John Aubrey

My Own Life

By: Ruth Scurr

Narrated by: Mark Elstob

Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Biography Award.

This is the autobiography that John Aubrey never wrote.

You may not know his name. Aubrey was a modest man, a gentleman-scholar who cared far more for the preservation of history than for his own legacy. But he was a passionate collector, an early archaeologist and the inventor of modern biography. With all the wit, charm and originality that characterises her subject, Ruth Scurr has seamlessly stitched together John Aubrey's own words to tell his life story and a captivating history of 17th-century England unlike any other.

©2015 Ruth Scurr (P)2022 W F Howes

Critic reviews

"An audacious and successful attempt to write a biography in the subject's own words. Scurr has ingeniously edited Aubrey's swift, vivid prose into a coherent account of the life lived by one of the most interesting (and interested—in everything) writers of our most exciting century, the 17th. Irresistible." (Guardian)

"To me this book is a delight and…it is the one that I would take with me to a desert island." (The Times)

"Writing a biography of a biographer that doubles as an experimental analysis of biography itself is a formidable and astonishing achievement. That it is also profoundly affecting is what makes John Aubrey: My Own Life a triumph." (Stuart Kelly, The Times Literary Supplement)