Writing the Lives of Writers ponders that strange ventriloquized dialogue between biographers and their subjects, a dialogue all the stranger when the subject is a writer. It contains 22 essays by internationally distinguished scholars and biographers including Martin C. Battestin, Isobel Grundy, John Haffenden, Hermione Lee, Lawrence Lipking, Ray Monk, Hazel Rowley, Max Saunders, Martin Stannard and John Worthen. They tackle the lives of Chaucer, Tyndale, More, Fielding and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Wordsworth, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Yeats, Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, F.R. Leavis, Richard Wright and Brian Penton.