Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing) 3031090187, 9783031090189

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction Edited by Julia Novak · Caitríona Ní Dhúill

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing Series Editors

Clare Brant Department of English King’s College London London, UK Max Saunders Department of English King’s College London London, UK

This series features books that address key concepts and subjects in life writing, with an emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers specialist but accessible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on connecting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars and students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects and forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative risks with potent materials. The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to reflect its academic, public, digital and international reach, and to continue and promote its democratic tradition. The series seeks contributions that address global contexts beyond traditional territories, and which engage with diversity of race, gender and class. It welcomes volumes on topics of everyday life and culture with which life writing scholarship can engage in transformative and original ways; it also aims to further the political engagement of life writing in relation to human rights, migration, trauma and repression, and the processes and effects of the Anthropocene, including environmental subjects and non-human lives. The series looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is understood and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on the subject; and which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the world relevance of life writing.

Julia Novak  •  Caitríona Ní Dhúill Editors

with Eugenie Theuer

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

Editors Julia Novak Department of English and American Studies University of Vienna Vienna, Austria

Caitríona Ní Dhúill Department of German University College Cork Cork, Ireland

ISSN 2730-9185     ISSN 2730-9193 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ISBN 978-3-031-09018-9    ISBN 978-3-031-09019-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2023 Chapter 1 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: from Deirdre Mulrooney, Lucia Joyce: Full Capacity (2019), with Evanna Lynch as Lucia Joyce, costume by Claire Garvey, choreography by Megan Kennedy. With thanks to Deirdre Mulrooney. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the contributors to this volume, most of whom we first met at the “Herstory Re-Imagined” conference at the Centre for Life Writing Research at King’s College London in December 2019. This conference, which inspired the present volume, took place in what must now be considered a different era. Despite the Covid pandemic, which set in soon afterwards, and the various difficulties and delays this entailed, our contributors’ unwavering dedication enabled us to see this project through to its completion. Special thanks are due to Clare Brant, one of the series editors and co-director of the Centre for Life Writing Research, without whose continuous patience and support this volume would not have been possible. For a number of inspiring conversations on the relationship between historical and biographical fiction, we thank Jerome de Groot, Dorothea Flothow, Farah Mendlesohn, and Christina Pössel. We would also like to express our gratitude to Michael Lackey, Monica Latham, and Lucia Boldrini, all of whom helped move this project forward, and to the anonymous peer reviewers of our manuscript, whose perceptive comments enabled us to refine our thinking on biofiction as we revised the text. We cannot thank Eugenie Theuer enough for her substantial assistance with both the “Herstory Re-Imagined” conference and the copy-editing of this volume. Molly Beck and Steve Fassioms at Palgrave and Springer are owed thanks for their practical support in the final phases of the publication process. Finally, we are much obliged to the Austrian Science Fund (grant number V543-G23), which provided financial support for the “Herstory” conference as well as for our work towards this volume. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As ever, we would like to thank our spouses, Jakob Lajta and Werner Garstenauer, for the vital support that is all too easily rendered invisible in academic life. Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill

Contents

1 Imagining  Gender in Biographical Fiction: Introduction  1 Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill Part I Recovery, Revision, Ventriloquism: Imagining Historical Women  47 2 “Everything  Is Out of Place”: Virginia Woolf, Women, and (Meta-)Historical Biofiction 49 Diana Wallace 3 Fictional  Futures for a Buried Past: Representations of Lucia Joyce 75 Laura Cernat 4 Imagining  Jiang Qing: The Biographer’s Truth in Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao109 Silvia Salino

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Part II Re-imagining the Early Modern Subject 133 5 From  Betrayed Wife to Betraying Wife: Re-writing Katherine of Aragon as Catalina in Philippa Gregory’s The Constant Princess135 Bethan Archer 6 Jean  Plaidy and Philippa Gregory Fighting for Gender Equality Through Katherine Parr’s Narrative157 Alison Gorlier 7 Australian  Women Writing Tudor Lives179 Kelly Gardiner and Catherine Padmore Part III Writing the Writer: History, Voyeurism, Victimisation 211 8 Biofiction,  Compulsory Sexuality, and Celibate Modernism in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author213 Paul Fagan 9 In  Poe’s Shadow: Frances Sargent Osgood247 Ina Bergmann 10 S  tanisława Przybyszewska as a Case of Posthumous Victimisation: On the Ethics of Biofiction271 Ksenia Shmydkaya

 CONTENTS 

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Part IV Creativity and Gender in the Arts and Sciences 295 11 R  e-visiting the Renaissance Virtuosa in Biofiction on Sofonisba Anguissola297 Julia Dabbs 12 The  “Mother of the Theory of Relativity”? Re-imagining Mileva Marić in Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein (2016)317 Christine Müller Part V Queering Biofiction 337 13 Visceral  Biofiction: Herculine Barbin, Intersex Embodiment, and the Biological Imaginary in Aaron Apps’s Dear Herculine339 Iseult Gillespie 14 “A  Way Out of the Prison of Gender”: Interview with Novelist Patricia Duncker369 Caitríona Ní Dhúill and Julia Novak  Correction to: Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction: Introduction  C1 Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill Index387

Notes on Contributors

Bethan Archer  is a doctoral candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University (UK), researching consensual sibling incest in contemporary fiction, film, and TV. Her thesis challenges the idea that our cultural obsession with incest is simply due to a fascination with the perverse and considers how incest can disrupt power and privilege. She is also the Treasurer for the Feminist and Women’s Studies Association and teaches in the Sociology and Criminology Departments at Lancaster University. Ina  Bergmann is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany. She is the author of two monographs, most recently The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction (2020), and has co-edited nine volumes of essays and special sections of journals, among them Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2018). She has held fellowships with the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute at Trinity College Dublin, and the Huntington Library. Laura Cernat  is a doctoral candidate at KU Leuven, Belgium, working on contemporary biofiction. She has contributed to the edited volumes Virginia Woolf and Heritage (2017) and Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons (2021) and has published in the journals Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and Partial Answers. She has been involved in the organisation of four international conferences hosted by KU Leuven, including one as main xi

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­rganiser: Biofiction as World Literature. Aside from biofiction, her o research interests include autofiction, authorship, world literature, life writing, queer studies, and neurodiversity. Julia  Dabbs  is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota, Morris. She has been researching the lives and accomplishments of historical women artists for nearly two decades, with her major work to date being Life Stories of Women Artists, 1550–1800: An Anthology (2009). Dabbs has published numerous essays and articles related to women artists’ life stories and art, with a particular focus on the representation of women as they age. Patricia  Duncker  is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Manchester (UK). Her first novel Hallucinating Foucault (winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize in 1996) has been translated into fifteen languages. She has written five further novels: The Deadly Space Between, James Miranda Barry, and Miss Webster and Chérif (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2007), The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award 2010 and the Green Carnation Prize 2011); her most recent novel is Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015). Paul  Fagan  is a senior scientist at Salzburg University, Austria. He co-­ founded the International Flann O’Brien Society and is founding general editor of the open-access journals The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies and Production Archives (Open Library of Humanities). Paul is co-editor of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (2021) and Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation (2021), as well as four edited collections on Flann O’Brien. He is finalising a monograph on Irish literary hoaxes and developing projects on “Representations of Nonhuman Skin in Modernist Writing” and “Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing, 1860s–1950s.” Kelly  Gardiner  Kelly Gardiner’s writing on biofiction has appeared in publications such as The American Book Review, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Michael Lackey’s recent Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions Across the Globe. Goddess, a novel based on the life of Mademoiselle de Maupin, in 2014. Kelly’s historical novels include Brimstone, 1917: Australia’s Great War, Act of Faith, The Sultan’s Eyes and the “Swashbuckler” trilogy. She is Lecturer in English at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.

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Iseult  Gillespie  is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Madison. She specialises in the literary and cultural study of disability from an intersectional perspective, with interests in queer and transfeminist theory, visual cultures, and science and technology studies. Her work has been recognised with awards from the Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Mellon-Wisconsin Foundation, and the Center for the Humanities at UW-Madison. Her forthcoming articles explore experimental life writing, Black feminist science, and disability justice. She is also an educator for PBS Digital Studios and TED-Ed. Alison  Gorlier holds a PhD in Culture, Media and Communication Studies from Liverpool Hope University (UK) and the Lille Catholic University, France. Her research concerns the phenomenon of Tudormania in Britain between 1995 and 2015. Publications include “From History to Page to Screen: A Mise-en-Abyme of History in The Other Boleyn Girl Novel and Film,” published online in La Revue (2019) and “Popularising the Tudors: The Case of Anne Boleyn,” Theorising the Popular, ed. Michael Brennan (2017). Christine Müller  is a PhD student at the University of Bremen, Germany. Her PhD project, which is tentatively titled “Reimagining the Herstory of Science: Female Scientists in Contemporary Anglo-­American Biographical Fiction,” focuses on the literary representation of the lives of historical women in science. Caitríona Ní Dhúill  is Professor in German at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, 2020) and Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch (2010). She is co-editor of the journal Austrian Studies, and guest co-editor of a double special issue of Poetics Today (2016) on negative futures. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on gender theory, utopian theory, on the history and theory of biography, German, Austrian, and European modernist literature, and life writing. Julia  Novak lectures in  Anglophone Literature and Mediality at the University of Vienna and has published widely on biographical fiction. She is an editor of the European Journal of Life Writing and has co-edited a special issue on Women’s Lives on Screen (2021) for the journal, as well as the volumes Experiments in Life Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (Palgrave 2017) and Life Writing and Celebrity: Exploring

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Intersections (2020), and the inaugural issue of the Journal of Historical Fictions (2017). She has authored  two monographs—Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (2011)  and  Gemeinsam Lesen (2007). Catherine Padmore  teaches Creative Writing and Literary Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, with research interests in historical and biographical fictions. Catherine’s novel Sibyl’s Cave (2004) was shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel Award and commended in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Catherine has been awarded two fellowships at Varuna, the Writers’ House, to develop novels-in-­progress about Tudor women Amy Dudley and Levina Teerlinc. Silvia  Salino  is a doctoral candidate at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna. She completed a Master’s in Sinology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and was a visiting scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She is writing her thesis on biographical portraits of Jiang Qing, studied across different genres. Ksenia Shmydkaya  is a doctoral candidate in Tallinn University’s School of Humanities. She holds an MA degree in Modern and Contemporary History from Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, and an M2 degree in History and Anthropology from Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris 1), France. Her research is on historical fiction by women writers in interwar Europe, with a particular focus on their representation of revolutions. Among her scholarly interests are gender history, Eastern Europe, historical representation, the relationship between literature and historiography, and the French Revolution. Diana  Wallace  is Professor of English Literature at the University of South Wales, Australia. Her publications include Christopher Meredith (2018), Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic (2013), and The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). With Andrew Smith she edited The Female Gothic: New Directions (2009). She has also edited Hilda Vaughan’s Here are Lovers (1926) and Harvest Home (1936) for Honno’s Welsh Women’s Classics series. She is working on a monograph, Modernism and Historical Fiction: Writing the Past, to be published by Palgrave.

CHAPTER 1

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction: Introduction Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill

Biographical fiction—or biofiction, as we will mostly call it in this book— has become an immensely popular genre in recent decades. It allows readers to dive into remote periods and places, to immerse themselves in a historical character and imagine what it may have been like to lead the “Cultural Revolution” in Maoist China, or to undergo gender reassignment surgery in early twentieth-century Germany, or to marry King Henry VIII in Tudor England, all while enjoying the evocative imagery, textual playfulness, suspense, and insider’s view that fiction provides. Using the factual outlines of historical lives as springboards for their own imaginative The original version of this chapter was revised: this chapter was previously published non-open access. It has been changed to Open Access. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_15 J. Novak (*) Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] C. Ní Dhúill Department of German, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2022, corrected publication 2023 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_1

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narratives, biofictions boldly go where no biography has gone before. Such metaphors of courageous (space) exploration are problematic, of course, not least as they suggest that life stories are “new worlds” just waiting to be “found” by writers. Even with regard to factual biography, the paradigm of discovery has long been troubled by the realisation that life narratives are ideological constructs, more or less carefully crafted for consumption by specific audiences for specific purposes and with reference to existing conventions of genre. Evoking authors’ “boldness” is useful, however, as a way to consider the creative licence of biofiction to stray from the biographical facts—by inventing encounters and dialogues, by writing about the subject’s thoughts and secret motives, or even by inserting fictional characters in their texts, in which such elements mingle with recorded history. It is exactly this narrative privilege that accounts for the fascination the genre exerts on its readers, and it is this privilege that critics periodically use as grounds for invalidating biofiction.1 While paying close attention to the productive tensions the genre creates between biographical fact and authorial licence, this volume reads biofiction as a discourse on gender. Following Judith Butler’s understanding of gender as “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint,”2 we inquire into biofiction’s improvisations within the constraints of both gender and genre. If, rather than to represent a life faithfully or accurately, the aim of biofiction is creatively to “answer perplexing questions, fill in cultural lacunae, or signify human interiors,” as Michael Lackey posits,3 gender often constitutes a central axis of its imaginative inquiry into past lives.



Biography, History, Fiction: Stories of Gender and Limits of Genre

Before we outline what sort of genre we have in mind when we speak of biographical fiction, however, we need to briefly clarify what we mean by genre. Genre is not a kind of box into which a literary text can unambiguously and exclusively be placed. We follow Jacques Derrida’s approach to genre as defined by “the law of abounding, of excess, the law of participation without membership, of contamination.”4 The Derridean concept of genre can be related to Butler’s notion of gender performativity: just as reiterations of gender also open up a space—in the very moment of repetition—for the subversion of normative patterns, so too is contamination an inevitable feature of literary genres, as each new individual text will never be an exact copy of previous specimens. Embracing a dynamic concept of genre does not mean that we insist on postmodern notions of “fluidity” to

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declare the idea of genre as void of all meaning or heuristic value. Rather, we take the view that genre as process—as historically conditioned and continuously evolving mode of writing and reading—requires greater specificity and nuance than any “grand theory” of a genre would allow. This process-oriented view of genre suggests a critical engagement that is attentive to the features of a text and its relation to other (bodies of) texts. We follow a definition of biofiction as literature based on the life of an historical person, using that person’s name,5 but approaching its subject through overtly fictional means that include varying degrees of invention.6 As such, biofiction “takes a real person and their real history as the subject matter for imaginative exploration,” as David Lodge states, by means other than “the objective, evidence-based discourse of biography.”7 Lodge’s statement evokes two obvious reference points for the genre of biofiction: the “imaginative exploration” of “real history” associates biofiction with historical fiction, while the move to distinguish biographical fiction from biography reminds us of the proximity of these genres. In the following, we will discuss biofiction’s relation to historical fiction and biography, and point to some ways in which gender-sensitive criticism of these latter two genres can be productively directed towards biofiction. The historical novel, according to Jerome de Groot’s broad definition, is “set in the past” and comprises a wide spectrum of forms, including “genre-specific work from detective to horror to romance” and a large segment of “literary fiction”8 extending also to self-reflexive narratives that “attack historiographical convention.”9 While some critics consider biographical and historical fiction to be distinct or even opposed forms,10 we argue that the broad scope of historical fiction outlined by de Groot can also accommodate biographical fiction. Some recent work on biofiction has indeed been carried out within the framework of historical fiction criticism.11 Several contributions to this volume also discuss biofiction as a form of historical fiction, and it is easy to see why. Biofiction is concerned with historical lives. Its engagement with history becomes especially clear once one moves away from a view of History as a series of momentous events and inventions, towards a multileveled concept of history informed also by more recent currents of historiography, such as social history and microhistory. De Groot describes the characters of historical fiction as “identifiable to us on the one hand due to the conceit of the novel form, in that they speak the same language, and their concerns are often similar to ours, but their situation and their surroundings are immensely different.”12 This also holds true for biofictional characters. Biographical fiction oscillates

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between two temporal levels, the time of writing and the time in which it is set, creating that “sense of historicized ‘difference’”13 that de Groot considers definitive of historical fiction and which is the foundation of its dynamic of identification and distance. Reflecting on her queer nineteenth-­ century protagonist Jenny Bonnet in Frog Music (2014), novelist Emma Donoghue describes this mediation between past and present as follows: “I am trying to make two periods resonate through this person. It’s almost like the character I’m focusing on is a time traveler.”14 Bonnet’s “delightfully self-destructive” behaviour made the author reach for an ADHD diagnosis, for instance.15 Donoghue notes, “So I’m making her a figure of our era in all those small ways to try and make sense of the historical record of how she behaved.”16 While Donoghue is indeed interested in shedding light on “history” for her readers and wants to “make sense of the historical record,” she does this by projecting present-day concepts and concerns onto her protagonist so as to render her relatable for present-­ day readers. Conceding to biographical fiction a place in the vast domain of historical fiction allows us to read biofictions in the light of critical work on historical fiction and gender. The genre of the historical romance novel, for instance, has given rise to insightful studies of its gender dynamics and politics, and these can also help to illuminate the cultural work of biofictional texts. Diane Haeger’s biographical novel The Perfect Royal Mistress (2007) about Nell Gwyn will serve as an example here. While Gwyn’s story may in some ways be inherently suited to the conventions of the classic, heteronormative version of the historical romance novel—offering, for instance, an attractive, empowered young woman,17 an aristocratic milieu,18 and a powerful “man of the world” hero19 in the figure of King Charles II—Haeger’s plot and cast draw on romance conventions rather more emphatically than the subject’s biography would seem to allow. The Perfect Royal Mistress opens with sixteen-year-old Nell as a virgin—a scenario that is historically unlikely, as Gwyn probably worked as a child prostitute,20 but which chimes well with historical romance’s penchant for inexperienced heroines, as diagnosed by Helen Hughes.21 The young heroine’s first encounter with the king, on page 4, already foreshadows her impending love affair with Charles, as “her knees were suddenly weak” in his presence,22 but the lovers’ union is then predictably delayed. In a manner typical of romantic fiction, the novel is oriented towards this central love relationship, and  organises Nell’s life narrative around it. The figure of Charles is endowed with the generic traits of the romance hero, “saturnine

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and abrasive,”23 and the novel also features those descriptions of “wild explicit sex” that have become a staple of the historical romance novel.24 It is most interesting to see, then, how the novel struggles to accommodate the fact that the historical Nell-Charles relationship departs from one of historical romance’s most salient structural premises: the “Happily Ever After” ending of a lasting, monogamous love relationship that is “the promise of the genre writer to his or her reader,” as Kristin Ramsdell states.25 In historical romance criticism, this is often referred to as the “winning and taming”26 of the hero by the heroine. Romance writers such as Ann Maxwell and Jayne Krentz describe this in rather more colourful and heteronormative terms when they declare romance novels to be “tales of strong women taming and gentling that most dangerous of creatures on earth, the human male.”27 Gwyn’s actual biography does not offer a romantically satisfying conclusion of this kind, as Charles never married her, nor was Gwyn the only mistress of the “Merry Monarch”—an inconvenience that the novel makes every effort to smooth over as it follows Gwyn’s life up to Charles’s death, by insisting in various ways that their love was the only meaningful relationship for them both. The Perfect Royal Mistress ends on a protestation of romantic fulfilment: “She may not have been the queen, nor even his only mistress—far from that—but she knew with every fiber of her being, and so did their son, that she had been his only love.”28 Haeger’s novel demonstrates not only that biofiction can accommodate elements from other genres and subgenres, but also that these may sometimes rub up against each other. Rather than speak of generic blending in such cases, a model of generic layering suggests itself, where elements of different genre conventions—in this case, historical romance and biography—accrue but do not quite merge into a homogeneous whole. It is precisely the fault lines between them that make the gender politics of Haeger’s biofiction most apparent.29 While the historical Gwyn was one of the first women on the English Restoration stage and one of the most celebrated comediennes of her day—an achievement that biographies tend to trace expertly and at length30—the novel’s emphasis on romance leads to a view of her stage career primarily as preparation for her liaison with the king and her life at court, as in a scene when Nell is about to meet Charles and her rival Louise de Kéroualle at the theatre: “She stood, glanced at her own reflection, forced an even more carefree smile, then prepared to receive him. Perhaps he believed she did not know about Carwell’s presence. That was how she intended to proceed. ‘You are an actress, now act!’”31 Haeger’s romance-centred narrative trajectory perpetuates the long-standing image

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of Nell Gwyn as “royal mistress,” attributing significance to Gwyn’s life and career only in relation to the king. It is unsurprising, therefore, that feminist or Marxist critics tend to assess historical romance rather critically. For them, the genre’s iterable plot structure signals its allegiance to patriarchy, as the heroine exchanges independence for romantic love,32 thereby affirming “the foundational premise of hetero-normative masculinist culture,” as Catherine Roach puts it.33 The absence of a convincing “Happily Ever After” conclusion in The Perfect Royal Mistress inadvertently serves to highlight Gwyn’s precarious dependence and need to maintain the king’s erotic interest in her even more, and the novel’s embrace of historical romance conventions forecloses the telling of Gwyn’s life in a way that could bring alternative aspects of her life and character to the fore. Just as historical fiction studies can help shed light on the gender dynamics of biographical fictions, it is worth examining critical work on life writing in order to establish how insights of this scholarship, too, may be applicable to biofiction. For this purpose, it bears to once more consider the relation between biography and biofiction—to understand what makes biofiction “biographical.” Biography, according to Hermione Lee’s definition, is “the story of a person told by someone else.”34 “A person” here denotes, of course, a real, historical person. Although “life writing” has gained popularity in recent decades as a more capacious term that, while also referring to actual lives, includes biographical and autobiographical fiction,35 the term “biography” evokes an expectation that “the story should be true” and the biographer “should tell us what actually happened in the life.”36 Lee relativises this stipulation by pointing to experimental forms, gaps in the records, agendas of witnesses and biographers, and failures of memory, but the idea of the biographer’s “responsibility to the truth”37 still holds as a general readerly expectation. The responsibility Lee evokes is not only to factual accuracy and verifiability, however, but also to the notion of character. For her, a central metaphor for biography is the portrait, which “suggests empathy, bringing to life, capturing the character,” as the biographer’s representation of the subject “will shape how posterity views them.”38 This idea of the textual afterlife and its role in cultural memory is also evoked by John F.  Keener, who discusses “biographical narrative” as a continuum that exceeds the bookends of birth and death dates to encompass the “cumulative, cultural life story” of the biographical subject39—which may also include their biofictional reincarnation.

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While biofiction is clearly marked as fiction, its reference to an actual person—not least through its use of real names—initiates a way of reading that keeps both the writer’s creative invention and the narrative’s rootedness in a specific historical life in view. Many writers consider this biographical rootedness central to their work. Authors of biofiction “frequently subordinate empirical facts to a symbolic truth,” as Lackey notes.40 This creation of a symbolic truth is often geared specifically towards being true to the character as the writer envisions it. Emma Donoghue, for instance, speaks of “an obligation”41 and “ethical commitment”42 to the historical figures she writes about to “get it right,” which makes her “go to a lot of trouble to write about them when you could just make them up.”43 Like Donoghue, David Ebershoff evokes the notion of responsibility when explaining his choice to change Gerda Wegener’s name in The Danish Girl about Lili Elbe because of the fictional liberties he took with the life of Lili’s co-protagonist.44 Ebershoff employed “the tools of fiction” in The Danish Girl because he believed in “fiction’s ability to mine a character’s inner life” as a way to “show a reader who Lili was, what she thought and felt, and what her life means.”45 David Lodge similarly points to the affordances of biofiction in capturing a historical figure’s “interiority,” which for him is a declared goal: “If a novel is about a real person, it can use the clues that are available, the information that is available, to try and recreate what that person’s consciousness was perceiving in any given situation. So that’s the point of doing it.”46 Underlining his concerns with being true to the subject’s life, he reveals a reluctance to “invent whole scenes” in his biofiction “if it can be avoided.”47 Even novelist Jay Parini, who emphasises biographical fiction’s licence and creativity in engaging with historical figures and opines that a biofiction about Franklin Roosevelt can “let him fly air balloons over France for thirty years,” if the author so chooses, stipulates that the purpose of such inventiveness would be “a clarifying effect”—that is, to “get us closer to some aspect of the personality of F.D.R.”48 If the notion of biography as portrait points to an artistically inflected, subjective kind of referentiality that nevertheless aims at “catching a likeness,” to use Lee’s phrase,49 these writers suggest that biographical fiction has something distinctive and valuable to contribute to the biographical effort. The transparency of an author’s engagement with biographical “raw material” also shapes readers’ expectations. Emma Donoghue, for instance, stresses the significance of back notes and that “readers really do care about facts.”50 Biographical novelist Kevin Barry recounts how he made

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every effort in Beatlebone (2015), his novel about John Lennon, to “get the voice right,” because he “realized that a lot of readers were going to have an expectation, before they even got to page one, of what the character should sound like.”51 This is not to say that biographical fiction and factual  biography can simply be conflated—they clearly operate under different truth contracts. The promise of biography to its readers is, after all, that nothing will be made up, and that speculations, while permissible, will be marked as such. Also, the idea of “getting it right” or “catching a likeness” may be a chief concern for many writers of biofiction, but it is certainly not an obligation. Yet biofiction is, like biography, a form of life writing, and both gesture across time and space towards what Caitríona Ní Dhúill has called “biography’s absent presence”52: the once living body from which all biographical discourse ramifies. Gender-focused studies of  life writing have long recognised that gendered bodies become subject to specific forms of narrative, and that such narratives, in turn, shape our views and expectations of gendered subjectivity. In what follows, we bring biofiction studies into dialogue with critical work on life writing and gender, illuminating biofiction’s creative dealings with gender—past and present—by relating the genre to other forms of life narrative.

Gender, Fame, and Agency in Biofiction From the late twentieth century onwards, feminist biography scholars have pointed to the inherent gender bias of biography—a genre that celebrates lives unfolding in public fields of action to which women have historically had little access and that long neglected the substantial contributions of those women who were active in such fields. Feminist biographers set out to “restore” women “to the record,” as Sara Alpern points out, and to bring a new “gender consciousness” to a genre that was once a “men’s club.”53 Fiction writers’ noticeable interest, particularly since the 1970s, in the lives of historical women can in part be understood as contributing to the feminist project of “reclaiming” neglected figures through biographical narrative. A novel that demonstrates this reclamatory potential of biofiction is Anna Banti’s Artemisia (1947) about Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, which even pre-dates the second-wave feminist turn towards women’s lives. As Lucia Boldrini notes, Banti’s text had a share in altering the often dismissive view that art history had taken of Gentileschi: it initiated the painter’s revaluation as “the woman who stood up to her

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rapist in court, who made a name for herself, who was able to establish a school in Naples and earn her living from her work.”54 Stephanie Bird, in her study of novels about historical German women, draws an explicit connection between women’s biofiction and twentieth-­ century feminist movements, observing that “the authors are almost invariably interested in rectifying the injustice of women who, for whatever reason, have not been accorded a historical voice.”55 Bird links these narratives to the feminist project of “herstory” that sought to uncover the blind spots of traditional historiography and to reevaluate as political the private and domestic spheres to which women had often been relegated.56 While Bird highlights the value of herstorical biofiction in the context of late twentieth-century women’s movements, she also points to the risks that inhere in upholding the classic division of public/masculine and private/feminine that herstory often reflects, as it may yet again marginalise women “from ‘proper’ history.”57 Her study is specifically concerned with what biographer and critic Jean Strouse has termed “semi-private lives,” stories of women such as Henriette Vogel and Cornelia Goethe who have entered public consciousness chiefly for their association with famous men. In feminist terms, the challenge of writing about such figures lies in according the female subject a story of her own. Too often, she is employed merely as a new lens through which to view an already famous man and is thus turned into one of biofiction’s “sousveillant” subjects—characters who “observe and narrate” a canonical figure “from below.” Such characters have become a generic staple of biographical fiction.58 That “herstorical” biofiction is capable of maintaining a more consistent focus even on  the life of a “semi-private” woman is evidenced by Maggie O’Farrell’s critically acclaimed Hamnet (2020)—which relegates a famous husband almost entirely to the background of the narrative. O’Farrell’s novel centres in the consciousness of the woman who was married to  William Shakespeare. It effectively “plunges the reader into the vivid life of the house, with its smells of a glover’s workshop, the heat and bustle of a cookhouse, the physical effort of planting a garden or twisting out newly washed sheets,” as one reviewer admiringly remarks.59 Anne or Agnes Hathaway’s sparsely documented and—in traditional biographical terms—unremarkable domestic life gives rise in Hamnet to an eerily evocative narrative of loss, grief, and emotional survival.60 Although the figure of William (who remains unnamed throughout) may well function to kindle readers’ interest and anchor the story in one of the “great lives” of world history, the novel remains centred on her story.61

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Recent decades have seen a notable surge in female-centred biofictions, reflected also in the contributions to this volume. When these are relational biofictions that centre on the heroine’s relationship with a (frequently famous) man, they often place masculinity under scrutiny no less than they interrogate female subjectivity. Thus, a biofiction like Judith Chernaik’s Mab’s Daughters: Shelley’s Wives and Lovers: Their Own Story (1991) does not just seek to reclaim female literary predecessors, as Beate Neumeier observes, but also to “deconstruct … the dominant male figures through the female perspective.”62 And indeed, the variety of male subjectivities emerging from the biofictions studied across this book— from an inscrutable and bloody-minded Mao Zedong, to an elusive Henry James and various versions of Henry VIII—testifies to masculinity as provisional, multiple, performative, and related to fluid relations of power and varying degrees of cultural visibility.63 For relational biofictions that do not clearly privilege one protagonist, Ina Bergmann suggests the term “double historical biofiction.”64 In her contribution to this volume, Bergmann discusses novels about Frances Sargent Osgood and Edgar Allen Poe, and demonstrates how the gendered positions within even seemingly balanced character constellations merit close attention, particularly with regard to the two subjects’ unequal legacies and prominence in cultural memory. Biofictional narratives featuring double or multiple protagonists help to trouble an all-too-easy alignment of the public/private dichotomy with gender binaries. A novel such as Margaret Forster’s Lady’s Maid (1990), about Elizabeth Barret Browning’s servant Elizabeth Wilson, is a case in point. For many years bound in service to a famous woman poet, Forster’s Wilson on one level becomes the linchpin for yet another retelling of the Brownings’ legendary elopement to Italy and the resounding success of Wilson’s mistress  among (mostly male) literati. Thus oscillating in its focus, Forster’s novel could be said to illustrate through biofiction a problem that has long preoccupied gender-conscious scholars of  biography: that the tropes of exceptionality and achievement so bound up with the genre of biography may clear a structural position for some “exceptional” women which inadvertently serves to uphold traditional gender hierarchies, cementing the cultural and political invisibility of those  women whose lives chiefly play out in “unexceptional” private spheres.65 Yet Forster also leaves considerable room for Wilson’s own experiences and concerns to unfold independently of, or even run counter to, those of her mistress. Lady’s Maid

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carefully teases out the intersection of gender with class, imagining the specific and too often undocumented experiences of Victorian female domestic servants and the frustrations their positions of dependency entailed. Biofictions such as Forster’s, which depict lives circumscribed by their place in a historical class system, call into question the “agency aesthetic” that Lackey locates in biographical fiction as distinct from historical fiction. What readers “want from the biographical novel,” Lackey surmises, “is a model of a figure that transcends the deterministic forces of history and the environment.”66 As the notion of agency has played a vital role in social justice discourses—and not least in gender theory—it is worth reflecting on the implications and limits of the agentic figure in biofiction. At first glance, this notion would seem to evoke the classic Carlylean hero whose biographical worthiness is measured by their impact in the public sphere—a model whose gendered undertones have long been called into question by feminist biography scholars.67 The genre of biofiction is indeed populated by numerous political leaders, famous artists, notorious criminals, and pioneers of all sorts. Yet there are also figures like O’Farrell’s Agnes and Forster’s Elizabeth Wilson, in narratives that make do almost entirely without the high-flying distinction of Carlylean protagonists of History. Biofictions such as Hamnet and Lady’s Maid highlight how an author’s choice of perspective shapes our perception of which lives, occupations, decisions, or spheres of action seem historically significant and worthy of attention, and how gender plays a role in this. As such, they resonate with Virginia Woolf’s question in “The Art of Biography”: whether the lives of great men only should be recorded. Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography—the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious? And what is greatness? And what smallness? We must revise our standards of merit and set up new heroes for our admiration.68

And in doing so, we might usefully scrutinise our understanding of agency, too. A closer look at subaltern female protagonists of biofiction reveals complex relationships between historical position and agentic possibility, allowing us to question the stark dichotomy of historical and biographical fiction that Lackey proposes. Two biofictions that serve Lackey as evidence for the argument that biographical and historical

