Biography 1 - Biography, once considered a second-rate genre, has never been so fashionable. Kathryn Hughes welcomes the thaw in relations between life-writing and the academy

Biography has always been a particularly British habit (disease, if you believe some people, including Germaine Greer and A S Byatt). From Dr Johnson onwards, getting someone else's life down on paper has proved a popular and profitable activity for professional writers with no university post to fund them. Although biographers do pretty much the same thing as academics - they go to libraries, find stuff out, and then publish books about it - the two camps have always kept themselves stiffly to themselves, held apart by a barely disguised tangle of envy, suspicion and defensive superiority.

Both Greer and Byatt are originally academics, and their dislike of biography borders on loathing. Greer, who found herself dissected in a particularly queasy biography back in the 1980s, sees the genre as essentially second-rate, the last refuge of hack writers who can't come up with their own plots. Biographers, to her, are scavenging dung beetles crawling over the remains of bigger, better lives. Byatt, who must dread the biography that will surely come (perhaps a joint one with her sister Margaret Drabble?) worries more about the way literary biography turns people away from the dark meat of literature towards the sliced white bread of gossip. In Byatt's worst-case scenario, reading about George Eliot's life becomes a junk substitute for people who are too lazy or stupid to tackle Middlemarch.

For most academics, though, the wariness towards biography has been less heatedly personal (they are, after all, unlikely ever to be the subject of one) and more coldly calculated. With a few notable exceptions, such as Hermione Lee and the late Richard Ellmann, they have kept aloof, arguing that there are fundamental intellectual problems with the form itself. Postwar developments in the research and writing of history and literary criticism, the two university disciplines that rub up hardest against biography, left the genre seeming not so much irrelevant as downright wrong. In history departments, it was increasingly the mass, the group, the trend that mattered. Corn prices, demographic shifts and nuclear weapons were the forces that powered the human story forward, rather than the doings of individual people. Against this intellectual backdrop, biography, with its insistence on the importance of the individual, started to resemble one of those "Great Men and Women of History" annuals that ten-year-olds used to get for Christmas.

In English departments, the cultural currents were even more extreme, and biography's intellectual isolation consequently greater. In the 1970s, a revolution in literary theory proclaimed "the death of the author" and insisted on turning books into "texts", to be read without any reference to the writer's intentions. There were many different theoretical underpinnings, but the point was that the text became a kind of field force, a shifting example of the different social and intellectual pressures that had produced it, rather than the brainchild of one particular man or woman. Knowing that the young Charles Dickens spent time in a blacking factory could not possibly tell you anything about how to read David Copperfield. Indeed, it got in the way.

In return, biographers have become accustomed to protesting - perhaps a tad too much - that they don't care about their outsider status. In fact, they love the way it licenses them as perpetual amateurs, genuine lovers of their subject. Instead of being obliged to drudge away in one tiny subject field for 30 years, they revel in their freedom to roam through other people's patches. And certainly it was the case that working on a biography of George Eliot for five years allowed me, a historian by training, to become a literary critic. More recently, writing about Mrs Beeton has taught me how to cook. As a professional writer, I can respectably move between these two subjects (they are, after all, both Victorian women who wrote big books). But as a career academic, it would be difficult to go from The Mill on the Floss to marzipan - how could I justify it to the Research Assessment Exercise panel?

Biographers, if their reputations are good enough, have found it as easy as Professor X or Dr Y to get access to the letters, papers, people and places which they need to write their books. They haven't, however, had the chance to teach, which is a shame (there's nothing like doing a seminar with good students to keep you sharp), but nor have they seen their research time gobbled up by the soul-deadening administration that makes up so much of modern university life. And, best of all, they have been able to develop an eager and sustaining relationship with the people who buy their books. While academics write for their colleagues, biographers have aimed for what Virginia Woolf, herself fascinated by the genre, called "the Common Reader", that intelligent, informed but entirely voluntary book-buyer. It is the Common Readers, with their clippings from the broadsheet review pages, book tokens from Christmas and attendance at local literary festivals, who power the highly commercial yet acutely discerning market for biography. If you write something the Common Reader likes, you will be rewarded with high sales and the kind of close attention to your work that authors dream about. If the Common Reader doesn't like your book, you will find it hard to write another.

