressed by his professional prefix and surname. The presenter closed the interview with, ‘Dr Read, it’s been nice talking to you. Jennifer, thanks as well’.

I suspect some profound misogyny in that instance, as if the presenter set out to deliberately belittle Dr Rudd. But I think that often we don’t notice this gendered discrepancy in naming, unless our attention is drawn to it. Does it perhaps seem more ‘natural’ to call a woman by her first name?

To begin with I hadn’t noticed what I was doing regarding my three subjects. But when I saw what I’d done, I knew that I couldn’t call Mary Kingsley by her first name while calling my male subjects by their surnames. Perhaps it sounds slightly odd to call her ‘Kingsley’, but if there is an oddness then it points up the oddness of the way we differentiate in this way between women and men. Moreover, the oddness perhaps adds – I would like to think – a further level to my depiction of Kingsley’s own anomalous place as a public, professional woman working within the rigid patriarchal structure of the late-Victorian world. But I also at times continue to call her ‘Mary Kingsley’: not too cumbersome, perfectly acceptable, apparently neutral, or even natural.

The names we call each other are freighted with meaning. They are neither natural nor innocent. Nonetheless, and in apparent contradiction to that statement, as a biographer I want my readers to not be consciously distracted by my choices, but to see them as unremarkable: even, perhaps, as natural. I want my readers to see through the names to the people who once carried them. Yet I also know that by naming people you are directing or manipulating the ways in which they are seen.

Whenever a biographer gives a name to their subject, they reveal their own position, their own partiality. But as Lytton Strachey believed, biographical writing should always be partial. Perhaps that partiality is one of the pleasures enjoyed by readers of biography; and the choices involved in it a pleasure that we life-writers can claim as particularly our own.

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