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fiction are fundamentally distinct invite further reflection: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings: A Novel (1979) and Mary Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey (2013). Bella Casey’s “Rising” coincides with the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. At the beginning of the novel, Morrissy’s Bella is raped and impregnated by a clergyman. In her despair, and to avoid becoming a social outcast, she seduces her brother’s friend, which leads to an unhappy marriage, her husband’s early death after a syphilis infection (passed on to him via Bella’s rape), and her destitution. During the Easter Rising, towards the end of Bella’s life, the protagonist comes into possession of a piano and experiences a rare moment of hopefulness and possibility, followed rather quickly by her decision to take on hard menial labour, which  ensues in bouts of sickness and her eventual death. Surprisingly, the short-lived epiphany at the piano—together with the fact that Morrissy has young Bella “ensnare” and “outmanoeuvre” her future husband to cover up her rape and pregnancy—suffices for Lackey to declare that the protagonist “has the desire, ability, and freedom to take agential control over her own life”69 and leads him to read her story, like that of Ned Kelly in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, as a “narrative about the power of individual agency and political autonomy.”70 But if agency can be defined as the “power to take control of one’s life,”71 the few glimpses Morrissy provides of Bella Casey’s agency are quickly submerged in the novel’s downward trajectory of crippling circumstance, economic hardship, and emotional suffering. Those moments of agency can, of course, be highlighted, insofar as they contribute to the shaping of a convincing, multi-dimensional character. However, if taken as a demonstration of biofiction’s commitment to agency, as that which sets it apart from historical fiction, the question arises as to what would constitute a nonagentic protagonist. To put it plainly, it is too easy to find patently agentic figures in “non-biographical” historical fiction—from Umberto Eco’s eccentric monk William of Baskerville in Il nome della rosa (1980) to Michel Faber’s inventive prostitute in The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) to Sarah Perry’s amateur palaeontologist in The Essex Serpent (2016)—for agency to hold as a defining feature of biographical fiction. More important in the context of this volume, though, is the historically unequal distribution of crucial forms of agency along gender lines, and the ways in which biofiction reflects or engages with this. It is not least Bella Casey’s vulnerable position and upbringing as a woman in late

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nineteenth-­ century Ireland that curtails her possibilities for self-­ determination and eventually leads to her downfall, as Morrissy’s novel makes clear. While it may be possible to read her epiphany at the piano as symbolic of the agency of the Irish nation erupting in 1916 in political insurrection72 (though Bella’s Protestantism would seem to complicate such a reading), an overemphasis on Bella’s agency threatens to obfuscate the novel’s critical engagement with the sex/gender system of the protagonist’s day. Through the figure of Bella, Morrissy’s novel marks “the insurmountable distance that existed between male and female societal expectations,” as Marisol Morales-Ladrón notes, and throws into relief “the limited choices women had.”73 In other words, the fictionalised suffering of a historical woman—punctured though it may be by brief moments of hopefulness and determination—may also serve to render visible the social pressures and limitations placed on women at the time. Not only does The Rising of Bella Casey point to sexual violence and its dramatic curbing of Bella’s options and expectations, it also counters a form of epistemic violence: the erasure of women from biographical and historical discourse. In an interview in which she addresses her feminist sympathies, Morrissy reveals that The Rising of Bella Casey was her response to renowned Irish playwright Seán O’Casey’s decision, in his experimental autobiography, to move his sister’s death forward by ten years: “This literary sororicide was what prompted me to write The Rising of Bella Casey. I felt his was a failure of the imagination; he couldn’t understand what had prompted her downfall and he hadn’t the capacity to see beyond appearances.”74 Morrissy’s novel thus “raises” the figure of Bella from an untimely textual annihilation and from the obscurity that often befalls female subjects in history—but does so without overstating her agency. A similar dynamic is at work in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings: A Novel, where the female protagonist’s experience of sexual oppression and her textual erasure intersect with the factor of race. The novel imagines a series of encounters between Thomas Jefferson’s ageing slave mistress Sally Hemings, who bore the late president and Founding Father several children, and census taker Nathan Langdon, who sets out to “white-wash” her record without her consent. The contradiction to which Chase-Riboud’s novel points so emphatically is summarised by Lackey as follows: “As the author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson affirmed the idea that all men are created equal and therefore have a natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But as a black woman, Hemings was not considered one of the ‘all men,’ so she was strategically

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excluded from the Declaration’s promises.”75 Jefferson’s secret relationship with Hemings, the novel suggests, may have been at the heart of his removal of a clause prohibiting slavery from an earlier version of the Declaration of Independence. Focusing on the problematic relationship Chase-Riboud’s Sally symbolises between the institution of slavery and the political birth of the United States, Lackey convincingly demonstrates how Sally Hemings “offers us a way of understanding what would become America’s national identity.”76 If we approach the agency of the biofictional subject in gendered terms, it is again worth pointing out that as a slave woman, Sally Hemings was at the receiving end of multiple intersecting forms of oppression, as Chase-­ Riboud’s novel makes clear. Already as an adolescent, the fictional Sally is well aware of the limits to her own agency. “Perhaps I had always known that he would claim me. Had not the same happened to my mother and my sisters? … I could hasten or delay that moment, but I felt powerless to prevent it.”77 Once Jefferson has physically “claimed” her she thinks: That other face, the public one, was the face of her enemy, her master. But one she owned. … When would he free her? she wondered. What if she asked him now … here? … She couldn’t, she was ashamed. The pallor, the soft eyes, the ribbon undone, the mouth softened by their kisses … He was smiling lazily at her. Even now after their moment of passion, there was a violence and a constraint about him that made her tremble. It was then she realized that he liked owning her.78

Chase-Riboud draws a complex portrait of a woman who is  simultaneously proud of her master’s physical attraction to her, of his need of and dependence on her, and habituated as a female slave into a subaltern position that would make it difficult for her to claim agency and demand her freedom or resist his advances. The narrative does sound out the limited forms of agency available to her, for example, when she later breaks off contact with census taker Langdon. By imagining such instances of self-­ determination, Sally Hemings also resonates with feminist debates about the limited utility of “victim feminism”: rather than portraying the central character as deprived of all agency, the novel carefully imagines the limited forms of agency available to Hemings at certain times. Yet Sally Hemings does not celebrate these episodes in a manner that would eclipse the structural limitations under which the historical Hemings’s life unfolded, nor does Chase-Riboud’s protagonist ever really

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overcome those limitations. In their discussion of the place of “relational autonomy” in feminist thought, Peta Bowden and Jane Mummery address the scope and meaning of agency under oppressive conditions, noting that “the question remains as to whether choices made under such conditions could ever be autonomous in a meaningful sense. … Could autonomy really equate to carrying out choices that are just what would be expected on the basis of one’s socialization?”79 In that sense, a biofiction that over-­ emphasises its protagonist’s agency may in fact work to downplay the system of often gendered norms and limitations that restricted the historical protagonist’s life course. Sally Hemings features a heroine with memories, ideas, and desires of her own, who makes occasional use of the limited agency available to her. But above all, Chase-Riboud’s novel renders visible the realities of those limitations placed on Sally Hemings as a female slave, a woman whose status deprives her of control over her own being and body in more than one way. It is obvious how a transgender pioneer like Lili Elbe can be said to possess agency—”that power to take control of one’s life.”80 Biographical novelists may often be drawn to a subject’s agency and highlight their capacity for self-invention. In Ebershoff’s novel on Elbe this becomes apparent not least in the way the author terminates the narrative shortly before the historical Elbe’s death after sex confirmation surgery—a strategy that grants Lili a moment of peace and contentment as her true self. In other biofictions, however, such as Sally Hemings and The Rising of Bella Casey, the limitations placed on the subject’s agency may be the very point of the narrative and a vital part of its politics. These novels, too, succeed in presenting a complex and engaging figure. Like many other biofictions, Chase-Riboud’s and Morrissy’s novels map a historical character’s outward existence and actions onto an inner landscape of motivation, suffering, beliefs, and desires in a manner that requires the author’s, and activates the reader’s, empathy. Such narratives illuminate how the conditions of agency are always also shaped by historically specific norms of gender, race, and class, which may have become internalised or may simply be too powerful for any one individual to overcome.

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Making Gender Intelligible: Biofiction, Exemplarity, and Narrative Identity Whether biofiction consolidates the status of cultural icons or sets out to rediscover marginalised lives, it partakes in the exemplary function81 often attributed to biography. The subject of a biographical discourse comes to represent a certain way of inhabiting gender. While in 1994, Linda Wagner-Martin could still observe that female subjects of biographies are perceived as “eccentric rather than exemplary, and eccentricity is not a trait that wins admiration,”82 recent decades have seen a change in attitudes. The appearance of numerous celebratory “lives” of women in the biography section of bookshops is matched by a similar boom in biofictions about “notable” women. Artemisia Gentileschi, for instance, emerges as an emblem of female artistic production and triumphant survivor of sexual violence in no fewer than five biographical novels.83 Nor is female subjectivity—in its many historical manifestations—the only identity for which biofiction can help to create a narrative space. While feminist biographers and life-writing scholars have set the scene for a critique of the politics of exclusion evident in dominant forms of life narrative, movements for the equality of lesbian and gay, trans, intersex, or non-binary people have long discovered the relevance of life writing for their own causes. In his groundbreaking study Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuals (1998), Jay Prosser claims that for transsexuals, “narrative is not only the bridge to embodiment but a way of making sense of transition, the link between locations: the transition itself.”84 What Prosser evokes here is the notion of narrative identity—that we are the stories we construct about ourselves. Rather than just making sense of a prior self, narrative thus becomes a way of bringing the self into being in the first place. Following Prosser, Jennifer Cooke posits narratives of self as significant points of identification for others. “If one’s identity is non-­ normative,” she argues, “then reading other similar personal stories is a (trans)formative act.”85 Life-writing scholar and gender theorist Quinn Eades illustrates this as he remembers his first encounter with Leslie Feinberg’s autobiographical novel Stone Butch Blues: It took me 17  years to work out why I couldn’t breathe while I read Feinberg’s words, ingested them, let them lay down in me. That day I pulled my first binder over my head and then struggled the black nylon down to flatten breast chest belly hips, then t-shirt over the top, then mirror gaze

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from front and side—a flood of incredulous recognition, an internal and pushing-all-ways yes—and there was Feinberg’s ghost text reaching out from/with the body to touch/stroke/hold/enfold me all over again.86

The relevance of others’ life stories to the formation of the self is also stressed by Wendy Moffat when she considers a “documentable queer textual past” as “foundational to the construction of gay identity.”87 Emma Donoghue, reflecting on the queer protagonist Jenny Bonnet of her biographical novel Frog Music, makes the same argument with reference to biofiction: “I think it’s crucial for us to know about queer life before now. If we only seem to exist now, then we look like a shallow phase. We look like a meme, something that’s just gone viral. Establishing a history that was not very visible before makes you feel like a grownup.”88 Going beyond literature’s role of helping to consolidate one’s own identity, Moffat also evokes the function of life narrative—including biofiction—as a “call for empathy” towards other identities. As such, literature can, for instance, become a means of “awakening us to the lived experience of transgendered people.”89 In her recent book Transgender and the Literary Imagination (2017), Rachel Carroll goes one step further as she explores the extent to which transgender narratives “give visibility or voice to transgender histories and identities.”90 Looking beyond the individual reader’s experience of empathy, Carroll notes “the role played by historical, literary and film narrative in shaping ‘conditions of intelligibility.’”91 Referencing Judith Butler’s work,92 Carroll thus highlights the broader cultural implications of transgender narratives as vectors of empowerment and acknowledges the role of fiction in carving out a discursive space in which diverse and non-normative identities can become culturally intelligible. Biofiction specifically can take on a vital role in endeavours to explore and expand possibilities for certain identities, not just through its referentiality—that is, its grounding in, and reference to, real lives—but also because of its affective power and reach. David Ebershoff’s award-winning novel The Danish Girl (2000), about Lili Elbe, illustrates this. Based on Niels Hoyer’s account of Elbe’s transition in Man into Woman: The First Sex Change (1933), Ebershoff’s book became an international bestseller at a time when LGBT groups worldwide were campaigning for equality and more inclusive legislation. In 2015, the novel was adapted into a screenplay by Lucinda Coxton; the motion picture The Danish Girl was eventually produced and released in 2015 to great acclaim, under the

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direction of Tom Hooper and starring Eddie Redmayne as Einar Wegener/ Lili Elbe and Alicia Vikander, who went on to win an Academy Award for her performance as Wegener’s wife Gerda. Based on Ebershoff’s novel, the film was largely considered an important step in rendering historical trans experience visible on a broad scale. The avid debates about its (lack of) historical accuracy and criticism of the casting93 testify to the significance that may be attributed to fictional representations of exemplary figures. The example of The Danish Girl demonstrates not only how biographical fiction can work to amplify trans history but also how it can assume a mediating function between different life writing media and genres. Some lives become starting points for multiple—and often conflicting—trajectories of gendered identification and appropriation even within the genre of biofiction. James Miranda Barry, an illustrious Irish-born army surgeon who was reportedly revealed on his death to have been biologically female, is a case in point here. When US-American author E.J. Levy announced in 2019 that her forthcoming novel The Cape Doctor would centre on James Miranda Barry, “a heroine for our time, for all time,” and referred to her subject as “she,”94 the novelist attracted criticism from transgender communities for disrespecting Barry’s self-chosen masculine identity. In response, Levy pointed to various biographical treatments of Barry as a cross-dressing woman to justify her approach—a gesture that ties her biofiction to “factual” biography. And indeed, as Ann Heilmann’s comprehensive study of “Neo/Victorian Biographilia” about Barry, which also examines several biofictions, illustrates, the surgeon’s gender identity was overwhelmingly given as female in textual treatments of the past 150  years—“as a cross-dressing woman rather than a transman.”95 June Rose’s 1977 biography The Perfect Gentleman: The Remarkable Life of Dr James Miranda Barry, the Woman Who Served as an Officer in the British Army from 1813 to 1859 (which also uses female pronouns) illustrates the pervasiveness of this view, as does the title of the 2016 book by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield, Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time.”96 Moving away from the idea of Barry as a feminist icon of gender transgression, other narratives cast Barry as a transgender man or an intersex person.97 Patricia Duncker, who discusses her acclaimed 1999 novel James Miranda Barry in the final chapter of this volume, also chose a rather different approach to her subject. Duncker’s biofiction, which shifts between narrative perspectives and pronominal markers of gender, does not settle

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on a single or stable gender identity for its protagonist. Her Barry novel can thus be said to do the work of “queer life-writing” as defined by Dallas Baker: a type of life narrative that undertakes “a critical and radical deconstruction of identity, of heteronormativity and of binary gender and sexual norms.”98 As such, queer life narratives unsettle the link between bodies and gendered subjectivities, as Duncker’s text does in more than one way: it leaves both the gender identity and the protagonist’s sense of self in flux and open to conjecture. Carroll explains the conspicuous divergence between narrative versions of a transgender life with reference to the varied meanings that “the historical practice of ‘gender crossing’ has acquired … in women’s, lesbian and gay, and queer historiography.”99 Her study addresses the often problematic effects of such competing claims, for instance, when the conventions of transsexual life writing erase intersex narratives (in the case of Ebershoff’s biofiction of Elbe100) or when “feminist narratives of women’s gender crossing … have the effect—however inadvertently—of erasing transgender narratives” (in the case of Duncker’s James Miranda Barry101). Carroll’s study also demonstrates that the varied meanings of certain gendered practices come particularly to the fore in comparative readings of narratives about the “same” historical subject, an approach that has variously been called “comparative biography”102 or metabiography.103 The case of James Miranda Barry demonstrates how renowned subjects can go through cycles of reclaiming, mythologisation, and revision in biographical discourse—including in biofiction. With the boom in biographical fiction over the last decades and the accumulation of fictional texts about certain illustrious individuals, it is unsurprising that scholars have increasingly taken an interest in the evolution of fictional treatments of prominent subjects.104 A cross-textual analysis, as can be found in some of the contributions to this volume, does much to clarify the different meanings that become attached to a figure in various cultural and historical contexts. What Ní Dhúill has proposed for biography studies also holds true for biofiction: that a metabiographical approach, which focuses on “how the biographical discourse on a single figure shifts and accumulates over time to form a complex palimpsest of portraits,” can “reveal much about the changing positions of biographer and reader, about changing conceptions of subjectivity, and about the changing understandings of how individual lives relate to larger structures and processes.”105 More specifically, metabiographical readings of biofiction can serve to establish what the possibilities of fiction are when it comes to imagining the experience of gender

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in past lives. By reading differently imagined versions alongside and against each other, metabiographical analyses help to highlight innovative treatments of gendered identities and plots or, conversely, reveal the persistence of conventional tropes of femininity, masculinity, and gender normativity in biofiction.

The Ethics of Biographical Fiction Levy’s novel The Cape Doctor has since been published, its protagonist renamed “Jonathan Mirandus Perry,” in all likelihood to evade criticism for the author’s choice of pronouns by lightly decoupling her text from the historical figure. While this decision moves The Cape Doctor into the realm of what Kohlke has termed “glossed biofiction,”106 the controversy around the novel also highlights what is at stake in re-imagining famous lives in fiction. Various communities are invested in historically “correct” representations—in gender terms—of Barry, regardless of the fact that today we have no way of knowing with any certainty how Barry would have self-identified in an age when present-day categories of gender identity were unavailable. The status of a text as fiction does not apparently relieve an author of their perceived responsibility either towards the historical individual or towards constituencies of readers who have a gender-­ political stake in the individual’s biography. The idea of the writer’s responsibility towards the historical subject and their afterlife in cultural memory brings us to the question of biofiction’s ethics, which has implications beyond narrative gender assignment. The genre’s creative licence renders it a site of important cultural work in the view of many readers and critics. Thus, biofiction is often said to “give a voice” to disenfranchised subjects—a metaphor that enjoys some popularity in biofiction scholarship and also appears repeatedly in contributions to the present volume. The idea is that biofiction can help redress a lack of representation that is manifest on various discursive levels—in biography and historiography but also on the primary level of archival material. Where factual biography finds itself impoverished by the gender bias of archives or works around the gaps by meticulously pointing them out to the reader,107 biofiction, powered by imagination, can venture right into the void. The liberty of novelists or playwrights may be curbed somewhat by the possibility of legal disputes when subjects or their direct descendants feel misrepresented by a text,108 but the artistic ethos of novelists or playwrights does not dictate close adherence to biographical facts.

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Biofiction thus has a vital role to play in rendering visible those subjects and experiences that have fallen through the grid of traditional androcentric history. Hence, with regard to women’s lives, fiction can paradoxically become “an arena for granting female experience an equivalent reality in the public sphere,” as Max Saunders points out.109 The “voice” metaphor is problematic, however, when we consider its epistemological implications. Biofiction may well be “one of the aesthetic forms par excellence for mediating, remediating, and shaping popular perceptions of the past,” as Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben state,110 but the kind of knowledge it produces about its subject is qualified by the text’s status as fiction. Obvious though it may seem, the biofictional subject’s experiences, thoughts, and utterances spring from the writer’s mind and are based to varying (and sometimes negligible) degrees on historical research. To put it plainly: the “recovered voice” is not recovered but invented. In this sense, the “voice” granted a subject through biofiction is that of a ventriloquist,111 raising critical questions around agency and appropriation. On a related note, biofictions can be seen as invading the privacy of their subjects, filling certain gaps that historical persons may well have left on purpose. Even where public achievement governs the choice of subject, the historical reputation of the central figure often functions as a point of entry into their private tribulations and intimate experiences—irrespective of their gender. The decision to re-write the life of an already famous woman may be a politically motivated attempt to elevate the private sphere as a historically significant zone of human (inter-)action, but it may also align with contemporary celebrity culture’s voyeuristic desire to pry into the privacy of prominent figures.112 Such invasions assume particular poignancy in the context of transgender biography, as Jack Halberstam notes. Halberstam discusses transgender biography as “a sometimes violent, often imprecise project which seeks to brutally erase the carefully managed details of the life of a passing person” and which often “recasts the act of passing as deception, dishonesty and fraud.”113 In the context of biofiction, the re-telling of trans lives may seem less problematic with a figure like Lili Elbe, who collaborated in Niels Hoyer’s account of her transition. Hence David Ebershoff’s novel about Elbe was based on her public self-disclosure and her own view of her identity. By contrast, the lived reality of the private parts and sexual preferences of James Miranda Barry were not disclosed by the subject, yet

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fictional accounts often take the ethically questionable step of imagining these disclosures.114 That said, biofiction has its own means of interrogating its fraught relation to the historical subject and challenging readers’ expectations with regard to gendered plots and subjectivities. An example is the suicide plot, which has become a gendered blueprint for telling creative women’s lives. Feminist critics have often denounced as reductive and disrespectful the way in which the work of female authors is read in relation to mental health and suicide at the expense of a sufficient focus on their creative output.115 Accounts of Sylvia Plath’s life and work, for instance, have traditionally been overshadowed by the author’s early suicide, epitomised by the title of Ronald Hayman’s book The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. It is all the more remarkable, then, that novelist Kate Moses ended Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath on a hopeful note, before the poet’s suicide, thus foregoing such easy teleology and sensationalism. It can, of course, be argued that biofiction as a genre is tacitly proleptic in that readers will be aware of the basic outline of a famous subject’s life story from the start, and that Plath’s suicide will always be an unspoken presence in the novel. However, with her “omission”—as some readers will surely perceive it—of the suicide, Moses can be said to take a stand for the inherent value of the poet’s lived experience and creative achievement. Apart from such basic structural decisions, there are other textual choices that signal an author’s engagement with ethical questions. In her monograph Autobiographies of Others, Lucia Boldrini pays close attention to the ethical implications of narrative situations and pronominal choices in what she terms “heterobiography”: “novels that gesture towards historical factuality and literary fictionality, towards ‘truth’ and invention, and exist under the sign of an essential displacement (the ‘autobiography’ is written by another) that brings to the foreground structural, narrative, and ethical issues also central to autobiography itself.”116 Engaging with the dialogic structure of Anna Banti’s Artemisia, Boldrini reads Banti’s novel as “a reflection of the difficulties that exceptional women encounter in trying to assert themselves.”117 Significantly, the heterobiographical “double I” of the first half of the novel gives way to a third-person narrative which, for Boldrini, signals the narrator’s “moment of letting go,” that is, “of recognition and respect for the integrity, unknowability, separateness of the other woman.”118 Patricia Duncker’s play with narrative and pronominal situations in James Miranda Barry is another case in point here. Beyond illustrating the

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inscrutability of her subject’s gender identity, Duncker’s fragmented approach also speaks to our necessarily tenuous grasp of all past subjectivities. Reflecting on Duncker’s strategies of deliberate fragmentation and ambiguity, Heilmann muses that “it is as if the Barry of fiction much more than that of biography existed only in fragments, always at a distance from us, ultimately unknowable.”119 In her refusal to construct a coherent inner life for her protagonist, Duncker “deliberately foils readerly identification processes, instead splintering her narrative as a marker of the patchy and erratic nature of the ‘evidence’ of Barry’s life and the futility of attempting to confine Barry to an orthodox textual/sexual framework,” as Heilmann notes.120 Through the means of experimental fiction, Banti’s and Duncker’s biographical novels can thus be said to flag their speculative relationship to a past life with greater honesty than many a biography. What these experiments in biofiction accomplish is to open up a space for metabiographical reflection.121 It is this space that the chapters of this volume seek to map in greater detail.

The Chapters in This Book The chapters that follow investigate how biographical fictions reflect and re-write available narratives and tropes of gender. The analyses they offer uncover tensions between relationality, empowerment, and agency in life stories within and beyond the gender binary and relate them to cultural and historical differences in both “raw” biographical material and fictional reworking. Exploring the role of creativity in imagining feminist, queer, and non-binary pasts, they investigate the processes of identification and (re-)imagination, instrumentalisation, and distortion that shape historical lives into fiction. Part I—“Recovery, Revision, Ventriloquism: Imagining Historical Women”—examines the positioning of historical women in biofiction, exploring the ethical questions that arise when novelists re-tell the story of an other  person’s life. Diana Wallace’s opening chapter “‘Everything Is Out of Place’: Virginia Woolf, Women, and (Meta-)Historical Biofiction” takes Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) as the starting point of a reflection on the interactions of biography, history, and fiction in meta-­ historical biofictions by and about Virginia Woolf. Keeping Woolf’s own metaphor of the “out of place”-ness of women’s stories in view, Wallace develops a model of reading biofiction that troubles binary oppositions. Drawing on Monica Latham’s work in dialogue with Edward Soja’s

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trialectical thought, Wallace’s analysis of five novels about Virginia Woolf demonstrates contemporary authors’ creative engagement with Woolf’s life and thinking while also pointing to their reliance on conventionally gendered narrative patterns that Woolf herself rejected. While Virginia Woolf as a “world-historical” woman writer has long served other authors as a reference point of literary achievement, interest in Lucia Joyce—the subject of Laura Cernat’s chapter “Fictional Futures for a Buried Past: Representations of Lucia Joyce”—is a more recent phenomenon. Cernat discusses biofictional portrayals of Lucia Joyce in light of the one-sided representation of her in biographical sources as the mentally ill daughter of a renowned and brilliant father, and focuses specifically on the alternative futures such fictions develop for their subject. Cernat then contrasts these biofictions with representations of Lucia Joyce in visual media—a graphic novel and films—to compare their effectiveness in reclaiming the subject as an accomplished dancer and in projecting a subtler understanding of the intersections between her gender and her mental life. Silvia Salino’s chapter “Imagining Jiang Qing: The Biographer’s Truth in Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao” also examines a biofictional counter-­narrative to dominant androcentric histories—an effort at reclaiming a female point of view which in Min’s novel also takes on an intercultural dimension. Salino draws on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of postmodernism to shed light on Min’s deconstruction of the prevalent historical discourse about Jiang Qing and the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Highlighting Min’s trope of life as performance, Salino uncovers a level of metabiographical self-reflection in the novel’s appropriation of Qing’s voice that points to the epistemological pitfalls of biographical reconstruction and highlights the importance of narrative perspective in biofiction. The three chapters in Part II—“Re-imagining the Early Modern Subject”—look at biofictions in which Tudor England, with its familiar royal cast, serves as a site of re-negotiation with regard to gender roles. In her chapter “From Betrayed Wife to Betraying Wife: Rewriting Katherine of Aragon as Catalina in Philippa Gregory’s The Constant Princess,” Bethan Archer reads Gregory’s novel of 2005 against the foil of historical and popular representations of Henry VIII’s first queen as pious and undesirable obstacle to Anne Boleyn’s ascent. Gregory recasts Katherine as a scheming figure whose progressive political vision is likely to resonate with modern readers; her “Catalina” becomes a surprisingly agentic character. On close inspection, however, Archer finds the heroine’s

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transgressions tempered by narrative choices that can be understood as concessions to a conservative readership. Alison Gorlier’s chapter “Jean Plaidy and Philippa Gregory Fighting for Gender Equality Through Katherine Parr’s Narrative” offers a comparative reading of two novels published over six decades apart, both centred on Henry VIII’s sixth marriage. Relating each narrative to the social conditions and gender equality policies of its day, Gorlier reveals a subtle shift from pre-secondwave feminist thought to contemporary (post-)feminist concerns. At different points in time, both narratives thus anchor women’s struggle for equality in a historical figure who emerges as an exemplary—if anachronistic—emblem of female survival and emancipation in the context of patriarchal oppression. Interactions between self and other, distant past and present in biofiction are rendered more complex still in Australian authors’ novels about the Tudors, as Kelly Gardiner and Catherine Padmore observe. In their chapter “Australian Women Writing Tudor Lives,” the authors take their cue from Jerome de Groot’s notion of “double othering,” which describes the distance between the cultural context of writers and readers of historical fiction and the often distant or different cultural settings of the narratives they read and write. Examining recent novels by four Australian women authors—Jesse Blackadder, Jane Caro, Michelle Diener, and Wendy J.  Dunn—which feature historical Tudor heroines and drawing on these writers’ paratextual statements about their work, Gardiner and Padmore tease out the specifically Australian elements in Australian Tudor biofictions. They perceptively demonstrate how the novelists’ feminist search for ownership of Tudor history is complicated by their postcolonial position. Biofictions about authors refract larger questions of gender through the specific challenges and motivations of the creative life, as the chapters in Part III—“Writing the Writer: History, Voyeurism, Victimisation”— demonstrate. Such “author fictions”122 also have the merit of “opening” historical authors to a contemporary readership, as Monica Latham observes in her study of Virginia Woolf’s afterlives.123 While the fresh critical engagement with women’s lives offered by many of the chapters highlights the need for continued re-reading and re-imagining of biofictions within and beyond binaristic paradigms, Paul Fagan’s contribution in this section is specifically addressed to the possibility of writing non-normative masculine identity in biofiction. In a comparative reading of two biographical novels on Henry James—Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author—Fagan shows how the plot needs of biofiction

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combine with a modern conception of compulsory sexuality to determine the narration of celibacy. The speculative space of biofiction is viewed in its full ambivalence here, as a field of indeterminacy which, paradoxically, can enforce a particular reading of gaps and silences. Ina Bergmann’s chapter “In Poe’s Shadow: Frances Sargent Osgood” deals with the representation of relationship in biofictions that remain within a conventionally heteronormative framework. Interrogating biofiction’s role as a form of popular literary history, Bergmann examines two novels about the nineteenth-­ century poet Frances Sargent Osgood, whose standing in American literary history has been eclipsed by her personal relationship with Edgar Allan Poe. Bergmann proposes the label “double historical biofiction” to capture the novels’ approach of giving room to, and thus creating interest in, their heroine while still  relying on the male subject’s fame. Here as in other chapters, we are reminded of the risks of relational biography—in which a female life is “recovered” from the shadow of a prominent male life. In her chapter on biographical dramas centred on the life of the Polish modernist playwright Stanisława Przybyszewska, Ksenia Shmydkaya explores the possibilities and limits of “biodrama” and identifies the ethical pitfalls of theatrical versions of Przybyszewska’s story. Shmydkaya notes how the temptation to reduce the subject to a cipher—for damaged female genius, insanity, and victimhood, or, when seen from a Western vantage point, for a distinctively Polish tragic artistic identity—results in a failure to engage with Przybyszewska’s works and thought, or to take seriously the philosophical edifice she erected from a lifelong preoccupation with the French Revolution. As with the biofictions on Frances Sargent Osgood discussed in Ina Bergmann’s chapter, here too we are confronted with a gesture of recovery that can tend to reinscribe the patriarchal conditions it sets out to illuminate. Tensions between the demands of creativity and the constraints of gender are a perennial theme in biographies and biofictions of women artists, writers, and scientists and are explored in detail in Part IV, “Creativity and Gender in the Arts and Sciences.” We might expect treatments of this theme to be historically mutable, shifting to reflect the changing concerns of biographers and biofiction authors and their readers, so it is all the more striking to find continuities between accounts that are remote from each other in time. Julia  Dabbs reads two recent biographical novels on the early modern artist Sofonisba Anguissola, comparing these with the early modern treatments that founded the biographical discourse on this virtuosa. The desire for independence and the mastery of technique in a

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male-dominated field of endeavour are key themes across both the early accounts and the later fictional reworkings; more surprising is the reworking of plot elements from the early modern sources that go against the grain of conventional understandings of historical gender relations. Thus, if Anguissola proposed marriage to a sea-captain during a voyage to Genoa—as the historical sources have it—then we may be perplexed to read a twenty-first-century fictionalised account that domesticates this biographeme by reinstating the more usual gender roles. Here as elsewhere, the novelist’s understandings of gender work with the dictates of genre and the expectations of readership to determine the construction of gender relations in the text. A different kind of creativity is at the centre of Christine Müller’s chapter “The ‘Mother of the Theory of Relativity’? Re-imagining Mileva Marić in Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein (2016).” Albert Einstein’s first wife emerges in biofiction as a tragic figure whose brilliance remains unrecognised, her ambitions thwarted in the patriarchal field of science. Through a critical feminist perspective and with reference to the history of women in science, Müller points up the ambivalence of Benedict’s novel, which reclaims Marić as an exemplary female scientist while resorting to standard tropes of female inspiration and victimhood. The final section, “Queering Biofiction,” considers the contrast between conventional illusionistic biofiction and experimental biofiction on the boundaries of prose, poetry, and epistolary life writing, probing the possibilities of writing gender in more exploratory ways. Iseult Gillespie’s reading of Aaron Apps’s prose-poem sequence Dear Herculine reveals a complex layering of dialogic auto/biographical reflection, in which the contemporary author speaks across time to the historical figure of Herculine Barbin. Brought to prominence through her catalytic effect for the gender philosophy of Michel Foucault, Barbin is imagined, in Apps’s text, in terms that seek to honour and not domesticate the experience of intersex embodiment. Refusing to contain his subject within the medicalising discourse which imposed a gender reassignment on the historical Barbin, Apps draws on archival documents, including Barbin’s memoir, as well as on personal experience of intersex subjectivity to create a resonant poetic text that, as Gillespie shows, pushes against the limits of biofiction. The volume is rounded off by an interview the editors conducted with eminent novelist and literary critic Patricia Duncker on her neo-Victorian biofictions James Miranda Barry (1999) and Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015), the latter revolving around nineteenth-­century

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novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). In the interview, Duncker historicises responses to Barry and explains her own approach to transcending gender binaries in creative fiction. Reflecting on her work on Eliot, she addresses the problematic idea of a female line of tradition and her own particular urge to “write back” to her famous predecessor. She outlines the possibilities, but also the ethical limits, of the licence to speculate in biofiction and criticises the tendency of historical fiction to “assault the nineteenth century with the sensibility of the twentieth” (and twenty-first). Attentive to a range of approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate, or reinvent their biographical “raw material,” the chapters of this volume variously demonstrate the effect of cliché, gender norms, and established narratives in biographical fiction, while also exploring the potential for subversion and critique that inheres in biofiction’s speculative and imaginative engagement with past lives. Funding  This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), grant number V543-G23.

