Where, Woolf wanted to know, was the odd particularity, that gesture or quirk which made a person recognisably themselves? Where, too, were the women? Woolf's chief argument with her father's memorialising strategy was the way it was skewed towards great men.

Her father's monumental Dictionary of National Biography missed that sense of irreducible strangeness which marked one individual from another. Woolf loved reading life stories while simultaneously decrying the way they habitually smoothed out the kinks and folds of lived experience. As you might expect from the biographer of Virginia Woolf, she is particularly good on what happened to life writing, as it was increasingly known, in the age of high modernism. Lee deftly integrates these questions of status and repute into a broadly chronological survey. It is this that gives it its lingering sense of carnival, and draws from commentators including Germaine Greer and AS Byatt such headmistressy disapproval. Today, too, biography remains constantly on the point of spilling over into 'lower' forms of writing - obituary, court reports and even Facebooking. Samuel Johnson, who thought biography the best and most humane branch of literature, nonetheless did it mostly for the cash. John Aubrey didn't even pretend to keep proper notes for his Brief Lives, but instead magpied his way to a kind of collage.

Suetonius, writing about the Roman emperors, piled up unsubstantiated anecdotes in a manner reminiscent of a gossip column. Plutarch felt obliged to make it defensively clear in his Lives that he wasn't doing history but something more intimate and glancing. As Lee points out, this whiff of illegitimacy has been there from the very beginning.

Virginia woolf by hermione lee