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David Ellis was educated at Cambridge and for the majority of his career taught English Literature at the University of Kent where he is now an emeritus professor. His interest in life-writing began with Wordsworth, Freud and the spots of time: Interpretation in `The Prelude’ (Cambridge University Press, 1985), one of the concerns of which is to ask whether it is ever possible to write an autobiography in verse. Switching the focus to biography, he edited in 1993 a collection of essays on various biographical texts under the title Imitating Art (Pluto Press).
In 1998 he was responsible for the third volume of the Cambridge biography of D. H. Lawrence, Dying Game. This deals with the final decade of Lawrence’s life and was short listed for the James Tait Black memorial prize. Writing it was the stimulus for an investigation of biographical method the results of which were set out in Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Described by Richard Holmes as a pioneering text, this book analyzes the different methods biographers have for making sense of the materials at their disposal. In the process of this analysis, it raised the question of how they manage when those materials are practically non-existent.
This is the theme pursued in That Man Shakespeare (Helm Information, 2005), a work which is partly an anthology illustrating how Shakespeare was depicted after his death in novels, plays and poems; but which also deals with the biographical tradition and concludes with a description of the methods modern biographers are obliged to use in order to compensate for the absence of reliable information.
David Ellis has written on Shakespeare’s comedy but his latest book on a biographical theme is entitled Death and the author: how D. H. Lawrence died, and was remembered and will be published in July 2008 by Oxford University Press in their trade impact series. At present he is working on a book to be called That Summer of 1816: Byron on the Lake of Geneva in which he hopes to throw new light not only on Byron himself but also on Shelley, Mary Godwin, `Monk’ Lewis and Madame de Staël.
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