Microhistorical Approaches and Playing with the Scales of History: a Microbiography of Historians’ Biographical Methods

This chapter is an intergenerational family history of a biographical dynasty, the “Stephen, Woolf, Bell” lineage, who collectively wrote family, intellectual and global biography. It links their interest in their own genealogy and biography-writing over six generations, beginning with James Stephen, his son James Stephen and grandson Leslie Stephen; and includes the latter’s daughter Virginia Woolf née Stephen; her nephew, niece and grandniece, Quentin Bell, Angelica Vanessa Garnett, née Bell and Henrietta Catherine Garnett. Recent historical scholarship has experimented with uncovering human connections in terms of scale from deep time to recent events; and in scope from macro to microhistory. Similarly, this chapter examines genealogically this single family for whom biography-writing and microbiography were central aspects of their collective dynastic world view over more than two centuries. It explores how the historical method of microbiography shape changes through generations.