Victoria Glendinning CBE, FRSL gave the 2002 Leslie Stephen Lecture in the Senate House yesterday afternoon (Wednesday 13 February 2002).

Ms Glendinning is a biographer, critic, novelist, and journalist. Her biographical subjects include Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, Anthony Trollope, and Rebecca West.

Her lecture, entitled The Lies and Silences of Biography, addressed the difficulties inherent in attempting a definitive biography of a subject using incomplete, deceptive and defective archive material. The lecture dealt with the barrier between biography and fiction, and the challenge of gleaning sufficient detail from an archive to make a long-dead subject come alive for a contemporary readership.

The lecture series is founded in memory of Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), the influential philosopher, man of letters, and biographer. Stephen was a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge until he resigned in 1862 having suffered a crisis of faith. The father of Virginia Woolf, he was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and biographer of Johnson, Pope, George Eliot, and Hobbes. Both Leslie Stephen and Victoria Glendinning have written biographies of Jonathan Swift, separated by more than a hundred years.

The first Leslie Stephen Lecture was delivered in 1906, the topic being prescribed as "some literary subject, including therein Criticism, Biography, and Ethics".

Early Leslie Stephen Lecturers included Lytton Strachey, John Masefield (when Poet Laureate), and Henry James, a prot


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