What’s in a nose? Apparently a good deal when it comes to Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic appendage in “The Hours,” the film based on the novel by Michael Cunningham, who based his book on “Mrs. Dalloway,” a novel by Virginia Woolf, who is the central character in both the novel and the movie. Whew! What a provenance for a proboscis!

And therein lies the problem for biography. It is a genre dependent on a multitude of sources – portraits and stories, documents and anecdotes – that make for a fraught chain of evidence. Look hard at any biographical “fact,” Hermione Lee suggests in “Virginia Woolf’s Nose” (Vintage, 944 pages, $20), and it begins to shimmer, lit up in different ways depending on the biographer.

Biographies can never deliver the whole person. They are made up of “body parts”- to use the British title of Ms. Lee’s book. Generations of biographers argue over exactly what happened to Shelley’s heart: Did Edward Trelawny really burn his hands rescuing the poet’s organ from the pyre that consumed the drowned body? Or is the story just another of that eccentric’s efforts to preserve the poet for posterity? And was it even a heart that Trelawny snatched? Some accounts suggest the prized part was the poet’s liver.

Virginia Woolf scholars and other adepts of the literary icon have deplored the movie’s portrayal of a beaky, suicidal, humorless writer. Ms. Lee, herself a biographer of Woolf, confesses that the film’s inaccuracies trouble her. Why, she asked the film’s director, was Woolf’s suicide shot in sunny June rather than in the bleak months of winter, when it actually happened? Because, he replied, he had Ms. Kidman’s services for only the month of June.

The director might also have said, “It’s only a movie.” Isn’t it tiresome – all this blather about how novels and films distort history? Art is supposed to distort history, to transform it into a drama of the author’s own making. If you like your history or biography straight, don’t watch movies or read novels. Anyone who believes that Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” is history probably believes in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. What is the point of hammering Mr. Stone?

Those who would stone moviemakers are, Ms. Lee recognizes, possessive of their subjects. The spirit of Edward Trelawny rises when an academic complaining about Ms. Kidman’s performance remarks that it is treading on her “territory.” An aghast Michael Cunningham rightly asked how anyone could think of Woolf as “territory.” Yet biographers and their readers tend to feel they own their subjects – that they can get to the heart of a Woolf, and that anyone who offers a different arrangement of body parts has created a monster.

And so biographers attack each other, transforming biography into a blood sport. Each account of Chekhov’s death became more elaborate and dramatic, Ms. Lee notes, as his survivors and biographers attempted to resuscitate their own takes on the writer. It is curious, how that word “take” – used to describe the camera’s recording of a piece of action – is now also a way of acknowledging that each of us has a take or interpretation, however fleeting or fragmentary.

Janet Malcolm – also known as the biographer’s scourge – showed in “Reading Chekhov” and in her earlier evisceration of Plath biographers, “The Silent Woman,” just how fanciful biographers can be. Ms. Lee does much the same in this volume, manifesting what a megillah biographers have made of the “fact” that Jane Austen fainted when she learned that her family was moving to Bath. She plotzed – several biographers surmise – because she dreaded her removal to that vulgar spa town.

No, no, wrote the contrarian biographer, David Nokes; she got the vapors because she was really not the Jane Austen of legend, the circumspect lady who confined her satire to the page, but actually something of a party girl who passed out with excitement over the prospect of so much diversion.

But did Austen even faint? “We actually know much less about Jane Austen than her biographers would have us believe,” concludes John Wiltshire, whose “Recreating Jane Austen” Ms. Lee relies on. The fainting story comes from one Austen relative, and anything relayed by an Austen has a dubious provenance. The family worked hard at restricting access to her papers and writing their own memoirs and biographies to shape the writer to suit the family’s rather staid image of itself.

Unlike Ms. Malcolm, however, Ms. Lee has not turned state’s evidence, trading her proof of biographers’ malfeasance for immunity. Biographers, no less than moviemakers, are villains in her book. They become rather like Rico and other family embalmers in the HBO series, “Six Feet Under”: If the biographer is as skillful as Rico, the family and friends come in for a viewing and are amazed at how – even after the gruesome accidents of life – he has captured their loved one’s likeness in a casket.

Of course biographies distort, but that is no argument against biography. Indeed, to say that biographies distort is to say that we have some measure by which to judge that distortion. Thus Ms. Lee draws our attention to what she calls “biographical hooks for plausibility” such as “seems likely” and “must have been.” Such phrases are what biographers try to hang their stories on. And it is very hard to let go of these props. Ms. Lee shows this in discussing novelist Carol Shields’s short Jane Austen biography, which asks: “Can she really have fainted, she who in her earliest work mocked extravagant emotional responses, especially those assigned to women?” Shields, Ms. Lee reports:

draws attention to the unreliability of the evidence (“not securely embedded in eye-witness reports …the story is muddled and riddled with inconsistencies”), and notes that unanswered questions remain: “Did other choices occur to her? Were other possibilities offered?” Still her main line agrees with [Claire] Tomalin’s, that this was a painful uprooting which “would have required extraordinary feats of adjustment; she thinks the letters to Cassandra [Austen’s sister] sound “merry and expectant and feverishly false,” and she agrees with Tomalin that “there can be little question that Jane Austen’s rather fragile frame of creativity was disturbed following the move to Bath.”

Curiously, Ms. Lee does not comment much on this passage. Why does Shields assume writers are like their books? Just because Jane Austen “mocked extravagant emotional responses” in her work does not mean she was not prone to them herself. It is as dangerous to believe that the work can be taken as evidence of a life as to presume a life can be employed to explain the origins of the work. As a biographer myself, it occurred to me to exclaim, “Watch out when Ms. Shields says ‘there can be little question.'” David Nokes, for example, thinks the letters Ms. Shields calls “feverishly false” are feverishly true.

As Ms. Lee suggests elsewhere in her book, biographies are retrospective constructs, not records of lives that moved forward in contingent fashion. In hindsight certain events look inevitable but that is because, Ms. Lee observes, “many lives change their shape as we look back on them.” Biographies are selective. Some body parts go missing and biographers have to reconstruct them.

A silent Jane Austen (no correspondence for a month after she arrives in Bath) means to certain biographers that she was still trying to come to terms with her traumatic arrival. No, no, rejoins Mr. Nokes, it means she was having such a good time she had no time to write. Neither interpretation can be conclusive, no matter how many times biographers nose through the evidence and recast their narratives. We cannot know for certain that Austen did not write during that month; what she did pen may have perished.

In the end, what matters is the critical eye and a sense of genre. The critical eye spots the wish fulfilling “must have been,” and the reader realizes the biographer is trying to play novelist. A viewer endowed with a sense of genre lingers over Ms. Kidman’s prosthesis and realizes it is the moviemaker’s de-Kidmanizing of the movie, defamiliarizing the movie star so that she can play a kind of Virginia Woolf. Norman Mailer wrote in “Pieces and Pontifications” that historians collect thousands of facts and distill them into hundreds and call them history. Movies and plays necessarily truncate biography and history even more – or elongate certain parts a la Kidman.

To complain that Kidman is not a Virginia Woolf scholar’s idea of Virginia Woolf seems futile, especially since there are now – what, a dozen Woolf biographies? (I’ve lost count). And even these cannot begin to settle once and for all who Virginia Woolf was.