To some people, the idea that biography needs an introduction is slightly strange. Surely it just is? All the biographer need do is point her journeyman prose at a suitable subject - a great man, a forgotten woman - and then wait while the life spools out on to the page.

Hermione Lee knows differently, and it would be hard to think of anyone better to provide a crisp contribution to OUP's "Very Short Introductions" series, which includes slim volumes on everything from ancient warfare to Wittgenstein. Lee is both a scholar and a writer, and teaches a course on the genre at Oxford. The significance of this last point really can't be overstated. While the novel has been installed as a proper object of scholarly scrutiny for a hundred years now, biography has always been deemed unworthy of such close attention.

As Lee points out, this whiff of illegitimacy has been there from the very beginning. Plutarch felt obliged to make it defensively clear in his Lives that he wasn't doing history but something more intimate and glancing. Suetonius, writing about the Roman emperors, piled up unsubstantiated anecdotes in a manner reminiscent of a gossip column. John Aubrey didn't even pretend to keep proper notes for his Brief Lives, but instead magpied his way to a kind of collage. Samuel Johnson, who thought biography the best and most humane branch of literature, nonetheless did it mostly for the cash. Today, too, biography remains constantly on the point of spilling over into "lower" forms of writing - obituary, court reports and even Facebooking. It is this that gives it its lingering sense of carnival, and draws from commentators including Germaine Greer and AS Byatt such headmistressy disapproval.

Lee deftly integrates these questions of status and repute into a broadly chronological survey. As you might expect from the biographer of Virginia Woolf, she is particularly good on what happened to life writing, as it was increasingly known, in the age of high modernism. Woolf loved reading life stories while simultaneously decrying the way they habitually smoothed out the kinks and folds of lived experience. Her father's monumental Dictionary of National Biography missed that sense of irreducible strangeness which marked one individual from another. Where, Woolf wanted to know, was the odd particularity, that gesture or quirk which made a person recognisably themselves? Where, too, were the women? Woolf's chief argument with her father's memorialising strategy was the way it was skewed towards great men. She also, as Lee perceptively points out, took that questioning, provisional mood into her fiction writing, making it abundantly clear that her characters must always remain just beyond the narrator/writer's control.

Although Lee is committed to a chronological approach, she resists any attempt to think in straight lines and strict periods. To speak of a Romantic phase in biography ("me, me, me") giving way to a Victorian one ("he worked very hard and then died beautifully") is clearly absurd. Instead, Lee hones in on the work of particular biographers or subjects (Shakespeare, Nelson) and uses them to illuminate issues which play out over the centuries. The most valuable outcome of this approach is a reminder that much of what is currently hailed as new in biography - obscure subjects, group lives, fictional elements - has actually been there all along.

 Kathryn Hughes's biography of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial.