Fine piece by @ruth_franklin on biography and who gets access. A couple of thoughts: after my last book was published I made pitches to do the biographies of two prominent women writers. Both projects ended up... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/biography-roth-bailey-sexual-assault-metoo-literature.html

...going to men. For reasons, but still. That said, we also need to talk about lack of funding. Biographers working on women of color, especially, get nowhere near the time and support they need. The author of a terrific literary biography told me she’ll never write another...

... because she went broke writing the first. A huge loss.
Also lost: all the scholarship that relies on secondary sources (including my current book on mother-writers) and that doesn’t have access to these voices and perspectives. The silence perpetuates itself.