Alison Booth

Alison Booth is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (1992) and How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (2004). She is completing a book on Anglo-American literary tourism, house museums, and biography, called “Homes and Haunts,” and also directs the online bibliography and database, Collective Biographies of Women.


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Writing on Public Books

Books Full of Women

Biography never tells the story of a single life. Even a biography ostensibly focused on an individual also tells the story of its subject’s family, friends, or associates; it invites us to download bits of the lives of others and make them our own: biography as file sharing. Collective biography compounds the melding of author, […]