Landscapes of the Imagination: sketching the scenery of Scott’s Lives of the Novelists

Scott’s conception of the imaginative life of the novelist was very much in evidence throughout many of his excursions into the realm of literary biography, yet arguably nowhere does it come into such clear focus as in his 1825 collection of biographical sketches, Lives of the Novelists. In considering some of the key aspects of Scott’s biographical approach in a number of these portraits of significant literary lives, a greater sense of Scott’s significance as an important figure in the evolution of Romantic-period life-writing begins to emerge. A sense of the symbiotic relationship between Scott’s own creativity and his engagement with the natural world also becomes increasingly apparent. In exploring Scott’s biographical sketches, this paper will seek to situate Scott’s Lives of the Novelists in the context of what Arthur Bradley and Alan Rawes identified as the defining tension present in what they term ‘Romantic biography’, which is ‘that it is both too Romantic and not Romantic enough’. Beginning with the contention that Scott’s contribution to ‘Romantic biography’ is yet to be fully acknowledged and understood, this paper will focus in particular upon the ways in which Scott foregrounds various landscapes in a number of his biographical sketches. It will also consider the significance of these aspects of Scott’s biographical approaches in relation to the way in which we consider Scott’s accounts of his own creativity, as well as how we might perceive his significance as a Romantic-period biographer.