Notes 1. For a discussion of the reception of biofiction, see Michael Lackey’s introduction to Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) and “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 3–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1095583. 2. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 3. Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 14. 4. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Glyph 7 (1980): 210. 5. As regards recent biofiction scholarship, Michael Lackey defines the genre exclusively as “literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure” (e.g. Lackey, “Locating,” 3), while Marie-Luise Kohlke includes fictions about famous historical characters who have been assigned different names as “glossed biofiction.” Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus,” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 18, no. 3 (2013): 11. We agree with Lackey that the actual name of the protagonist accomplishes something specific in biofiction. As in its neighbouring genre the biopic, biofiction’s use of the real name “suggests an openness to historical scrutiny” that accounts for biofiction’s dual allegiance to cre-

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ative invention and biographical fact. George F.  Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 8. The case could be made, though, that a narrative whose characters and plots are very obviously based on certain historical personages will initiate a similar kind of hybrid reading. Moving to the other end of the spectrum, there are fictions that rely on a famous name but hardly refer to the historical subject’s biography. We would again consider texts such as Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen Mysteries as on the very fringe of biographical fiction, as the historical author is turned into a detective figure who solves murder mysteries that clearly bear no relation to Austen’s life. Hence, as Barron’s fictions display very little interest in Austen’s “real history,” it would be difficult to justify calling them “biographical.” Such loose referentiality may be better captured by a term such as Wolfgang Müller’s “interfigurality.” See Müller, “Interfigurality. A Study on the Interdependence of Literary Figures,” in Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991), 101–21. The distinction is one of degree rather than kind. 6. This latter criterion helps to distinguish biofiction from literary biography, whose artful style may often approach that of fiction, but which avoids making things up. See, for instance, Julia Novak, “Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction,” in Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing 3, ed. Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), 7–8, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-­3-­319-­55414-­3_1. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben further understand biofiction as “a multi-media umbrella term” that includes biographical motion pictures. Kohlke and Gutleben, “Taking Biofictional Liberties: Tactical Games and Gambits with Nineteenth-Century Lives,” in Neo-Victorian Biofiction: Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects, ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2020), 3. While we acknowledge the affinity of biofiction with biopics, we do not treat the latter in this volume, unless where films about a certain subject throw into relief the work of the biofictions (as in Laura Cernat’s contribution). Biopic scholarship has gained much traction within film studies in recent decades and has brought forth its own extensive body of media-specific research. For a recent, gender-focused contribution to the field, see the European Journal of Life Writing’s special issue on “Women’s Lives on Screen,” edited by Eugenie Theuer  and Julia Novak. 7. David Lodge, The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel: With Other Essays on the Genesis, Composition, and Reception of Literary Fiction (London: Penguin, 2007), 8.

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8. Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel, The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1. 9. Ibid., 2. 10. See Michael Lackey, “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 33–58. Lackey proposes a “shift from the historical to the biographical novel” in the twentieth century (Lackey, “The Rise,” 54), and that the biographical novel has “supplanted the classical historical novel” (Lackey, “The Rise,” 33; see also “Introduction: The Agency Aesthetics of Biofiction in the Age of Postmodern Confusion,” in Conversations with Biographical Novelists, ed. Michael Lackey [New York: Bloomsbury, 2019], 1–20). In our estimation, such a view can only be maintained if one considers - as Lackey does - Georg Lukács’s (1937) partial conception of the work of Scott, Balzac, and Tolstoy as representative of “the historical novel” in general, and if one ignores the varied directions in which historical fiction has developed over the past century. While biofiction has certainly become a prominent form of historical fiction particularly in recent decades, “non-biographical” historical fiction continues to enjoy both tremendous popularity and critical success. Nor do we subscribe to an opposition of biographical and historical fiction on the basis of a realism/surrealism dichotomy or the protagonist’s agency. While realism can indeed be said to be a dominant mode of historical fiction today, there are also biofictions such as Margaret Forster’s Lady’s Maid that are staunchly realist, as well as other forms of historical fiction that break with realism, such as historiographic metafiction. We discuss agency in gendered terms below. For a detailed discussion of definitions of historical fiction, see the first chapter in Caterina Grasl, Oedipal Murders and Nostalgic Resurrections: The Victorians in Historical Middlebrow Fiction, 1914–1959 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014). On the development of the historical novel in the twentieth century, see, for instance, the works of Elodie Rousselot (“neo-­ historical novel”), Ina Bergmann (“new historical fiction”), or Ansgar Nünning, who sketches various innovative directions in which the historical novel has developed over the past decades in terms of a spectrum of variants rather than placing experimental, self-reflexive modes such as historiographic metafiction in opposition to the more traditionally realist currents of historical fiction. Rouselleto, ed., Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-­historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction, Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York: Routledge, 2021); Nünning, “Von der fiktionalen Historie zur metahistoriographischen Fiktion: Bausteine für eine narratologische

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und funktionsgeschichtliche Theorie, Typologie und Geschichte des postmodernen historischen Romans,” in Literatur und Geschichte: Ein Kompendium zu ihrem Verhältnis von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Daniel Fulda and Silvia Serena Tschopp (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 540–69. On the gendered implications of rigid definitions of the historical novel, see Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 10. 11. See, for instance, Grasl, Oedipal Murders; Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed; Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, eds., The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Dorothea Flothow, “Those Gay Days of Wickedness and Wit”: the Restoration Period in Popular Historiographies (18th–21st Centuries) (Heidelberg: Winter, 2021); some contributions in Kelly Gardiner and Catherine Padmore, eds., “Historical Biofictions from Australia and New Zealand,” special issue, TEXT 26, no. 66 (2022). 12. De Groot, The Historical Novel, 3. 13. Ibid., 4. 14. Emma Donoghue, “Voicing the Nobodies in the Biographical Novel,” interviewed by Michael Lackey, Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 85. 15. Ibid., 83. 16. Ibid., 85. 17. Kristin Ramsdell, Romance Fiction: A Guide to the Genre (Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1999), 115. 18. Helen Hughes, The Historical Romance (London: Routledge, 1993), 2; Ramsdell, Romance Fiction, 138. 19. Hughes, The Historical Romance, 17. 20. Derek Parker, Nell Gwyn (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), 11–12; Charles Beauclerk, Nell Gwyn: Mistress to a King (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), 37–39. 21. Hughes, The Historical Romance, 127. 22. Diane Haeger, The Perfect Royal Mistress (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 7. 23. Hughes, The Historical Romance, 39. 24. See Ramsdell, Romance Fiction, 114. 25. Ibid., 19. 26. Hughes, The Historical Romance, 17. 27. Ann Maxwell and Jayne Krentz, “The Wellsprings of Romance (1989),” in Women and Romance: A Reader, ed. Susan Ostrov Weisser (New York: NY University Press, 2001), 351. 28. Haeger, The Perfect Royal Mistress, 399.

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29. The Perfect Royal Mistress is, in fact, one of several novels published about Gwyn in recent decades. For a more detailed critique of Gwyn novels, see Julia Novak, “Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels: Biography and the Dictates of ‘Genre Literature,’” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 3 (Oxford UP, 2014): 373–90; and Novak, “Feminist to Postfeminist: Contemporary Biofictions by and about Women Artists,” Angelaki 22, no. 1 (2017): 223–30. See also Laura Martínez-García, “Restoration Celebrity Culture: Twenty-First-Century Regenderings and Rewritings of Charles II, the Merry Monarch, and his Mistress ‘Pretty, Witty’ Nell Gwyn,” Anglia 138, no. 1 (2020): 118–43. 30. See, for instance, Parker, Nell Gwyn 2000; Beauclerk, Nell Gwyn. 31. Haeger, The Perfect Royal Mistress, 320. 32. Barbara Fuchs, Romance: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2004), 126. See also Hughes, The Historical Romance, 129. 33. Catherine Roach, “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy,” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1, no.1 (2010): 6. 34. Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 5. 35. See Zachary Leader’s definition of life writing as “a range of writings about lives or parts of lives, or which provide materials out of which lives or parts of lives are composed. These writings include not only memoir, autobiography, biography, diaries, autobiographical fiction, and biographical fiction, but also letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings …, marginalia, nonce writings, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings, and digital forms.” Leader, “Introduction,” in On Life-­Writing, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 1. Biofiction research has also been featured by life-writing journals, see, for example, Michael Lackey’s (ed.) special issues on biofiction in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 and 36, no. 1; Boldrini and Novak’s (eds.) volume Experiments in Life Writing in the Palgrave Studies in Life Writing series; and Novak’s article on Clara Schumann and Artemisia Gentileschi biofictions: “Father and Daughter across Europe: The Journeys of Clara Wieck Schumann and Artemisia Gentileschi in Fictionalised Biographies,” European Journal of Life Writing 1  (2012): 41–57, https://doi.org/10.5463/ejlw.1.25. 36. Lee, Biography, 6. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 2. 39. John F. Keener, Biography and the Postmodern Historical Novel (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2001), 2. 40. Lackey, The American Biographical Novel, 12.

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41. Donoghue, “Voicing the Nobodies,” 82. 42. Ibid., 86. 43. Ibid. 44. David Ebershoff, “The Biographical Novel as Life Art,” in Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 100 and 102. 45. Ibid., 103. 46. Lodge, “The Bionovel as a Hybrid Genre,” interview by Bethany Layne, Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 120. 47. Ibid., 122. 48. Jay Parini, “Reflections on Biographical Fiction,” in Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 212. These novelists’ statements thus resonate with Ina Schabert’s view of “fictional biography”—a term often used synonymously with biofiction—as “engaged in the comprehension of real historical individuals by means of the sophisticated instruments of knowing and articulating knowledge that contemporary fiction offers.” Schabert, In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography (Tübingen: Francke, 1990), 4. 49. Lee, Biography, 3. 50. Donoghue, “Voicing the Nobodies,” 91. 51. Kevin Barry, “Positive Contamination in the Biographical Novel,” interviewed by Stuart Kane, in Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 24. 52. Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (Cham: Palgrave, 2020), 122. 53. Sara Alpern, ed., The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 5–7. 54. Lucia Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction, Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 26 (New York: Routledge, 2012), 153. 55. Stephanie Bird, Recasting Historical Women: Female Identity in German Biographical Fiction (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 1. 56. Ibid., 16. 57. Ibid., 17. 58. Ní Dhúill, Metabiography, 79. In this context, Kohlke proposes the category “biofictions of marginalized subjects.” Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction,” 9. Gender hierarchies are, of course, not the only principle governing the positioning of sousveillant subjects in biofiction. Like

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Richard Burton’s servant in Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds), such figures can equally be found in colonial contexts, where they may or may not articulate a postcolonial critique of their famous cosubjects. See Ní Dhúill, Metabiography, chapter 4, for a more detailed discussion of this point. 59. Stephanie Merritt, “Tragic Tale of the Latin Tutor’s Son,” review of Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, The Guardian, March 29, 2020, https:// w w w. t h e g u a r d i a n . c o m / b o o k s / 2 0 2 0 / m a r / 2 9 / hamnet-­by-­maggie-­o-­farrell-­review. 60. Ibid. 61. John Mullan, “A Brilliantly Observed Historical Novel,” review of Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, New Statesman, November 18, 2020, https://www.newstatesman.com/Maggie-­ofarrell-­hamnet-­review. 62. Beate Neumeier, “The Truth of Fiction—The Fiction of Truth: Judith Chernaik’s Mab’s Daughters,” in Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama, ed. Martin Middeke and Werner Huber (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), 108. 63. See also Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), xii–xiii. 64. Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed, 158. 65. See, for instance, Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 81. 66. Lackey, “Introduction: The Agency Aesthetics,” 8. 67. For a more detailed critique of Carlylean heroic discourse and its masculinism, see Ní Dhúill, Metabiography, 55–57. See also Liz Stanley, The Auto/ Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Jean Strouse, “Semiprivate Lives,” in Studies in Biography, ed. Daniel Aaron (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 113–29; Esther Marian, “Zum Zusammenhang von Biographie, Subjektivität und Geschlecht,” in Die Biographie—Zur Grundlegung ihrer Theorie, ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 169–98; Ann-Kathrin Reulecke, “‘Die Nase der Lady Hester’: Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Biographie und Geschlechterdifferenz,” in Biographie als Geschichte, ed. Hedwig Röckelein (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1993), 117–42. 68. Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth, 1981), 125. 69. Michael Lackey, Biofiction: An Introduction (Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2021), 54. 70. Ibid. 71. Michael Lackey, interview with Ebershoff, “The Biographical Novel,” 96. 72. See Lackey, Biofiction, 55.

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73. Marisol Morales-Ladrón, “Mary Morrissy’s The Rising of Bella Casey, or How Women Have Been Written Out of History,” Nordic Irish Studies 15, no. 1 (2016): 36. 74. Mary Morrissy, “On the Brink of the Absolutely,” interview by Loredana Salis, Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 6 (2016): 314. We came across this interview and the remarkable story behind Morrissy’s novel in Claire Palzer’s unpublished MA dissertation, which we gratefully acknowledge. 75. Michael Lackey, “The Bio-national Symbolism of Founding Biofictions: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 36, no. 1, 2020: 30, https:// doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1775983. 76. Ibid., 31. 77. Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings: A Novel (London: Virago Press, 1979/2002), 122. 78. Ibid., 147. 79. Peta Bowden and Jane Mummery, Understanding Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2009), 135. 80. Lackey, interview with Ebershoff, “The Biographical Novel,” 96. 81. Chapter 2 of Hermione Lee’s Biography: A Very Short Introduction offers a historical perspective on the notion of the “exemplary life.” 82. Linda Wagner-Martin, Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 21. What WagnerMartin demonstrates convincingly in this context is how popular biographies about female stars tend to focus on a woman’s love relationships and sexual exploits, thus directing attention away from her achievement and her path to stardom, which male quest plots typically outline. Ibid., 151ff. 83. So far, biofictions about Artemisia Gentileschi include Anna Banti’s Artemisia (1953), Alexandra Lapierre’s Artemisia: A Novel (1998), Susan Vreeland’s The Passion of Artemisia (2002), Joy McCullough’s Blood Water Paint (2018) and Linda Lafferty’s Fierce Dreamer (2020). 84. Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia UP, 1998), 9. For a more thorough discussion of Prosser’s argument, see Judith Halberstam, “Telling Tales: Brandon Teena, Billy Tipton, and Transgender Biography,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 15, no. 1 (2000): 62–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/0898957 5.2000.10815235. On the relevance of transsexual life narrative in a clinical context, see also Sandy Stone’s groundbreaking essay “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 1987/2006), 221–34; and Rachel Carroll, Transgender and the Literary

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Imagination: Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 129–31. See Annette Runte’s essay “Biographie als Patographie: Lebens- und Fallgeschichten zum Geschlechtswechsel,” in Spiegel und Maske: Konstruktionen biographischer Wahrheit, ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2006), 128–42—an early exploration of transgender life writing. 85. Jennifer Cooke, Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity, Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 137. 86. Quinn Eades, “Holograms, Hymens, and Horizons: A Transqueer Bodywriting,” Parallax 25, no. 2 (2019): 175, https://doi.org/10.108 0/13534645.2019.1607234. 87. Wendy Moffat, “The Narrative Case for Queer Biography,” in Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, ed. Robyn Warhol and Susan S.  Lanser (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2015), 219. 88. Donoghue, “Voicing the Nobodies,” 84. 89. Moffat, “Queer Biography,” 218. 90. Carroll, Transgender, 31. 91. Ibid. 92. Judith Butler, “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 621–36. 93. See, for instance, Carol Grant, “Regressive, Reductive and Harmful: A Trans Woman’s Take On Tom Hooper’s Embarrassing ‘Danish Girl,’” IndieWire.com, December 3, 2015, https://www.indiewire. com/2015/12/regressive-­reductive-­and-­harmful-­a-­trans-­womans-­take-­ on-­tom-­hoopers-­embarrassing-­danish-­girl-­213499/; Nick Duffy, “Masterful but The Danish Girl Is Still Flawed,” PinkNews, January 1, 2016, https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/01/01/review-­eddie-­ redmayne-­is-­masterful-­but-­the-­danish-­girl-­is-­still-­flawed/; Alex von Tunzelmann, “The Danish Girl Transforms Fascinating Truths Into Tasteful, Safe Drama,” The Guardian, January 13, 2016, https://www. theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/13/the-­d anish-­g irl-­t ransforms-­ fascinating-­truths-­into-­tasteful-­safe-­drama. 94. Alison Flood, “New Novel about Dr. James Barry Sparks Row over Victorian’s Gender Identity,” The Guardian, February 18, 2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/18/new-­n ovel-­a bout-­d r-­ james-­barry-­sparks-­row-­over-­victorians-­gender-­identity. 95. Ann Heilmann, Neo-/Victorian Biographilia & James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender & Transgenre (Cham: Palgrave, 2019), 7.

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96. Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield,  Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time (London: Oneworld, 2016). 97. For Barry as an intersex person, see Rachel Holmes, Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Dr. James Barry, Queen Victoria’s Preeminent Military Doctor (London: Viking, 2002). 98. Dallas Baker, “Queer Life Writing as Self-Making,” in Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice, ed. Donna Lee Brien and Quinn Eades (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2018), 149. 99. Carroll, Transgender, 7. 100. Ibid., 29. 101. Ibid., 102–03. 102. Richard Holmes, “The Proper Study?” in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, ed. Peter France and William St Clair (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 7–18. 103. Nicolaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography. Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press, 2008. 104. Some examples of such comparative metabiographical studies are Luke Ferretter on Plath biofictions (“A Fine White Flying Myth of One’s Own: Sylvia Plath in Fiction—A Review Essay,” Plath Profiles 2 [2009]: 278–98); Julia Novak on Nell Gwyn (“Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels”), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (“The Notable Woman in Fiction: Novelistic Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1, special issue on Biographical Fiction [2016]: 83–107, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1092789 ), and Clara Wieck-­ Schumann (“The (Re-)Making of Clara WieckSchumann: Celebrity and Gender in Biofiction,” in Search for the Real: Authenticity and the Construction of Celebrity, ed. Andrew J.  Sepie [Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2014], 97–112); Bethany Layne on Henry James (Henry James in Contemporary Fiction: The Real Thing [Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020]); Monica Latham on Virginia Woolf (Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives: The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama [London: Routledge, 2021]). Some studies that centre on textual afterlives of one individual integrate biography and biofiction in their analyses, signalling an awareness that these two forms perform similar work with regard to cultural memory—for instance, Heilmann on James Miranda Barry (Neo-/Victorian Biographilia); Sarah Churchwell on Marilyn Monroe (The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe [London: Granta, 2004]). 105. Ní Dhúill, Metabiography, 6. 106. Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction,” 11. 107. See, for instance, Katerina Bryant’s recent article about her work on Loretta La Pearl, the first woman clown in America. Bryant says: “It is my

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role as biographer to respect these gaps, enacting a refusal to ‘pretend’ that her life has not been erased, even as I am trying to speak to and remedy this. To the reader, I will highlight these gaps as well as the way I have selected and processed archival material.” Bryant, “Speculative Biography and Countering Archival Absences of Women Clowns in the Circus,” Life Writing 18, no. 1 (2021): 34–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/1448452 8.2021.1866777. 108. On this point, see Naomi Jacobs’s chapter on “Lies, Libel, and the Truth of Fiction,” in The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990). 109. Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10. 110. Kohlke and Gutleben, “Taking Biofictional Liberties,” 3. 111. For a discussion of the ventriloquism metaphor in biofiction criticism, see Kohlke and Gutleben, “Taking Biofictional Liberties,” 19–22. 112. For a discussion of the relevance of celebrity studies to life-writing research, see Sandra Mayer and Julia Novak’s edited volume Life-Writing and Celebrity: Exploring Intersections (London: Routledge, 2019). 113. Halberstam, “Telling Tales,” 62. 114. In her monograph on Barry, Ann Heilmann discusses the questionable ethics of biofictions as occasions for scopophilic pleasure. See Heilmann, Neo-/Victorian Biographilia, 19. 115. On this point, see, for instance, Hermione Lee, “Am I Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in Writing the Lives of Writers, ed. Warwick Gould and Thomas F. Staley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 224–37. 116. Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 1. 117. Ibid., 153. 118. Ibid., 160. 119. Heilmann, Neo-/Victorian Biographilia, 175. 120. Ibid. 121. Ansgar Nünning proposes “fictional metabiography” and “biographic metafiction” as “two postmodernist variants of biofiction.” Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies and Metautobiographies: Towards a Definition, Typology and Analysis of Self-Reflexive Hybrid Metagenres,” in Self-­Reflexivity in Literature Text & Theorie 6, ed. Werner Huber, Martin Middeke, and Hubert Zapf (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 202. According to his typology, fictional metabiographies “explore, revise and transform the conventions of the traditional biography …, but what they formally foreground are the problems of ‘life-writing’ and the forms of historical consciousness,” whereas biographic metafiction “explicitly thematizes and undermines the conven-

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tional boundaries between biography and fiction by deploying the devices of metafiction.” Ibid. 122. See Laura Savu, Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 9. 123. Latham, Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives, 225.

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———. “Feminist to Postfeminist: Contemporary Biofictions by and about Women Artists.” Angelaki 22, no. 1 (2017): 223–30. ———. “Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels: Biography and the Dictates of ‘Genre Literature.’” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 3 (Oxford UP, 2014): 373–90. ———. “The Notable Woman in Fiction: Novelistic Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no.1, special issue on Biographical Fiction (2016): 83–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1092789. ———. “The (Re-)Making of Clara Wieck-Schumann: Celebrity and Gender in Biofiction.” In Search for the Real: Authenticity and the Construction of Celebrity, edited by Andrew J.  Sepie, 97–112. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2014. Nünning, Ansgar. “Fictional Metabiographies and Metautobiographies: Towards a Definition, Typology and Analysis of Self-Reflexive Hybrid Metagenres.” In Self-Reflexivity in Literature, Text & Theorie 6, edited by Werner Huber, Martin Middeke, and Hubert Zapf, 195–209. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. ———. “Von der fiktionalen Historie zur metahistoriographischen Fiktion: Bausteine für eine narratologische und funktionsgeschichtliche Theorie, Typologie und Geschichte des postmodernen historischen Romans.” In Literatur und Geschichte: Ein Kompendium zu ihrem Verhältnis von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Daniel Fulda and Silvia Serena Tschopp, 540–69. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002. O’Farrell, Maggie. Hamnet. London: Tinder Press, 2020. Palzer, Claire. “Re-telling the Easter Rising: Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction and the 1916 Rebellion.” Master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2018. Parini, Jay. “Reflections on Biographical Fiction.” In Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, edited by Michael Lackey, 205–16. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Parker, Derek. Nell Gwyn. Stroud: Sutton, 2000. Perry, Sarah. The Essex Serpent. London: Serpent’s Tale, 2016. Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New  York: Columbia UP, 1998. Ramsdell, Kristin. Romance Fiction: A Guide to the Genre. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1999. Reulecke, Anne-Kathrin. “‘Die Nase der Lady Hester’: Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Biographie und Geschlechterdifferenz.” In Biographie als Geschichte, edited by Hedwig Röckelein, 117–42. Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1993. Roach, Catherine. “Getting a Good Man to Love: Popular Romance Fiction and the Problem of Patriarchy.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–15.

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Rose, June. The Perfect Gentleman: The Remarkable Life of Dr James Miranda Barry, the Woman Who Served as an Officer in the British Army from 1813 to 1859. London: Hutchinson, 1977. Rousselot, Elodie, ed. Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-historical Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Runte, Annette. “Biographie als Patographie: Lebens- und Fallgeschichten zum Geschlechtswechsel.” In Spiegel und Maske: Konstruktionen biographischer Wahrheit, edited by Bernhard Fetz and Hannes Schweiger, 128–42. Vienna: Zsolnay, 2006. Rupke, Nicolaas A. Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008. Saunders, Max. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Savu, Laura. Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009. Schabert, Ina. In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography. Tübingen: Francke, 1990. Stanley, Liz. The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/ Biography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Stone, Sandy. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 221–34. New York: Routledge, 1987/2006. Strouse, Jean. “Semiprivate Lives.” In Studies in Biography, edited by Daniel Aaron, 113–29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Trojanow, Ilija. Der Weltensammler: Roman. München: Hanser, 2006. Von Tunzelmann, Alex. “The Danish Girl Transforms Fascinating Truths into Tasteful, Safe Drama.” The Guardian, January 13, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/13/the-­d anish-­g irl­transforms-­fascinating-­truths-­into-­tasteful-­safe-­drama. Vreeland, Susan. The Passion of Artemisia. London: Review, 2002. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Woolf, Virginia. “The Art of Biography.” In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, 119–26. London: Hogarth, 1981.

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Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

PART I

Recovery, Revision, Ventriloquism: Imagining Historical Women

CHAPTER 2

“Everything Is Out of Place”: Virginia Woolf, Women, and (Meta-)Historical Biofiction Diana Wallace

“[T]he truth is that when we write of a woman,” remarks Virginia Woolf in Orlando: A Biography (1928), “everything is out of place—culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does with a man.”1 Orlando is a difficult text to categorise—a historical novel which is also a (thinly disguised) biography of a living person (its dedicatee Vita Sackville-­West) and which traces its protagonist across several centuries, from England to Constantinople, and, most famously, a change from male to female, as well as being an iconoclastic history of (English) literature. Woolf’s parenthetical aside uses a spatial metaphor—the notion of being “out of place”—to foreground the gendered patterns which dominate traditional prose

This chapter was originally delivered as a keynote lecture at the Herstory Re-Imagined Conference at King’s College, London, 16–17 December 2019. I would like to thank the organisers for allowing me to rework it for inclusion here. D. Wallace (*) University of South Wales, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_2

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narratives. What Woolf is saying here is that traditional narrative structures (whether fiction, biography, or history), with their linear progression towards climactic moments, do not work for women. Women she suggests, need  new narrative structures. We also need meta-narratives which draw our attention to the constructed nature of all narratives and the ways in which they construct us (now as much as in the 1920s). As a meta-historical biofiction,2 Orlando offers a trialectical space which brings together biography, historiography, and fiction to develop some of Woolf’s most imaginative and radical thinking about gender and narrative. While there are debates about nomenclature, it is important to remember that “biographical historical fiction” or “biofiction”—fictional life-­ writing about real historical subjects—is not a new form. Despite the recent boom, the roots of this form go back to and are entangled with the beginnings of historical fiction: Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783–5), about the imagined twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots, is a form of biographical fiction, as is Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810), about William Wallace (both of which precede Walter Scott’s Waverley [1814], so often wrongly seen as the first historical novel), as is Scott’s own Kenilworth (1821) about Amy Robsart, or Mary Shelley’s The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830). The early twentieth century is a particularly rich period for experimental historical biofictions in Britain: examples include Ford Madox Ford’s trilogy The Fifth Queen (1907–8), about Katherine Howard, Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard (1933), and Robert Graves’s Claudius novels. In the mid-twentieth century, biographical historical fictions were one of the major forms of women’s writing and reading (as Alison Light has shown3); including the work of Margaret Irwin (most famously Young Bess [1944]), Anya Seton, Norah Lofts, and the extraordinarily prolific Jean Plaidy. It is not so much that biofiction is a new literary form, then, as that it has only recently gained a literary credibility and critical currency, in part by severing its links with historical fiction. In “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel” (2016), Michael Lackey argues that the flourishing of biofiction is primarily a late twentieth-century development which is closely linked to postmodern theories about history and narrative and has now superseded historical fiction.4 In The American Biographical Novel (2016), Lackey acknowledges an earlier boom in biographical fiction in the 1930s, which he sees as short-lived because of the Marxist critic Georg Lukács’s denigration of the form in The Historical Novel (1937). He cites 1999 when Michael Cunningham’s The Hours

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(1998) and Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter (1998) were both up for the Pulitzer Prize as the decisive turning point which “made the literary establishment recognise this genre of fiction as legitimate.”5 In his introduction to Biographical Fiction: A Reader (2017), Lackey outlines what he sees as a tussle over dis/ownership of biofiction: one faction, following Lukács, rejects it as a bastardised version (or subgenre) of historical fiction, while another, exemplified by Paul Murray Kendall, denounces it as a form of biography which fails because it is “imaginary.”6 Arguing that the life-­ writing tradition has dominated criticism so far, Lackey presents his anthology as “symbolising the official arrival of biofiction, which has finally emancipated itself from both historical fiction and life writing and has charted a narrative space uniquely its own.”7 It is the gendering of this new legitimacy for biographical fiction in both America and Britain which is interesting. Popular biographical novels about women by women like Irwin, Seton, Lofts, Plaidy, and, later, Philippa Gregory appear to be “out of place” in the “narrative space” which is being carved out for the genre. Instead, a focus on male writers and/or subjects has been as much a part of the legitimising process as postmodern theories: in addition to Cunningham and Banks, key milestones in Britain are Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983); Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991–5), about the First World War poets; two novels about Henry James—Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author (both 2004);8 and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy (2009, 2012, 2020), about Thomas Cromwell. It is notable, however, that most of these novels have been discussed primarily as historical fiction rather than biofiction. The “narrative space” that Lackey carves out in The American Biographical Novel is specifically American (but also predominantly male).9 It is puzzling, therefore, that he spends four pages of the introduction explaining why Woolf’s Orlando and Flush (1933), both of which are explicitly subtitled A Biography, are not “biographical novels” but historical novels; Orlando because “it does not name its protagonist after an actual historical person,” and Flush because it “focuses mainly on its canine hero” as a Lukácisan “historical-social type,” rather than on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who is Woolf’s “actual historical personage.”10 Drawing on Woolf’s “The Art of Biography” (1939) and her letters about Roger Fry (1940), Lackey concludes that Woolf “could not imagine her way to the biographical novel because she could not allow herself to take the liberty of altering facts about an actual person in order to convert him or her

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into a literary symbol.”11 Lackey repeats this assertion in his contributions to a special edition of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany on Woolf and biofiction. The editors’ preamble notes: “That Woolf would become the central figure in contemporary biographical novels makes sense since many of her aesthetic innovations set the stage for what would evolve into the contemporary biographical novel. But, ironically, Woolf could not imagine her way to the aesthetic form.”12 In his own essay, Lackey argues that Woolf “failed to understand that biographical novelists use rather than represent their subjects.”13 This reading of Woolf’s work is very different from that in Max Saunders’s Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (2010). Saunders sensitively teases out the complex implications of Woolf’s engagement with life writing in Orlando and Flush, calling her work “the most sustained and diverse exploration of the relation between fiction and auto/biography.”14 In contrast, the effect of Lackey’s argument is that Woolf’s own fiction is set aside as a “failure” of imagination while the use of her as a character in fiction is validated. The taxonomical imperative in literary criticism frequently leads to binary judgements about whether a text “is”/“is not” historical fiction or biofiction (or whatever genre is under discussion). Such endeavours to categorise texts have historically tended to exclude women’s work. Lackey’s attempt to delineate a unique “narrative space” for biofiction is laudable (as is his attention to race and gender in his work on Hurston and other women writers elsewhere). But this particular instance still functions through the exclusion of novels by a woman (Woolf) as not “biographical fiction.” Moreover, Lackey’s original argument that biographical fiction has supplanted the historical novel is based on a definition of historical fiction which comes from Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937),15 a text which discusses no novels by women at all. As Woolf reminds us, “when we write of a woman … the accent never falls where it does with a man.” When theorising a genre, we need to be mindful of the gendered frames of reference which may already be in place in earlier theories so as to avoid replicating patterns which exclude certain kinds of texts. Thomas Carlyle famously argued in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841) that “the History of the world is but the biography of great men.”16 For women who have been erased from traditional historiography and biography by precisely that kind of androcentric conceptualisation, it has been historical fiction, including historical biofiction, that has allowed us to re-­ imagine women’s lives (“great” and “obscure”) within history. Fiction very often, is where women do their history.

