Tom Cain. The Life of the Author: John Donne

Inducting me into Donne studies twenty years ago, a senior scholar explained a tenet of research in the field, as he saw it: there could not be a reliable biography of John Donne, he explained, before his letters were properly attributed, dated, and edited. Nearly 400 years after his death, there is no scholarly edition of Donne’s correspondence, the most extensive source of biographical data; the edition commissioned by Oxford University Press to I. A. Shapiro in 1929 is still underway, now led by an international team of scholars. Biographers, however, did not get the same memo as me: there have been at least seven serious accounts of Donne’s life this century. John Stubbs’s expansive Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006) was followed by the taut Poetic Lives: John Donne (2011) of Nicholas Robins; a decade later, Andrew Hadfield’s John Donne: In the Shadow of Religion (2021) interrogated Donne’s devotional world, and Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (2022) conveyed his literary brilliance to a huge popular audience. Excellent short accounts also exist in the ODNB (2004) and History of Parliament (2010).