“This Astonishing Anfractuous Passage, Over Rocks and Precipices”: The Tortuous Process of Biographical Research

Annabel Robinson
Department of Philosophy and Classics

3 October 2002

Biographical research is like a detective story, following leads, sometimes up blind alleys, at other times with startling success. The whole process brings many experiences of serendipity, the opportunity to meet remarkable people and make new collegial friends. It is a highly interdisciplinary exercise, since the life of another will inevitably push the biographer beyond the boundaries of her own specialist expertise. It needs to be done with sensitivity, since the reputation of another is at stake. Archival material cannot always be trusted. At times there is a frustrating lack of material, at others there is an over-abundance.

What is the writer to do? Should she aim at creating a deceptively coherent account (deceptive, because of the need at times to fill in the gaps by guesswork), or should she offer the reader the more jagged results of her research?

In this inaugural talk in the HRI Profiling Scholarship series, Annabel Robinson shared her account of writing the biography of the Cambridge Classicist, Jane Ellen Harrison, which was published by Oxford University Press in the summer of 2002.

For publication details, see Annabel Robinson. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 340 pp. ISBN# 0-19-924233-X.