It’s not often that a literary biography generates sensational headlines, but "Lord of the Flies author tried to rape girl, 15” certainly brought Oxford critic John Carey’s life of William Golding to public attention.

He’s no stranger to the media, as the Sunday Times’s chief reviewer and a regular on BBC’s Newsnight Review. But he says: “I think it’s a pity that the papers immediately seized on that as the only important thing in the book. My son works at the New Yorker and he rang me to say that some awful gossip magazine had the story.”

Golding revealed his attack, which happened when he was a student at Oxford University, in an unpublished memoir written to explain to his wife how his own ‘monstrous’ character had developed.

“I put it into the book partly because I wanted to be honest, and also because Golding used the experience in a later book, The Pyramid, and it threw new light on his writing. Golding’s daughter Judy saw the typescript and didn’t want it changed. It was very brave of her,” said Prof Carey.

Golding, who died in 1993 at the age of 81 after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, left a wealth of biographical material which proved irresistible to Prof Carey, who had just retired from his Oxford Professorship. “I had previously written studies of Dunne, Dickens and Thackeray which had a biographical element, but they were critical books. This was using two untouched archives — one kept by Golding’s editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, and the family one.

“I hadn’t done anything like this — that was what was so exciting, reading things that no one else had read. I think it’s the most exciting thing that I have done.”

Prof Carey is anxious to put the ‘rape’ into context. “I’m not sure I’m convinced it was rape. He was a very self-blaming person. Of course, she was 15, which makes it much more serious, as he says himself.”

The book does not identify the victim, and Golding’s memoir records his shame about his relationship with ‘Dora’. Prof Carey also writes that when Golding was a teacher in Salisbury, some of his pupils believed he was pitching them against each other deliberately, with echoes of the Lord of the Flies choirboys’ descent into barbarism.

The novel was rejected by many publishers, and only accepted after radical editing by Monteith. Prof Carey also teases out the wholesale re-drafts done by Golding on almost all of his novels. He was notoriously touchy about reviews, and cagey about commenting on literary criticism of his works. He told The Oxford Times during one of his last interviews, while visiting the university in his 70s, that he was ‘flabbergasted’ by academics who read meanings into the text that he had been unaware of when writing them. Prof Carey said: “There was a real ambivalence and a reluctance to say what it meant. He couldn’t have done — he had done so many drafts.”

His university career at Oxford had left him humiliated about his background. However, later in life he came back to pick up an honorary degree, dine with Monteith at All Souls, or discuss science fiction with Brian Aldiss, former literary editor of the Oxford Mail.

Prof Carey says Golding “was aware of and repelled by the cruelty in himself and was given to saying that, had he been born in Hitler’s Germany, he would have been a Nazi. Dora seems to have played her part in this self-knowledge”.

Despite this, some reviewers were surprised at Carey’s friendly attitude towards his subject. In person, Prof Carey is gentle and unassuming, but in print he has a reputation for trenchant criticism.

He said: “I think if you are going to write a life of someone, you should try to understand them. It took me six months to get through his journal and I felt quite close to him.”

After three years immered in Golding’s archive — two autobiographical works, including a journal of two million words written over 20 years, and unpublished novels — he is now finding it hard to get into another writer.

“Certainly, unless there was an untouched archive, I don’t think I would want to do a biography, rehashing the struff that people had gone over before.”

Prof Carey, 75, is known for his anti-elitist views on high culture, despite having spent his entire career at Oxford University.

It is telling that the quote on the back cover comes not from an academic pundit but from pop musician Pete Townshend, of The Who — a sailing friend of Golding.

Prof Carey will be happy if his biography entices people to read more of Golding’s books. “I wanted it to be a book that you can’t put down,” he said. “A lot of it reads like a novel, and I hope people will find that they don’t want to finish.”

* William Golding is published by Faber at £25. Prof Carey will discuss the book at Blackwell’s in Oxford on November 25, 7pm.