Speaking of Biography, by Judith P. Zinsser:

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My great aunt wrote biographies and even made a living at it, Book of the Month Club and everything. When I would ask her why she chose the subjects she did, she always looked at me as if I were silly. “Why, of course,” she would say, “because they were bright, interesting men.” Women, to her, though perhaps bright, could not be as interesting because they never had power, in the sense she admired it. So Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote best-selling biographies of John Adams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sir Edward Coke, and the authors of the US Constitution. Only at the end of her writing life did she turn to men who were not quite such “models of probity,” as she would have said, to Sir Francis Bacon and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom had a relatively harmless, but scandalous side. Was she really a lawyer or a politician at heart? A judge? Born when she was, and into a family of four brothers and a renowned beauty for a sister, she never even went to college. She always told me that her mother introduced her to guests and visitors differently from the other children: “and this is my daughter who plays the violin.” So, I guess that’s as close as I’ll come to understanding why these men appealed to her.

Surprisingly, my great aunt hasn’t been the only biographer to leave it to readers to guess why they write about their person. After I started thinking of doing a biography of Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the marquise Du Châtelet – I love that whole marvelous name, and even more, how proud of myself I was when I learned to say it – but, back to the point. Before I started writing about her, I looked at a lot of other biographies. Even those, by authors I most admire, such as Hermione Lee and Claire Tomalin, only hint at what might have caused them to devote years of their lives to Virginia Woolf or Sir Samuel Pepys. Angela V. John always explains the historian’s and writer’s problems with each new subject she presents to us, but, were I not her friend, I would be guessing at the feminism and passionate advocacy that keep her going in the long days of research and writing that each has demanded of her. Of course, you are now asking, “So, did you tell all in your biography?” When you read it, you can be the judge, but I certainly hoped to keep fewer secrets.

I did write about how I first heard of Emilie Du Châtelet. I included the true story of falling over an earlier biography. I didn’t mention that I was already a pushover for the eighteenth century– one summer my cousin and I read Old Court Life in France– two volumes about kings, mistresses and intrigue, Diane de Poitiers, Montespan and Madame de Maintenon, Louis XV and Pompadour. Bonnie Anderson, my co-author at the time, used to call Du Châtelet “the Miss Piggy of the 18th century” because she seemed so outrageous and so oblivious to the constraints of her class and era. We put her in our book, of course, but I still hadn’t decided to keep writing about her. That happened bit by bit. I started saying I was going to do something related to her at job talks, when musty old male professors asked me “And what will your next project be?” Du Châtelet seemed an easy, liveable answer. Then my new university had money for travel to archives in Europe. Paris? Sounded great. There were grant proposals I could write, conference papers I could give, and Du Châtelet became more and more officially “Judith’s project.”

Then, I swear, Du Châtelet just took charge.

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Judith P. Zinsser, Emilie du Chatelet, history, philosophy, Enlightenment, Voltaire, Newton, France, Paris, Penguin Books, books