Another one bites the dust....

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

Easy for the bitter to put a sinister slant on things. Was the grotty bio really scholarly or jusr cashing in? Did they really put the hard word out or was it a case of letting people know which was the authorised bio?

As for the more recent works, publishing an extract from one of Christopher's letters without acknowledgement, let alone permission, is probably not the way to get cooperation for future projects...

There's only one way to find out - read the Grotta book! I don't know if we've got it somewhere in our book piles, but if we do then I'm going to read it and find out for myself

As I say, there was a very similar firestorm over the Plath estate and the unauthorised biographies turned out to be absolutely the best, despite having to be published without quotes (easy enough to pinpoint them, when I was a student with a special interest in 20th C poetry in any case). I will have to dig out the piece I wrote back at Uni which looked at how the critic benefits from different sources and whether anything authorised can be considered a 'primary' source - it was based on the Plath/Hughes Estate wrangle. But the basic gist was that authorised biographies are actually quite limiting to those wishing to study works with reference to biographical as well as textual detail. What you get from them is in effect a 'fiction' of the writer's life, and they are never objective. Just as much as an unauthorised bio can have an agenda, so does an authorised one. The only way you can really get close to an objective assessment is to have a range of bios at hand.

If it's CT Himself putting the brakes on then he is in effect acting as gatekeeper to all subsequent scholarly work, whether formal or informal. He has a right to do this but is it right?