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Park Honan, an American biographer whose prodigious research opened new vistas on the family history of some of Britain’s greatest literary figures and reshaped modern views about their personalities, died on Sept. 27 in Leeds, England. He was 86.
The cause was liver cancer, his daughter, Corinna Honan, said.
Mr. Honan wrote five major biographies in the last four decades, including books on Jane Austen and Shakespeare. Most were considered high-water marks in scholarship about their subjects.
He was the co-author, with William Irvine, of a 1974 biography of Robert Browning that was described by Anthony Burgess in The New York Times Book Review as the best in the field, unlikely to be surpassed “for a decade at least.” He wrote the first major biography of Matthew Arnold, a poet and social critic chiefly famous for his foppishness until Mr. Honan’s 1981 “Matthew Arnold: A Life” recast him as one of the most influential progressive voices of Victorian England.
The renowned British Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells reviewed Mr. Honan’s 1998 “Shakespeare: A Life” for The Observer and called it “the best available life of Shakespeare.”
Mr. Honan taught English at Connecticut College and Brown University before moving in 1968 to England, where he became a professor of American and English literature at the University of Leeds. Until he was named professor emeritus there in 1993, he taught a full course load while researching his books, each of which took as long as 10 years to complete, his daughter said.
His last published book, “Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy,” (2005), documented and parsed the evidence suggesting that the untimely death at 29 of Marlowe, Shakespeare’s rakish contemporary and the author of three acclaimed plays, may have been related to his undercover work as a government agent for Queen Elizabeth I. (He was probably recruited while a student at Cambridge, where the royals went to get almost all their spies, Mr. Honan wrote.)
Though his writing was aimed at general readers, his books were praised by scholars for giving historical context to the lives of his subjects, and for uncovering previously unknown information. His “Jane Austen: Her Life,” published in 1988, revealed a trove of detail about Austen’s extended family that largely contradicted the conventional view that she was a cloistered soul, unconcerned with the roiling political and economic storms of her time.
In fact, Mr. Honan found, Austen was in close correspondence with — and deeply attached to — a host of people embroiled in those events. They included a cousin Eliza, whose husband was beheaded in the French Revolution; a brother, Francis, a naval officer involved in fearsome sea battles during the Napoleonic Wars who eventually became admiral of the fleet; and another brother, Henry, a financial speculator who went bankrupt and took clerical orders as expiation.
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Austen’s life “was full of events, of distress and even trauma, which left marks upon her as permanent as those of any blacking factory,” Mr. Honan wrote — a reference to Charles Dickens, who was sent by his destitute parents to work in a shoe polish factory at age 11.
For his biography of Shakespeare, Mr. Honan unearthed evidence that young William was not as poorly educated as widely believed — he apparently had two Oxford-educated schoolmasters — and that he was something of a ham. The cameo roles Shakespeare took for himself, Mr. Honan found, included Antonio in “Twelfth Night” and the ghost in “Hamlet.” Shakespeare, he wrote, “coveted the normalcy of being a group-member.”
Mr. Honan believed a biographer’s obligation was to inhabit his or her subject’s time, place and personal history. In a 1990 essay collection “Authors’ Lives: On Literary Biography and the Arts of Language,” he said that understanding the life of a long-dead person required “changing oneself, one’s outlook, one’s orientations, until it is possible at least approximately to think and feel in the distant and lost world of the subject.”
Hobart Park Honan was born in Utica, N.Y., on Sept. 17, 1928, to William Honan and the former Annette Neudecker, and was raised during his earliest years in Manhattan. After the sudden death in 1935 of his father, a thoracic surgeon, the family moved to Bronxville, N.Y., where Park and a brother, William, attended public schools and their mother worked as a journalist.
After two years at Deep Springs College in Big Pine, Calif., he attended the University of Chicago, where he received his bachelor’s degree and a master’s in English. Drafted into the Army at the end of the Korean War, he used the G.I. Bill, after his discharge, to go to University College London, where he received his Ph.D. in 1961.
He was hired at Birmingham University in 1968 as a lecturer and appointed a professor of literature at Leeds in 1983.
In addition to his daughter Corinna, Mr. Honan is survived by another daughter, Natasha Honan; a son, Matthew; and six grandchildren. His wife, Jeannette Colin Honan, died in 2009. His brother, William, a former culture editor of The Times, died this year.
Mr. Honan’s work on the Browning biography, his first, represented a kind of double leap of imagination, his family said — in understanding the mind not only of his subject but of his co-author, who had died.
Mr. Honan had begun researching a book about Browning at about the same time that William Irvine, a Stanford professor of English, was finishing his own study of that poet’s life. When Mr. Irvine died, in 1964, his widow asked Mr. Honan to merge his biography with her husband’s. Their acclaimed 1974 book, “The Book, the Ring and the Poet,” represented Mr. Honan’s effort to incorporate their two scholarly orientations.
At his death, Mr. Honan was about halfway through writing a biography of T. S. Eliot, Corinna Honan said. In an email on Wednesday, she added, “It is hoped that the right person will be found to complete it.”