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In thinking about the relationship between biography, historiography, and fiction here, I start, firstly, by discussing the theorisation of historical biofiction. Secondly, I discuss Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and, more briefly, Flush as meta-historical biofictions. Thirdly, I focus on what has become a biofictional genre in its own right: novels which take Virginia Woolf herself as a character.



“About the Dead”: Theorising Historical Biofictions

Genres, Derrida suggests, are never pure: it is “impossible not to mix genres.”17 Rather than separating out biofiction as a new genre, it seems more fruitful to think about how theories of historical fiction and life-­ writing can be brought together to read biofictional texts. Recent theories of the historical novel, for instance, have moved well beyond Lukács to acknowledge the plurality and diversity of this form.18 My argument here is that it is not a question of either/or but both, or rather, that we need to keep all three elements—fiction/biography/historiography—closely in view when discussing biofiction. This is partly because, as I shall argue, the majority of biographical novels are also historical novels; that is, they are set in the past. As Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee remarks in Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing (2005): “Most (though not all) biographies are about the dead.”19 She also quotes Andrew Bennett, writing about Percy Bysshe Shelley, who says: “What we do with dead bodies is different from what we do with live ones.”20 In one sense, this is so obvious that it hardly needs stating. Like biographies, biographical novels are usually “about the dead” because writing a novel about someone who is still alive brings up moral, ethical, and legal issues, particularly problems of censorship and of libel. Woolf herself confronted these issues when she wrote a biography of Roger Fry soon after he died. It is worth thinking about how this chimes with the ways in which we define historical fiction. Broadly, this is fiction set in the past but how far back is “the past”? Scott’s subtitle to Waverley, “Tis Sixty Years Since,” is often taken as a guideline. Avrom Fleishman suggests: “Most novels set in the past—beyond an arbitrary number of years, say 40–60 (two generations)—are liable to be considered historical.”21 Given the “arbitrary” nature of any number, another defining factor is that historical fiction is

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based on research rather than the lived experience of the author. If “sixty years since” is taken as a rough guideline, however, it provides a useful way of thinking about when it becomes possible to write a biographical novel about someone. The timing of the mini-boom in novels about Virginia Woolf fits precisely this model; Cunningham’s The Hours was published in 1998, fifty-seven years after Woolf’s death in 1941. In The Historical Novel, Lukács deplored the tendency towards biography in the modern historical novel.22 For Lukács, what makes a novel “historical” is “the derivation of the individuality of the characters from the historical peculiarity of the age,”23 that is, how people are shaped by their historical moment. For him the “classical historical novel” (epitomised by Waverley) was “anti-biographical.”24 Its task was to invent a middle-­of the-road protagonist while the “world-historical individual” who embodies the great dialectical conflicts of history should remain a minor character.25 If the world-historical individual’s life becomes the central concern, Lukács argues, it weakens the novel: We may generalise this weakness of the biographical form of the [historical novel] by saying that the personal, the purely psychological and biographical acquire a disproportionate breadth, a false preponderance. As a result, the great driving forces of history are neglected. They are presented in all too summary a fashion and relate only biographically to the person at the centre.26

As noted above, Lukács’s theorisation is based on an all-male sample of novels and his primary interest is in the realist historical novel. Lukács’s influence is, in part, why the modernist historical novel has been so neglected. Critics of the historical novel have tended to move swiftly over the modernist period—pausing only to note the existence of Orlando as what Fleishman calls a “lone jeu-d’espirit”27—and focus on the postmodern novel. Saunders’s Self Impression shows how important modernism is to thinking about life-writing, but we do not as yet have a similar theorisation of modernist historical fiction.28 My argument here is that we need to consider the historical novel (particularly the modernist historical novel, which has close affinities with the “new biography” developed by Lytton Strachey) not as something which has been supplanted by the biographical novel but as part of the same tradition. Here I want to move from thinking in terms of either/or binary oppositions (historiography/biography, fact/fiction, biofiction/historical fiction) to thinking in terms of a trialectic (a term borrowed from cultural

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geography) which brings together historiography, biography, and fiction and holds each in view. Lukács, drawing on the Hegelian tradition, conceptualises history as a dialectical process; that is, as a conflict between two “great driving forces” which produces a synthesis. As he sees it, Scott’s novels are exemplary because they represent history as a dialectical conflict between social forces (English Hanoverians/Scottish Jacobins in Waverley) which resolves itself into “a glorious ‘middle way’”29 which represents progress. In contrast to this dialectic (which is often gendered through the use of a marriage ending to represent national union in Scott’s novels), the concept of the trialectic as theorised by Edward W. Soja, drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, is especially suggestive. Although Lefebvre’s concern is primarily with the spatial, his work offers a critique of the Western tendency to think in terms of either/or dualities through the introduction of a third destabilising term: “Reflexive thought and hence philosophy has for a long time accentuated dyads,” Lefebvre argues, “[But] is there ever a relation only between two terms …? One always has Three. There is always the Other.”30 Soja draws on the work of Foucault to make explicit an over-privileging of the historical in Western thought which has, he argues, “silenced and subsumed the potentially equivalent powers of creative spatial thought.”31 He reads the work of Hayden White as an example of such “‘under-spatialised’ historicism.”32 In contrast, Lefebvre’s transdisciplinary project “was to introject a third dimension to the dually privileged dynamics of historicality and sociality” and thus produce a “rebalanced trialectic of spatiality-historicality-­ sociality.”33 The trialectic, which Soja reappropriates to develop his critical strategy of “Thirding-as-Othering,” “is not just a triple dialectic but also a mode of dialectical reasoning that is more inherently spatial than the conventional temporally defined dialectics of Hegel or Marx.”34 This “critical thirding-as-Othering” is “the first and most important step in transforming the categorical and closed logic of either/or to the dialectically open logic of both/and also.”35 In contrast to the temporally defined logic of Lukács’s Hegelian dialectic (thesis/antithesis/synthesis), the trialectic opens up a “time-space or geohistory of radical openness.”36 Finally, Soja’s creative re-reading begins with a “spatialised biography” of Lefebvre himself which offers a model for thinking about biography as well as historiography.37 The trialectic, then, offers us a way of conceptualising a (triangular) narrative space of “both/and also …” in which three elements (fiction/ historiography/biography) and their creative intersections can be held in

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balance. While I am repurposing the notion of the trialectic here, I want to retain Soja’s attention to the importance of spatiality as well as historicality. As Franco Moretti has argued, “Space is not the ‘outside’ of narrative, … but an internal force, that shapes it from within.”38 This allows us to keep in sight Woolf’s attention to the spatial element of narrative: “when we write of a woman everything is out of place.”

Orlando and Flush as (Meta-)Historical Biofictions Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Flush, two (meta-)historical biofictions, offer some of her most extensive and original thinking about the possibilities of a narrative space which can bring together biography, historiography, and fiction. Lackey’s argument that Woolf “could not imagine her way to the biographical novel,” is based on a partial reading of her 1939 essay “The Art of Biography”: “ultimately,” he writes, “Woolf concludes that this ‘combination proved unworkable,’ because ‘fact and fiction refused to mix.’ As Woolf claims, the ‘novelist is free’ to create while ‘the biographer is tied’ to facts.”39 Drawing on her correspondence about Roger Fry, he concludes that, for Woolf, the choice between fiction and biography is an “either/or choice” because they are “separate and distinct.”40 In fact, Woolf’s 1939 essay, like “The New Biography” (1927), is far more exploratory and trialectical than this acknowledges. In both essays, Woolf is probing the possibilities of biography through an engagement with specific texts: in the first, Harold Nicolson’s Some People (1927) and, in the second, Lytton Strachey’s work. The first section of “The Art of Biography” takes the form of an imagined argument with “the biographer” (who is male). The assertion that “[t]he novelist is free; the biographer is tied” is actually “the biographer’s” putative explanation of the restrictions which prevent biography becoming an art.41 On a superficial reading this appears to endorse a contention in “The New Biography,” which famously uses the metaphor of a “marriage” of granite (representing the truth of facts) and rainbow (representing the truth of personality) to describe the difficulties of fusing fact and fiction, which appears to lead to the assertion: “Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.”42 However, as Monica Latham notes, this actually represents the “imaginary outcry” of “Woolf’s common reader.”43 Having assessed the state of Victorian biography, Latham suggests, Woolf goes on to pioneer a “new genre … that

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shows that imagination can successfully serve two masters.” Saunders usefully reads this essay as “the stirrings of a new engagement with auto/ biografiction.”44 I would, however, caveat these conclusions by noting that the master-servant metaphor Woolf uses here should give us pause. Woolf is interested in the possibilities signalled by Nicolson’s Some People, which, she thinks, is partially successful in blending the reality of truth with the freedom/artistry of fiction: the “method” of the biographer who can “present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality … remains to be discovered,” Woolf concludes, but Nicolson “with his mixture of biography and autobiography, of fact and fiction … waves his hand airily in a possible direction.”45 Woolf is not saying that fact and fiction cannot be combined but that it has not yet been done successfully. When she returns to the subject in “The Art of Biography,” she does argue that Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex is a failure (in comparison with his Queen Victoria), because “fact and fiction refused to mix.”46 But this is a carefully reasoned judgement on one book, and she moves on to interrogate different kinds of “fact” in language which echoes Orlando. Firstly, she suggests that biographical facts are not like the facts of science—once they are discovered always the same. They are subject to changes of opinion; opinions change as time changes …. The accent on sex has changed within living memory … Many of the old chapter headings—life at college, marriage, career—are shown to be very arbitrary and artificial distinctions.47

History, in the sense of events through time, is crucial here: “Facts” are neither immutable as granite nor inherently linear. (This may have been one of the things Woolf liked about Nicolson’s Some People, which opens with a misremembered event.) The echo of her comment in Orlando— “everything is out of place … the accent never falls where it does with a man”—is clear here. But her subsequent comment that the biographer “must be prepared to admit contradictory versions of the same face,”48 echoes another important passage in Orlando: For [Orlando] had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.49

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This thinking is reflected in Roger Fry, suggesting that the two texts are closer than we might at first assume. From the vantage point of 1939, she notes, it is difficult to realise what “violent emotions” were aroused by Fry’s 1910 exhibition of post-Impressionist art: “The pictures are the same; it is the public that has changed.”50 Likewise, she emphasises Fry’s plurality of identity—“Roger Fry was a man who lived many lives.”51 Biography, Woolf concludes in 1939, “is only at the beginning of its career” but the biographer can give us “much more than the facts”: “He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.”52 “Facts,” then, are contingent upon time and space, from when and where we (“the public”) see them. Recognising this is itself a creative act. Based on a framework of “creative facts,” Woolf’s Orlando famously flouts and thereby exposes the rules of fiction, biography, and historiography. As Saunders notes, it “parodies not just a single mode of biographical or historical writing but just about every mode from the Renaissance to the present day.”53 Woolf constructs an implied (male) biographer54 to show how Orlando’s unconventional life and multiple selves repeatedly “discompose” his attempts to tell her story according to the traditional conventions: But (here another self came skipping over the top of her mind like the beam from a lighthouse). Fame! (She laughed.) Fame! Seven editions. A prize. Photographs in the evening paper (here she alluded to the “Oak Tree” and “The Burdett Coutts” Memorial Prize which she had won and we must snatch this space to remark how discomposing it is for her biographer that this culmination to which the whole book moved, this peroration with which the book was to end, should be dashed from us on a laugh casually like this; but the truth is that when we write of a woman, everything is out of place— culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does with a man).55

Both Saunders and Cooley read Orlando as metabiography.56 But Woolf’s other key technique is to flout the rules of historiography and realist historical fiction by moving Orlando “out of place” in both time (through several centuries) and space (from England to Turkey). As Moretti argues, in novels “what happens depends a lot on where it happens.”57 It is in Constantinople, meeting place of East and West, that Woolf can transform “he” into “she.”

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Although Orlando calls itself a biography, Woolf’s parodic and seemingly random “Preface” acknowledges debts to “Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater.”58 The reference to Lord Macaulay should alert us to the way in which she satirises historiography through her parody of the “spirit of the age.” “The perfect historian,” Macaulay argued, “is he [sic] in whose work the character and spirit of the age is exhibited in miniature.”59 In Woolf’s novel, the “Spirit of the Age” becomes a captious and bullying censor in the Victorian period: Orlando is “forced to yield completely and submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.”60 The inclusion of Scott is equally important in situating Orlando in a tradition of historical fiction to which Woolf is indebted (her parents loved Scott’s novels and Woolf knew his work well) but which she is parodying (not least in including the preface). What Woolf is exploring here is what Lukács called “the derivation of the individuality of the characters from the historical peculiarity of the age,”61 as expressed in the historical novel. If Woolf was explicit in her desire to “revolutionise biography in a night”62 she is also revolutionising historiography through (historical) fiction. In parodying and hybridising genres, Woolf’s trialectical meta-fiction repeatedly draws attention to the triple set of narrative conventions it exposes as constructs which exclude women. Perhaps Orlando’s most radical subversion of the conventions of biography and the historical novel is that it is  not “about the dead.” It is a “biography”63 of a living woman, Vita Sackville-West, to whom it is dedicated and with whom Woolf was in love.64 As Nigel Nicolson’s notes show, the novel is based closely on Sackville-West: Orlando’s appearance, his clumsiness, perfect French, and methodicalness are based on Sackville-­ West, for instance, and Nicolson identifies Clorinda with Rosamond Grosvenor, Sasha with Violet Trefusis, noting as well that Vita really did have a spaniel called Pippin, and so on.65 There is a heavy-handed literalness to Nicolson’s notes but they remind us that this fantastic novel has its roots in the “creative facts” of Sackville-West’s life, however displaced in time and space. Orlando may not name its protagonist after “an actual historical person”66 but the first edition made a visual and (in the light of the trial of The Well of Loneliness), potentially scandalous identification by including photographs of Sackville-West as illustrations of Orlando “on her return to England,” “about the year 1840,” and at “the present time.”67 These playfully anachronistic photographs force the novel out of the historical or

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the allegorical and into the realm of the contemporary.68 They are juxtaposed with reproductions of portraits of Sackville-West’s ancestors, representing Orlando at earlier junctures.69 The family likeness thus foregrounded suggests a continuity of human personality through history as well as a similarity between the sexes which remains visible despite variations of historical costume. Woolf’s Orlando is the same person as both man and woman—but as a woman she is treated very differently, hemmed in by petticoats and conventions, and forced to bow to the narrative structures dictated by the “spirit of the age” and take a husband. As a meta-­historical novel, Orlando shows how individuals are shaped by the narratives of their historical moment and exposes gender itself as a construct, a fiction. If we read Orlando in relation to Flush, Woolf’s “biography” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, it looks less like a “lone jeu-d’espirit” and more like a serious attempt to re-imagine both biography and history through meta-fiction.70 Originally conceived as a “joke on Lytton [Strachey]—to parody him,”71 Flush includes the scholarly paraphernalia of the typical biography: endnotes (including a mini-life of Barrett Browning’s maid Lily Wilson), and a list of “Authorities.” By dis-placing the point of view to dog’s eye-level, it offers us a history from below which “defamiliarises the Victorian period.”72 Through the parallels between Flush and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, it offers an allegory of women’s position outside/below mainstream history. Moreover, Flush extends Woolf’s debunking of Victorian historiography in an endnote which notes that the “whole question of dogs’ relation to the spirit of the age, whether it is possible to call one dog Elizabethan, another Augustan, another Victorian … deserves a fuller discussion than can be given here.”73 Both women and dogs are “out of place” in mainstream history. Lackey is right to argue that Flush himself embodies a Lukácsian “historical-social type.” But the key point is that Flush is a parody of what Lukács calls Scott’s “middle-of the road” protagonist, the “more or less mediocre Englishman” typified by Waverley, through whose point of view we see the great crises and personages of history.74 If we read Flush trialectically, it is, like Orlando, a meta-historical biofiction which reminds us that “facts” change depending on the time and place from which we see them. Both novels suggest that to represent women’s lives we need meta-­ narratives which actively draw our attention to the constructed nature of all narratives (whether of fiction, biography, or history). By writing trialectically, Woolf does not subscribe to an “either/or choice” between (historical) fiction and biography but is able to hold all three narrative

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modes—historiography/biography/fiction—in a fluid and creative tension which enables her to move things “out of place.” Fiction becomes the narrative space through which she interrogates historiography and biography—and vice versa.



“Sixty Years Since”: Woolf’s “Bogey”?

Sixty years on, Woolf herself is being re-imagined in historical biofiction in ways which illustrate her own understanding that biographical “facts” “are subject to changes of opinion” but which also suggest that she has (to borrow her own metaphor) replaced Milton as the “bogey” with whom (women) writers must now reckon.75 Monica Latham’s Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives: The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (2021) discusses twenty-five bioplays and biographical novels, ranging from the 1970s to 2019.76 As Latham shows, these texts evidence the place Woolf has come to occupy in our literary imaginary. Woolf has become a modern myth, an “icon,” as Brenda Silver indicates,77 her famous profile endlessly reproduced on mugs, bags, film posters. But Woolf is also disputed territory. In a 2002 essay, for example, Theodore Dalrymple argued that Three Guineas would have been better titled “How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved,” concluding: “Had Woolf survived to our time … she would at least have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind—shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal—had triumphed among the elites of the western world.”78 The 2003 film of The Hours polarised reactions further. In Britain, Philip Hensher argued that Woolf’s “truly terrible” novels (“inept, ugly, fatuous, badly written and revoltingly self-indulgent”) were “responsible for putting more people off modern literature than anything else.”79 There’s something excessive— even hysterical—about Dalrymple and Hensher’s desire to put Woolf “in her place,” that is to squash her pretensions as a writer. In contrast, Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee is sensitive to how Woolf’s reputation has changed: “Virginia Woolf’s story is reformulated by each generation,” she reminds us.80 The highbrow authoress of the 1930s was replaced by the frigid, mentally fragile Woolf of Quentin Bell’s 1973 biography, which was in turn challenged by feminist critics who re-­ read Woolf as a subversive political writer.81 Lee’s own biography itself marks a turning point. Biofictions of Woolf, as Latham acknowledges, have been “largely determined by how the auto/biographical material

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about Woolf has been disseminated through time.”82 This means that images of Woolf offer us, in Silver’s words, “vivid multifaceted images of our own ever-changing faces, cultures and histories: our desires and fears.”83 Biofictions, like any historical fictions, tell us more about our own time than about the time in which they are set. So, what do these historical biofictions about Woolf tell us? Here I want to focus primarily on three novels—Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), Claire Morgan’s A Book for All and None (2011), and Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014), with briefer references to two others. All these novels emerge from the writers’ knowledge of, and respect for, Woolf’s writing. They respond to Woolf’s life and work by using Woolfian narrative tools (interiority, free indirect discourse, shifts in focalisation) but within the context of postmodernism. (Latham suggests that biofiction is the postmodern genre par excellence.84) My interest here is in how they blend historiography, biography, and fiction and particularly how they repeat the techniques in Orlando and Flush by moving Woolf and/or her characters out of place in space and/or time. They re-­ locate her to America or Wales, resurrect Woolf in the twenty-first century, or move the point of view sideways to another figure. These novels reflect and contest views of Woolf which are shaped by contemporaneous attitudes to gender, class, art, mental illness, and sexuality. Latham, like Lackey, regards Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) as marking a “turning point.”85 Cunningham’s novel opens with a prologue, narrated in the present tense, which describes Woolf in 1941 walking to the river and drowning. Using a triptych form, it then interleaves accounts of three single days in the lives of three women: Clarissa Vaughan, a 1990s New Yorker who is throwing a party for her friend, the writer Richard who is dying from AIDS; Mrs Brown, a young mother in 1949 whose son Richie becomes the adult Richard; and Woolf herself writing Mrs Dalloway in Richmond in 1923.86 This tripartite structure, paralleling past and present, allows Cunningham to map how what Woolf called “the accent on sex” has shifted since the 1920s. Cunningham’s Clarissa Vaughan is bisexual, had an affair with Richard Brown, has a daughter, and now lives with her partner Sally. Richard Brown (the Septimus Warren Smith figure) is a prize-winning gay writer, but his sanity is threatened by the medication he is taking. He kills himself on the eve of Clarissa’s party. Cunningham lived through the AIDS epidemic in New York, losing friends to the disease. He has said, “If you survive a war or an epidemic, your sense of life and the world is changed.”87 This perhaps more than anything shapes the book

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and marks it as being of its moment in time. The effect of the prologue is that the novel becomes teleological, driven by an image of Woolf as suicide-to-be. In writing Mrs Dalloway, Cunningham’s Woolf is mainly concerned with whether Clarissa will kill herself although her final decision is that “someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die.”88 Likewise, Mrs Brown’s day circles around the question of suicide, and in Richard’s own book his fictionalised mother does kill herself. The effect, oddly, is to erase the women in the book as creative beings and to foreground the male writer, Richard, as the “genius.” Woolf’s fragile mental state and suicide shape some of our most dominant narratives about her, illustrated by two other biofictions. A “mock biography” modelled on Flush, Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1991), for instance, presents Woolf as “a fragile mind in a fragile body.”89 Nunez parallels Mitz and Woolf: “Two nervous, delicate, wary females, one as relentlessly curious as the other. Both in love with Leonard.”90 Indeed, it is Leonard, besieged by unstable females and undertaking a dangerous trip to Hitler’s Germany, who emerges as the heroic figure here. The novel ends with Mitz’s death on Christmas Day 1938, “the last year of peace,”91 implicitly foreshadowing Woolf’s own death during the war. Similarly, Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia (2008), despite being told in the present tense first person by Vanessa Bell, is shaped by Woolf’s suicide. Bethany Layne points out how Sellers challenges the “dualisms”—carnal/intellectual, painter/writer, mother/barren, sane/insane—which have dominated accounts of the sisters, instead emphasising their similarities, as well as hinting at Woolf’s lesbianism.92 Nevertheless, Woolf’s drowning is foreshadowed by a scene where Vanessa walks into the river after Duncan Grant has left her. Later, Bell imaginatively shares Woolf’s death: “I feel the paralysing cold as you wade in … the river drags us under. This time I cannot escape.” 93 The sisters merge, as if Bell too is trapped in the narrative associated with her sister’s death. This narrative—the fact that “everyone has concentrated on Woolf as the woman who killed herself”—is critiqued in Morgan’s A Book for All and None.94 Constructed as two parallel narratives (reminiscent of A.S.  Byatt’s Possession (1990)), Morgan’s novel uses the present-day researches of two academics, Raymond Greatorex (a Nietzsche scholar), and Beatrice Kopus (a Woolf scholar married to construction tycoon Walter Cronk), to trace a link in the past between Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Lou von Salomé. Shifting the geographical locus to Wales, Morgan has Beatrice retrace the then Virginia Stephen’s visits to Manorbier,

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Pembrokeshire, in 1908–9, when she was writing her first novel, The Voyage Out, to research a hunch that the lighthouse there was the inspiration for Woolf’s eponymous novel. In contrast to the “awful fascination with [Woolf’s] death, with the tragic nature of her existence, as though everything had mapped her out for that,” Beatrice foregrounds the “life” in Woolf: “She’s full of drive and optimism … a powerful woman. She’s more in charge of her own fate than people give her credit for.”95 What Beatrice discovers is that the young Virginia Stephen had a baby, given up for adoption, as a result of an affair with the illegitimate son of Nietzsche and von Salomé. The novel ends with a scene in which Virginia Stephen and Stephan von Salomé row out to the lighthouse and make love. A highly self-reflexive novel, A Book for All and None contains enough clues for us to read it as meta-fiction. The title invokes Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883), while the prologue, a letter addressed to “Schklovsky,” seems to direct us to the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky, best known for his concept of defamiliarisation (or estrangement), itself a kind of moving “out of place” in order to see something afresh. Morgan states that, inspired by her Nietzschean epigraph, she has taken “enormous liberties” with the facts of Woolf’s life in order to create a “‘what if’ world”: to “transform every ‘It was’ into ‘Thus would I have it!’” is, she suggests, “perhaps, a central impulse in the creation of fiction.”96 “Perhaps”—but Morgan’s final scene (despite Beatrice’s rejection of marriage and motherhood) reinserts Woolf into exactly the heterosexual romance plot which Woolf critiqued in Orlando. The desire to give the “Famously chaste, traumatised” Woolf, as Maggie Gee calls her in Virginia Woolf in Manhattan,97 a fulfilling heterosexual sexual experience, or a baby, is as problematic as the “fragile suicide” narrative. Gee’s novel transports Woolf to twenty-first century Manhattan, resurrecting her in the New York Public Library, where the novelist Angela Lamb is reading Woolf’s manuscripts in preparation for a conference lecture in Istanbul. This is a brave move given that in 1997 Gee had lambasted writers who turned to the past for their subject matter, asserting that it was “Easier to cling on to the coat-tails of fact, to write historical reconstructions, or novelized biographies, or fictional autobiographies.”98 In fact, by dis-placing Woolf into present-day America, Gee ensures that “nobody can think it is the real Virginia Woolf. She will obviously be my construction.”99 Alternating three points of view (Angela, Woolf, and Angela’s daughter Gerda), Virginia Woolf in Manhattan culminates in Woolf’s appearance at “her” conference in Istanbul.100 In her

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“Acknowledgments,” Gee characterises her novel as a “twenty-­ first-­ century love letter as well as an act of cheek, an attempt not to be afraid of Virginia Woolf.”101 “[T]his Virginia,” she acknowledges, “is a phantasm, one of Thackeray’s fiction ‘puppets,’ always and only my own.” 102 Gee’s dis-placement of “Virginia Woolf” in time and space self-­ consciously makes visible what is less obvious in many biofictions set in Woolf’s own time: the “constructed” nature of the character of the author. Despite this, Gee, like Morgan, reinserts Woolf into the heterosexual romance plot. Her “Acknowledgements” note one passage in particular, on “pages 437–438,” as “a complete invention.”103 This passage alternates Woolf’s memories of a failed attempt at sex with Leonard with the resurrected Woolf’s sexual encounter in Istanbul with a Turkish man, Ahmet, which leads to successful climax: “In a split second, the man was inside me, I was the sand as the sea pressed in, he entered me as the waves rolled onwards.”104 Gee does triangulate this passage with other possibilities. It is framed by Angela’s speculations, sparked by the sight of a Muslim maid and a man’s shoe in Virginia’s room, as to what has occurred in the night. Angela reaches “a mind-boggling explanation”: “[Virginia] had gone to bed with a woman and a man. But why was I shocked? I had read Orlando.”105 Furthermore, in the third narrative strand which re-writes Andersen’s “Snow Queen,” Gerda has an affair with a robber girl in Central Park. But the encounter with Ahmet is told from Woolf’s point of view, giving it an authority which outweighs these alternatives. In her account of writers who attempt to remedy “a certain damaged image of Woolf,” Latham writes: “Indeed, Woolf is too often reduced to a gifted depressive, an eccentric woman with lesbian proclivities, and one of literature’s most famous suicides.”106 In attempting to remedy certain narratives, both Morgan and Gee substitute a heterosexual narrative which erases the written and physical lesbian relationship with Sackville-West that inspired Orlando. A Woolf with “lesbian proclivities” is perhaps the Woolf some twenty-first-century readers still find most difficult to accept. Theorising meta-bio-historical fiction as a trialectical form which triangulates historiography, biography, and fiction can alert us to the constructed nature of old narratives which have no place for women’s experience. But it can also alert us to the dangers of what we “do with dead bodies” when we write new narratives for them. Virginia Woolf has become a “world-historical individual” who is reinvented in as many different selves as Orlando. As such she is, in Gee’s words, an “overwhelming presence in modern English literature, especially for women who write”:

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“We who come after her,” Gee suggests, “have to cope with her genius.”107 This is a new, and differently gendered, version of what Harold Bloom called the “anxiety of influence.”108 These biofictions suggest Woolf has become both an inspirational and an overwhelming figure, a kind of “bogey.” For some (often male) writers and critics, Woolf seems to represent the precursor they have to remove in order to carve out their own place. For women writers, the situation is different. They may have got past what Woolf called “Milton’s bogey,” and perhaps they have overcome what Gilbert and Gubar call the “anxiety of authorship.”109 But how do they negotiate Woolf’s presence? Latham suggests that biofiction “keep[s Woolf’s] work alive and prevent[s] her from falling into the oblivion that threatens every writer or artist, dead or alive.”110 The best way to keep Woolf’s work alive, surely, is to read it, with as much care and attention as possible. But the increasing tendency to co-opt Woolf as a character suggests a desire to put Woolf “in her place,” and to evade or control her influence by putting her back into the very narrative patterns which she urged us to evade.

Notes 1. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), 297–98. 2. In using the term “meta-historical biofiction,” I aim to foreground not only the three key narrative modes under discussion—history, biography, and fiction—but also the meta-discursive level of these texts. Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.” Waugh, Metafiction (London: Routledge, 1984/1988), 2. For an informed discussion of the recent proliferation of genre designations in this area, see the introduction to Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak, eds., Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1–35. And for an excellent overview of key debates around biography which acknowledges the close relationship between biography, fiction, and historiography, see Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Cham: Palgrave, 2020). Crucially, Ní Dhúill notes, “metabiography is a way of reading biography,” 4. 3. Alison Light, “Young Bess: Historical Novels and Growing Up,” Feminist Review 33 (Autumn 1989): 57–71. See also Diana Wallace, The Woman’s

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Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). 4. Michael Lackey, “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no.1 (2016): 33–58. 5. Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). See also Michael Lackey, Biographical Fiction: A Reader (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 234. 6. Michael Lackey, Biographical Fiction, 1–2. 7. Ibid., 3. 8. See Paul Fagan’s chapter in the current volume for a discussion of these two Henry James biofictions. 9. His key writers include Bruce Duffy, Zora Neale Hurston, Lance Olsen, Jay Parini, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Arna Bontemps, William Styron, and David Ebershoff. 10. Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 4, 5. 11. Lackey, American Biographical Novel, 6, emphasis added. 12. Michael Lackey and Todd Avery, eds., “To the Readers,” Special Issue on Virginia Woolf and Biofiction, Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 1–2. 13. Michael Lackey, “Usages (Not Representations) of Virginia Woolf,” Special Issue on Virginia Woolf and Biofiction, Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 12–14, 12. 14. Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 438. 15. Lackey, “Rise,” 33–58. Lackey’s two exemplary novels here are also by male authors: Lance Olsen’s Nietzsche’s Kisses (2006) and Jay Parini’s Benjamin’s Crossing: A Novel (1997). 16. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship in Selected Writings (London: Penguin, 1986), 233. 17. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 222. 18. For a concise introduction see Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2010); and on gender, see Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel. 19. Hermione Lee, Body Parts: Essay in Life-Writing (London: Pimlico, 2005/2008), 200, emphasis added. 20. Lee, Body Parts, 3. 21. Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 3. 22. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 300–01. 23. Ibid., 19. 24. Ibid., 314.

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25. Ibid., 310. 26. Ibid., 321. 27. Fleishman, The English Historical Novel, 234. 28. See Diana Wallace, Modernism and Historical Fiction: Writing the Past, forthcoming from Palgrave. 29. Lukács, Historical Novel, 32. 30. Henri Lefebrve, La Presence et l’absence (1980), quoted in Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Lost Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 53. 31. Soja, Thirdspace, 15. 32. Ibid., 174. 33. Ibid., 44, 45. 34. Ibid., 5, 10. 35. Ibid., 60. 36. Ibid., 183. 37. Ibid., 29. 38. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998/1999), 70. 39. Lackey, American Biographical Novel, 5. 40. Ibid., 4. 41. Virginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography” (1939), Collected Essays, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth, 1967), 221. 42. Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography” (1927), Collected Essays, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth, 1967), 229, 234, emphasis added. 43. Monica Latham, “‘Serv[ing] Under Two Masters’: Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives in Contemporary Biofictions,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2012), reprinted in Lackey, Biographical Fiction, 408. 44. Saunders, Self Impression, 467. 45. Woolf, “New Biography,” 235. 46. Woolf, “Art of Biography,” 224. 47. Ibid., 226, emphasis added. 48. Ibid. 49. Woolf, Orlando, 294–5. 50. Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (London: Hogarth, 1940), 153, emphasis added. 51. Woolf, Roger Fry, 200–1. 52. Woolf, “Art of Biography,” 228. 53. Saunders, Self Impression, 449. 54. See Elizabeth Cooley, “Revolutionising Biography: Orlando, Roger Fry and the Tradition,” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (May 1990): 71–83, for a discussion of Woolf’s parody of the Victorian biographer. 55. Woolf, Orlando, 297–8, emphasis added.

