The genre of "biographies through the prism of everyday life" in modern English literature (based on the works of Lucy Worsley)

Novikova Vera Grigor'evna ORCID: 0000-0002-7398-3867 Doctor of Philology Professor; Department of Foreign Literature; N.I. Lobachevsky National Research Nizhny Novgorod State University. 23 Gagarin Ave., Nizhny Novgorod, 603000, Russia wnovikova@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

In the literary process of Great Britain, the genre of biography has had a stable position for several centuries, undergoing genre transformations depending on the understanding of the relationship between an individual's life and history. Already at the beginning of the 17th century, biography was first conceptualized theoretically as a kind of knowledge distinct from history in Francis Bacon's work "Progress of knowledge" (1605), where three separate branches of historical narrative were identified: "chronicle", representing an epoch, "life", describing a person, and "history" (narrative), narrating the events. In the nineteenth century, the genre of autobiography developed, which, according to its researcher, has romantic (as exemplified by Thomas de Quincey's "Confession of an Englishman who Used Opium"), spiritual (John Henry Newman's "Apologia pro Vita Sua") and Victorian (E. Trollope's "Autobiography") forms, where the main plot is "the path of life which leads a person to self-discovery" ^{[1, p. 245]}. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the traditional biography of the 19th century was replaced by the so-called "new biography", the main principles of which "are increased attention to the inner world of a person, emphasized psychology, an attitude towards objectivity, rejection of evaluation and varnishing, and often an ironic tone" ^{[2, p. 55]}. An example of such a form is the "Eminent Victorians" (1918) by D. L. Strachey, who "understood the potential of the biographical genre, the fact that biography, on the one hand, belongs to science, and on the other – to art. By combining these two principles, he created a kind of genre hybrid that fully met the demands of his modern society" ^{[2, p. 56]}. This genre form retained its position until the 1970s. The last decades of the twentieth century were called the "Golden Age of Biography" in English criticism. The vast majority of such works were devoted to writers, connected with attempts to convey the specifics of the creative process. The German researcher Yu. Schleger emphasizes the special status of the writer's biography in England: "Personality-centered culture in English defines the central position of "biographical writing" ^{[3, p. 58]}. Peter Ackroyd, the most famous in this field of writing, not only enriched the traditional literary biography with magnificent examples, but also created innovative alternative biographies and, finally, radically updated the status of the genre by writing a biography of London. We agree with the opinion of A.V. Shubina: "The phenomenon of the history of the city as a biography in the work of the English novelist arose under the influence of postmodern aesthetics. Postmodernism blurs the boundaries between the subject and the object of creativity, and therefore the seemingly objective reality of the city acquires the features of incompleteness, subjectivity inherent in an individual human personality. for him, it is fundamentally important to have a personal understanding, to "experience" the city as an event. It is through the process of experiencing that "a historical fact receives a biographical meaning" ^{[4, p. 230]}.

In the era of postmodernism, prerequisites appear for the emergence of a new genre form associated with the category of "everyday life". In this regard, it seems appropriate to refer to the works of the French historical school "Annales". A representative of its second generation, F. Braudel, author of the work "Material Civilization, economics and Capitalism of the XV-XVIII centuries" (1979), calls the first volume "Structures of everyday life: possible and impossible" and devotes it to various aspects of material life. He proposes the concept of three levels of structures of historical reality: microhistory (the rhythm of an individual's daily life), cycles of economic life (commodity circulation, demography), and the level of "long extension" (technologies, methods of cognition, and civilizations). Braudel's words: "Material life is about people and things, things and people. To study things — food, houses, clothes, luxury goods, tools, money, plans of villages and towns — in short, everything that serves a person is a way to experience his daily existence" - reflect the general idea of studying everyday life in modern science ^{[5, p. 1]}.

In the UK, the fascination with everyday life has been growing since 1948, when the book by Marjorie and Charles Heinrich Born Quennell, "Everyday Life in England" ("A History of Everyday Things in England", 1948), which consists of four volumes and covers the history of the country from 1066 to 1914, appeared for children. It became more noticeable in the literary process and has not been lost to this day^[6]. It is characteristic that in 1947 the first version of the Critique of Everyday Life by A. Lefebvre was published in France, the author of the preface to the reprint of which in the UK writes: "Thanks to this book, philosophy no longer despises the concrete and everyday. By making alienation "a key concept in the analysis of human situations since the time of Marx," Lefebvre opened philosophy to action: criticism, taken in its Kantian sense, was not just knowledge of everyday life, but knowledge of means." Lefebvre is characterized here as "the clearest proponent of living philosophy today"^{[7, p. X]}.

