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The Biographer's Tale
A. S. Byatt novel From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Biographer's Tale is a book by A. S. Byatt. The story is about a postgraduate student, Phineas G. Nanson, who decides to write a biography about an obscure biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes. During the course of his research he fails to learn much about the actual subject of his biography, but discovers a lot of Destry-Scholes' unpublished research about real historical figures Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen. In the book, Byatt combines facts with fiction when recounting the lives of the three latter figures.[1]
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Byatt originally intended it as a short story titled "The Biography of a Biographer", based on her notion of a biographer's life in a library investigating another person's life.[2] This she developed into writing about a character called Phineas G. Nanson and his search.[2] Phineas Gilbert Nanson (to give him his full name) is called after an insect and is a near anagram of Galton, Ibsen and Linnaeus, though Byatt said this was an "uncanny" coincidence which she did not realise until afterwards.[2]
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