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56. Saunders, Self Impression, 444; Cooley, “Revolutionising Biography,” 76. 57. Moretti, Atlas, 70. 58. Woolf, Orlando, 5. 59. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “History,” in Lays of Ancient Rome and Miscellaneous Essays (London: Dent, 1968), 36. 60. Woolf, Orlando, 232. 61. Lukács, Historical Novel, 19. 62. Virginia Woolf, October 9, 1927, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth, 1977), 429. 63. Critics vary in how far they see Orlando as a “biography” of Sackville-­ West. Pamela Caughie writes that “Orlando is a biography of Vita—a curriculum vitae as it were”: “Curriculum Vitae: Transsexual Life Writing and the Biofictional Novel,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 25. Monica Latham calls it a “mock biography” of Sackville-West: “‘I Have Been Dead and Yet Am Now Alive Again’: Virginia Woolf on the Contemporary Stage,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 22. Saunders calls it “biografiction,” Self Impression, 379. 64. For accounts which show how formative the relationship with Vita Sackville-West was for Woolf, see Sherron E.  Knopp, “‘If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?’: Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” PMLA 103, no.1 (January 1988): 24–34; and Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), “Chapter 28: Vita,” 484–511. 65. Woolf, Orlando, 318–40. 66. Marie-Luise Kohlke proposes the term “glossed biofiction” for a text which “relies on supposedly non-referential, made-up characters and plots, which are nonetheless extensively modelled on famous historical subjects, their lives, writings and/or art, often with little or no attempt at any effective disguise.” Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus.” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 18, no. 3 (2013): 11. 67. Reproduced in the Oxford edition. 68. I am indebted to Meredith Miller for enabling me to clarify this point. 69. Saunders usefully reads Orlando as “composite portraiture.” Self Impression, 470–76. 70. Julia Novak makes a convincing case for treating Flush as metabiography in “The Notable Woman in Fiction: The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no.1 (2015): 83–107. 71. Virginia Woolf, Flush [A Biography] (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), xvi. 72. Kate Flint, “Introduction,” in Woolf, Flush, xliii.

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73. Woolf, Flush, 114. 74. Lukács, Historical Novel, 37, 33. 75. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth, 1929/1977), 108. 76. Monica Latham, Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives: The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (New York: Routledge, 2021), 3. 77. Brenda R. Silver, “Virginia Woolf Icon,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 239-413. 78. Theodore Dalrymple, “Virginia Woolf and the Triumph of Narcissism,” The Guardian Review, August 17, 2002, 5–6. 79. Philip Hensher, “Virginia Woolf Makes Me Want to Vomit,” Daily Telegraph, January 24, 2003, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/ personal-­v iew/3586663/V irginia-­Woolf-­m akes-­m e-­w ant-­t o-­ vomit.html. 80. Lee, Virginia Woolf, 769. 81. See Hermione Lee, “Biomythographers: Rewriting the Lives of Virginia Woolf,” Essays in Criticism 46 (April 1996): 95–114; and Latham, Afterlives, 219–22. 82. Latham, Afterlives, 219–22. 83. Silver, “Virginia Woolf Icon,” 410. 84. Latham, Afterlives, 22. 85. Ibid., 16. 86. Michael Cunningham, The Hours (London: Harper, 2006). 87. Emma Brockes, “Michael Cunningham: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian, February 27, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/feb/07/michael-­cunningham-­life-­writing. 88. Cunningham, The Hours, 211. 89. Sigrid Nunez, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (New York: Soft Skull, 2019), 38. 90. Ibid., 59. 91. Ibid., 147. 92. Bethany Layne, “The ‘Supreme Portrait Artist’ and the ‘Mistress of the Phrase’: Contesting Oppositional Portrayals of Woolf and Bell, Life and Art, in Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia,” Woolf Studies Annual 21 (2015): 82, 89. 93. Susan Sellers, Vanessa and Virginia (Ullapool: Two Ravens Press, 2008), 177. 94. Claire Morgan, A Book for All and None (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001). 95. Ibid., 70. 96. Ibid., 360.

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97. Maggie Gee, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (London: Telegram, 2014), 381. 98. Maggie Gee, “Clinging to the Coat-Tails of Fact,” Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 1997, 10. 99. Maggie Gee, interview by Mine Ozyurt Kilc, Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition of England Novel (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 153–62. 100. Gee, Virginia Woolf, 463. 101. Ibid., 475. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid., 440. 105. Ibid., 242. 106. Latham, Afterlives, 32, emphasis added. 107. Gee, Virginia Woolf, 475. 108. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 109. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth, 1929/1977), 108; Sandra M.  Gilbert and Susan Gubar borrow Woolf’s phrase “Milton’s bogey” to explore the shadow cast by Milton over women writers in The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979/1984). 110. Latham, Afterlives, 229.

References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Boldrini, Lucia, and Julia Novak, eds. Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Brockes, Emma. “Michael Cunningham: A Life in Writing.” The Guardian, February 27, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/feb/07/ michael-­cunningham-­life-­writing. Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes and Hero-Worship in Selected Writings. London: Penguin, 1986. Caughie, Pamela, “Curriculum Vitae: Transsexual Life Writing and the Biofictional Novel.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 23–26. Cooley, Elizabeth. “Revolutionising Biography: Orlando, Roger Fry and the Tradition.” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (May 1990): 71–83. Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. London: Harper, 2006. Dalrymple, Theodore. “Virginia Woolf and the Triumph of Narcissism." The Guardian Review, August 18, 2002, 4–6. De Groot, Jerome. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge, 2010.

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Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” In Modern Genre Theory, edited by David Duff, 219–31. Harlow: Longman, 2000. Fleishman, Avrom. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971. Gee, Maggie. “Clinging to the Coat-Tails of Fact.” Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 1997, 10. ———. Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. London: Telegram, 2014. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Hensher, Philip. “Virginia Woolf Makes Me Want to Vomit.” Daily Telegraph, January 24, 2003. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-­ view/3586663/Virginia-­Woolf-­makes-­me-­want-­to-­vomit.html. Kilc, Mine Ozyurt. Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition of England Novel. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus.” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 18, no. 3 (2013): 4–21. Knopp, Sherron E. “‘If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?’: Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” PMLA 103, no. 1 (January 1988): 24–34. Lackey, Michael. The American Biographical Novel. New  York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. ———, ed. Biographical Fiction: A Reader. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. ———. “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 33–58. ———. “Usages (Not Representations) of Virginia Woolf.” Special Issue on Virginia Woolf and Biofiction. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 12–14. Lackey, Michael, and Todd Avery, eds. “To the Readers.” Special Issue on Virginia Woolf and Biofiction. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018):1–2. Latham, Monica. “‘Serv[ing] Under Two Masters’: Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives in Contemporary Biofictions.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (2012). Reprinted in Lackey, ed., Biographical Fiction, 408–25. ———. “Virginia Woolf on the Contemporary Stage.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (2018): 21–23. ———. Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives: The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama. New York: Routledge, 2021. Layne, Bethany. “The ‘Supreme Portrait Artist’ and the ‘Mistress of the Phrase’: Contesting Oppositional Portrayals of Woolf and Bell, Life and Art, in Susan Sellers’s Vanessa and Virginia.” Woolf Studies Annual 21 (2015): 78–106. Lee, Hermione. “Biomythographers: Rewriting the lives of Virginia Woolf.” Essays in Criticism 46 (April 1996): 95–114. ———. Body Parts: Essay in Life-Writing. London: Pimlico, 2008.

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———. Virginia Woolf. London: Chatto and Windus, 1996. Light, Alison. “Young Bess: Historical Novels and Growing Up.’” Feminist Review 33 (Autumn 1989): 57–71. Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “History.” In Lays of Ancient Rome and Miscellaneous Essays, 1–39. London: Dent, 1968. Morgan, Claire. A Book for All and None. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1999. Ní Dhúill, Caitríona. Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography. Cham: Palgrave, 2020. Novak, Julia. “The Notable Woman in Fiction: The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no.1 (2015): 83–107. Nunez, Sigrid. Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury. New York: Soft Skull, 2019. Saunders, Max. Self Impression: Life-writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Sellers, Susan. Vanessa and Virginia. Ullapool: Two Ravens Press, 2008. Silver, Brenda R. “Virginia Woolf Icon.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, edited by Maggie Humm, 239–413. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2010. Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Lost Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Woolf, Virginia. “The Art of Biography.” In Collected Essays, vol. 4, 221–35. London: Hogarth, 1967. ———. Flush [A Biography]. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998. ———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. London: Hogarth Press, 1977. ———. “The New Biography.” In Collected Essays, vol. 4, 229–34. London: Hogarth, 1967. ———. Orlando: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998. ———. Roger Fry: A Biography. London: Hogarth, 1940. ———. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth, 1977.

CHAPTER 3

Fictional Futures for a Buried Past: Representations of Lucia Joyce Laura Cernat



Introduction: Confronting a “Constructed Silence”1

Two emotions dominate the tone of those trying to rewrite the life of Lucia Joyce2 (1907–1982) for twenty-first-century audiences: fascination and powerlessness. Her talent as a dancer, costume-designer, and illustrator, her entanglement in vibrant avant-garde networks, her potential as an artist and as the partner of artists, all offer premises for a captivating narrative. Yet anyone searching for James Joyce’s daughter is reduced, in this posthumous rediscovery of an effaced (not simply lost) figure, to longing for more clues and resorting to imagination, because most of her papers were destroyed in the 1980s and early 1990s by her nephew, the late Stephen Joyce (1932–2020). Scattered in archives over two continents and in the four languages she spoke, the remaining documents can only offer a fragmentary picture. The helplessness is twofold: on the one hand,

L. Cernat (*) Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_3

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one wants to know more; on the other hand, much of what is known—of her betrayal by close friends and family, her subjection to inhuman treatments, her deliberate concealment by relatives—is heart-rending. We know for sure that Lucia suffered, though it is equally true that, for a brief moment, she shone. This tension between a story riddled with lacunae and odd glimpses of glory and terror has given rise to an array of recent literary, radiophonic, and cinematographic tributes to Lucia, which this chapter aims to analyse, with a view to interpreting their articulations of gender, creativity, and mental illness. Before addressing these, it is useful to recapitulate her portrayals in non-literary sources, if only as a reminder of the scarcity of objective accounts.

“Missed Understandings”3 (FW, 175.27): Lucia Joyce in Others’ Biographies Carol Loeb Shloss, the author of Lucia’s biography, has often been accused of imagining and embellishing too much.4 But there is one bias she programmatically avoided: the “bias toward madness” or the “need to look for symptoms foreshadowing an inevitable breakdown,”5 which informed early accounts of the Joyces’ family life. After mentioning Lucia’s birth in Trieste, James Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann warns his readers that “[t]his child was to affect Joyce’s life much more deeply than he would have believed possible.”6 Despite this prolepsis, Lucia remains a background figure, much less often mentioned than her brother Giorgio7 until Ellmann’s otherwise meticulous report reaches the late 1920s, when, we are told, she “began to manifest the little oddities of behaviour that later exploded into something worse.”8 Her dance career is briefly listed under “her activities outside of school,” dismissed as “another history of false starts.”9 The following pages, detailing her breakdowns,10 set the tone for many subsequent retellings: Joyce is depicted as naïvely confident that his daughter was curable while everyone else considered her insane. According to Ellmann, Joyce’s “mind was fixed”11 about refusing to consult doctors in the early stages; he “continued desperately to treat his daughter as a slightly confused but on the whole … typical young woman.”12 If Ellmann is right in criticising Joyce’s association of female gender with capriciousness and irrationality, he overcompensates by medicalising even Lucia’s most benign emotions. What he does not seem to take into account when judging Joyce’s reluctance to

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consult a psychiatrist is the stigma associated with such a consultation at the time, especially for young women (the situation was significantly different for men, as suggested by the example of Beckett, who underwent psychoanalysis with Wilfred Ruprecht Bion for his neurosis but terminated it on his own terms13). The time Ellmann spends discussing symptoms and cures rather than causes of the illness suggests that he perceives Lucia mainly as a patient, rather than as a person of unique if stunted talent. Deirdre Bair’s sketch of Lucia in her biography of Samuel Beckett (1978) follows suit, reading signs of imminent nervous trouble into Lucia’s emotional life. Invoking Lucia’s alleged lack of friends (no word about Katheleen Neel, Hélène Vanel, or Dominique Gillet), her difficulties with French,14 and the supposed fleetingness of her artistic interests, Bair portrays her as the pathological partner in a one-sided romance: “When Beckett was around, her behaviour was nervous, hyperactive and sometimes silly. What she thought was witty, flirtatious chatter was really erratic speech.”15 Bair’s Beckett appears as either simply passive and perhaps afraid of losing touch with Joyce, his literary idol,16 or “fascinated by aspects of the father’s mind running rampant in the daughter”17; he sees Lucia “more as a case study than a possible love interest.”18 The problem with this account, which is corroborated in part by Beckett’s own statements in a late interview,19 is that the suspicions of insanity, which only became prominent in the early 1930s, and particularly in 1932 when Lucia had her famous outburst and threw a chair at her mother, are insistently read as having been there all along, in early 1929 and even late 1928. This feeds into the narrative of the “inevitable breakdown” that Shloss would later warn against. Later in the book, Lucia is criticised for her letters of gratitude to Beckett, written from the Northampton asylum, which are said to cause “unpleasantness” because of their “depressing” content.20 Such remarks show little empathy for the situation of someone living in isolation. One might expect Brenda Maddox, the biographer of Nora Barnacle, who had access to Lucia’s papers at Austin,21 and whose work was hailed by feminists,22 to provide a more refined articulation of the connections between gender and mental illness. Disappointingly, there is nothing of that in Maddox’s character assassination of Lucia. If Ellmann’s “bias toward madness” in deciphering Lucia’s narrative is discreetly disguised under his shy avoidance of the topic until he recounts the breakdowns, Maddox asserts hers more overtly, detecting ominous early signs of illness in the cast of Lucia’s eyes23 and reading “a disturbing expressionlessness”24

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in most of her photographs. Not satisfied with building a case for early signs of schizophrenia on the basis of strabismus, the biographer instrumentalises retrospective knowledge of Lucia’s breakdowns to diagnose her as a born problem-child, judging crying or the mumps as more symptoms of a “difficult” charge for Nora.25 Giorgio, on the other hand, is emphatically described as “a handsome, well-formed child”26 and his poor results at school are glossed over. Conversely, Lucia’s excellent school results are mentioned only in passing,27 her dance performances are dismissed as “merely pupil recitals,”28 and her designing of her own costumes is frowned upon as “another drain on the family purse.”29 Despite her overt preference for her son Giorgio, her habit of chastising Lucia as a child,30 and her severing of ties with Lucia after the latter’s definitive institutionalisation,31 Nora showed enough kindness to her daughter to be remembered by her fondly, as a best friend and almost as a sister.32 Maddox’s harsh depiction of Lucia is therefore a result not simply of favouring Nora, but also of a deep misunderstanding of mental illness, evident in her conviction that even in her day (late 1980s) schizophrenics could at most achieve “a seminormal life” by means of “tranquilizing drugs.”33 Maddox’s account is marred by this kind of stigmatising assessment, and by crude misreadings of treatments and side-effects (Veronal is supposedly given to Lucia to “slow her down,”34 but then Maddox criticises the girl’s weight-gain, seeing no connection with the drug). Commenting on the phrase “nervous breakdown” used by Joyce about Nora in a letter, both Ellmann35 and Maddox36 dismiss it as “hyperbolic” and, respectively, “difficult to put … into modern perspective.” But little attention is given to the obsoleteness of the vocabulary that described Lucia’s crises, a vocabulary that Maddox herself does not hesitate to perpetuate, using terms like “deranged”37 and affirmations like “reasoning with madness never works.”38 A similar double standard is applied by Maddox to Nora’s and respectively Lucia’s sexual behaviour: Nora is praised for “[taking] to sexual intercourse with enthusiasm and imagination” and “[fulfilling] all [Joyce’s] dreams of domination by a fierce woman”39 while remaining open-minded about his refusal to be formally married; her famous obscene letters to Joyce are hailed as an intelligent, if facetious, way to “rescu[e] him from the isolation of his imagined depravity by indulging in it with him.”40 By contrast, Lucia’s probably much milder sexual experimentation, despite the difference in generation, is deemed by Maddox “promiscuous.”41 While the first part of the biography takes pains to construe Nora as a modern woman and

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thus justify her sexual non-conformism, the second part is thrown off balance by the attempt to hold up the image of her as a matron and to explain her nearly irrational strictness towards her children, particularly towards Lucia. Nora’s attempt at controlling both Lucia’s dancing career and her intimate life, along with preconceptions about marriage which she preached without having practised, converged in restricting Lucia’s freedom to discover and pursue her own desires. Maddox’s lack of understanding of the connection between sexual and emotional repression and mental illness informs her biased portrayal of Nora’s daughter. As Shloss points out,42 censorship by the Joyce Estate was another factor in Maddox’s misrepresentation: an epilogue about Lucia was refused permission for publication. Nonetheless, in hindsight the stigma associated with schizophrenia in these narratives is itself unreasonable, so a different story was in order.



Making Sense: The Battle for Lucia

Soon after Lucia’s death in December 1982, some of her surviving papers were purchased by the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Texas. Giving a description of these documents, Joyce scholar David Hayman makes it clear from the title (“Shadow of His Mind”) that Lucia was mainly considered interesting as “the plaintive yet appealing shade of a real girl/woman”43 behind Issy in Finnegans Wake or Milly Bloom in Ulysses. Nonetheless, some material sheds light on Lucia directly—for instance, information about her love affairs, of which the one with Beckett, surprisingly, occupies a smaller part.44 In Hayman’s conclusion that the papers reflect “a complex and anguished family background which may, after all, be closer to the norm than most of us are willing to admit,”45 a shift in the understanding of mental illness is detectable. Though Hayman assesses that “Lucia’s mind is not well-stocked or well-developed,”46 he sees her suffering as symptomatic of enduring societal forces. If a more informed understanding of the nature and prevalence of mental unwellness has led to more nuanced accounts of Lucia’s “episodes,” the recovered memories of her promise and accomplishments as a dancer have also done much to rebalance the narrative. Especially the testimonies of Dominique Maroger (formerly Gillet) and Hélène Vanel, published in a special Joyce issue of Cahiers de L’Herne, have been invaluable in this regard. Though she met Lucia only in 1931, Maroger witnessed her passion for dance recitals and her frustration at being cut off from the

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constructive use of her energies. Maroger questions Lucia’s decision to quit dancing, which she considers a “spoiling of precious resources” (gâchage de valeurs).47 Attributed to a “health accident” but also to Nora’s “narrow authoritarianism” (autoritarisme borné),48 the replacement of a fulfilling activity with the walking cure recommended by doctors seemed absurd. Maroger’s recollection evokes Lucia’s trainings with Jacques Dalcroze, Margaret Morris, Jean Borlin, Elisabeth Duncan, and Liubov Egorova, her performances with Loïs Hutton, Hélène Vanel, Katheleen Neel, and her recital at Bal Bullier. Lucia’s dancing gains texture and vibrancy in this lyrical but analytically precise account. The tensions between Lucia and her mother (whom the eye-witness remembers as “heavy and material, caught up in ‘proprieties’”49) surface in these pages, along with Joyce’s own initial opposition to Lucia’s dancing.50 “Dance was her life,”51 Maroger concludes bitter-sweetly, and the thwarting of that impetus (élan) brought about the dispersal of her once focused and confident strengths. In a separate text,52 Maroger recounts her last meeting with Lucia at St Andrew’s in 1980 and tries to decipher her friend’s moments of lucidity, which were embittered by nostalgia. Emphasising Lucia’s originality, Maroger laments the strict exclusion of any “creative passion” (ardeur créatrice) in this “medicalized environment,”53 whose purpose is “reduction to the norm, if not to mediocrity.”54 Without denying the loss of genuine talent and the devastating effects of mental illness, Maroger patiently seeks the logic of this breakdown. Hélène Vanel, Lucia’s companion in Les six de rythme et couleur, also evokes her dance partner’s assiduous capacity to imbue symbols with vibrancy,55 her seriousness and dedication, and her immense energy, although in her father’s presence Lucia seemed to Vanel like his “projected shadow.”56 Casting new light upon Lucia’s relationship with Joyce and upon her attempted cures, the much-awaited opening of the Paul Léon Papers at the National Library of Ireland in 1992 (after a fifty-year seal) confirmed Ellmann’s insight that Joyce never abandoned faith in his daughter, but it also shed light on Joyce’s reasons: “troublesome or capricious or egoistic as she may be there is no doubt about her talent,” the writer explained in a letter to Léon from 1932.57 Alternating defence of Lucia and despair on account of her, this new batch of Joyce’s letters helps reconstruct a mental trajectory that looked more like oscillation than like direct downfall. The richness of this material can only be weighed approximately, since Stephen Joyce removed some items58 and imposed the sealing of others until

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2050,59 but the material currently available confirms Joyce’s constant concern for his daughter. The Joyce Estate not only blocked access to sources, but also blocked the publication of scholarly works trying to recover Lucia’s narrative for its relevance to textual scholarship. Finn Fordham’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, “Languishing Hysteria? The Clou Historique? Lucia Joyce in Finnegans Wake,” was one such work, which would have brought clarity and objectivity to an otherwise lyricised topic. Under the restrictions, Fordham was only able to publish some articles and chapters about Lucia, from which we can glean some of his premises. His central associations are with dance,60 light, and the figure of Narcissus. Identifying, in the use of metaphors of light and particularly lightning flashes in Finnegans Wake, a transition from brilliance61 to violence62 and then to the controlled use of violent brilliance  (lightning) as electricity63 and corroborating this with the dates of corrections and insertions, Fordham retraces the course of Lucia’s illness as reflected by the text. Like the destructive power of lightning, Lucia’s “unreason,” negatively connoted, needs to be channelled by Joyce’s “positive unreason”64 to become intelligible as art. Later on, Fordham discusses the genesis of the “Nircississies” fragment,65 stressing the reversal of Tristan’s maddening love in the figure of Issy, a girl “mad gone on him,”66 being “like both Narcissus and Ophelia,”67 which hints at obsession and self-absorption. Allusions to Lewis Carroll’s interest in young girls (“alicious through alluring glass”68) and to psychoanalytical interpretation (“languishing hysteria”69) seem to point to Lucia, although Fordham remarks that some of these insertions predate her breakdown.70 While Fordham’s intelligent deciphering of the Issy passages is excellent qua textual scholarship, construing Issy’s gender performance in terms of hysteria sheds an ambiguous light on the connection with Lucia’s complicated diagnosis. In an interesting complementary reading, Marian Eide aims to recover Lucia’s part in the Wake for an ethical reading of Joyce. The accent shifts from the obvious Narcissus reference to Echo, a better equivalent for Issy, who, in Eide’s reading, is the real storyteller and the “ethical figure”71 who turns the repetition of others’ words into her own meaning, thus healing the trauma of “emotional incest,” defined as “the failure to recognize the difference between self and other in an over-­ identification that reduces the other to a version of the self.”72 The publication of Carol Loeb Shloss’s biography of Lucia in 2003 marked a new phase of exploration. Building on massive documentation, Shloss compellingly reconstructed the possible triggers of Lucia’s nervous

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breakdowns. She brought detailed evidence for Maroger’s intuition that giving up dance was harmful and absurd, but also looked carefully at Lucia’s emotional life, her physical health, the treatments she was given, and  the plethora of diagnoses by different doctors. Lucia’s biography, intended to “place her in her own time, to recontextualise her life in the history of medicine, in the sexual ethics of her own generation, in the world of the performing arts in Paris and in the ideologies of physical culture,”73 compellingly shows that James Joyce truly understood and cared for Lucia until the end, an affection reciprocated by the “father-identified child.”74 It also demonstrates that the daughter’s own self-presentation is worthy of attention from literary historians,75 and that “the merest strand” separated Joyce’s creativity and Lucia’s illness.76 Uncomfortable for many of her critics, Shloss’s conviction that “sanity is not in one place and insanity in another,”77 that they are both part of a spectrum through which the mind often slides, pushed by circumstances and often triggered by confusing and unfair gender standards, actually resonates with Hayman’s earlier insight.78 Shloss combines archival information about Lucia’s teachers and models to reconstruct the spirit and values of her dance career.79 New resonances between Joyce’s innovative style and Lucia’s avant-garde connections emerge. Diaries of contemporaries like Helen Kastor Joyce, Peggy Guggenheim, and Mary Colum are used to fill gaps and offer perspectives that differ from the Ellmann and Maddox versions. Far from being a capricious move, the discontinuation of Lucia’s dance career appears as the effect of Nora’s “nagging” and “bullying.”80 Shloss also makes ample use of Joyce’s correspondence and Maroger’s memoir to prove that Lucia did try to resume dancing between her initial decision to quit in the fall of 1929 and her parents’ departure for London in 1931.81 Having to give up her career did not only mean the loss of an ambition for Lucia. It correlated with a loss of independence and self-determination as a woman. Caught between her mother’s narrow-minded principles about choosing partners and the daring sexual experimentation of rich young women in her entourage (Shloss reflects on the effect of money on the lifting of sexual taboos for Peggy Guggenheim and Helen Kastor82), Lucia encountered immense obstacles in pursuing her own desires. Despite his affection for her, Joyce, who according to Stella Steyn entertained such gender stereotypes as considering that “it was enough if a woman could write a letter and carry an umbrella gracefully,”83 was unable to comprehend his daughter’s need for both sexual and professional freedom. Along

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with renouncing dancing, Lucia had to face the rejection of Beckett (who, in the words of his hero Belacqua, was “trine”84 and unable to make up his mind), followed by failed relationships with Alexander Calder and Albert Hubbell, all against the backdrop of finding out that her brother was getting married and so were her parents, who had concealed their lack of legal marriage documents. Analysing this set of events which threatened Lucia’s emotional balance and exposing the double standard which Nora applied to Giorgio and herself while keeping her daughter under much tighter scrutiny, Shloss concludes that Lucia had become secondary in “Joyce and Nora’s emotional economy,”85 and that her first fits were a desperate attempt to draw attention to the unfairness of her position in the family.86 Apart from uncovering the complex circumstances preceding Lucia’s outbursts—episodes which she distinguishes from “the collapse of sanity” and sees more as “temper tantrum[s]”87—Shloss also highlights the ambivalences of psychiatry in the 1930s. Still undecided about whether to qualify schizophrenia as an organic or strictly behavioural anomaly,88 doctors tried cures that varied from solitary confinement89 to barbiturates, which risked causing addiction,90 and to bovine serums prescribed by endocrinologists.91 A pattern emerged, which Shloss aptly identifies as a vicious circle: “The effects of the attempted cure were posited as illness and then were used as the basis for further misdiagnosis.”92 Even more resonant than Shloss’s discoveries was her dispute with the Joyce Estate.93 In approaching Lucia’s story, the biographer was opposing Stephen Joyce’s “Victorian theory of reputation”94 and maintaining a perspective on privacy inspired by Virginia Woolf and Hannah Arendt, in light of which Lucia’s plight was not “pre-political … requiring the darkness of the household,” but rather “a chapter in the history of medicine … exemplifying the fate of many other young women who had been labelled ‘mad.’”95 The great contribution of Shloss’s book to re-charting the history of mental illness and its institutional monitoring was soon acknowledged by the inclusion of a section on Lucia Joyce in Lisa Appignanesi’s monograph about female mental health over the past two hundred years. Appignanesi corroborates Shloss’s account and significantly aligns Lucia’s case with those of Zelda Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf.96 Aiming to dismantle the monolithic understanding of madness, Appignanesi  links it instead to the societal expectations of women’s behaviour in different historical periods,97 and  describes Burghölzli, where Lucia spent time in 1933, as innovative by the time’s standards,98 but cautions that “while the governing principle of the asylum is that treatment should lead to ‘cure,’

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the compliance it generates in patients … can lead to entrapment in a schizophrenic role and a pattern of recurrent institutionalization.”99 This is precisely what seems to have happened to Lucia. Shloss’s biography was criticised on account of having “completely romanticized” Lucia100 or having “giv[en] in to the mythicalization of Lucia’s world,”101 as well as for its overenthusiastic writing style, framed as “movie-guide idiom” by Terry Eagleton.102 But even these critics concede the great value of the reconstruction of avant-garde dance circles103 and the impressive “delicacy” of Shloss’s treatment of family relationships.104 Regarding the parallel between the father’s writing and the daughter’s art, Eagleton admits to having the “irritating” impression that “there is something in it,” but thinks that Shloss “makes too direct a connection between art and life.”105 The problem, it would seem, is that one cannot easily frame Lucia within the limits of scholarly discourse. Literary fiction promises greater freedom in configuring the connecting threads between gender, art, and mental illness.

