“All good writing from the past remains relevant,” argues Sarah Houghton-Walker, a Gonville & 91ֱ English Fellow. “Many of the things Clare is interested in respond directly to modern concerns: questions about the environment, questions about mental health.”
Sarah is the author of a new Critical Lives biography of John Clare (1793–1864), a Romantic era labouring ‘peasant poet’ from Northamptonshire, which also happens to be her home county.
Having had little formal education, Clare lived in poverty throughout his life and died in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. His poems are most famous for their observations of the natural world.
But this brief, summative history of Clare’s life is just the type Sarah cautions against.
“Lots of people know the bare bones of Clare’s story, so it’s very easy to make quick assumptions,” she says. “But any of these big narratives about thwarted love, or about a poet going mad and having identity delusions, these are always much more complex than they seem. It’s worth digging down and finding the detail.”
While housed in High Beech Asylum, Clare experienced delusions of being bigamously married to both his wife Patty and his late childhood sweetheart Mary Joyce, who burnt to death after her skirts caught alight in a brewhouse.
“Thinking about what somebody’s life means—and the depth of everybody’s life—is like a case study for paying attention and not taking things for granted,” she continues. “Not making assumptions.”
Still, this level of rigour proved challenging during the writing process, as Sarah had only a modest 40,000 words to work with.
Published by University of Chicago Press, Critical Lives is a series of short, illustrated biographies of cultural figures. Hence, when the manuscript for Sarah’s first chapter stood at a robust 45,000 words, she knew she had to start making some cuts.
“It was quite a destructive way of writing a book,” she explains. “I was ripping stuff out.”
Distilling 70 years of life into such a slim volume is no mean feat, not least because the archival material Sarah had to work with was not always in accordance. A good example of this discord is found in the different autobiographies Clare wrote at separate stages in his life.
“The autobiographies don’t always agree with one another. What do you do with that? And, of course, that’s because he’s a person and we don’t always think the same,” she explains.
“There are all sorts of little fragments of writing. There are huge archives of manuscript material by Clare. You’ll suddenly find a paragraph about a particular thing, which you’re then trying to reconcile with these other things that he has said. The sense of chronology in that writing is very uncertain. It takes quite a lot of effort to piece together when things happened.”
Discussing the many tragedies that troubled Clare’s life, Sarah considers the importance of avoiding writing with a purely teleological framework in mind.
“Biography is so interesting because we can see events retrospectively, in a kind of omniscient way,” she says. “They take on new meaning because of what we know, but Clare didn’t know what would happen to him when he was writing. So, when you’re writing a biography, you have to try not to inflect it with that tragic undertone.”
Such emphasis on the difficulty to anticipate the future seems salient as Sarah reflects on her own life path into academia.
“When I was doing my undergraduate degree, the paper I teach now was my least favourite. I would never have guessed I would end up working on it,” she confides.
Writing on Clare for her second-year undergraduate dissertation seems to have been the catalyst that set the wheels in motion. Following this, Sarah continued this topic of study at the behest of her Director of Studies.
She is now a pre-eminent Clare scholar, and Co-Director of the Centre for John Clare Studies, which is based in the Cambridge English Faculty. She says: “The onus is on you to do justice to somebody else’s life. That feels like a big responsibility as well as a privilege.”
A privilege indeed, and, in Sarah’s view, a real pleasure too.
“In the British Library, there are five big boxes of letters that people wrote to him—quite a lot when you consider his social place and how unlikely it is that they might have survived.
“Looking through them, you will suddenly come across some incredible gem in the middle of a letter regarding something you might previously have had no idea about. It might be really funny, or it might be really sad. Even when you think you’re building up a picture, there is so much life everywhere, surrounding it. And obviously it’s lost, it’s gone, but sometimes you get to recover it.”
Sarah Houghton-Walker's John Clare (Critical Lives) will be available to purchase from June 1, 2026.
