Every biographer who mounts a platform knows this one. Not so much a question, more a challenge, hurled with an edge to the voice, as if anticipating the unwanted answer. The wanted answer is Hermione Lee's. She felt a profound sense of bereavement when she finished her biography and had to give Woolf back to the wider world. Ann Douglas, who reviewed Barry Miles's biography of Jack Kerouac in The New York Times Book Review, also thinks deep affinity is essential.
Many biographers take the opposite view.
When Hermione Lee asked Peter Ackroyd, who has written the lives of T. S. Eliot and Charles Dickens, whether he liked his latest subject, Thomas More, Ackroyd bristled. Liking is irrelevant, he answered. Biography is a job, and he gets on with it. I'm in the Ackroyd camp. I know well the cries of dismay this admission brings.