Lucia Revived: Biofiction’s Forms of Futurity Hermione Lee, best known for her rigorous but captivating biography of Virginia Woolf, has remarked that Shloss’s attempt to reconstruct Lucia’s thoughts and reactions on the basis of limited evidence “damages the book’s credibility, making it read more like an exercise in wish fulfilment than a biography.”106 McAuliffe similarly claims that imagining is “a problematic process in the pursuit of biography, more akin to fictional memoir.”107 Few researchers seem to have been aware that a fictional memoir had already been published in 1992: Alison Leslie Gold’s Clairvoyant: The Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce (reprinted in 2014). Brenda Maddox’s unsurprisingly disparaging review of the novel starts with a recap of the known facts, as if to show Gold how biography is done and reduce Lucia again to an institutionalised schizophrenic. Apart from the persistent disdain for mental health patients (who are said to “litter our streets” after the liberalisation of care methods108), the review displays a distrust of biofiction as a genre. Though she accepts fiction’s freedoms, Nora Barnacle’s biographer claims there should be “a point to doctoring reality”: the enlargement of “a greater truth.”109 This is in line with the perspectives current at the time, even among early biofiction scholars like Ina Schabert, for whom biographical novels share in literature’s “imaginative truth,”110 but are only valuable as unveilings of their protagonists’ “unique personhood”111

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if based on a thorough practice of “interpersonal knowledge”112 and an intimate acquaintance with historical documents through “laborious research.”113 The form of truth that biofiction was called to unveil was, in Schabert’s understanding, still mostly historical and not purely literary or metaphorical. In Clairvoyant, Gold pursued the latter. Lucia’s imagined first-person writings, creative glosses of her memories, alternate with third-person descriptions of the patient’s late years, partly focalised through the eyes of a fictional nurse, Mrs. Leary, who despite her puritanism grows attached to Lucia’s eccentricities. The setting, moved from the Northampton asylum to a fictional one in the west of Ireland, presumably symbolises a homecoming. Though details taken from Ellmann and Maddox abound in the character’s reconstructed reminiscences, the perspective tends to suggest the dissociation of Lucia’s mind from her environment, with interesting implications for the psychological plausibility of the breakdowns: “I watched a girl dressed in my clothes throw a chair at Mother’s italics on the day of Father’s fiftieth birthday.”114 Gold’s novel explores and expands the dead end of Lucia’s hospitalisation not only by opening it up towards the past through the character’s imagined memoir, but also by giving her some control over the future. Drawing on Joyce’s speculations about his daughter’s clairvoyance,115 Gold’s Lucia predicts accidents to Harriet Weaver and nurse Leary. Though locked up and excluded from society, the character is thus depicted as having privileged access to the future. The insertion, in the pages of the imagined memoir, of a fictive love story with a character called Edgar Anthagros, who follows Lucia’s peregrinations, has a similar effect of putting her in control, although the scenario is markedly escapist. For the knowledgeable reader, who perceives that Edgar is fictional, the question remains whether he is made up by Lucia, the supposed author of the memoir, or whether he is part of the story world, as the final scenes, narrated in the third person, seem to suggest. Either way, the two plot devices of Clairvoyant (the prophecies and the counterfactual love affair) reveal Gold’s interest in telling Lucia’s story in order to give it a hopeful spin. Hope is not, at first sight, central to Michael Hastings’s satirical play Calico (2004), where Lucia’s character is caricatured as a comic fool, yelling four-letter words unexpectedly (Hastings speculates in the introduction that her condition was akin to Tourette’s116), reading Joyce’s “dirty” correspondence out loud,117 indulging in very explicit wishful thinking with a passive but amused Beckett,118 and accosting men on the streets at

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night.119 Though he shows understanding for Lucia by revealing how disturbingly off the mark everyone else was—how they all oscillated between eccentricity and conformism, tragicomically deceived each other, and indulged in the very promiscuity they preached against—Hastings is not exactly compassionate. The only character treated with much mercy is Beckett, although his servility towards Joyce makes him equally ridiculous (“I’d only take such a post on the condition it is entirely unpaid,” he says about being Joyce’s secretary120). Nonetheless, hope is thematised in the bittersweet scenes where Lucia and Sam imagine their lives together as Mr. and Mrs. Beckett (a fantasy whose absurdity they both realise in the play), scenes which resonate with Gold’s ambivalent empowerment of her character through escapism. The painful awareness of the limitations of escapism makes Lucia a more tragic figure in Hastings’s comedy than in Gold’s Clairvoyant. Another way to project Lucia into a potential future, without falling into the trap of escapism, is to address her surviving legacy. As I will show, there are several ways to do this, but one of the simplest and most effective ones is to draw an analogy between Lucia’s world and more recent dilemmas or situations. This is the premise of Mary and Brian Talbot’s graphic novel Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (2012), which animates the narrative known by then from Shloss, condensing and simplifying it, and adorning it with renditions of the atmosphere, outfits, and settings of the time. Daughter of Joyce scholar James Atherton, Mary Talbot draws implicit parallels between her upbringing and Lucia’s, stressing both fathers’ absorption in the text of Finnegans Wake and their ensuing neglect of their daughters. Rebelling against her father, briefly trying her luck at ballet, and exploring her sexuality despite conservative surroundings are features that bring Mary’s story close to Lucia’s. These parallels are drawn in a detached, tongue-in-cheek way: the book’s metafictional snippets overtly play with the idea that the two stories differ.121 Nonetheless, this personal dimension enriches the perspective and sketches an effective criticism of gender norms, suggesting that, with due adjustments, some degree of obtuseness, neglect, and patriarchal thinking has survived through generations. Beginning and ending with a wink to the phrase “my cold mad feary father”122 from the final page of Finnegans Wake, the graphic novel explores the mechanisms of memory, loss, and forgiveness. The great value of the parallel between the interbellum dance and romance narrative and the postwar one is its insight, akin to Shloss’s, that Lucia’s story was not so out of the common. But the novel glosses quickly over Lucia’s

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institutionalisation, which is presented in only two brief (if visually exquisite) plates.123 A similar framing is provided by Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl (2016), which does weave in Lucia’s mental illness and attempts at recovery, but as background for a generic hope-and-heartbreak story. Chapters set in 1934 during Lucia’s talking cure with Carl Gustav Jung alternate with fragments of an imagined memoir written by Lucia, going over the events of the late 1920s and early 1930s, trying to make sense of her decisions and mistakes. If the structure resembles that of Clairvoyant at first glance, the result differs significantly, the closer proximity of the narrating voice to the events that sealed Lucia’s fate granting the account an increased plausibility, a smoother flow, and a less artificial tone. The risk, however, is of downplaying the character’s confusion and hopelessness during the psychoanalytic treatment by showing her so articulate and confident in the pages of her memoir. But the text provides a coherent and moving account, presented as Lucia’s own. Starting with “the first stirrings of desire and ambition,”124 Lucia’s imagined recollections offer an image of the promise she must have felt as an acclaimed dancer, an attractive young woman surrounded by figures of Parisian modernism and avant-garde, a talented artist who worked with incredible dedication. Though there are allusions to clairvoyance, manifested in what Abbs’s novel calls “Cassandra moments,”125 this does not become an ironic device of making Lucia prevail over her caregivers by dint of supernatural access to ominous intuitions, as it did in Gold’s text. Instead, these clairvoyant flashes are, in Abbs’s novel, moments of extreme emotional vulnerability, when Lucia tries to decipher what her own future has in store, such as in her first glimpse of Beckett126 or her idea about designing a rainbow dance based on a Keats poem.127 Anticipation is structurally more important than clairvoyance in Abbs’s plot. The protagonist tries to follow different possible futures with her mind’s eye (marrying Emile Fernandez, becoming Mrs. Samuel Beckett or Mrs. Alexander Calder) and constantly has to adjust her expectations. Lucia’s efforts to relinquish her own illusions and projections are foregrounded over the real-life interactions inspiring those illusions: Lucia “saw Mrs Samuel Beckett dissolving like an apparition”128 and “wept for the premature death of Mrs Samuel Beckett and Mrs Alexander Calder,”129 fantasies which absorb her so much that she fails to explain the reasons for her grief to her parents until it is too late. The only effective outlet seems to be dance, the theme of some of the strongest passages in Abbs’s book.

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When Lucia is finally prevented from dancing, her repressed anger erupts uncontrollably. Approaching the topic of dissociation caused by despair, Abbs uses the problematic metaphor of a “she-beast” that Lucia feels within her.130 Though this metaphor, like Gold’s “girl dressed in my clothes” analogy, fails to explain the onset of psychosis, the internal motivations of the character and the tension building towards her breakdown are narrated persuasively. The Joyce Girl’s main strength lies in the consistency of the character’s voice and motives. Instead of portraying Lucia as a victim of either Beckett’s mischief or a misunderstanding about his reasons for visiting, the novel puts her in control by imagining a scene in which she seduces Beckett, only for their love-making to be interrupted by Nora’s arrival, followed by intensive lecturing.131 This scene plausibly negotiates Lucia’s position in tune with Beckett’s own description of the “Syra-Cusa” as prone to “titillat[ing] and arous[ing],”132 ready to “rap[e]” Belacqua and “commi[t] decorous nuisance with the nozzle,”133 and by the same token reveals Lucia’s craving for agency and her desperate wish to fight her way out from under Nora’s stifling authoritarian influence. Rather than unambiguously and somewhat artificially empowering the character, this scene stresses her predicament as a young woman caught between conflicting gender expectations. Abbs’s Lucia is not hopelessly ill or weak, she is simply put in an impossible situation, which the novel skilfully layers to justify the final fall. The future-oriented perspective that dominates the first two thirds of the book is systematically constructed, Lucia’s hopes are justified at the level of her perception of her achievements and opportunities, and warning messages such as Stella Steyn’s are frequently dismissed as marginal, so that it is easy for the reader to relate to the character’s frustrations and her sense of entrapment, while maintaining a broader awareness of where the story is headed. If some elements seem to cater too much to a potential postfeminist reading,134 where marriage is viewed as a key to fulfilment and the failure of marriage prospects as a personal fiasco, Abbs’s text wards off such interpretations by articulating an insightful critique of the double-­ bind implied by Nora’s conservative suspicion both of female career aspirations and (hypocritically) of sexual emancipation. This is accomplished by thematising marriage in its strategic liberating role in the characters’ own conversations135 and by revealing how, for Lucia, it gradually becomes the only way of evading her parents’ control: “I planned my own wedding, my own escape.”136 Marriage is thus pursued not only as a romanticised

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view of female destiny, but also as the only rational way to avoid the family’s infantilising influence. There is one striking incongruity in the novel. The rigorous motivation of Lucia’s breakdown, gradually built by showing her disappointment with lovers, career options, and family, is undone by the final flashback to a scene of childhood incest between Giorgio and Lucia.137 This scene completely brackets the “thwarted future” narrative, assigning the main cause of schizophrenia to childhood trauma. Abbs’s text thereby loses some of its consistency, weakening the very motor of the narrative, which up until that point had been geared towards understanding the triggers of the breakdown and showing possible avenues of recovery. Revealing this fictional incest episode as the actual trigger, after having already exposed sufficient causes, seems simply to peddle shock-value—such as it is, since speculations about incest in the Joyce household are hardly new.138 However, with the Shloss biography already old news, shedding new light on Lucia’s story seemed to require precisely shock-value. Alex Pheby’s 2018 Lucia not only discusses incest,139 casting Giorgio into the role of pet-torturer to blackmail his sister into compliance,140 suggesting that Joyce and even his brother Stanislaus molested Lucia141 and that Joyce might have beaten Nora.142 It also gives detailed accounts of abortion procedures, the extraction of animal foetuses to obtain the bovine serums with which Lucia was “treated,” the physiology of tape-worms,143 the ice-­ baths and boiling baths that were common asylum procedures, and the plans of Nazi eugenicists during the invasion of France. Amid all this sordidness, though, images of intense poetic beauty emerge, like the symbolic identification of Lucia with Andersen’s Little Match Girl, a version of which was filmed by Jean Renoir with Lucia’s participation in a toy-­ soldier’s role.144 To create such visions, though, Pheby claims that one needs to divorce truth from beauty: “Verity—one should not be a slave to it. There are times when beauty trumps truth, but these are very few.”145 Despite his own credo, though, Pheby seems to focus on the loss more than on the recovery of beauty. His prose is also laden with bitter accusations and with reiterations of plausible and implausible traumatic events. A central question raised by a book such as Pheby’s is whether biofiction has more to do with warding off amnesia by re-imagining voices that can never be fully recovered than with “the imagination as a truthful principle for … selection”146 of already existing material. This quandary exceeds the one described by Michael Lackey when he speaks about the difference between “truthful fictions,” which make “responsible and

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illuminating changes” to the historical record, and narratives that “misappropriate a life,” relying on “irresponsible and confusing” alterations of history.147 Because, in Lucia Joyce’s case, so much is left unknown, even Pheby’s wildest claims are not entirely falsifiable. Without being downright “untruthful,” his text suggests that biofiction’s mission is to challenge mechanisms of systematic oppression and recover the irrecoverable. To illuminate this paradox, Pheby uses the following reversal of perspective: he builds his text around the metaphor of a vandalised Egyptian sarcophagus that an archaeologist furtively tries to restore (a theme running parallel to the Lucia-centred chapters). He thus frames the question of recovering Lucia’s future not as a future in the past, as Abbs had, but as a salvaging of her afterlife: “This woman had gone into the afterlife friendless and I resolved to address that lack.”148 Not meant to simply reconstruct a chain of events, filling in the gaps where possible, à la Abbs, nor to play with truth by inserting premonitions, in the manner of Gold, Pheby’s novel has the tone of a manifesto against the writing of history by its winners, and an aggressive one at that: “If one has secrets, and then burns the evidence…, one invites speculation, and speculation is infinite in a way that the truth is not.”149 Biofiction’s restoration of effaced images acquires, for this author, a retributive undertone. Besides, this social justice component reveals a strong affinity between the biographical novel and the genre that Jeremy Rosen has called “minor-character elaboration”150—a similarity confirmed by biofiction’s tendency to focus on more obscure lives.151 By showing the absurdity of Lucia’s treatments, incarcerations, forced baths, and electroshocks, Pheby is also raising a human rights issue: where Shloss tries to show that Lucia was “no lunatic,”152 Pheby suggests that even if she were one, she did not deserve to be treated the way she was. Lucia’s hospitalisation recently constituted the subject of two other novels, Lucia: The Girl Who Danced in Shadows (2017) by Joyce Garvey and Saving Lucia (2020) by Anna Vaught, both drawing on her relationship to another famous patient at St Andrew’s Hospital: Lady Violet Gibson, whose life story came to light in Frances Stonor Saunders’s 2010 The Woman Who Shot Mussolini. Declared insane after her failed attempt to kill Il Duce in 1926, Gibson was still at the Northampton asylum in 1951, when Lucia was admitted there. Stonor Saunders, who makes it clear that “asylums were never really about cure, so much as homes for incurables,”153 remarks that Lucia’s files at the institution are “stored in a filing cabinet next to Violet’s, but permission to read them is denied. Lucia,

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who for long stretches would refuse to speak, remains a silent—and silenced—riddle”154—a perfect pretext for biofictional explorations. Futurity, which, as we saw, plays a key part in the other Lucia biofictions, is also at the core of the two novels depicting Lucia in the dead end of asylum life. In Joyce Garvey’s version, what drives the plot is the anticipation of a supposed visit from James Joyce, for which Violet and Lucia are preparing a dance. Although Lucia gradually becomes aware that her father is no longer alive, she and Violet keep practising the dance, which becomes a metaphor for a planned shared suicide. In the end, only Violet is said to kill herself, which she does by overdosing on medication.155 Though chaotic and burdened by unjustified anachronisms and fantastic or counterfactual elements (Lucia is said to have been pregnant with Beckett’s child, Joyce’s ghost appears and behaves wildly, etc.), Garvey’s text is interesting in its attempt to imagine asylum life and in its search for reasons to keep going in that environment. More eloquent than Garvey’s account of the friendship between Lucia and Lady Gibson, Anna Vaught’s novel is also more ambitious in its approach to imagined futures. Tired of the life of “routine and mahogany”156 offered by the asylum, where the best pastime was to feed songbirds, Violet plans an escape not to the outside, but into imagination’s infinite possibilities. Lucia and Violet depart on a fantastic time-travelling adventure, to visit their past and also more remote times, where they meet Blanche (Marie) Wittman, Jean-Martin  Charcot’s famous patient at Salpêtrière at the turn of the twentieth century, and “Anna O.” (Bertha Pappenheim), Josef Breuer’s patient and one of Sigmund Freud’s first case studies. To complete the picture of misunderstood and maltreated women, Vivien Eliot also makes a few appearances.157 Like Appignanesi’s gender-­ focused account of the history of psychiatry, Vaught’s novel attempts to circumscribe the fraught relationship between men in positions of power and women who are subjected to their authority, to their often unethical and experimental treatments, and sometimes to the inquisitive public gaze. Unlike Appignanesi, though, Vaught also tries to rectify this imbalance in the realm of fantasy. As the four main characters travel through time, they revisit their tragedies and humiliations, and also decide to fix some things, including the killing of Mussolini in 1926 (this time successful158) and the freeing of the patients at Salpêtrière in 1887.159 Surpassing even Gold in its degree of escapism, Vaught’s narrative nonetheless drives home in original ways the point that “insanity” is not something that can be sealed and isolated, that the risk exists in everyone (“we are all ill

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sometimes; maybe all mad: no one is immune”160), and that this should not prevent creativity and life from flourishing—in the words of Bertha’s character, “you do not need to heal completely to be effective.”161 Despite some beautiful and well-documented pages of anti-psychiatry, Vaught’s collection of imaginary adventures errs on the side of excess. All four characters speak mostly in the first person or address each other in the second, which, while creating interesting resonances and parallels, makes the narrative formula hard to master. The alternation of voices at the beginning of the novel is promising, reminding one of Lucia Boldrini’s notion of the “the ‘double I’ of heterobiography,”162 which seems to be enriched by Vaught’s creation of a “dual voice”163 within the text and not just implicitly, since Lucia is supposedly writing Violet’s memoir. However, when the two characters from the past (Blanche and Bertha) are also given first-person voices, the dialogue leaves the reader with a sense of overcompensation. Accumulating examples makes for a good case against psychiatric abuses, but a less tellable story. In a recent book of interviews with authors of biofiction, Michael Lackey distinguishes two approaches to the genre: “one is a biographical novel that creates a metaphorical diagram so that readers can illuminate past and present. The other biographical novel actually tries to bring into existence a new reality,”164 using figures from the past “to illuminate not just who we are in the present, but who we can become in the future.”165 Though some Lucia-inspired novels, like The Joyce Girl, have a strong tendency towards the first category, by trying to make sense of the past and identify patterns and motives, and by imagining personalities and complex thoughts and feelings behind the facts that survive, overall the Lucia biofictions described above are best categorised as future-oriented. They are not as much concerned with reconstruction as they are with making something new possible: a long due dialogue about gender norms and their impact on women’s mental health. However, the note of escapism predominates in many of these imagined alternatives. The novels and plays offer Lucia alternative lives she might have lived, either in imagination, or in memory, or in a parallel life. Biofiction has a hard time giving Lucia a place in our world. To “illuminate … who we can become in the future,” we would need an image of Lucia Joyce that does not halt in a dead end. By setting their stories within Lucia’s period of glory, Talbot and Abbs try to provide precisely this. And if Talbot gets closer, it is thanks to two aspects: first, her medium is the mixed image-word canvas of the graphic novel, and second, she draws a

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parallel between Lucia and her own experiences. This fruitful model is also  explored by dance historians and artists who take up the dancer’s experiences in works of cinema.

Lucia Recovered: Other Futures in Works of Cinema Some of the symbols Lucia used in her art shared the surrealist penchant for the oneiric and for hybrid creatures, combining the human and the non-human in images like the famous silver-fish and the walking gramophone.166 These otherworldly incarnations speak to the unconscious in ways that seem to exceed the powers of language. Poetry can capture some of their flashes and intensities, but prose (other than Finnegans Wake) often fails to do so. Though he draws some associations between Lucia and the figures she interpreted, particularly the Little Match Girl, Pheby is too busy building his case against the villains to dwell upon the richness of the images. The less moralising language of film can afford to bring the harsh realities of childhood trauma and the innovative fantasy of surrealist visions closer together. Áine Stapleton’s 2016 Medicated Milk does exactly that, juxtaposing beauty and horror in a suggestive sequence, avoiding direct accusations but drawing evident parallels between Lucia’s story and the author’s own process of recovery from trauma through art. Opening with the image of the human gramophone, the film explores the possibilities of unrecoverable memory. Like a gramophone that tells without understanding, the body repeats gestures and patterns that functioned as coping mechanisms. But if the instrument of telling does not comprehend what it tells, this does not make the tale meaningless. The contemporary narrator’s voice muses on the mysteries of embodied memory: There’s no memory. You might not ever remember, but the feelings are still there and that’s what you have to deal with then. Apart from the odd time you might get a flash, but it might be a flash of being in a particular room somewhere in someone’s house, or a smell of something or … So it’s hard to, it’s hard to get a full picture. It feels like you know something, but you can’t tell what it is because the memory of it’s buried.167

Because of the voluntary and involuntary deletions, the trope of the buried memory is central to Lucia’s narrative, both at a psychological level, where her illness is concerned, and at a historical level, where her

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documents are concerned. The documents cannot tell what Lucia could not tell because she only knew it in her body. We cannot simply assume that this knowledge referred to incest, because then we fall, like Pheby, into the trap of descriptions and accusations, of imagining who did what, where, and how—things that Lucia herself might not have remembered. When Stapleton suggests child  abuse, she does so by blurring the lines between her own story and Lucia’s. The sense of violation and fear, evoked by the image of the dancer in white drawers with one white sock on (a vaguely allusion to Nabokov’s Lolita), is symbolically linked to Lucia’s experiences, which are deciphered as traumatic, following the path opened by Cary Baynes, who spoke of an “incest situation.”168 The breaking of a doll (which resembles the doll that we see Lucia holding in some photos169) becomes a troubling token of the loss of innocence. Another disturbing image, the killing of lambs in slaughterhouses, anticipates Pheby’s exposé about bovine serum extraction, and might have its roots in Lucia’s treatment with the serum, but at the same time it can be read as a metaphor for the disavowed and brutal sacrifices accepted by society. The image gains density by condensing the symbolic scapegoating of the mentally ill and the historical reference to Lucia’s treatment. Medicated Milk does not edulcorate the story, but it also refuses to pretend it is telling “the” truth. By recounting a personal and embodied truth, though, it lends texture to what Lucia’s trauma might have felt like. In a dark but highly poetical scene, the two female characters (the older one being Stapleton herself and the younger presumably a figure for Lucia, if we judge by her association with the gramophone in earlier frames) cross a stormy lake on a gloomy day. Like Lucia and Mary Colum,170 they have their nightdresses pinned together. But if the original gesture, at least in some interpretations,171 was meant to prevent Lucia from escaping, here its aim is to recover, and perhaps protect, her image. Reminiscent of Charon’s boat, the boat in the film brings Lucia’s ghost back, but it still preserves some of her evanescence: alluding to an entry in Lucia’s dream diary, which is heard in the background, the girl is wearing a black veil. The safety pins might then be interpreted as metaphors for the forces holding the psyche together or for Orpheus trying to cling to Eurydice, rather than as symbols of captivity. This potential reversal is integrated into the film’s more general theme of healing through storytelling. This metaphorical inversion of perspectives is powerfully represented by the scenes where a naked female body swims underwater while a clothed masculine figure floats above it. This is an obvious allusion to Jung’s

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famous verdict that Joyce and his daughter were “like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.”172 However, in Stapleton’s rendition, the camera is turned upside-down, so that the difference between falling and diving, like the distinction between artistic thought and schizophrenic thought, is called into question. As Shloss had suggested, labels like “mad” are both a question of perspective and an effect of circumstances. The girl’s immersed body is surrounded by ink, a poignant echo of both Shloss’s metaphor of the “sacrifice for a book”173 and Joyce’s portrayal of Shem the Penman’s “squidself.”174 Horrible Creature (2019), Stapleton’s second film about Lucia Joyce, combines a similarly symbolic language with images filmed in settings where Lucia herself actually lived and with extraordinary dance performances by Michelle Boulé, Sarah Ryan, and Céline Larrère. In many of these settings (the hospital, the school she attended), Lucia was not allowed to dance, but Stapleton’s movie reconstructs, through dance, the impulses she may have felt, the flights of imagination and hope, the confusion, and the desire to escape. A perfect expression of both the limitations of mental illness and the power to overcome them, the dancers’ contortions, stretches, and twists illustrate a story of thwarted wishes, strong will, graceful beauty, and humiliating restraint. Breathtaking scenes show Michelle Boulé performing her delicate and precise rhythmic movements in the snowy hills of Switzerland or on the shores of Lake Maggiore, suggesting an interesting superposition of different moments in Lucia’s life. Like bodies in the first film, places are explored here as stores for non-­ verbal memory. The classrooms and the asylum, though changed, bear some resemblance to what Lucia would have seen, and the dance projected upon these canvases evokes anxiety (we see Michelle Boulé’s eyes looking confused and fearful as she hides from nurses, but her expressive movement never ceases). Conversely, in the scenes filmed in the open air against the backdrop of lakes and mountains, the dance figures are wider, freer, more graceful, suggesting the body’s exultation in the absence of restraint. Frames shot in a railway station recall Lucia’s breakdown in the Parisian Gare du Nord, when she refused to leave for London with her parents in April 1932.175 In all these settings, the dancers’ bodies articulate emotion with carefully controlled choreographic balance, suggesting that, had Lucia had constant access to this mode of expression, she might have traversed her crises more easily. The intermittent movement of Horrible Creature, with its strong contrast between tension and relief, pays tribute to Lucia in the language she was at home in. In both films, remaining

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fragments of Lucia’s own words are played in the background, as if to piece her together from the “crossword puzzle”176 she declared herself to be. Another exquisite re-imagining of Lucia in cinematic discourse is Deirdre Mulrooney’s short film Lucia Joyce: Full Capacity (2019), which compellingly restages the dancer’s scenic presence, casting Evanna Lynch in the role of Lucia rehearsing for her 1929 performance at Bal Bullier and reviving the moment when Berenice Abbott took the iconic photo of her in the handmade mermaid costume. Mulrooney, a dance historian who did extensive research on Lucia, uses the (by now notorious) prediction of a 1928 Paris Times critic that when Lucia Joyce “reaches her full capacity for rhythmic dancing, James Joyce may yet be known as his daughter’s father”177 to create a vision of power and grace. Mulrooney’s film reconstructs a mesmerising, swirling, leaping, confident, and brilliantly free Lucia, who “deserves to be considered for her actual artistic trajectory and achievements, unmuddied by subjective fictional flights of fantasy.”178 Dressed in a magnificent reproduction of the sequined sleeveless silver-­ fish costume (designed by Claire Garvey), Lynch pirouettes to the tune of George Antheil’s period piece Ballet Mécanique (1924),179 and the lines of W.B. Yeats’s The Song of Wandering Aengus (1899) are heard in the background. This is no coincidence, for Mulrooney has an interesting theory about a link between Yeats’s “little silver trout” which turns into “a glimmering girl”180 and Lucia’s idea of dressing up as a water creature. In a larger radiophonic tribute to Lucia,181 the historian develops this hypothesis and argues (drawing on Yeats’s correspondence with Lady Gregory) that Yeats was considering Lucia for dance performances planned at the Abbey Theatre. More plausibly than the Egyptian metaphors of Pheby or Vaught’s time-travelling, this offers a glimpse into Lucia’s alternative future. The possibility that Yeats thought of her for his ballet plays shows that audiences and experts were impressed with her, and that she was not just doing “pupil recitals” as Maddox would have it. Had the cards fallen differently, Lucia Joyce might have gone to Ireland not to nurse her psychic wounds and fall into Veronal-induced depression, but to fulfil her artistic promise in the company of other gifted dancers and poets. Yet what is brilliant about Mulrooney’s film is that it does not surmise so much. It just suggests, discreetly, through poetry, rhythm, and colour, that the girl in the mermaid photograph had more to show to the world. Swathed by the costume, the setting, the reconstructed choreography, Lynch’s “body swayed to music”182 makes the dance come to life and,

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recalling Yeats’s memorable line, tries to resurrect the dancer, too. At the beginning and end, we can see the actress step in and out of the role, as if it were a trance. The suggestion is subtle but clear: Lynch is not just performing the part of Lucia, she is trying to let Lucia inhabit her past and future self. These cinematic futures are impressive not only because of what they imagine for Lucia, but also through the possibilities they open for young women of this generation who, like Lucia, are trying to overcome trauma through movement and creativity. Áine Stapleton addresses this overtly, bridging the gap between Lucia’s history and more recent personal narratives. Even though they engage less directly with mental illness, Deirdre Mulrooney’s film and radio-documentary also contribute to the rebirth of hope. In biofiction, there is an unresolved tension between representations of Lucia as fundamentally sane but misdiagnosed (Abbs, Pheby) and representations which make her a sort of poster-girl for mad pride (Vaught). Admittedly, this tension persists in works of cinema—between Mulrooney’s approach, which is mostly about recovering the dancer, and Stapleton’s, for whom dance and trauma are more tightly linked—but there seems to be more room for nuance. The description of Horrible Creature on Stapleton’s website speaks of Lucia’s “unproven illness,” yet points to the fact that Medicated Milk “considered the complexity of mental instability.”183 Stapleton seems convinced that something major happened in Lucia’s life  and that trauma was as much part of this event as dance was. One thing is clear: neither Stapleton nor Mulrooney, nor the biographical novelists are content with not knowing more. Going to archives, digging up metaphors, uncovering new aspects (like the Violet Gibson connection), looking into Lucia’s remaining letters, researching the artistic history of the interwar years, they bring the fragments together in tense images—plural, sometimes contradictory, often incomplete. Precisely their diversity shows that retrieving Lucia Joyce’s story is neither strictly a task of research, nor simply an exercise for the imagination. Sometimes art documents missing details (as the films do), sometimes research borrows an artistic tone (as Shloss often does). The Lucia that emerges from these fragmentary representations is not always a coherent or plausible subject, but every added detail enriches a picture that has for so long been eclipsed and erased.

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Conclusion: Fictional Lucia—Caveats and Possibilities While biofictions and biopics are bringing Lucia to larger audiences, many scholars are reluctant to accept the forms that the unearthing of her figure has taken. Genevieve Sartor points out that the “emergent Lucia trend has segued the complexities of a historical subject into the arena of popular discourse,” leading to a “neglect” of the “archival research and existing manuscript-based or genetic scholarship on Finnegans Wake.”184 Similarly, Helen Saunders worries that the emerging “Lucia industry” runs on the amplifications of a gap-filled narrative: “The problem is not that we undervalue [Lucia] Joyce, but that we read more into her than is justified.”185 Although they gloss over some of Lucia’s real contributions, these warnings are worth heeding. Recent works have emerged that lucidly analyse the role of dance in Lucia’s visual collaboration with her father when creating the lettrines for Pomes Penyeach, which impress a “kinetic rhythm” on the page, working on the fringes between media,186 but Lucia’s entanglement in Finnegans Wake is still a matter of debate, and many biofictions exaggerate her role as a muse. What would be the middle ground between using Lucia’s biography to write a glossy story about creativity, insanity, and inspiration and producing a fully objective, but dry scholarly treatise which gives her just the right amount of artistic credit? How could a story told in neither of these modes do justice to the complexity of her journey through mental illness and negotiate the ambiguities of her predicament as a young woman living in a family with repressive double standards regarding gender? Two possibilities seem to emerge: the more predictable one is to divorce biofiction from any exigence of verisimilitude and write not just against the psychiatric establishment, but also against the norms of logic and temporality (as Vaught and, at times, Pheby do); the other is to re-embed Lucia’s narrative in the medium of dance and image and view it not as a function of Joyce’s or Beckett’s literary visions, but as the dancer’s own performance (as Stapleton and Mulrooney do). The challenge remains, then, to transfer this freshly recovered mobile image back into the language of literature. While Talbot and Abbs are close to achieving such a task, a literary rendition of Lucia’s full strength as a dancer and illustrator may be yet to come. Acknowledgements  I would like to thank the FWO (Research Foundation— Flanders) for its generous support of my project (1240823N). Special thanks to

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Áine Stapleton and Deirdre Mulrooney for kindly sharing their work, and to Ortwin de Graef, Phyla Kupferschmidt, and Ioannis Tsitsovits for their readings and suggestions.

Notes 1. Carol Loeb Shloss, “Privacy and  the  Misuse of  Copyright: The  Case of Shloss v. the Estate of James Joyce,” in Modernism and Copyright, ed. Paul K. Saint-Amour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 243. 2. From here on, I frequently use only the first name “Lucia” to refer to Lucia Joyce. Where I use only the surname (“Joyce”), I am referring to James Joyce. Although this is not standard practice in feminist studies, which rightfully encourage referring to women by their last name, I have preferred this option in order to avoid confusion, as Joyce scholars might find the text easier to follow if James Joyce, who is mentioned here rather often, is referred to as “Joyce,” according to a well-established tradition. Though this usage of proper names goes against the grain of my argument, it favours clarity and readability. 3. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Robert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet, and  Finn Fordham, introd. Finn Fordham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 175.27. 4. See Hermine Lee, “No She Said No,” The New York Times, December 28, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/books/no-­she-­ said-­no.html; Terry Eagleton, “Her Father’s Dotter,” London Review of Books 26, no. 14, July 22, 2004, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-­paper/ v26/n14/terry-­eagleton/her-­father-­s-­dotter; Jody McAuliffe, “Lucia Joyce as Cordelia and the Fool,” Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 3 (2005): 170–82; Finn Fordham, “Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Review),” Modernism/modernity 12, no. 2 (2005): 357–58. 5. Carol Loeb Shloss, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (London, Bloomsbury, 2004), 31. 6. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 273. 7. Ellmann’s emphasis on Giorgio is suggested by the following anecdote: in one of the countless instances of Joyce’s struggles with money, which Ellmann delights in recounting, Joyce is said to have borrowed money because the next day would be his son’s birthday. Ibid., 504. Since Giorgio’s birthday, July 27, directly followed Lucia’s, July 26, this would imply that Joyce was concerned with buying a present for his son, but not for his daughter. 8. Ibid., 624. 9. Ibid., 625.

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10. Ibid., 660–99. 11. Ibid., 669. 12. Ibid., 679. 13. See Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 214. 14. Ibid., 81. 15. Ibid., 84. 16. Ibid., 100. 17. Ibid., 84. 18. Ibid., 93. 19. Samuel Beckett, Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett: Uncollected Interviews with Samuel Beckett and Memories of Those Who Knew Him, ed. James and Elizabeth Knowlson (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 49–50. 20. Bair, Samuel Beckett, 535. 21. Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989), xviii. 22. Rosemarie Battaglia was persuaded, after reading Maddox’s book, that Nora was Joyce’s “better half.” Battaglia, “His Better Half,” American Scholar 58, no. 4 (1989): 615. 23. “When Nora first saw her daughter, her heart must have skipped a beat.” Maddox, Nora, 83. 24. Ibid., 147; see also 225, 247. 25. Ibid., 89, 112, 242. 26. Ibid., 89. 27. Ibid., 127, 136, 139. 28. Ibid., 232. 29. Ibid. 30. Ellmann, James Joyce, 447; Maddox, Nora, 112. 31. See Maddox, Nora, 317: there are no records of any visits from Nora between Lucia’s internment at Ivry in 1936 and Nora’s death in 1951. 32. Lucia Joyce, cited in David Hayman, “Shadow of His Mind: The Papers of Lucia Joyce,” in Joyce at Texas, ed. Dave Oliphant and Thomas Zigal (Austin, Texas: Henry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, 1983), 71. 33. Maddox, Nora, 292. 34. Ibid., 311. 35. Ellmann, James Joyce, 433. 36. Maddox, Nora, 141. 37. Ibid., 316. 38. Ibid., 305. 39. Ibid., 57. 40. Ibid., 98. 41. Ibid., 251.