T.G. Strukova finds an accurate formulation of this bias: "The protective quality of everyday life becomes a kind of anchor of stability in the unstable era of postmodernity with its epistemological uncertainty, the collapse of knowledge, a multitude of truths, disbelief in meta-discourses, the variety of stories told and the dominance of mass culture ... everyday life in a virtually simultaneous world that a person can no longer comprehensively comprehend and embrace. It turns into a protective system that allows an individual to feel like an integral part of a place, time, environment and culture" ^{[8, p. 158]}.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the nonfiction of one of the most notable authors in this field, Lucy Worsley, from the perspective of genre–specific "biographies through the prism of everyday life."

The main part

Lucy Worsley (born 1973) is the author of a significant number of works of nonfiction about the everyday life of different historical eras in the 21st century. She is motivated to write them by her occupation – from the position of curator of Bolsover Castle to the position of chief curator of historical royal palaces (Tower of London, Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace). In 2005, she was elected a Senior fellow at the Institute of Historical Studies at the University of London. In the UK, L. Worsley is also famous as the creator of BBC television series on historical topics. Already at her first job at Bolsover Castle, the diversity of her creative activities was outlined: first she wrote a guidebook (2001), and then the book Cavalier: a Story about Chivalry, Passion and Great Houses (2008). Over the course of twenty years, she has written more than twenty books, including she began to try herself in fiction for children (Eliza Rose, 2016; My Name is Victoria, 2017).

Let's single out three books from this series, written in the 2010s: "The English House. An Intimate story" (If the walls could talk, 2011); "A very British Murder" (A very British Murder, 2013); "Visiting Jane Austen. Biography through the prism of everyday life" (Jane Austen at Home, 2017), which will be the subject of our research.

The first book has four parts: "intimate stories" of the bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen ^[9]. These are really stories in the sense that they are a story about the changes in the purpose and content of these rooms in the chronology of the historical process. The microhistories of individual household items are considered in the context of individual structures (in Braudel's terminology) and, ultimately, in the "great extent" of the formation of civilization in a particular country. The epigraph can be the words uttered by John Beadle in 1656: "The most joyful of all stories is the story of human life and everyday life: it revives the past, resurrects those who have been dead for a long time" ^{[9, p.9]}.

The history of the bedroom begins with the history of the bed and the chest next to it, which marked the personal space of a medieval man. Blankets, sheets, pillows. The birth of a person is also connected with the bed. Hence the distraction to the problem of childbirth, motherhood, breastfeeding, childhood as such and the lack of interest in it until the 19th century. Underwear, health and treatment of diseases, sex and sleep clothes, sleep history (in Britain, the dark time is 14 hours in winter, which predetermined the sleep regime in two steps: the first sleep and the second sleep). In other words, the whole thickness of existence, both in the most everyday sense of the word, but also in the deep meanings of Englishness – the national mentality at different stages of the development of European civilization.

The bedroom traces a long way from a place open to the public in the world of "collective existence" of the Middle Ages (the author says that understanding the spiritual environment where "Not man, but God stood at the center of the universe" is the task of studying all this medieval furniture and the rooms where it stood) ^{[9, p. 15]} before gaining privacy, which became appreciated only in the 17th century. This need is motivated by the Glorious Revolution, the formation of a new type of statehood and the middle classes gaining their rights, gaining individuality. And finally, the story of the bedroom of the 19th century, when the middle class, "the creator and creation of the era of industrialization," raised the furnishing of the premises to a cult.

In the second part, in the story of "the most personal of all places in the house," the bathroom, the story naturally begins with the very tradition of washing. Bathing was an important part of medieval man's life: bathing the king, "knight bathing", and public baths. "The Londoners of the Middle Ages loved water no less than fish" ^{[9, p.149]}.

However, two centuries – from about 1550 to 1750 – are called unwashed here. The main reasons are the views of medicine (terrible diseases spread in the water) and the church (bathing in holy springs is idolatry) ^{[9, p. 153]}. The stories of the living room and kitchen follow the same principle: from a multitude of private details to increasingly generalized observations.

