EF is the author of six biographies, the earliest being a life of American blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937), published in 1986. Many of her biographies manifest a preoccupation with the legacy of the past and the recent history of European Jews. Her strong interest in Russian poetry is reflected in three of her biographies: A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetayeva (1987); Pushkin - A Biography (1998); and Anna of All the Russias: The Life of a Poet under Stalin (2005). The latter, about Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (1889-1966), the Russian Modernist poet better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, has been translated into twelve languages, including Russian.
Stalin's Great Terror (1936-38) and its aftermath is a dominant subject in her biography of Akhmatova, EF illuminates key episodes in Akhmatova's life by using her own translations of passages from Akhmatova's poems. The book focuses on Akhmatova's relationships - her failed marriages, her lovers and admirers (from the painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), and the dancer Olga Glebova-Sudeikina (1885-1945), to, decades later, the Russian-British social and political theorist, Isaiah Berlin (1909-97)). EF's visits to Russia and her own acquaintances, notably Margarita Aliger (1915–1992) Soviet poet and translator, and the Russian and American journalist, poet and essayist, Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), helped her research Akhmatova's later years, when post-Stalin, she was finally free to accept literary awards in Europe.
EF's other biographical studies focus on two British writers with turbulent lives: D.H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes. In Lawrence's Women (1993), she argues that female domination (by his mother and then his wife Frieda) was a central theme of Lawrence's works. Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2001) was a more personal project in that EF was a long-time friend of Hughes. She had also been a contemporary at Newnham College, Cambridge of Hughes's first wife, the American writer Sylvia Plath (1932-63); and they had mutual friends such as the American sculptor Leonard Baskin (1922-2000). EF and Hughes also shared an interest in Eastern European poets. EF's biography of Hughes was shortlisted for the biennial Marsh Biography Prize.
This series contains material relating to all of EF's biographies apart from her life of Bessie Smith. It comprises: pre-publication papers like TS or word-processed drafts, often revised and annotated, representing the composition and revision process; research material; rough notes; some correspondence; and shorter articles written on some of the subjects represented.