The subject on the Post this week is biography, specifically five of the best C20 and C21 female biographers whose books have made significant contributions to the understanding of their subjects' lives and expanded the concept of biography with modern ideas of life-writing. We begin with Hermione Lee (b 1948) whose acclaimed biography (1996) of Virginia Woolf "moves freely between a richly detailed life-story and new attempts to understand crucial questions".  She has also written biographies of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Elizabeth Bowen.