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42. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 27. 43. Hayman, “Shadow of His Mind,” 65. 44. Ibid., 75. 45. Ibid., 79. 46. Ibid., 69. 47. Jacques Aubert and Fritz Senn, James Joyce (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 1985), 67. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 72. 50. Ibid., 73. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 76–82. 53. Ibid., 78. 54. Ibid., 81. 55. Ibid., 84. 56. Ibid., 83. 57. Joyce, cited in Catherine Fahy, “The James Joyce/Paul Léon Papers in the National Library of Ireland: Observations on Their Cataloguing and Research Potential,” Joyce Studies Annual 4 (Summer 1993): 6. 58. See Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 25. 59. See “The James Joyce—Paul Léon Papers,” 1930–1940, National Library of Ireland, accessed March 1, 2022, http://catalogue.nli.ie/ Collection/vtls000356640. 60. See Finn Fordham, “Finnegans Wake and the Dance,” Abiko Quarterly with James Joyce Studies 9, no. 17 (1997), 12–41. 61. Fordham, “Lightning Becomes Electra: Violence, Inspiration, and Lucia Joyce in Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2002): 665–67. 62. Ibid., 668–70. 63. Ibid., 671–72. 64. Ibid., 670. 65. Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 175–213. 66. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 526.27. 67. Fordham, Lots of Fun, 177. 68. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 528.17. 69. Ibid., 528.14. 70. Fordham, Lots of Fun, 195. 71. Marian Eide, Ethical Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 127. 72. Ibid., 111. 73. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 30. 74. Ibid., 77.

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75. Ibid., 31. 76. Ibid., 32. 77. Ibid. 78. Hayman, “Shadow of His Mind,” 79. 79. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 99–183. 80. Helen Kastor Joyce quoted in Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 180–81. 81. Ibid., 180–83. 82. Ibid., 93. 83. Stella Steyn quoted in Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 197. 84. Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (London: Calder Publications, 1993), 120. 85. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 211. 86. Ibid., 215–16. 87. Ibid., 183. 88. Ibid., 262–65. 89. Ibid., 232. 90. Ibid., 340–44. 91. Ibid., 357–58. 92. Ibid., 340. 93. After winning the trial, Shloss gained the right to publish previously censored material from her biography of Lucia Joyce. The website where this material appeared has been  taken down, but it can be retrieved at https://web.archive.org/web/20090313024158/ http://www.lucia-­ the-­authors-­cut.info/, Internet Archive, accessed September, 20, 2022. It consists mostly of quotes from Joyce’s works and letters, which are included under fair use but which were initially refused publication by the Joyce Estate. 94. Shloss, “Privacy,” 252–53. 95. Ibid., 257. 96. Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present (London: Virago, 2008), 260–62. 97. Ibid., 5. 98. Ibid., 232. 99. Ibid., 285. 100. Lee, “No She Said No.” 101. Fordham, “Dance in the Wake.” 102. Eagleton, “Her Father’s Dotter.” 103. Lee, “No She Said No.” 104. Eagleton, “Her Father’s Dotter.” 105. Ibid. 106. Lee, “No She Said No.” 107. McAuliffe, “Lucia Joyce,” 173.

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108. Brenda Maddox, “Messing with History,” Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1992, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­1992-­08-­09-­bk-­ 5935-­story.html. 109. Ibid. 110. Ina Schabert, “Fictional Biography, Factual Biography, and their Contaminations,” Biography 5, no. 1 (1982): 2. 111. Ina Schabert, In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1990), 2. 112. Ibid., 18. 113. Ibid., 23. 114. Alison Leslie Gold, Clairvoyant: The Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce (Providence: TMI Publishing, 2014), 64. 115. Ellmann mentions Joyce’s “belief in her [Lucia’s] clairvoyance.” Ellmann, James Joyce, 689. Interestingly enough, Shloss would later cite one instance when Lucia’s words proved to be ominous. Maria Jolas saw the girl’s message “attention au squelette et à la béquille” as a “spooky” foreshadowing of a death in Ponisovsky’s family, followed by an accident Ponisovsky himself had. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 16. 116. Michael Hastings, Calico (London: Oberon Books, 2004), 10. 117. Ibid., 66–67. 118. Ibid., 43–46. 119. Ibid., 77–78. 120. Ibid., 27. 121. Mary and Brian Talbot, Dotter of her Father’s Eyes (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), 15. 122. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 628.02. 123. Talbot & Talbot, Dotter, 83–84. 124. Annabel Abbs, The Joyce Girl (Exeter: Impress, 2016), 6. 125. Ibid., 11, 23. 126. Ibid., 17. 127. Ibid., 23. 128. Ibid., 243. 129. Ibid., 287. 130. Ibid., 332. 131. Ibid., 150–62. 132. Ibid., 46. 133. Ibid., 36. 134. For a development of the hypothesis according to which feminist interpretations of women’s lives are slowly being replaced by postfeminist ones in biofiction, see Julia Novak, “Feminist to Postfeminist: Contemporary Biofictions by and about Women Artists,” Angelaki 22, no. 1 (2017): 223–230.

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135. Ibid., 15–16. 136. Ibid., 235. 137. Ibid., 314–47. 138. Ellmann, Maddox, and Shloss mention the crowded living arrangements in the various Joyce homes, which suggests that Lucia had to share a bed with either Girogio or her parents. Ellmann, James Joyce, 485, 501, 567; Maddox, Nora, 149; and Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 69, 80. Complemented by readings of the Lewis Carroll allusions in Finnegans Wake and with Jung’s speculations on Joyce’s anima, this has brought about the incest hypothesis. 139. Alex Pheby, Lucia (Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2018), 34. 140. Ibid., 55. 141. Ibid., 68–69. 142. Ibid., 159–62. 143. Jung compared Joyce’s “visceral thinking” in Ulysses with that of a “transcendental tapeworm.” See Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 277–78. 144. Pheby, Lucia, 91–94, 151–54, 199–209. This does not seem to be fully confirmed, but it appears that some footage survived: “Lucia Joyce Dances as a Tin Soldier,” Finnegans Wake, YouTube video, April 16, 2016, https://youtu.be/5KbNCcFTB3U. 145. Pheby, Lucia, 94. 146. Schabert, In Quest, 48. 147. Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 229. 148. Pheby, Lucia, 296. 149. Ibid., 54. 150. Jeremy Rosen, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 2. 151. See Boldrini’s remark that a “key feature” of contemporary biofiction (especially of first-person biofictions or “heterobiographies,” which constitute Boldrini’s focus) is the central part given to “[d]ogs and wives, rather than the poets that ‘owned’ them,” such that “established categories come under attack.” Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2012), 6. 152. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 31. 153. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), 271. 154. Ibid., 322. 155. Joyce Garvey, Lucia: The Girl Who Danced in Shadows (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017), 190–91. 156. Anna Vaught, Saving Lucia (Hebden Bridge: Bluemoose Books, 2020), 2.

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157. Ibid., 125, 174. 158. Ibid., 137. 159. Ibid., 154–61. 160. Ibid., 174. 161. Ibid., 147. 162. Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 4. 163. Ibid., 12. 164. Michael Lackey, Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 139. 165. Ibid., 182. 166. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 175, 108. 167. Áine Stapleton, Medicated Milk, featuring Ayla Stapleton and Áine Stapleton, produced by Áine Stapleton, 2016, min. 8. 168. Cary Baybes quoted in Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 291. Featured also in Stapleton, Medicated Milk, min. 11. 169. Ellmann, James Joyce, plate VIII. The episode of Lucia being scolded for breaking the doll is recounted in Maddox, Nora, 112; Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 49. 170. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 223. 171. Maddox, Nora, 285. 172. Ellmann, James Joyce, 692. 173. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 416. 174. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 186.06–07. 175. Maddox, Nora, 279–80; Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 220. 176. Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 288. 177. Quoted in Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 6. 178. Deidre Mulrooney, “The Lost Story of James Joyce’s Daughter as a Parisian Dancer,” Irish Times, June 21, 2018, https://www.irishtimes. com/culture/stage/the-­l ost-­s tory-­o f-­j ames-­j oyce-­s -­d aughter-­a s-­a -­ parisian-­dancer-­1.3534604. 179. Though this was not Lucia’s music of choice, she was acquainted with it, since Antheil was part of the Joyce entourage. 180. W.  B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.  B. Yeats, introd. Cedric Watts (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2008), 47. 181. Deirdre Mulrooney, “Lucia, Sweet Dancer,” Mixcloud, accessed March 2, 2022, https://www.mixcloud.com/deirdre-­mulrooney/lucia-­ sweet-­dancer/. 182. Yeats, The Collected Poems, 185. 183. Áine, Stapleton, “Horrible Creature,” Áine Stapleton, accessed March 2, 2022, https://www.ainestapleton.com/horriblecreaturefilm. 184. Genevieve Sartor, “Genetic Connections in Finnegans Wake: Lucia Joyce and Issy Earwicker,” Journal of Modern Literature 41, no. 4 (2018): 19.

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185. Helen Saunders, “Lucia Joyce: On Bloomsday, Consider This Real-Life Character’s Enduring and Mysterious Appeal,” The Conversation, June 15, 2018, https://theconversation.com/lucia-­joyce-­on-­bloomsday-­ c o n s i d e r-­t h i s -­r e a l -­l i f e -­c h a r a c t e r s -­e n d u r i n g -­a n d -­m y s t e r i o u s -­ appeal-­98020. 186. Siobhán Purcell, “Rhythm and Colour: Reading Lucia Joyce and the Legacy of Dance in the Works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett,” in Dance and Modernism in Irish and German Literature and Culture, ed. Sabine Egger, Catherine E. Foley, and Margaret Mills Harper (New York: Lexington Books, 2020), 146.

References “The James Joyce—Paul Léon Papers”. 1930–1940. National Library of Ireland. Accessed March 1, 2022. http://catalogue.nli.ie/Collection/vtls000356640. “Lucia Joyce Dances as a Tin Soldier”. Finnegans Wake, YouTube video, April 16, 2016. https://youtu.be/5KbNCcFTB3U. Abbs, Annabel. The Joyce Girl. Exeter: Impress, 2016. Appignanesi, Lisa. Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present. London: Virago, 2008. Aubert, Jacques, and Fritz Senn. James Joyce. Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 1985. Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978. Battaglia, Rosemarie. “His Better Half.” American Scholar 58, no. 4 (1989): 615–18. Beckett, Samuel. Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Edited by Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier. London: Calder Publications, 1993. ———. Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett: Uncollected Interviews with Samuel Beckett and Memories of Those Who Knew Him. Edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Boldrini, Lucia. Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2012. Eagleton, Terry. “Her Father’s Dotter.” London Review of Books 26, no. 14, July 22, 2004. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-­paper/v26/n14/terry-­eagleton/ her-­father-­s-­dotter. Eide, Marian. Ethical Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Fahy, Catherine. “The James Joyce/Paul Léon Papers in the National Library of Ireland: Observations on Their Cataloguing and Research Potential.” Joyce Studies Annual 4 (Summer 1993): 3–15. Fordham, Finn. “Finnegans Wake and the Dance.” Abiko Quarterly with James Joyce Studies 9, no. 17 (1997): 12–41.

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———. “Lightning Becomes Electra: Violence, Inspiration, and Lucia Joyce in Finnegans Wake.” James Joyce Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2002): 655–78. ———. “Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Review).” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 2 (2005): 357–58. ———. Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Garvey, Joyce. Lucia: The Girl Who Danced in Shadows. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017. Gold, Alison Leslie. Clairvoyant: The Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce. Providence: TMI Publishing, 2014. Hastings, Michael. Calico. London: Oberon Books, 2004. Hayman, David. “Shadow of His Mind: The Papers of Lucia Joyce.” In Joyce at Texas, edited by Dave Oliphant & Thomas Zigal, 65–79. Austin, Texas: Henry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, 1983. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Edited by Robert-Jan Henkes, Erik Bindervoet, and Finn Fordham. Introduction by Finn Fordham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Lackey, Michael. The American Biographical Novel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. ———. Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Lee, Hermione. “No She Said No.” The New York Times, December 28, 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/books/no-­she-­said-­no.html. Maddox, Brenda. Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce. New  York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989. ———. “Messing with History.” Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1992. https:// www.latimes.com/archives/la-­xpm-­1992-­08-­09-­bk-­5935-­story.html. McAuliffe, Jody. “Lucia Joyce as Cordelia and the Fool.” Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 3 (2005): 170–82. Mulrooney, Deirdre. “The Lost Story of James Joyce’s Daughter as a Parisian Dancer.” Irish Times, June 21, 2018. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/ stage/the-­l ost-­s tor y-­o f-­j ames-­j oyce-­s -­d aughter-­a s-­a -­p arisian-­d ancer-­ 1.3534604. ———, dir. Lucia Joyce: Full Capacity. Featuring Evanna Lynch. Out There Productions, 2019. ———. “Lucia, Sweet Dancer.” Mixcloud. Accessed March 2, 2022. https:// www.mixcloud.com/deirdre-­mulrooney/lucia-­sweet-­dancer/. Novak, Julia. “Feminist to Postfeminist: Contemporary Biofictions by and about Women Artists”. Angelaki 22, no. 1 (2017): 223–230. Pheby, Alex. Lucia. Norwich: Galley Beggar Press, 2018. Purcell, Siobhán. “Rhythm and Colour: Reading Lucia Joyce and the Legacy of Dance in the Works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.” In Dance and Modernism in Irish and German Literature and Culture, edited by Sabine

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Egger, Catherine E.  Foley, and Margaret Mills Harper, 141–56. New  York: Lexington Books, 2020. Rosen, Jeremy. Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Sartor, Genevieve. “Genetic Connections in Finnegans Wake: Lucia Joyce and Issy Earwicker.” Journal of Modern Literature 41, no. 4 (2018): 18–30. Saunders, Helen. “Lucia Joyce: On Bloomsday, Consider This Real-Life Character’s Enduring and Mysterious Appeal.” The Conversation, June 15, 2018. https://theconversation.com/lucia-­joyce-­on-­bloomsday-­consider-­this-­ real-­life-­characters-­enduring-­and-­mysterious-­appeal-­98020. Schabert, Ina. “Fictional Biography, Factual Biography, and their Contaminations.” Biography 5, no. 1 (1982): 1–16. ———. In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography. Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1990. Shloss, Carol Loeb. Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. London, Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. “Privacy and the Misuse of Copyright: The Case of Shloss v. the Estate of James Joyce.” In Modernism and Copyright, edited by Paul K.  Saint-Amour, 243–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Stapleton, Áine, dir. Medicated Milk. Featuring Ayla Stapleton and Áine Stapleton. Produced by Áine Stapleton. 2016. ———, dir. Horrible Creature. Featuring Michelle Boulé, Sarah Ryan, and Céline Larrère. Produced by Áine Stapleton. 2019. ———. “Horrible Creature.” Áine Stapleton. Accessed March 2, 2022. https:// www.ainestapleton.com/horriblecreaturefilm. Stonor Saunders, Frances. The Woman Who Shot Mussolini. London: Faber & Faber, 2010. Talbot, Mary M., and Brian Talbot. Dotter of her Father’s Eyes. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012. Vaught, Anna. Saving Lucia. Hebden Bridge: Bluemoose Books, 2020. Yeats, W.  B. The Collected Poems of W.  B. Yeats. Introduction by Cedric Watts. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2008.

CHAPTER 4

Imagining Jiang Qing: The Biographer’s Truth in Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao Silvia Salino

Introduction Jiang Qing (1914–1991) was the fourth wife of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and herself a leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). She was one of the architects of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a campaign that saw the purge of Mao’s political adversaries and the persecution of millions of people indicated as counter-revolutionaries. Before fully dedicating herself to the Communist cause, Jiang Qing worked as an actress in Shanghai in the first half of the 1930s, when the city was an attractive centre for artists and intellectuals influenced by Western lifestyle and progressive ideas. Jiang Qing, who was at that time using the stage name of Lan Ping, became well known to the public in the role of Nora, in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, in 1935. In 1937 she travelled to Yan’an, in the north of

S. Salino (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_4

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China, the headquarter of the Communist Party. There she met and married Mao Zedong. In the 1960s Mao entrusted Jiang Qing with revolutionising the performing arts, and she became the driving force behind the creation of the Model Operas (yanbangxi), revolutionary works which centred on flawless heroic models. The aesthetic principle at the basis of the Model Operas was that of the “Three Prominences”: “Among all characters, give prominence to the positive characters; among the positive characters, give prominence to the main heroic characters; among the main characters, give prominence to the most important character, namely the central character.”1 As the responsible  for the national culture that would establish a new proletarian society, Jiang Qing was a political protagonist of the decade 1966–1976, but after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, she was arrested and vilified by her opponents and became the symbol of the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution, during which many people were killed or sent to prison, while others lost their property and their health. Jiang Qing was accused of anti-party activities and sentenced to death in a show trial that took place in the winter of 1980–1981. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. In 1991 Jiang Qing committed suicide. Chinese-born American writer Anchee Min re-writes the story of Jiang Qing from a unique perspective. Indeed, the novel caused some controversies when it was first published in 2000 because it gives a relatively positive assessment of the protagonist.2 Min’s personal experience of the Cultural Revolution forms the basis of her interest in Jiang Qing. The author grew up listening to the teachings of Maoism and singing the tunes of Jiang Qing’s revolutionary operas. When Min was seventeen, she was sent to work and live in the countryside;3 then, towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, she was recruited by the Shanghai Film Studio and even chosen to compete for the leading role in one of the filmic operas produced by Jiang Qing.4 The project of the film was abandoned only because of Mao Zedong’s death and the consequent downfall of Jiang Qing. In 1984, with the help of actress Joan Chen, Anchee Min emigrated to the US. By focusing on Becoming Madame Mao, this chapter seeks to explore the ways in which the figure of Jiang Qing is constructed between China and the US, an interstitial space where the author re-invents the female subject as a non-fixed identity. My aim is to demonstrate that, in keeping with Linda Hutcheon’s definition of postmodernism as a challenge to historical knowledge and her identification of the protagonists of

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historiographic metafiction as non-normative subjects, Becoming Madame Mao questions the way in which we know about the past through its protagonist, Jiang Qing, whose unconventional status casts doubts on the authoritative act of writing history. Furthermore, drawing on Caitríona Ní Dhúill’s concept of metabiography, I will show how Min’s novel further unsettles the tenets of biography, as the “truth” of biography is explicitly presented as gendered and subjective. Becoming Madame Mao reconstructs Jiang Qing’s life from her childhood until her arrest, constantly shifting between first- and third-person narrator. At the beginning and at the end of the novel, we see the protagonist in her prison cell, resolved to commit suicide the next day. Min focuses on the private aspects of Jiang Qing’s life, placing a strong emphasis on sexuality. According to Wendy Larson, the re-writing of the Cultural Revolution as an erotic experience, which she analyses in Min’s autobiographical novel Red Azalea (1994),5 can be seen as a sexualisation of the spirit of the revolution.6 Red Azalea describes the secret  erotic involvements of the author in a context of strict state control and ends with Min leaving China for the US. Larson claims that by giving voice to women and women’s sexuality—aspects that were oppressed during the Cultural Revolution—Min opposes a liberating, erotic force (“cultural Maoism”) to a repressive and false one (“political Maoism”)  and, at the same time, generates the view that a future for Chinese women where they can be sexually free is possible only outside China.7 If we consider this latter aspect, Red Azalea can be included among a number of English-language memoirs of the Cultural Revolution shaped by a Cold War ideology, as they present the binary opposition of “Chinese suffering and American salvation.”8 Becoming Madame Mao can likewise be read as literature about “sexual liberation.” As Eric Hayot correctly points out: [A] critique of the Cultural Revolution that makes it a site for repressed or illicit sexual expression, paired with a sense that true liberation and self-­ development can occur only through immigration to the United States (the endpoint of both Red Azalea and Katherine, Min’s second novel), quite seriously challenges public, state-sponsored notions of Chinese history and Chinese difference.9

This does not mean total assimilation of all immigrant Americans. Hayot shows how Min’s novel ultimately resists the “ethnic bildungsroman,” a genre that includes the works by immigrant writers, which reproduce the

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mutual bending of the ethnic subject towards America and vice versa, producing “the fiction of a resolution on both sides.”10 Hayot examines how Becoming Madame Mao makes use of Chinese theatre and Western melodrama in order to reflect on the question of mediation in the process of fiction writing. Min’s novel employs the conventions of melodrama insofar as “nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatise through their heightened and polarised words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship.”11 At the same time, Becoming Madame Mao also mobilises the vocabulary of Chinese revolutionary operas, where the actors, by symbolising emotions, actions, and situations, lack psychological interiority and make it clear that they are just re-­enacting a scene, rather than identifying with a character. This must be seen, according to Hayot, as an “allegory of the cultural translation of form, as an attempt simultaneously to render and to perform, for an American audience, the aesthetic style that dominated all Chinese artistic practice during the Cultural Revolution.”12 Hayot’s analysis evokes the problematic status of Becoming Madame Mao in relation to the issues that are regarded as the common core of Min’s work: Asian assimilation, sexual  representation, Western individualism.

Postmodernism and the Genre of Biofiction In her book Autobiographies of Others (2012), Lucia Boldrini analyses fictional first-person narratives about historical figures published in the second half of the twentieth century which self-consciously reflect on the implications of using the autobiographical in the construction of subjectivity. By taking up another’s voice—stealing another person’s identity— these works, which Boldrini calls “heterobiographies,” raise a number of issues deriving from the “double I” of the author and the subject; issues concerning not only the conception of the individual self, but also the relationships of power that define the individual. These works are concerned with the gap between “historically believable contexts and [the] individual”13 and ultimately “interrogate the status, construction and conception of the modern subject, its modalities of existence … and explore not only the individual self, but also how we have historically defined the human being (or, often, “Man”) as a philosophical category.”14 While Boldrini is interested in the “recognizable historicity”15 of the examined protagonists, the concerns she investigates also address a postmodern

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emphasis on “the visibility of the device, the fragmentation and instability of the subject, and the impossibility of recovering the historical being.”16 Indeed, life writing practices blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction long before the advent of the postmodern Zeitgeist.17 At the same time, the growing number of playful “experiments”18 in auto/biographical writings in recent times seems to suggest that these works can be seen as part of the postmodern scepticism around boundaries. A significant part of this experimentation in life writing can be found in the genre of biographical fiction, a narrative “based on the life of a historical person, weaving biographical fact into what must be otherwise considered a novel.”19 Martin Middeke classifies biofiction as a subgroup of Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, and he describes the genre as a type of writing able to acknowledge “parallels and points of reference” between two historical eras, in which the focus of interpretation is placed more on the present than in the past.20 In this sense, the liberty of the author of biofiction to re-write the life of a historical character not only generates a text that is freed from the claim of historical accuracy, but also leads to a sustained inquiry into the way we can know about the past. In historiographic metafiction as Hutcheon conceives it, the protagonist does not serve to establish an ontological link between what is described in the novel and the real world but is constructed through intertextual references in order to stress the textual nature of historical knowledge: Facts are events to which we have given meaning [and in] historiographic metafiction the very process of turning events into facts through the interpretation of archival evidence is shown to be a process of turning the traces of the past (our only access to those events today) into historical representation.21

The playful use of biographical material in biofiction vividly responds to these theoretical concerns through textual strategies that reveal an increasing insecurity about the relationship of biography to facts. In Biography and the Postmodern Historical Novel (2001), John Keener—echoing Hutcheon—sees biofiction as “biography with a parodic twist,”22 as it engages with “biography as a complex of biographies,” relating to the numerous ways in which “(biographical) history” is written by other authors:23 In the case of the historical figure, then, the “available data” simply includes all available biographical narrative on a given figure. The result is a form of “superhistory” we might call “Biographical Metafiction,” defined perhaps as

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“biography with a parodic twist.” Biographical Metafiction recognizes biography as an ongoing, self-reflexive project.24

According to this view, postmodern biofiction engages with biography not just in preparation for writing fiction but because it self-consciously converses with previous renderings of a life. Caitríona Ní Dhúill, in her study Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (2020), gives special attention to how biofiction can contribute to metabiographical thinking. Metabiography, which Ní Dhúill defines as a “belated postmodern manifestation of the biographical, a necessary compliment to the tenacious cultural presence of biography after the dismantling of the genre’s underlying illusions,”25 aims to unsettle the unified notion of the “biographical subject,” contradicting the biographical promise of an encounter between the reader and the subject. Ní Dhúill proposes metabiography as a way to “trouble[] the biographer’s claim, and the reader’s expectation, that the subject will be ‘brought to life’ and become somehow ‘knowable’ through the telling of a story.”26 Her approach is firmly concerned with the representation itself, and with its “ideological investments.”27 In this context, biofiction constitutes an opportunity: the liberty in re-writing the subject through a fictional re-telling of the past allows the biographer to experiment with new and non-conventional ways of representing subjectivity, in a manner that might be more revealing of the “working of projections, desire, othering, identification, and self-reflexivity.”28 In other words, the “fiction” added by the fictional biographer may favour a reflection on some crucial questions about biography itself. In order to clarify how Min’s novel participates in this project of foregrounding historical and biographical consciousness, I will read it against the official narrative about Jiang Qing.

Defining the Frame: Official Historiography on Jiang Qing The “Gang of Four” trial, which took place in Beijing in 1980–81, fixed the image of Jiang Qing as the main culprit of the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution.29 According to the long indictment, Jiang Qing had framed up cases against the party leadership, setting in motion large-scale purges for personal vendettas. It is acknowledged that this unprecedented media event was a show trial, a demonstration of political power from the

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post-­Mao leadership which provided the Chinese public with a picture of the destructive political machinations of the Cultural Revolution in an effort to redeem the socialist project.30 As Mary Farquhar and Chris Berry have argued, by speaking of “past bitterness,” it is possible to create “present sweetness,” a positive assessment of the present—as well as a more just future.31 Such a narrative is necessarily dualistic, with a clear-cut opposition between right and wrong, order and chaos, past and present. The main problem was how to separate Mao from the devastating events of the Cultural Revolution in such a way as to protect the legacy of the CCP. In this sense, the verdict was complementary to the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China” (1981),32 which established the official version of historical truth: Mao Zedong the man was separated from Mao Zedong Thought. The former was criticised for his “errors”—not crimes—and the latter was shown to be a valid ideology for the future because the Party was able to acknowledge its mistakes.33 In this dualistic narrative, Jiang Qing represented the perfect villain. The trial was, in fact, preceded by a huge vilification campaign, orchestrated by the Party in an authoritarian political culture which continued under Mao’s successor Hua Guofeng (1921–2008). In the years between Jiang Qing’s arrest in 1976 and 1980, posters and cartoons appeared, violently attacking the Gang of Four in a way that recalled the purging of the victims of the Cultural Revolution, denouncing them as class enemies and spies.34 In the case of Jiang Qing, she came to be identified as the “White-Boned Demon,”35 a (gendered) destructive monster. She was ridiculed for aspiring to be an empress, depicted as a prostitute and a traitor, recurring to a “silenced, but not forgotten, legacy of evil women who bring disorder to family and state.”36 Indeed, in traditional Chinese historiography, we find a long list of such women: treacherous concubines, manipulative empresses, and evil wives, whose main characteristics are cold-hearted cruelty, wild ambition, and sexual depravity. Jiang Qing’s past as an actress was used to demonstrate her immoral character and, as a consequence, the invalidity of her political views. Sources of this period attribute her monstrous character to her childhood, highlighting her fundamental desire to appear in public and her hunger for power. In this narrative, she instrumentalised Mao for her own purposes; in fact—because of her lack of merits—she could only rise to power by means of feminine wiles. Official historiography thus managed to divorce Mao from Jiang

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Qing at all levels, denigrating her in the private sphere in order to blame her on a public level as well.37

“Let Me Tell You Stories of My Life”: Deconstruction of Ideological Authoritarianism in Becoming Madame Mao In an unnumbered page at the beginning of the book, Min introduces her protagonist as an actress playing three roles: Madame Mao as Yunhe (1919–1993) as Lan Ping (1934–1937) and as Jiang Ching (1938–1991)38

The book then reconstructs the life of Jiang Qing from her childhood until her downfall; her arrest frames the biography. By focusing on her feelings and states of mind, the novel deconstructs the dichotomies of good and evil, hero and villain, through which Chinese historiography has defined a master narrative that, when it comes to giving an assessment of Jiang Qing, has so far managed to hinder any alternative interpretations of the past.39 Becoming Madame Mao opens with a typically postmodern statement about history: “What does history recognize? A dish made of a hundred sparrows—a plate of mouths.”40 In the Prologue we find Jiang Qing in her prison cell the day before her suicide: Fourteen years since her arrest. 1991. Madame Mao Jiang Ching is seventy-­ seven years old. She is on the death seat. The only reason the authorities keep postponing the execution is their hope for repentance. Well, I won’t surrender. When I was a child my mother used to tell me that I should think of myself as grass—born to be stepped on.41

Becoming Madame Mao is thus a reconstruction of the main events of Jiang Qing’s life from the special perspective of her imminent self-inflicted death. The personalities of the main male figures—Mao Zedong above all—are filtered through the memory of Jiang Qing. Becoming Madame Mao thus effects a deconstruction of the public image of Mao from a

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female perspective which reveals the less heroic aspects of his character: a tendency to jealousy and rage and, later on, fear of death and persecution complex. By choosing the point of view of Jiang Qing, Min allows her character to speak with her own (and only) voice in the narration, reacting against the official biographical record which has always defined her story. The Prologue then presents a dialogue between Jiang Qing and her daughter Li Na, in which the mother begs the daughter to be her biographer: “You are a historian, Nah.42 You should document my role in the revolution. I want you to demonstrate my sacrifices and contributions.”43 Li Na refuses: “You are a miserable, mad and sick woman. You can’t stop spreading your disease. Like Father said, you have dug so many graves that you don’t have enough bodies to lay in them!”44 By repeating what Mao had said about Jiang Qing, Li Na relegates her mother to the role of the object of male narrations: there is no place for the subject Jiang Qing in historiography, even after Mao’s death. The Prologue ends with an allusion to her astounding life: “The great moments … Now as I think about them for the last time, they still make my heart hammer with excitement.”45 This opens up the main topic of the novel: the memory of an “extraordinary life” told by its female protagonist. However, Jiang Qing had already anticipated at the beginning that she was not being judged fairly: “Side by side Mao Tse-tung46 and I stood, yet he is considered a god while I am a demon.”47 Apart from presenting Jiang Qing’s life from her perspective, the novel also wants to direct our attention towards another reading: the consequences faced by those (women) who do not respect the roles imposed by the dominant political discourse. In an interview discussing Becoming Madame Mao, Min noticed: “It is the Chinese tradition that every dynasty’s downfall is the concubine’s fault.”48 The gendered and political position from which Min is writing is thus made clear: the book can be seen within the wider context of Min’s project to renegotiate the public role of Chinese women in history. As Emily Lau Kui Ling has pointed out, in Becoming Madame Mao, Min uses the power of narrative and imagination to represent Jiang Qing as a “self-constructed heroine,” giving prominence to female consciousness “to reappropriate the historical category of women from the State discourse for the purpose of empowering the female gender.”49 Becoming Madame Mao establishes a series of thematic parallels between different time levels, which serve to link the past and the present, in keeping with its postmodern poetics. Among them is the notion that pain is necessary for rebellion. The narrative starts with Jiang Qing who rips the

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foot-binding cloth after her mother tries to bind her feet, in what is called her “debut” as a “heroine of the real-life stage.”50 In rejecting the traditional marker of female beauty, the young Jiang Qing refuses to allow her body to be concealed and thereby defies the dominant gender norms. The pain she feels, and the rebellion—later revolution—become the main leitmotif of the novel: The girl is never able to forget the pain, even when she becomes Madame Mao, the most powerful woman in China during the late 1960s and ‘70s. She recalls the pain as “evidence of the crimes of feudalism” and she expresses her outrage in a series of operas and ballets, The Women of the Red Detachment and The White-Haired Girl, among many others. She makes the billion population share her pain. To understand the pain is to understand what the proletariat went through during the old society, she cries at a public rally. It is to understand the necessity of Communism!51

Moreover, Jiang Qing is associated with the fate of China under foreign attack: “China is collapsing and no one pays attention to the girl’s cries.”52 This serves to increase the pain of the protagonist, which is tied to the pain of the (feminised) nation.53 A closer study of the three main “characters”—the three stages of the protagonist’s development—can shed light on the way in which the novel aligns its construction of the female subject with a deconstruction of a totalising master narrative. The first such version of Jiang Qing we encounter is called Yunhe. When she is only eighteen, Yunhe escapes from her first, arranged marriage. Her grandfather had purchased her out of a small opera troupe and forced her to marry Mr Fei, a local businessman. The grandfather opposes the idea of acting as “[t]o him, actresses and prostitutes are the same.”54 But poignantly, Yunhe feels sexually oppressed in her role as wife: “The first night is awful. The man claims his territory. She thinks of herself as an animal on a slaughtering table …. I weep in the middle of his act. How different am I from the prostitutes on the streets?”55 Instead of downplaying her involvement in acting to free herself from the stereotype of the promiscuous woman, Yunhe strongly desires to be an actress. Yet the novel manages to question the assumptions of historiography’s judgement of Jiang Qing by rendering the image of the prostitute

