D

A few years ago, I wrote a piece in which I declared that biography, if not quite dead, was in very poor condition. I was concerned that for far too long, it had been criticized that biographies were poorly written and just listed facts from birth to death. I even hesitated before telling people I was a biographer: it felt tantamount to admitting that I was a journalist incapable of original thought.

But it turns out to be otherwise. It was more that I hadn't been looking for it hard enough or in quite the right places. Last weekend, the University of East Anglia hosted a conference at which the masters of biography. took its pulse and gave the encouraging conclusion. What has happened, these experts explained, is that biography has changed its shape. This shift has come from a growing sense that biography as it used to be done was not getting us close to the experience it was trying to describe. We all know that life isn't actually comprised of a stately march through the decades in which loose ends, false trails and those periods where nothing much happens are tidied away out of sight. Mostly our lives feel shapeless, coming into focus only when a particular occasion makes us feel, for a few minutes at least, fully ourselves.

To better reveal the authentic, unscripted nature of a life, one new approach to biography employs the presenting of something small to tell a bigger story. Frances Wilson demonstrated how effective this can be in How to Survive the Titanic. She focuses on the moment when J Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner, jumped into a lifeboat meant for women and children, vividly charting a story about one man's lost honour. Another approach is to organise your story around objects that carried a particular emotional charge for the person you are writing about. In The Real Jane Austen, for instance, biographer Paula Byrne pulls out an East Indian shawl (披肩) and a carringe that figured in both Austen's personal experience and her fiction, and tells a new story around them. Other biographers have realised that their subject's non-eventful schooling or the long holidays by the sea can be cut down to a few short paragraphs so they can spend more time on the bits that matter.

These new ways of telling lives are not entirely driven by intellectual concerns. The pressures are commercial, too. People also have shorter attention spans, which means that those doorstop biographies of 400 pages can start to seem like an approaching threat rather than a delicious promise. But more and more interesting books are being published which deal with the lives of others. They may not announce themselves as "biographies", but that doesn't mean they aren't.