SOURCE: Hulbert, Ann. “The Soul and Discretion.” New Republic 211, no. 819 (22 August 1994): 40-5.

In the following essay, Hulbert discusses Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame, and E. M. Forster: A Biography, by Nicola Beauman. Hulbert asserts that Hamilton's approach to his subject matter is scholarly and even-handed.

Literary biography suffers from a chronic identity crisis. Working with methods that are plainly unscientific and from motives that are inevitably open to question, most biographers wonder at many points whether their enterprise qualifies as a creative art, or a more prosaic historical craft, or a scandal. And literary biography, in treating the murky realm where art and life mingle, invites even more intense self-doubt. Is it an especially high creative tribute, or an especially scandalous affront, to try yoking aesthetic achievements with the mundane details of a writer's personal life? The answer to the quandary is presumed to depend on how...