The book is extremely full of details. All these particulars have already been in literature, especially in social realism, where they become a means of representing objective reality. But at the same time, costume, everyday, psychological, and portrait details are carefully selected by the author. Roland Barthes wrote that realistic literature is itself narrative, but only because realism in it boils down to fragmented, scattered "details"; in general, any narrative text, however realistic, develops on unrealistic paths. This phenomenon can be called a referential illusion. The truth of this illusion is that "reality", having been banished from a realistic statement as a denotative signified, enters it already as a connotative signified; it is only necessary to recognize that certain details directly refer to reality, as they immediately begin to implicitly mean it. Flaubert's "barometer" and Michelet's "small door" ultimately say only one thing: we are reality; they mean "reality" as a general category, and not its special manifestations." pp. 394-396. Books about everyday life demonstrate a different approach. The details are equal, each one is important, especially considering the author's predilection for the historical genesis of each of them. This creates an obvious redundancy, oversaturation of details and provoked a special perception of the text, the effect of immersion in a distant reality ^{[10, p. 396]}. The advantage of L. Worsley is that she manages to avoid the impression of a chaos of details. On the contrary, they form a coherent system that reveals, in fact, the national conceptual sphere.

In the book "Pure English murder. An amazing story of national obsession" the author once again turns to the national mentality, telling about one of its features: "I'm going to explore the pleasure with which the British perceive, absorb and assimilate the idea of murder as such, a phenomenon that arose in the early 19th century and has survived to this day" ^{[11, p. 8]}. The author also follows the chronology here, combining several plans in the story about the gradual formation of this specific socio-cultural phenomenon. The social plan (society's attitude to murder), the literary plan (writers who marked the stages of the development of this passion: from Thomas de Quincey's "Murder as one of the fine Arts" to D. Orwell's "The Decline of the English Murder"), the commercial plan (the story of profiting from the sale of souvenirs and other products related to the murder).

Up until the very end of the 18th century, murders were apparently not properly solved, since, for example, back in 1810, only 15 people were convicted of murder. The turning point was the murder on Radcliffe Road, but even "after a lot of attention from the crowd," the appropriate police (investigating the crimes) were not created. Only by 1829, under the leadership of Interior Minister Robert Peel, a new structure was created in which peelers served. In February 1827, De Quincey published his essay "Murder as one of the Fine Arts." The main idea in it is "murder is a performance that arouses public expectations" ^{[11, p. 25]}. In this regard, Worsley expresses "The idea that crime, especially murder, can be seen as entertainment, was born in the first decades of the 19th century, but it was destined to have a long life and commercial success for years and years to come. ^{[11, p. 25]}.

Commercial success is supported by literature. De Quincey discovers the aesthetic potential of murder, arguing that the crime on Radcliffe Road has brilliance and perfection of execution. Basically, we are talking about the most primitive mass literature. The author writes that already in the first third of the 19th century, printed sheets with a story about the murder appeared on sale, transformed into editions of "passion for a penny." They become the prototype of the Newgate novel (after the name of the New Gate prison, which not only housed criminals, but also carried out public executions, which themselves were a favorite pastime of hundreds and thousands of Londoners). The collection "Newgate Calendar" (A list of bloody villains) was published. The series "Secrets of the London Courts", published in the 1840s, had 40,000 thousand subscribers. ^{[11, p.90]}. Bulwer Lytton's novel Pelham or The Adventures of a Gentleman was one step away from the passion for singing. Pays tribute to the theme of crime and murder of Ch. Dickens. In the novel about Oliver Twist, the pages about the murder of Nancy, who is criminal but has revealed noble feelings, become the most touching to the readers' soul. Dickens also creates the first image of a police inspector capable of solving crimes and protecting the law. Later, the deductive method, amateur detectives, and professionals will appear in English literature. And the huge popularity of the genre right up to the end of the 1940s. In 1946, D. Orwell wrote in his essay "The Decline of English Murder" that "fascination with murder" is lost after "the large-scale breakdown of the entire human existence that we observe in the twentieth century." ^{[11, p.304]}.

However, it seems that even today we can agree with the words of the author of the detectives Dorothy Lee Sayers: "It seems that death for the Anglo–Saxons is the source of the greatest pleasure, amusing them more than all other topics. ^{[11, p. 13]}. We can give an example as proof of the series "Purely English Murders", which was launched in 1997, has 22 seasons and 132 episodes.

