Brief Lives

I have, in all honesty, lost track of the number of times I have returned to this gem of a book since I first read it in the 1960s. There is something so very modern about Aubrey's way of portraying his subjects that never pales. He brings to life the people and life of the 16th and 17th centuries with personal recollections and trivia that illuminate and educate. Vivid, frank and sometimes bawdy Aubrey is always entertaining and ever enlightening.

The foreword by Oilver Lawson Dick is a none too brief life of Aubrey himself but is in its own way fascinating.

A must read if only for the lives of Shakespeare and Marvell

It's a laugh a minute the way John Aubrey puts down his musings on the knobs of Restoration England. Great Biography of Aubrey himself by Oliver Dick to introduce the collection.

There was a wonderful almost magical period when science and sorcery were alive and well and england was full of the moist interesting characters, or so they seem to be in the short biographies Aubrey, lover of all things odd, left us. The editor only gives part of the original but gives us the best skimmings from what he cut and more from elsewhere in an introduction of well over a hundred pages. Everyone in LibraryThing should have a copy of this. The "swisserswatter" -- what someone overheard the maid saying to sir walter raleigh as he had her in the garden -- alone is worth the price of the book.

Casting himself as the "Ingeniose and publick-spirited young Man," who Aubrey wished to put his papers in order, Oliver Lawson Dick treated Aubrey's manuscripts as if they were his own, and while not changing the writing, ruthlessly rearranged it. It is hard to see how a better job could have been done. About a third of Aubrey's gossipy, sometimes touching, often funny, short biographies are contained here, with much more material in the long biographical introduction. Aubrey's spellings are retained; after a few pages, any book with normal spellings seems very thin stuff.

This is a wonderful collection of gossip about Englishmen, some of them great from Elizabethan times to the Restoration of 1660. Many colourful details from here have gone on to enlighten more involved biographies. The Editor did a very good job, and the book is the better for it, I have been told.
The original first partially saw print in the early 1700's.

First published by Secker and Warburg, 1949.As new; UM Press stock

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