Written Lives (Spanish: Vidas Escritas) is a collection of biographical sketches of famous literary figures, written by Spanish author Javier Marías 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:
“If you say to me: “Master, it would seem that you weren’t too terribly wise to have written these bits of nonsense and pleasant mockeries,” I respond that you are hardly more so in finding amusement in reading them.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)