A special layer of English culture consists of "bizarre and diverse artifacts generated by society's interest in and response to murder" ^{[11, p.9]}. Worsley made a television series, where she captured the specimens she had collected. For example, her book tells the story of the "Murder in the Red Barn," which "became a real sensation of the time, profoundly and for a long time affecting what historians call material culture: trinkets, paintings, song lyrics and all kinds of artifacts appeared." ^{[11, p. 103]}. The list of souvenirs also characterizes the national mentality.: "Corder's Last Word" (a detailed recording of what was said on the eve of the execution), the ballad "The Murder of Maria Martin" and other ballads (selling thousands of texts), a melody that has survived to this day as one of the most popular folk, Staffordshire ceramics – figurines of lovers, a barn, trinkets made from the boards of the barn where the murder took place, a snuffbox in the shape of a shoe, pieces of Mary's tombstone, Corder's scalp and his wrinkled ear in the Bern-St. Edmunds Museum, puppets depicting Mary and her murderer in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the finale, the author quotes the words of one of the now-forgotten authors of detective stories from the 1930s: "Wishing to study the mores of our era, a historian of future times may turn not to a collection of official documents and statistics, but to detectives." The study of the spirit of a nation from the point of view of the attitude to murder as part of its (nation's) everyday world is also of undoubted value.

Completely different qualities of the English character are found in the book "Visiting Jane Austen" (in the original "Jane Austen at Home")^[12]. The author defines his task as follows: "I hope to show you the everyday side of Jane's life, with its bright and dark days, with its family joys and worries, and with those "insignificant objects that make up the happiness of domestic life every day," as Jane herself wrote about it in Emma. ^{[12, p. 9]}. Dozens of articles and books have been written about Jane Austen. The problems associated with the documentary base are determined by the fact that the heirs destroyed most of Jane Austen's documents and correspondence in order to "refine" her image. Worsley also emphasizes that the perception of this writer changes in history – from a housewife with an innocent passion for writing novels to a feminist who despised the very idea of marriage in the name of her own independence. In this book, the author summarizes the information she has about the large and smallest details of Jane's life, which has become part of the national mythology, and form the most objective picture of her: "I tried my best to fit Jane into the context of the objective world of her homes." Worsley argues that "finding a home is an idea that is central to Jane's fiction... Indeed, although we tend to emphasize the romance of Austen's novels, the need for a happy and prosperous marriage, it is more often a means to achieve the goal of creating a safe and comfortable home for both men and women."

The author of a dissertation study on the aestheticization of everyday life by the Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell concludes that "Victorian writers who make the microcosms of their characters the subject of their images, aestheticizing everyday life, turning everyday life, the consciousness of their characters, and everyday objects into objects of art, reach a high level in depicting everyday culture. Of particular value is the special modality of everyday life, which is embodied in the artistic world created by her, the understanding of reality that is characteristic of the everyday consciousness of the British Victorians, the vision of reality that is provided by a specific set of common sense attitudes" ^{[13, p. 6]}. This statement certainly applies not only to Jane Austen's work, but also to her biography, written by Worsley. The factual information about the houses where Jane Austen lived has been known to the smallest detail for almost two hundred years. However, it has never been reproduced with such precision. Especially in the description of the first house in her life, the Steventon parsonage, that is, the house of her father, the priest. Data is given on the size of Steventon parish, which "was three miles long and three quarters of a mile wide." "The parsonage included a house and three acres of "church" land, the harvest of which went entirely to the priest. Steventon's former communal fields were "fenced off" and turned into large private farms, which saved George from the onerous need to levy taxes on each individual family. He simply took 10 percent of the monetary profits of the neighboring farmers" ^[12]. Thus, Jane's father's income did not consist solely of donations from parishioners (they were poor and brought few). The Stephen's parsonage (rectory) included, in addition to the house, a laundry, a hoeing, a barn, a brewery, a barn, a poultry house, an oil mill with a cheese factory, a garden with cherries and a garden with cucumbers ^{[12, p. 33]}. This means that both the mother and the children were constantly busy working in the garden and in the rest of the household, since they could only have a limited number of employees. So the facts dispel the idea of the "lordly" life of the family. The biographer most carefully describes the life of a family, both a specific and generalized gentry family of the turn of the XVIII- XIX centuries. The personal life of her parents, considering that they married for practical reasons. A man needs a mistress, he's not marrying a woman, he's marrying a lifestyle. There are many children, there are seven in the Austin family. A practical attitude towards them – one sick son is, as it were, removed from the family and brought up, and later lives away from loved ones, the second, very attractive, is given to foster sons by rich relatives. The latter proved to be justified, as he would later be able to support his mother and unmarried sisters. And in general, "in that age when people often died before they could raise children, aunts, uncles, and in general numerous relatives meant no less than father and mother" ^[12]. All the close and not-so-close family members make up a large community, and each of its Austen family members finds a detailed description in Austen's book. The conditions of birth and upbringing of children are also described. For example, Jane, the seventh child, was born on December 16, 1775, and was probably raised according to the infant care manual, The Nannies' Guide, published in 1774. How they fed, swaddled, and walked with the children. And further, what kind of education was given. The boys' work and their path "to the republic of reason" (in many details, including a globe and a microscope) is compared with the education of girls, that is, the art of writing letters, needlework, and playing the piano (the family bought a piano with a beautiful case and had a large collection of musical compositions that Jane rewrote so that "sheet music they read as if they were printed") ^{[12, p. 69]}. But Mary, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, is "bullied for her commitment to music and reading" ^{[12, p. 70]}. Perhaps this shows Jane's own attitude to these activities? The house has a 500-volume library and a home theater, which they call the Steventon Enterprise. Modern excavations of the parsonage complement the idea of this world, where there was "family porcelain with a blue willow pattern", "cream Wedgwood porcelain" The path to the church with hedges has been preserved, and one can imagine "Jane Austen's England covered with a floral carpet" ^{[12, p. 41]}. Having lost this house, Jane will spend most of her short life in temporary, alien homes. She never has a place for creativity. In the famous essay by Virginia Woolf, this topic will be called "Your Own Room."