However, it looks as though the cold war between biography and the academy might finally be thawing. The sheer presence of biographical writing in our culture - from the wild, unexpected success of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, through Andrew Morton's biography of Princess Diana (where the book itself became part of the narrative of the royal marriage breakdown), to the soft-focus interviews of OK! magazine - has meant that the academy has been obliged to reconsider its view of biography as beneath its notice, if not its contempt. Fittingly, the impulse for change has come from the Common Reader, the buyer of biographies who decided that she (and it often is a "she") would like to know more about what she is reading and, who knows, might even try to write one herself. And since university is still the place to go if you want sustained training in how to think, talk and write about books, it has made sense for alert institutions to set up MA programmes dedicated to the theory and practice of life-writing.

The first of these programmes (in the world, beating New York University by a head) was the MA in biography at Buckingham, founded in 1996 by the distinguished historian Dr Jane Ridley, the biographer of Disraeli. The course, which grows from year to year, is both theoretical and practical, grounding students in texts such as James Boswell's Life of Johnson and Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, while giving them the chance to produce an extended piece of biography for their 15,000-word dissertation. Some students choose to write about an interesting ancestor, others want to work on Marilyn Monroe. The great thing about biography, according to Ridley, is that it is absolutely suited to the current vogue for mixed-disciplinary MAs. You may enter the programme as a 19th-century literature specialist and come out as the greatest living expert on Cherie Blair.

The University of East Anglia has been close behind in setting up its own MA in life-writing as a first cousin to the more famous MA in creative writing (cross-pollination is strong, with some creative writing students choosing to take a subsidiary strand in life-writing). The significance of the new programme has been underpinned by the university's appointment of Richard Holmes to a chair in biographical studies. Award-winning biographer he may be, but for the past 35 years Holmes has stayed firmly outside the academy, using his platform as an independent intellectual to develop highly original and influential approaches to biography. It is hard to see how a book such as Footsteps, which in 1985 explored the vexed and loving relationship between biographer and subject, could have been written by a serving academic with a watchful eye on promotion. The university's decision to appoint Holmes, whose formal education finished with a Cambridge MA, to a professorship suggests a willingness to accept, explore and extend the academy's understanding of biography's strange nature. And Holmes's decision to accept the offer points to the growing readiness of more thoughtful biographers to consider that taking their bread and butter into the seminar room and examining its historical development and current practice might actually represent a promise rather than a threat.

Certainly, all the signs suggest that biography is benefiting from this increasingly formal and rigorous attention. Taking on board the concerns of university academics about its implicit, and therefore unexamined, assumptions (that human identity is fixed and steady, that authors generate intended meanings, that history is just a matter of getting the facts in the right order), biography has shown itself quite able to answer back. The best new books are keenly reflexive, working hard to break down the dull and bullying chronological structures that used to hold the narratives so boringly in place. Holmes's pioneering merging of biography with autobiography (never was the term "life-writing" so conveniently accurate) has led to the comic turn that was Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, a first-person account about failing to write a biography of D H Lawrence. Ann Wroe's miraculous Pilate: the biography of an invented man asks how you write a biography when the sources simply aren't there.

It used to be thought that Common Readers would never be able to bear all this tricksiness. The received wisdom was that they bought biographies in order to retread yet again the biological narrative of birth-reproduction-death, and didn't wish to be sidetracked by clever-clever meditations on the essential falseness of their quest. But Common Readers are a surprising lot, and it seems that they have entirely understood - and enjoyed - this new braining up of biography. They are certainly signing up for MAs in the subject, becoming in the process a kind of human bridge between what once seemed like two cultures permanently at war.

Kathryn Hughes's George Eliot: the last Victorian (Fourth Estate) won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. She is currently teaching on the University of East Anglia's MA course in life-writing

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