Content area
Full text
Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect, by John Sloan; pp. ix + 285. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, £78.00.
Andrew Lang was so prolific that the New York Times was not alone in joking that he was a syndicate ("Andrew Lang as a Syndicate" [14 Jan. 1899], 24). He was indefatigable, his publications ranging across Homeric and folklore scholarship, anthropology, journalism, psychical research, Jacobite history, English and comparative literature, poetry and popular fiction. The latter alone included authored fairy tales, the edited colored fairy-tale books (in collaboration with his wife, Leonora), and less successful attempts to pull off contemporary fiction and romance. Almost as an aside, John Sloan credits Lang as an originator of the true crime genre. It might seem surprising, then, that it was his biography of the Conservative politician Stafford Northcote that "threatened to overwhelm him." When Sloan surmises that Lang may have accepted the task before realizing "the huge amount of work life-writing entailed," readers can't help but reflect on the considerable work entailed in the biography in their own hands (129). Before sleuthing in numerous archives, lesser biographers might have quailed before the library stacks alone: Lang's prodigious output of books and articles could threaten to overwhelm any biographer, who might be fearful of going the way of Leonard Bast.
Lang may have wished that someone else was tasked with doing Northcote's biographical "hoeing," but Sloan's tilling of the soil of Lang's life and work is clearly a labor of love (qtd. in Sloan 129). He is open about the challenge of writing a biography of a subject who asked recipients to burn letters on receipt, and whose wife, on destroying his papers after his death, complained that "her wrists ached for weeks" (viii). Lang claimed to be the first "psycho-folklorist," seeing...