Jane does not marry, according to Worsley, because she does not want to commit herself to obligations that would imprison her in a kind of prison. However, this did not relieve her of the many and arduous responsibilities that unmarried daughters carried in family communities.

As for the big story, she is hardly shown here, because in her life, as in her novels, "all the great dramas of that era — the French Revolution, the industrial and agrarian revolutions — are played out behind the scenes. Instead, it shows us the subtle changes that have taken place under their influence in the hearts, minds and daily routines of ordinary people" ^[12].

In the aggregate of episodes, quotations, comments, and details, chronology in a certain sense recedes into the background, because compared to the "thickness of being", the life span of one person is very short. This reflects the palimpsest type of consciousness, which means the presence of all the elements of the past in the "now" moment, as opposed to the "linear" deployment of these elements in classical thinking. Peter Ackroyd, in his biography of London, speaks directly about the palimpsest of the city. The authors analyzing the poetics of everyday life in the novels of S. Faulks also came to the conclusion that the named poetics "is based on the principle of palimpsest, which provides the opportunity to create an image of everyday life as a multi-layered dynamic formation, all the components of which interact with each other. In Faulks, the image of everyday life is a factor in the formation of the general ideological concept of his novels, the basis of plot-plot organization and a means of characterization of characters"^{[14, p. 65]}. The same applies to Worsley's book. It is important to note that the author manages to create an artistically convincing image of Jane Austen.

Conclusion

An analysis of the documentary prose by the English historian and writer Lucy Worsley allows us to conclude that the works under consideration have a significant artistic potential. L. Worsley's books are a typical example of the representation of stories of people ("Visiting Jane Austen"), things ("English House. An intimate story") and even literary genres ("Purely British murder") through the synthesis of scientific knowledge and artistic image. Detailed detailing creates the effect of authenticity of reality, concentrating the "local flavor" technique known since the birth of the historical novel. The combination of elements of various kinds of scientific knowledge: history, medicine, sociology, cultural studies, art criticism – creates a rich text and creates the impression of simultaneous presence of fragments of the past. At the same time, the author follows the chronology, consistently presenting the history of household items and the specifics of their use at different times, the history of the crime and novel genres in the context of changes in the consciousness of the British in the last two centuries. A lively, stylistically accurate and diverse account of the life of the nation allows the reader to get an idea of the specifics of national thinking. The book "Visiting Jane Austen" significantly expands the idea of Englishness. Publisher's supplement – . "Biography through the prism of everyday life" seems to be very successful and is used here as a research topic, since it focuses, firstly, on biography, a genre that can offer not only the life story of an individual, but also the biography of an entire nation (or city, as it is presented in "London. Biography" by P. Akroyd). Secondly, the expression "through the prism of everyday life" accurately characterizes the features of the modern type of thinking, which presupposes understanding history precisely as a palimpsest made up of "a billion forms of being" (we are using here the thought of the writer Thomas Wolfe, who set himself a similar task of creating an image of the American world back in the thirties of the twentieth century).