Written Lives (Spanish: Vidas Escritas) is a collection of biographical sketches of famous literary figures, written by Spanish author Javier MarÃas and originally published in 2000. Margaret Jull Costa's English translation was published by New Directions in 2006.
Authors featured include:
- Djuna Barnes
- Joseph Conrad
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Isak Dinesen
- Marie du Deffand
- William Faulkner
- Henry James
- James Joyce
- Rudyard Kipling
- Malcolm Lowry
- Thomas Mann
- Yukio Mishima
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Arthur Rimbaud
- Laurence Sterne
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
- Ivan Turgenev
- Oscar Wilde
There is also, towards the end of the book, a section entitled 'Fugitive Women', which includes shorter sketches of Emily Brontë, Julie de Lespinasse, Violet Hunt, Vernon Lee, Adah Isaacs Menken and Lady Hester Stanhope. The final chapter, 'Perfect Artists', looks more generally at the tradition of the literary artist.
Famous quotes containing the words written and/or lives:
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)