Lee admits there are discrepancies mainly due to lapses in time memory and perspective but asks us to take her patchwork of quotations on

Lee admits there are “discrepancies, mainly due to lapses in time, memory and perspective”, but asks us to take her patchwork of quotations on trust as “based on events as they have been most frequently reported”. Even her father admitted, on reading his daughter’s work after the war, that he had never really known her.Neither author addresses the problems in picking and mixing material from interviews, statements and memoirs about Frank’s life. Lee and Muller offer no more insights into this than Frank herself. For the first time, we have access to her extraordinary inner development, even as she cultivates it both as a means of survival and for her imagined public. How far Frank eludes those who try to depict her only becomes clear when the narrative moves to the annex and can use Frank’s own words.

Despite the retrospective wishes of all concerned, Frank was no prodigy, but a pretty ordinary child. Delicate, extrovert, imaginative, fun-loving, appealing, confident – but also rather silly, vain, flighty, flirtatious and driven by a craving for attention. Significantly, her father doted on her, indulging and encouraging her fondness for story-telling and performing. On the basis of her pre-Diary life, she is more Erica Jong in embryo than Nadine Gordimer.Lee, whose book is much more honest than Muller’s, recognises the limitations of biography. Comparing Frank’s original diary with the version she worked up for publication, she observes that the former “is that of an ordinary teenager living in exceptional circumstances, which she largely ignores, preferring to write about boys, school, friends, the ping-pong club and her birthday party”.

Carol Ann Lee quotes scores of people who knew Frank, admired the Diary and have promoted memoirs and anecdotes on the back of her celebrity, groping for something truly remarkable about her, some presage of greatness. Consequently, both end up presenting her life up to July 1942, when both the period in hiding and her diary begin, as rather flat and trivial. Both pad out the narrative with family history, which rarely rises above a blur of genealogical facts or the banal detail characteristic of round-robin letters.The biographical fallacy – that an author’s life explains her work – seems at its most absurd in the quest for the special qualities which destined the child for literary stardom. Even a psychoanalytic account, which neither of these books aspires to, requires more information about Frank than is available.