John Aubrey, My Own Life

Starred review from May 30, 2016
Scurr follows her acclaimed first biography, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, by immortalizing a Renaissance man of 17th-century England. John Aubrey (1626–1697), a biographer himself, is known primarily for his book Brief Lives. Scurr brings him brilliantly to life by using surviving letters and manuscripts to craft the diary he never wrote. Living in a century of religious and political upheaval, Aubrey sought to preserve the old and discover the new, researching and engaging in correspondence on a wide range of subjects including medicine, architecture, and archaeology. Scurr’s diary format allows us to watch him grow from a curious boy who “like to think about the past” to a man quietly passionate about everything ancient: “If I do not keep careful notes... no one else will make these records.” He is a humble friend who values and amplifies the ideas of others, an omnivorous thinker always asking “Why?”, and an enthusiastic collector of details about contemporary and historical personalities. Indeed, the Aubrey whom Scurr recreates for us is as charming and entertaining as his “diary,” which Scurr has rendered accessible by modernizing spelling and word choices. This book is both a wonderful historical resource and a delight to read.

Starred review from June 15, 2016
A historian and literary critic offers a unique and revealing look at the life of English philosopher John Aubrey (1626-1697), told in Aubrey's voice in the form of a diary.Scurr (History and Politics/Cambridge Univ.; Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, 2006) has hit upon a compelling narrative device. Although she has traditional introductory and closing chapters, the bulk of the biography deals with the quotidian affairs of Aubrey, who was a friend and/or acquaintance of some of the great early Enlightenment names, including Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke (with whom Aubrey often hung out in coffee shops, new to London), Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, and numerous others. Aubrey also lived during some of the most tempestuous times in English history--Charles I, Cromwell, the Restoration, the Great Fire of London, the ascent of William and Mary, the unspeakable violence practiced upon Roman Catholics: Aubrey wrote about all of it. Scurr also shows us, through Aubrey's work, the birth and growth of science in England, including Hooke's contention that Newton had stolen his ideas. As the author notes, Aubrey was obsessed with English history and geography. He did massive, detailed studies of the countryside (including Stonehenge), studies not duly credited until centuries later. But among the delights of Scurr's account are the practices and beliefs that conflicted with the emerging science of his day--e.g., witchcraft, astrology, and primitive medicine (Aubrey recommended egg white and sugar to palliate/cure gonorrhea). We also witness Aubrey's struggles with finances (he frequently borrowed from Hooke), his internecine struggles with his brother, his failures in love (one woman he'd hoped to marry took him not to the altar but to court--more than once), his aches and pains, and his moods. A creative, engaging, and profoundly moving account of a man's fierce desire to discover, understand, and preserve.

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September 1, 2016

The English antiquarian John Aubrey (1626-97) is best remembered for a book he never published. Brief Lives, versions of which have been released over the past two centuries, most recently and authoritatively edited by Kate Bennett in 2015, is based on unsystematic collections of notes Aubrey gathered about hundreds of people living in the 16th and 17th centuries, including himself. In this biography, Scurr (history, Cambridge Univ.; Fatal Purity) arranges Aubrey's own words, modernized and supplemented with her own where necessary to provide context, into a year-by-year diary. It makes for pleasant reading and has garnered much praise in England, where it was originally published. Yet, scholars curious about the contents of any paragraph must turn to the endnotes to find their origin; to discover Aubrey's exact words requires copies of Scurr's printed and manuscript sources. Similar to Aubrey, Scurr digresses, and some details seem extraneous. VERDICT Scurr's book is accessible and entertaining for all readers. For a more conventional portrait, suggest Anthony Powell's John Aubrey and His Friends.--Joseph Rosenblum, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2016
In her innovative life of the author of the immensely influential Brief Lives, sketches of most of seventeenth-century England's intellectual elite, Scurr creates a life-spanning diary out of Aubrey's own words in his manuscripts and letters and as reported by contemporaries, arranging them playingly (as Aubrey said of his writing) but carefully in chronological order. While tracing every paragraph to its source, she doesn't fill in gaps, define rare words, or describe greater social and political contexts. Despite the frustration this hands-off approach engenders, the book bubbles with the energy and obsessions of the fussy, totally committed Aubrey. From boyhood, he was fascinated by ruins and old objects, living (trees) and inanimate (buildings, furniture); while seeing old manuscripts rent asunder to stopper bottles and wrap bread loaves appalled him. The animals and plants, the climate, and the land and its uses in any discrete locality also enthralled him, so that he was a natural historian as well as an antiquarian. Oh, and a participant-fan of scientific experimentation who yet doted on astrology. Quite the man, vividly present here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)