SOURCE: "Whose Life Is It Anyway?: Why One Prefers a Biographer of One's Own," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 23, 1994, pp. 2, 8.

[Glendinning is an English biographer and novelist whose biographies include Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (1977) and Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (1981). In the following review of Ian Hamilton's Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992), she recounts how biography has changed through the years as those close to an author have sought to control what is said about that person. She also raises questions about the appropriateness of certain details in biographies and illustrates cases in literary history where opportunism on the part of the living ran rampant.]

What is posterity? Nothing but "an unending jostle of vanities, appetites and fears," concludes Ian Hamilton at the end of [Keepers of the Flame,] a book that is quite surprisingly entertaining and...