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which seeks to be both ultimately literary and ultimately scientific.^^ James
L. Clifford, in his admirable From Puzzles to Portraits, suggests "a series
of five categories for biography"—"objective," "scholarly-historical," "artis-
tic-scholarly," "narrative," and finally "subjective"—although he makes
clear that his preference is for "artistic-scholarly,"^' which he takes to
represent the happy medium between historical science and literary art.
The classification systems advanced above emphasize a methodological
median that biographies ought to adopt. Biographers acknowledge that
there is an irreducible subjective or interpretive element both in the
subject matter and in the production of biographies. This recognition of
irreducible subjectivity has manifested itself in the internecine battle to
determine whether biography is an "art," or "craft" or a "science." Woolf,
for example, advocates a melioristic position between these antipodean
options by arguing that the biographer is "a craftsman, not an artist; and
his work is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between."^
This interpretive element is also evident in the production of
biographies since biographers have agendas that influence their choice
and decision of subject, the angle that they adopt and the conventional
form in which they choose to depict their stories. Such productions will
also involve the adoption of philosophical assumptions about the nature
and viability of their enterprise. One particularly tantalizing and seductive
temptation is to adopt what Young-Bruehl calls the "essentialist assump-
tion"—"the temptation to try to capture the subject as the subject really
was, to catch the subject in moment of truth, to reveal what was hidden
even from those close to the event, even from the subject himself or
herself."^^ This assumption can manifest itself in a number of different
forms. In the majority of academic biographies, the attempt is to discover
the key theoretical concern or the object of the subject's intellectual or
spiritual quest. Once located and an account advanced to explain the
adoption of this pivotal insight or central principle, the biographer then

^* Paul Murray Kendall, The Art of Biography (New York and London:
Garland Publishing, 1985), 126-127.
^' James L. Clifford, From Puzzles to Portraits (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1970), 83-89.
^ Virginia Woolf, "The Art of Biography," 170.
^1 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, "The Writing of Biography," in Mind and Body
Politic (New York: Routledge, 1989), 125. The following classification of the forms
of biographies and parts of its description are borrowed from this essay.