The Biographer's Tale is a book by A. S. Byatt

A. S. Byatt

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner...

. The story is about a postgraduate student, Phineas G. Nanson, who decides to write a biography

Biography

A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...

 about an obscure

Obscure

Obscure may refer to:Obscure *ObsCure, a survival horror video game released in 2004*"Obscure" , by Japanese rock band Dir en grey, from Vulgar* Obscure Records, started by Brian Eno in 1975 to release works by lesser-known composers...

 biographer, Scholes Destry-Scholes. During the course of his research he fails to learn much about the actual subject of his biography, but discovers a lot of Destry-Scholes' unpublished research about real historical figures Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton

Francis Galton

Sir Francis Galton /ˈfrɑːnsɪs ˈgɔːltn̩/ FRS , cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician...

 and Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...

. In the book, Byatt combines facts with fiction when recounting the lives of the three latter figures.

External links

• The Biographer's Tale - at The Complete Review