In a fitted box. Oatmeal cloth bind with gilt and red rectangles on the front board and spine. Brown title plate with gilt lettering on the spine.

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Brief Lives is a collection of short biographies written by John Aubrey (1626–1697) in the last decades of the 17th century.

Aubrey initially began collecting biographical material to assist the Oxford scholar Anthony Wood, who was working on his own collection of biographies. With time, Aubrey’s biographical researches went beyond mere assistance to Wood and became a project in its own right.

Aubrey was careful, wherever possible, to seek out and talk with those who had been acquainted with his subjects. His sociable nature and his wide circle of friends helped him in this pursuit. At his death, Aubrey left his biographical writings in a state of chaos. It has been the task of later editors to organise the manuscripts (held at the Bodleian Library) into readable form.

Aubrey’s Brief Lives has been loved for generations for its colourful gossipy tone and for the glimpses it provides of the unofficial sides of its subjects. Aubrey’s use of informants and his eye for the unusual provides much more vivid pictures than a biography based on documents could. He is frank but never malicious. The Brief Lives includes biographies of such figures as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Thomas Browne, John Dee, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Halley, Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes, William Petty and William Shakespeare. There have been many modern editions.

Patrick Garland wrote and directed a play Brief Lives based on Aubrey’s work; featuring Roy Dotrice as Aubrey. The production has been performed worldwide since 1969. In 2008, Aubrey’s Brief Lives was a five-part drama serial on BBC Radio 4. Writer Nick Warburton intertwined some of Aubrey’s biographical sketches with the story of the turbulent friendship between Aubrey and Wood. Abigail le Fleming produced and directed.

John Aubrey FRS (12 March 1626 – 7 June 1697) was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer. He is perhaps best known as the author of the Brief Lives, his collection of short biographical pieces. He was a pioneer archaeologist, who recorded (often for the first time) numerous megalithic and other field monuments in southern England, and who is particularly noted for his systematic examination of the Avebury henge monument. The Aubrey holes at Stonehenge are named after him, although there is considerable doubt as to whether the holes that he observed are those that currently bear the name. He was also a pioneer folklorist, collecting together a miscellany of material on customs, traditions and beliefs under the title “Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme”. He set out to compile county histories of both Wiltshire and Surrey, although both projects remained unfinished. His “Interpretation of Villare Anglicanum” (also unfinished) was the first attempt to compile a full-length study of English place-names. He had wider interests in applied mathematics and astronomy and was friendly with many of the greatest scientists of the day.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks largely to the popularity of Brief Lives, Aubrey was regarded as little more than an entertaining but quirky, eccentric, and credulous gossip. Only in the 1970s did the full breadth and innovation of his scholarship begin to be more widely appreciated. He published little in his lifetime, and many of his most important manuscripts (for the most part preserved in the Bodleian Library) remain unpublished, or published only in partial form.