Biography Writers Editing and Proofreading Services

Somewhere in every life there are eleven years with almost nothing in them. No letters survive, the diaries stop, the people who could have said what happened are dead. The biographer knows roughly what the subject must have been doing, and the temptation at that point is not to lie — nobody sets out to lie — but to write a paragraph whose grammar quietly converts a reasonable inference into a fact.

We work on what biographers write — full manuscripts and sample chapters, proposals and chapter outlines for publishers and agents, notes and source apparatus, permissions correspondence for quoted material, prefaces explaining method and sources, timelines and chronologies, archive and interview summaries, funding and residency applications, and the passages that describe periods where the evidence is thin. Our editors work on the sentences where the record runs out.

Handling the gaps is what separates a biography that can be trusted from one that merely reads well, and it is a matter of grammar as much as scholarship. We work through these so speculation is marked in the sentence that contains it, not in a note thirty pages away, since a reader absorbs the prose and never the apparatus; so the strength of each inference is visible in the verb — what is documented, what a letter suggests, what a later account claims, what you believe and cannot show — because a biography that uses the same confident register for all four teaches the reader nothing about its own reliability; so the source of a claim appears close enough to it that the reader can weigh it, particularly where the source is the subject's own account of themselves; so interior states are attributed rather than narrated, given that "she must have felt abandoned" is your feeling and "she wrote to her sister that she felt abandoned" is hers; so the absence itself is described where it matters, as an unexplained eleven-year silence is a fact about a life and often a more interesting one than a smooth paragraph; and so hindsight is kept out of the subject's head. Biographies written this way get trusted on the parts that cannot be checked.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unpublished manuscripts, archive material and living sources. We are editors rather than historians, lawyers or publishers, and we offer no view on your evidence, conclusions or legal exposure. What we can do is make the prose tell the reader how much you actually know.