The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography

Modern biography can be said to have begun with John Gibson Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart in 1838. But Scott - the 'Great Unknown' - has always presented challenges to the biographer. Layers of myth (much of it manufactured by the faithful son-in-law Lockhart) continues to protect him from posterity. There is also the sheer size of Scott's achievements as poet, novelist, man of letters, and self-made Laird of Abbotsford. The two standard lives - Lockhart's, and Edgar Johnson's published in 1970 - run to some three-quarters of a million words apiece. Finally, there has been the precipitate slump in Scott's general popularity: he is now the great unread. John Sutherland's critical biography attempts to penetrate into the darker areas of Scott's life in a sceptical spirit, bringing the massive oeuvre and the chronicle of the life into manageable and readable proportions. Sutherland justifies Scott as a writer to be read and known today as much as in his heyday in the 19th century.