Brief Lives

John Aubrey's racy portraits of the great figures of 17th-century England stand alongside Pepys's diary as a vivid evocation of the period. Aubrey was born in 1626, the son of a Wiltshire squire; at the age of 26 he inherited a family estate encumbered with debt, and finally went bankrupt in the 1670s. From then on he led a sociable, rootless existence at the houses of friends - from Oxford and the Middle Temple -pursuing the antiquarian studies which had always obsessed him. At his death in 1697 he left a mass of notes and manuscripts, among them the material for Brief Lives. He never managed to put even a single life into logical order; all we have are the raw materials, scribbled down -'tumultuously as they occurredto my thoughts'. With this full, modern English edition, which reproduces Aubrey's words as closely as possible, Richard Barber introduces us to Aubrey and his world, tells how the Livescame into being and enables many new readers to enjoy this eccentric masterpiece.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member keigu

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.

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LibraryThing member papalaz

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

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LibraryThing member Aubreycat

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.

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LibraryThing member ivanfranko

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.

LibraryThing member DinadansFriend

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.

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