Brief Lives

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Brief Lives is a collection of short biographies written by John Aubrey in the last decades of the seventeenth century. Aubrey initially began collecting biographical material to assist the Oxford scholar Anthony Wood, who was working on his own collection of biographies. With time, Aubrey's biographical researches went beyond mere assistance to Wood and became a project in its own right.

Aubrey was careful, wherever possible, to seek out and talk with those who had been acquainted with his subjects. His sociable nature and his wide circle of friends helped him in this pursuit. At his death, Aubrey left his biographical writings in chaotic order. It has been the task of later editors to organize the manuscripts (held at the Bodleian Library) into readable form.

Aubrey's Brief Lives has been loved for generations for its colorful gossipy tone and for the glimpses it provides of the unofficial sides of its subjects. Aubrey's use of informants and his eye for the unusual provides much more vivid pictures than a biography based on documents could. He is frank but never malicious.

The Brief Lives includes biographies of such figures as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, John Dee, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Halley, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. There have been many modern editions.

Patrick Garland wrote and directed a play Brief Lives that was based on Aubrey's work of the same title.

[edit] External links

• Brief Lives at Google Books
• A few "Lives" from Brief Lives" at Druidic.org (Thomas Allen, Elizabeth Broughton, Thomas Harcourt, Mary Herbert, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Hobbes)
• Mathematician biographies in John Aubrey's Brief Lives
• Julia Trevelyan Oman Archive University of Bristol Theatre Collection, University of Bristol

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