The Author: Susan Tridgell is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. She has taught at both the Australian National University and the Australian Catholic University and has published articles on biography, nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, ethics and literature, Holocaust biography, philosophical biography and conceptions of the self. Authors of interest have included Bertrand Russell, Emmanuel Levinas, George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. She received her doctorate in literature from the Australian National University.

«...this is an essential work for anyone interested in biography and the self.» (David McCooey, Biography)«...Tridgell's book...defends with great success the possibilities of biography as a route to the truth about human beings. It will be an essential resource for the literary discussion of biography, which is surely due for the renaissance that biographies themselves have achieved.» (James Franklin, API Review of Books)

• Contents: Biography as a literary form – Self and narrative – Conceptions of the self – Embodiment – Relational selves – Time and narrative – Linear and fragmented narratives – Problems of representation – Sympathy, power and knowledge – Holocaust biographies – Philosophical biographies – Ethics and literature.