"In the end a writer is the work that appears under his name, not a personality or character; all that in time gets lost."

Not necessarily. If he or she is famous enough or good enough (whatever the reason), a writer will be studied and his or her personality traced in the pages of a biography. Malouf is overplaying his hand here, I fear. Insights into a writer's personality are one of the things we look to biographies to provide, and biographers know it. Some writers embed a poison pill in their wills, like Nabokov, who decreed that his papers could not be accessed for fifty years after his death.

I'm guessing that Malouf was saying (consciously or not) what his ideal is, or what he wishes were the case, rather than what actually is. I've seen him at a lot of writers' festivals and he has always very determinedly avoided talking about himself.

I'm also guessing that embargoes on people's papers are usually put there to avoid damage and hurt to the living. I'm sure we've all got stuff lying around the house that we'd burn/shred/flush down the toilet immediately if we got the bad news from the doctor tomorrow. If you look at it from a different angle you could say Nabokov was actually being quite generous and responsible in leaving his papers intact instead of destroying them, knowing that people would be curious.

The electronic era will be the death of biography as we know it in any case, I think. There won't be any papers of interest at all.

Dedicated fans are usually very much attracted to the "voice with its individual cadence" and want it to be less quiet because they like what they read. Nobody goes from the person of the writer to the book (open to dispute). They go from the book they love to the writer who made this fantastic thing.

They want to understand the "great plural world of phenomena" which includes, of course, writers who are (again open to dispute) different from other people. They seek to grasp "the tumbling paraphernalia of living" which includes facts about writers' lives that are of minimal interest to people who are not bibliophiles. They may feel part of a select club, which has tokens of inclusion such as the knowledge that Jane Austen loved one particular book by Samuel Richardson (which of course for that reason you rush out to buy).

The detailed matrix of meaning of the literary fan serves to expand his or her realm of experience. It's neverending.