Percy Lubbock stands in a remarkably special relationship to literary biography. It is characteristic of him that two of his books, on George Calderon (1921) and Mary Cholmondeley (1928), have the subtitle A Sketch from Memory. Both of them are personal memoirs with the central emphasis on qualities of character as experienced by the author, nuances of personality carefully pondered and described. There is a certain amount of information about their lives but no systematic record such as a professional biographer would provide. There are brief comments on their literary works but no attempt to trace a literary career. In assessing the worth of the person he is concerned with such virtues as integrity and genuineness, moral and social qualities, not with the techniques and methods of an artist. In his last book, where his subject is a more important writer, Edith Wharton, the approach is similar. The preface, a...