Dishing the dirt on John Aubrey

 

By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL

Without John Aubrey – the seventeenth-century antiquarian, toponymist, playwright, astrologer, folklorist, educational theorist, assiduous collector – we wouldn’t know much about the personal, curious traits of many of the most important figures (mainly men, but some women, too) of his age (and the one before it). Posthumously published as Brief Lives, Aubrey’s notes on people such as Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Elizabeth Danvers, René Descartes, Walter Raleigh and William Shakespeare are the work of a journalist before the age of journalism, uniquely voicing a vanishing past (he lived through the Civil War and the Great Fire of London). Yet what do we know about Aubrey himself? His own life has always been overshadowed, perhaps understandably, by those of his more famous subjects.

In this week’s TLS, Stuart Kelly reviews Ruth Scurr’s new Life of Aubrey, “an experiment in the art of biography” that illuminates both its shadowy subject and “the unquestioned presumptions” behind the genre. Scurr's clever conceit is to write the biography as if it’s the diary Aubrey might have written, if he’d kept one. Recently, she joined me in our studio for the latest in the TLS Voices series (listen above) to tell us a little more about this unconventional approach. She gives us a wonderful sense of Aubrey’s brutally honest Lives and reads some excerpts, including one on the “sanguine and tractable” Venetia Stanley, who died in her bed suddenly: “When her head was opened there was found but little brain, which her husband imputed to her drinking of viper-wine; but spiteful women would say 'twas a viper-husband who was jealous of her that she would steal a leap . . .”. Is this just speculation? And why should we care about it? Well, after all – in the words of Truman Capote – isn’t all literature gossip?

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