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more complex and presenting two versions of prostitutes—the actress, which Yunhe chooses to be, and the wife, which Yunhe rejects. The acting profession becomes central in the second stage of the protagonist’s development, when Jiang Qing works as an actress in Shanghai and goes under the name of Lan Ping. Lan Ping’s sojourn in Shanghai lasts from 1934 to 1937. In 1935 she was chosen for the lead role in Zhan Min’s production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. As Natascha Vittinghoff has pointed out, the quality of Lan Ping’s performance of Nora was assessed by later historians not in terms of acting but in terms of its link to her “real-life” personality, propagating an image of Lan Ping as a ruthless and selfish woman.56 To counter this historical narrative, Min presents a non-unified subject, “Lan Ping-Nora,”57 and uses the drama of Nora to explore the complexity of Lan Ping’s emotions.58 Lan Ping’s co-star Zhao Dan  humiliates her and despises her,59 and he influences other professionals to negatively judge Lan Ping’s acting. As a result, Lan Ping “lives out her eternal despair. Nora’s lines fall from her lips like words of her own. I’ve lived by performing tricks, Torvald, and I can bear it no more.”60 It is again through Nora’s lines that Min expresses Lan Ping’s suffering in seeing Dan with another woman: “She tries to handle herself, tries to get over Dan. She invites Dan and Lucy to tea ... She bends down to sip tea while feeling her tears coming. I am walking out of this house that suffocates me and I will survive. You will see, Torvald! She cries on stage.”61 Similarly, Lan Ping’s feelings as a wife are described by constantly referring to Ibsen’s play. Min emphasises how Tang Na, Lan Ping’s husband in Shanghai—a talented literary critic, an upper class, cosmopolitan Chinese that is culturally Westernised—”is confident about transforming her”;62 he instructs her on how to be a “modern woman,”63 teaching her English and introducing her to Western culture. Lan Ping clearly enjoys Tang Na’s guidance at the beginning; moreover, there is love: “to Tang Na she is the universe.”64 However,  as the relationship progresses, Lan Ping reveals that she “feels like a peacock being forced into a hen cage.”65 She is frustrated because she is deprived of roles in the theatre and because Tang Na “doesn’t take her trouble seriously.”66 Lan Ping’s concern about the couple’s financial situation shows her responsibility, while Tang Na, like Torvald, is weaker and more childlike and “continues to throw big parties to entertain his friends,”67 being only concerned about his place in society. The fight that follows opens Lan Ping’s eyes to Tang Na’s pettiness, which can be compared to Torvald’s sense of superiority towards Nora:

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I am beginning to believe what my friends say about you. You have come from a small place. I am trying to grow a flower out of a cooked seed. At this point her rage rises. The impact chokes her. You are my lover, she says, pointing her finger at him, her tears pouring. I can bear nasty rumor, insulting gossip and mean criticism. I can hold up a falling sky, but not your words.68

As to anticipate the end of their marriage, and echoing the end of A Doll’s House, “the winter of 1936 starts with slammed doors and tears”;69 then, Lan Ping speaks in a voice that is reminiscent of Nora’s: “Make up your mind and do it, I tell myself. I am packing and will be gone tonight … I will not be manipulated this time.”70 By indicating the exchangeability of Lan Ping and Nora, the novel addresses issues of authenticity, identity, and performance, and it foregrounds the complexity of subjectivity. This complex version of female subjectivity, which entails a radical challenge to Chinese official historiography, is confirmed by the last version of Jiang Qing. Moreover, in this final phase of the protagonist’s development, the authenticity of both subjectivity and history becomes dubious. Here we see Jiang Qing as the wife of Chairman Mao and the top leader of the CCP. Becoming Madame Mao recounts her process of maturation as she becomes more aware of Party bureaucracy and its trickeries. In particular, we read about Mao’s attempt to eliminate his military supporter Lin Biao. Lin’s death is announced in the novel with striking clarity and reveals, through a dialogue between Jiang Qing and Mao’s close associate Kang Sheng, a totally different version from the one which can be found in the literature of that period: “The Lins are dead, he reports. The mission was completed neatly and quietly within the compound of the Forbidden City.”71 This sheds a disturbing and sinister light on Mao Zedong: “Will Mao do the same to her one day?”72 On the other hand, Jiang Qing’s maturation will lead her to be the architect of her own (tragic) destiny, as she becomes complicit—consciously or not—with an oppressive regime: “I am learning to kill. I am trying not to shake. There is no middle ground, I tell myself. Kill or be killed.”73 Min foregrounds the paradoxes of Jiang Qing’s condition, where she is both victim and perpetrator, overcoming the dualistic narrative of the hero and the villain. We see an intricate web of lies: “Throughout the Cultural Revolution Mao makes Jiang Ching believe that she is inheriting China. What’s

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hidden from her is that Mao makes the same promise to others.”74 Jiang Qing is confident as Mao’s ally on the one hand, but on the other hand she loses control, as she fears being assassinated. In this way, the novel denies the appearance of a single truth, thus questioning the possibility of recovering the historical facts and of arriving at a final assessment of the Cultural Revolution. But it is not just history that is denied its traditional structure. Jiang Qing’s subjectivity is also split, and so is her sexual identity. In an attempt to redeem Jiang Qing from history, Min complicates the stereotype of the “Dragon Lady,” the temptress and oversexualised Chinese woman, which constitutes one of main tropes in Asian American literature.75 While Jiang Qing self-consciously seduces Mao, showing how sexuality has empowered her, she also identifies with the heroines of her Model Operas, “characters who are ardent Maoists”;76 these figures are asexualised women-soldiers. Jiang Qing sees herself as “A heroine with a touch of masculinity. The woman who came from poverty and rises to lead the poor to victory.”77 Becoming Madame Mao, in its attempt to re-­imagine Jiang Qing’s life, appears open-ended: “Let me tell you stories of my life. Because in a few minutes it will be a different story. I will be called the White-Boned Demon,”78 says Jiang Qing to a girl from her entourage the moment before being arrested. By overtly telling stories about herself, Jiang Qing subverts the continuity of patriarchal history, forcing us to interrogate the one-dimensional, didactic, and simplistic narrative about Jiang Qing.

“Real-Life Drama Is Better than Any Playwright’s Imagination”: A Metabiographical Reading of Becoming Madame Mao Becoming Madame Mao carries out a sustained inquiry into our concept of the past through structural devices that direct the reader’s attention to the way in which the past is evoked; at the same time, its self-reflexive moments are specifically metabiographical, as they engender a sophisticated reflection on biography. The text’s combination of fact and fiction is one way of bringing to the fore the unreliability of sources and biographers, and the subjective nature of biography. Becoming Madame Mao presents itself as “A Novel”; at the same time, in another unnumbered page that precedes the Prologue, Min adds a note saying: “I have tried my best to mirror the facts of history.”79 Min often uses expressions like: “In the recorded

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history,” “As history reveals itself in the official documents,” and she counters them with “the truth is” in order to encourage the reader to distinguish between the narratives propagated in official biographies and what is presented as Min’s version. In favourably comparing “the truth” to written sources, the author connects historiography to a failure in understanding the subject’s experience, and perhaps with the degree to which (official) historiography is an affront to history as it is lived subjectively (by women). At the same time, the novel does point to the partiality of its interpretation of Jiang Qing’s life by being explicitly selective in its narrative, and it thus also invites readers to doubt this interpretation. As such, it makes clear that there are some important parallels between history writing and fiction writing. A biofiction like Becoming Madame Mao, then, can be read as an expression of the view that writing a biography, just like historiography, is a subjective and constructive process while it claims to be objective and final. This is particularly revealing when the represented past is subject to all sorts of government censorship. The novel highlights the textual nature of historical knowledge as, for example, the history of China and of Mao Zedong are presented through Jiang Qing’s reading of texts: “Books and papers. The stories fascinate her. They are about the history of the Communist Party, but more about one man’s success.”80 Other epistemological and methodological problems faced by biographers are thematised in the novel in an explicit way. There are, for example, comments such as: “Different views and interpretations have been adopted,”81 which place the attention on heterogeneous versions of the past, alluding to the difficulties of the biographer in choosing which one to use. The novel thus demonstrates an awareness of the incompleteness of all written sources and the inaccessibility of the past. The treatment of the biographical subject is also characterised by self-­ reflexive elements that question the existence of a unified subject and are, therefore, metabiographical. The novel imagines Jiang Qing’s female subjectivity through the drama of Nora and the heroines of the Model Operas. Her identity is thus constructed through the specificity of other (fictional) identities. Moreover, these characters are from both the Chinese and the Western repertoire, which highlights the inter-culturality of Min’s representation. Min’s Jiang Qing will not and cannot separate her self-­ representation from the representation of these figures, and the result is the fictionalisation of Jiang Qing herself. At the same time, intertextual references are used to juxtapose Jiang Qing with a series of historical figures, such as Lady Yuji82 and Empress Dowager,83 suggesting that we can

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only know the subject through a network of discourses of the past. Becoming Madame Mao then addresses the issue of subject-as-construct, confronting the reader with the idea that what seems knowable is, in fact, mediated. Jiang Qing herself is conscious of the fact that she will be the object of biographical and historiographical representations: “You will always come across me in the books about China.”84 The sliding from the third to the first person always seems to emphasise Jiang Qing’s awareness of her state of self as both narrator and narrated. The most striking feature of Min’s representation of Jiang Qing is its investment in performance. The “theatrical” appearance of Madame Mao at the beginning of the book—in the roles of Yunhe, Lan Ping, and Jiang Qing—gives way to a series of layered metaphors of acting to suggest that Jiang Qing’s life only reaches us through the aesthetic act of an actress on stage. More than a story, Jiang Qing is a performance. This, combined with Jiang Qing’s utterances about the proximity of life and drama, opens up a metabiographical reading. As she talks to the actresses of her revolutionary plays, Jiang Qing says: “This is not a fantasy, I tell the leading actress of my opera. The heroine is real. She has come to hardship. I want you to treat the red paint on your chest as a real wound.”85 We see how Min’s fascination with Jiang Qing’s fascination with acting generates a structure that emphasises the contamination of life and performance. In trying to represent her own subjectivity, Jiang Qing is forced to challenge the boundaries between history and fiction. She is thus encouraged to use a play and to present herself as a role; finally, she is driven to exclaim: “History is full of tricks. Real-life drama is better than any playwright’s imagination.”86 Nothing demonstrates this notion better than Jiang Qing’s Model Operas, which constitute a whole new world through performance—a world of heroines. The staged nature of Jiang Qing’s life emerges  pointedly  on the last page of the biofiction, presented  to the reader by “an actress, a great actress … acted with passion.” In this way, Becoming Madame Mao strongly announces as integral to its project of biofiction the question of the truth value of the represented life. 87

Conclusion As in many other self-reflexive fictional biographies, the focus of Becoming Madame Mao is on the process of biographical and historical reconstruction. As a form of historiographic metafiction, the book shows a

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“theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human construct”88 and forces us to acknowledge the epistemological limits to our conception of the past by reminding us of how representations have defined history. In addition, Min’s novel can be read as a metabiography insofar as, in showing its concern with the (im)possibility of capturing the subject’s life per se, it “takes a step back from biography, seeking to establish a level of reflection, distance, irony, and self-consciousness with regard to the claims, assumptions, and conventions of biography.”89 By presenting Jiang Qing’s life and her biography as a performance, Becoming Madame Mao not only suggests that the rendering of another person’s life is always a construct. Min herself, and her background, might be considered as an example of the fact that the distinction between life and performance is problematic. Min’s experience of the Cultural Revolution, itself an intensely theatrical event in both a ritualistic and a dramatic sense,90 as well as the “operatic qualities” of her life,91 contributes to an emphasis on the performative aspects of biography. Ultimately, a study of Becoming Madame Mao as simultaneously historiographic metafiction and metabiography holds the potential to disclose an expanded view on what can be considered its “gendered interventions”: Min’s biofiction intervenes with a woman’s perspective and a fluid representation of a predominantly male historiographical and biographical tradition.  By being explicitly partial in her biographical narrative, and by claiming that this is “the truth,” Min’s female subjectivity becomes a constitutive part of Jiang Qing’s life.

Notes 1. Huiyong Yu, “Rang wenyi wutai yongyuan chengwei xuanchuan maozedong sixiang de zhendi” (Let the Stage of Art be the Everlasting Front to Propagate the Thought of Mao Zedong), Wenyi Bao (Wenhui Daily), May 23, 1968. Translation refers to Gu Yizhing, “The Three Prominences,” in Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution, ed. Wang Ban (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 283–303. 2. One reviewer, for example, remarks: “Readers who remember the hundreds of thousands of people who died during the Cultural Revolution may wince at Becoming Madam Mao, seeing it as the moral equivalent of a sympathetic portrayal of Hitler.” Sheryl WuDunn, “Sympathy for the Demon,” New York Times, July 18, 2000, https://www.nytimes. com/2000/07/09/books/sympathy-­for-­the-­demon.html.

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3. Min was one of the so-called sent-down-youth, young people who left the cities to work and live in the countryside to learn from the workers and farmers there. It was part of the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement,” instituted in the late 1960s and early 1970s to fight pro-bourgeois thinking. 4. In many interviews, Min expressed her feelings about Jiang Qing’s influence in her life, the fact that “[Mao’s] wife made her into a national starlet” while “Mao [had] exiled her to the rice paddies.” A.O.  Scott,  “The Re-Education of Anchee Min,” New York Times Magazine, June 18, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/18/magazine/the-­re-­education-­ of-­anchee-­min.html. 5. “Red Azalea” is also the name of the operatic film in which the author was chosen to play, as well as an allusion to Jiang Qing. 6. Wendy Larson, “Never This Wild: Sexing the Cultural Revolution,” Modern China 25, no. 4 (1999): 423–50. 7. As Larson has noticed, the character of the Supervisor in Red Azalea is the one who combines revolutionary and erotic passion. He is a gender-­ ambiguous figure of high political rank whom Min meets at the Shanghai film studio where she is assigned, and he becomes her sexual interest. The Supervisor is, in the novel, a clear reference to Jiang Qing, who is thus represented by Min in a mystified version, ending up symbolising “the true spirit of the revolution,” as well as “the motivation that allows Chinese creative forces to go onward and outward toward the future.” Ibid., 442. 8. Pin-chia Feng, Diasporic Representations: Reading Chinese American Women’s Fiction (Berlin: Lit, 2010), 166. For a discussion of the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the contemporary Chinese diaspora, see Peter Zarrow, “Meanings of China’s Cultural Revolution: Memoirs of Exile,” Positions 7, no. 1 (1999): 165–91. 9. Eric Hayot, “Unfailing Mediation in Dictée and Becoming Madame Mao,” Contemporary Literature 47, no. 4 (2006): 618. 10. Ibid., 604. In a footnote Hayot notices: “Min’s emergence (as a person and author) out of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) gives her a historical background that dovetails neatly with the Cold War origins of the ‘model minority’ stereotype.” Ibid., 621, note 19. Indeed, in interviews and articles on Min, a lot of emphasis is placed on how she learned the English language by watching Sesame Street and began to write Red Azalea at the same time; in this way, she has come to model, for the public eye, the “ideal of Asian assimilation.” Ibid. 11. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 4, quoted in Hayot, “Unfailing Mediation,” 623. 12. Hayot, “Unfailing Mediation,” 625.

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13. Lucia Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2012), 5. 14. Ibid., 6. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Ibid., 8. 17. In Self Impression, Max Saunders explores the ways in which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life writings for the purpose of fiction, some of them being a major source of inspiration for postmodernism. Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiographiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 18. See, for example, Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak, Experiments in Life-­ Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 19. Julia Novak, “Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction,” in Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction, ed. Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 9. 20. Martin Middeke, “Introduction,” in Biofiction: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama, ed. Martin Middeke and Werner Huber (Rochester: Camden House, 1999), 101. 21. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 57. The scholar who most influentially criticised the notion of neutrality of historiography is Hayden White, who in his book Metahistory elaborated his view on the (Western) forms of historical representation as tragedy, romance, comedy, or satire. White concludes that historiography and fiction are not mutually exclusive, because they are both of a narrative nature and involve making sense through narrative. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 22. John F. Keener, Biography and the Postmodern Historical Novel (Lewiston: Mellen, 2001), 239. Hutcheon’s definition of historiographic metafiction was “fictionalized history with a parodic twist.” Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 53. 23. Keener, Biography, 237. 24. Ibid., 239. 25. Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 77. 26. Ibid., 24. 27. Ibid., 6. 28. Ibid. 29. The Gang of Four was a radical faction formed by Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen. In 1976, after the death of

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Mao Zedong, the group was removed from power by their political opponents, the moderate faction, and this commonly signals the end of the Cultural Revolution. The Gang of Four were not the only ones to be indicted at the trial of 1980–1981, but they were the most notorious ones—and the ones who gave the trial its misnomer—mainly because of the extraordinary attitude of their leader Jiang Qing, who defended herself vigorously in the course of the trial and openly challenged the court with affirmations like: “To rebel is justified!” and “To vilify me is to vilify Mao!” Her most famous claim remains: “I was Chairman Mao’s dog, whoever he told me to bite I bit!” 30. For a detailed discussion of the forty-eight charges against all the accused, as well as a critical discussion of the trial, see Alexander Cook, The Cultural Revolution on Trial: Mao and the Gang of Four (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 31. Mary Farquhar and Chris Berry, “Speaking Bitterness: History, Media, and Nation in Twentieth Century China,” Historiography East and West 2, no. 1 (2004): 116–43. 32. “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China,” June 27, 1981, Chinese Communism Subject Archive, accessed March 1, 2022, http://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm. 33. Cook, Cultural Revolution on Trial. 34. Official portraits of Jiang Qing, such as Jiang Qing shi qishi daoming de zhengzhi bashou (Jiang Qing Is a Traitor and Political Usurper, 1976), started to appear after her arrest and describe her as a manipulative woman with conspiracy tendencies. 35. The White-Boned Demon is a fictional monster from the popular Chinese novel Journey to the West (Xiyouji, sixteenth century). For a discussion on this matter, see Rudolf Wagner, “Monkey King Subdues the White-­Boned Demon: A Study in PRC Mythology,” in The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama: Four Studies (Berkley: University of California Press), 139–235. 36. Farquhar and Berry, “Speaking Bitterness,” 133. 37. Natascha Vittinghoff, “Jiang Qing and Nora: Drama and Politics in the Republican China,” in Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective, ed. Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowki (Münster: Lit, 2005), 208–41. 38. Anchee Min, Becoming Madame Mao (London: Alison & Busby, 2001). Jiang Qing is spelled Jiang Ching in Min. 39. Ye Yonglie’s Jiang Qing zhuan (Biography of Jiang Qing) might be considered, to some extent, an alternative representation of Jiang Qing, coming from an author based in Mainland China. However, while the biography

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includes private aspects of the life of Jiang Qing which have never appeared in a political biography before, and which give glimpses of a romantic and womanly Jiang Qing, the main narrative follows the official assessment of Jiang Qing and presents her as a scheming woman. See Yonglie Ye, Jiang Qing zhuan (Biography of Jiang Qing) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1993). 40. Min, Becoming Madam Mao, 15. 41. Ibid. 42. Li Na is spelled Li Nah in Min. 43. Min, Becoming Madame Mao, 17. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 18. 46. Mao Zedong is spelled Mao Tse-tung in Min. 47. Min, Becoming Madame Mao, 15. 48. Roxanne Farmanfarmaian, “Anchee Min: After the Revolution,” Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2000, 66, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-­ topic/authors/interviews/article/39698-­p w-­a nchee-­m in-­a fter-­t he-­ revolution.html. Already in Red Azalea, one of the characters remarks on the sexism in historiography’s judgement of Jiang Qing: “All the wisdom is men’s wisdom. That’s Chinese history. The fall of a kingdom is always the fault of the concubine. What could be more truthful? Why should Comrade Jiang Ching be an exception?” Anchee Min, Red Azalea (New York: Random, 1994), 274. 49. Emily Lau Kui Ling, “Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao and the SelfConstructed Heroine,” Asiatic 10, no. 2 (2016): 199. 50. Min, Becoming Madame Mao, 21. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. The feminising of China is a common trope in Western representations of China as “other” to the West. 54. Ibid., 35–36. 55. Ibid. 56. Vittinghoff, “Jiang Qing and Nora,” 233–34. 57. Min, Becoming Madam Mao, 65. 58. Ibid. 59. The character of Nora is herself complex, as she is introduced in the novel as a “traditional Western housewife” and as “a concubine, a foot warmer, and a slave.” Ibid., 60. 60. Ibid., 63. 61. Ibid., 64. 62. Ibid., 69. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 68.

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65. Ibid., 74. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 75. 69. Ibid., 78. 70. Ibid., 87. Lan Ping’s sufferings are again linked to the fate of China “falling apart.” Ibid. 71. Ibid., 282.The official version is that Lin Biao and his wife died in an airplane crash while trying to leave Beijing after Mao Zedong had found out their plan to assassinate him. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 239. 74. Ibid., 235. 75. See, for example, Audrey Wu Clark, “Disturbing Stereotypes: Fu Man/ Chan and Dragon Lady Blossoms,” Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies 3 (2012): 99–118. 76. Min, Becoming Madame Mao, 245. 77. Ibid., 284. For a discussion on the masculinisation of women in the Model Operas, see, for example, Rosemary Roberts, Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) (Boston: Brill, 2009). 78. Min, Becoming Madame Mao, 302 (emphasis mine). 79. Ibid., n. pag. 80. Ibid., 105. 81. Ibid., 94. 82. Lady Yuji (died 202 BC), also known as Consort Yu, was the concubine of warlord Xiang Yu (232–202 BC), king of Chu. She killed herself after her husband’s men had been surrounded by the adversary troupes of Liu Bang (died 195 BC), the future emperor of China. Yuji’s story has been fictionalised in the Peking Opera Farewell My Concubine (Ba Wang Bie Ji). By 2000, the year in which Becoming Madame Mao was published, this character was already known internationally due to Chen Kaige’s film Farewell My Concubine (1993). 83. Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) ruled during the late Qing dynasty. Chinese historiography has depicted her as a savage despot and cruel woman. Jiang Qing has been associated with the “evil empress” Cixi after the Cultural Revolution. Min is also the author of two fictionalised biographies of Cixi: Empress Orchid (2004) and The Last Empress (2007). 84. Min, Becoming Madame Mao, 305. 85. Ibid., 264. 86. Ibid., 278. 87. Ibid., 305.

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88. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction (London: Routledge, 1999), 5. 89. Ní Dhúill, Metabiography, 4. 90. See, for example, Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Tuo Wang, The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics Between Politics and Performance (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014). 91. In recording Min’s memories of the revolutionary past, Scott highlights how Jiang Qing’s Model Operas influenced Min’s “sense of her own life,” which “as recalled in memoir and in conversation, sometimes takes on operatic qualities as well.” Scott, “Re-Education of Anchee Min.”

References Jiang Qing shi qishi daoming de zhengzhi bashou (Jiang Qing Is a Traitor and Political Usurper). Bejing: Renmiin wenxue chubanshe pipan zu et al., 1976. “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China.” June 27, 1981. Chinese Communism Subject Archive. Accessed March 1, 2022. http://www.marxists.org/subject/ china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm. Boldrini, Lucia. Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2012. Boldrini, Lucia, and Julia Novak, eds. Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Cook, Alexander. The Cultural Revolution on Trial: Mao and the Gang of Four. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Farmanfarmaian, Roxanne. “Anchee Min: After the Revolution.” Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2000, 66–67. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-­ topic/authors/inter views/ar ticle/39698-­p w-­a nchee-­m in-­a fter-­t he-­ revolution.html. Farquhar, Mary, and Chris Berry. “Speaking Bitterness: History, Media, and Nation in Twentieth Century China.” Historiography East and West 2, no. 1 (2004): 116–43. Feng, Pin-chia. Diasporic Representations: Reading Chinese American Women’s Fiction. Berlin: Lit, 2010. Gu, Yizhong. “The Three Prominences.” In Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution, edited by Wang Ban, 283–303. Leiden: Brill, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004188600.i-­342.53. Hayot, Eric. “Unfailing Mediation in Dictée and Becoming Madame Mao.” Contemporary Literature 47, no. 4 (2006): 601–35.

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Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. ———. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction. London: Routledge, 1999. Keener, John F. Biography and the Postmodern Historical Novel. Lewiston: Mellen, 2001. Larson, Wendy. “Never This Wild: Sexing the Cultural Revolution.” Modern China 25, no. 4 (1999): 423–50. Leese, Daniel. Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Ling, Emily Lau Kui. “Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao and the Self-­ Constructed Heroine.” Asiatic 10, no. 2 (2016): 198–214. Middeke, Martin. “Introduction.” In Biofiction: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama, edited by Martin Middeke and Werner Huber, 1–25. Rochester: Camden House, 1999. Min, Anchee. Red Azalea. New York: Random, 1994. ———. Becoming Madame Mao. London: Alison & Busby, 2001. Ní Dhúill, Caitríona. Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Novak, Julia. “Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction.” In Experiments in Life-­ Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction, edited by Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak, 1–35. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Roberts, Rosemary. Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Boston: Brill, 2009. Saunders, Max. Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiographiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Scott, A.O. “The Re-Education of Anchee Min.” New York Times Magazine, June 18, 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/18/magazine/the-­re-­ education-­of-­anchee-­min.html. Vittinghoff, Natascha. “Jiang Qing and Nora: Drama and Politics in the Republican China.” In Women in China: The Republican Period in Historical Perspective, edited by Mechthild Leutner and Nicola Spakowki, 208–41. Münster: Lit, 2005. Wagner, Rudolf. “Monkey King Subdues the White-Boned Demon: A Study in PRC Mythology.” In The Contemporary Chinese Historical Drama: Four Studies, 139–235. Berkley: University California Press, 1990. Wang, Tuo. The Cultural Revolution and Overacting: Dynamics Between Politics and Performance. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Wu Clark, Audrey. “Disturbing Stereotypes: Fu Man / Chan and Dragon Lady Blossoms.” Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies 3 (2012): 99–118.

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WuDunn, Sheryl. “Sympathy for the Demon.” New York Times, July 18, 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/09/books/sympathy-­f or-­t he-­ demon.html. Ye, Yonglie. Jiang Qing zhuan (Biography of Jiang Qing). Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1993. Yu, Huiyong. “Rang wenyi wutai yongyuan chengwei xuanchuan maozedong sixiang de zhendi” (Let the Stage of Art Be the Everlasting Front to Propagate the Thought of Mao Zedong). Wenyi Bao (Wenhui Daily), May 23, 1968. Zarrow, Peter. “Meanings of China’s Cultural Revolution: Memoirs of Exile.” Positions 7 (1999): 165–91.

PART II

Re-imagining the Early Modern Subject

CHAPTER 5

From Betrayed Wife to Betraying Wife: Re-writing Katherine of Aragon as Catalina in Philippa Gregory’s The Constant Princess Bethan Archer

Katherine of Aragon’s story can be said to suffer from the reader knowing how it ends: in divorce, betrayal, and desertion. The decision of many Tudor novels and dramas to focus on the latter part of Katherine’s life is understandable. The story of a king who changes his country’s religion, alienating his strongest international allies, beheading his domestic advisors, and divorcing his faithful wife of two decades for the sake of a much younger woman, is a compelling tale. However, in their reworkings of this material, many authors relegate Katherine to the position of a supporting role; less a character and more a plot device—an obstacle to the aims of the exciting, seductive, and dynamic Anne Boleyn. In history Katherine becomes a symbol of Christian womanhood; so perfect that she is little more than a one-dimensional caricature. In 1855 Henry William Herbert declares, “there was no speck to mar the loveliness, no shadow to dim the

B. Archer (*) Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_5

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perfection, of her faultless, Christian womanhood.”1 With little to explore in regard to her immaculate character, it is unsurprising that, portrayed as the supposedly perfect woman, Katherine has not occupied the central role in as many stories as her successor. In her biographical novel The Constant Princess, however, Philippa Gregory re-writes Katherine as an ambitious, cunning, and desirable protagonist. This chapter explores how Gregory (re-)writes Katherine and the story of her first marriage to Henry’s brother, Arthur. Positioning their relationship as more than a legal debate, the outcome of which will secure or dissolve her second marriage, Gregory’s novel disrupts the popular idea of Katherine as The Betrayed Wife2 and casts her in the role of The Betraying Wife. Powered by a purpose greater than piety, Gregory’s Katherine lies to Henry VIII about her past marriage, condemning herself and committing the sin of affinity in order to “save” both herself and England. This sin—which is defined as “an impediment to marriage arising if one has previously consummated marriage, or had sexual intercourse, with someone related within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity”3—is most often focused upon as a site of legal disagreement and as a display of Henry’s desperation to be rid of Katherine. Whether Katherine did consummate her marriage with Arthur is often seen as unimportant; the impetus for the end of their marriage is a matter not of morals but of Henry’s political and genealogical desires. Henry’s wish for a male heir—perceived to be necessary to secure both England’s stability and the Tudor dynasty—and the consequences of the denial of his demand for the absolution of their marriage (the formation of the Church of England) take centre stage in most historical and fictional accounts. When Katherine’s position in the story is considered, most historians and authors display a conformity of view, believing it unlikely that her marriage to Arthur was consummated and demonstrating a belief in her declaration of this fact. The idea that she is telling the truth—that what benefits her personally and politically could be sought through telling the truth— engenders a simplicity to her story that does not make for varied fiction. Gregory, however, offers another perspective. Where many historians have imagined Katherine as incapable of lying, Gregory’s story was prompted by the question: what if Katherine had lied? However, Gregory does not present the novel as a counter-narrative or alternative history but declares in the author’s note that after researching for the book she believes Katherine did lie. “That it was a lie is, I think, the most likely explanation. I believe that her marriage to Arthur was

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consummated. … Later historians, admiring Katherine and accepting her word against Henry’s, put the lie into the historical record where it stays today.”4 Gregory’s confident declaration does not situate the novel as an alternative perspective or story for consideration, but as a fictionalisation of a declared truth. Women writers of historical and biographical fiction have often been discussed as active participants in the postmodernist project to reconsider ideas of truth and fact in history.5 Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn detail how the questioning of an individual’s account as proof of fact and the refusal of objective truth has furthered “the possibilities of resurrecting, altering and (re)imagining women’s historical lives.”6 This, however, does not appear to be Gregory’s endeavour. Gregory’s Katherine is resurrected, altered, (re-)imagined, and then firmly (re-)positioned in a framework of truth and fact. This chapter does not argue that Gregory’s assessment is correct—or even that it is more likely than any other re-creation of Katherine’s biography in history or fiction. Instead, it seeks to explore the ways in which Gregory’s starting assumption (that Katherine lied) is used as a means to transform entirely what is “known” of Henry VIII’s “Betrayed Wife.” In this chapter, I argue that Gregory’s provocative attempt to destabilise the historical record is rendered conservative through its need to justify an impact of her lie: the transformation of Katherine of Aragon into a disruptive incestuous figure requires the confinement and control of other aspects of her depiction. In consummating her relationship with Arthur and then marrying his brother, Gregory’s Katherine commits incest. Affinity may not be incest as a twenty-first-century reader would understand it. However, the legal understanding of sex/marriage between in-laws as an incestuous act is more modern than many might imagine—the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act, allowing brother and sister-in-law to marry, only passed into law in the UK in 1907. Mary Jean Corbett argues that this legal change indicates a societal shift in our understandings of how families and incest are defined, demonstrating an understanding of incest as an act committed through blood rather than marital ties.7 However, Jenny DiPlacidi’s work troubles this idea, citing the illegality of marrying parents-in-law until 2007 and the continued legal murkiness surrounding the marriage of step-siblings as examples of our continued unease over potential incest in families created through marriage.8 I argue that this slippery understanding of incest extends beyond legal omissions. Although the law must create legal boundaries to incestuous acts, there is a cultural obsession with

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“seeing” incest,9 demonstrating that the cultural understanding of incest does not end with the law. Katherine’s marriage to Henry might not comply with the modern understanding of incest, but it would still be viewed as a less-than-ideal relationship with “incestuous overtones.” By her contemporaries’ standards, Gregory’s Katherine broke arguably one of the most socially deviant of taboos. By modern standards, the taboo may not be broken but it is disquieted. In allowing for the shifting cultural definitions of incest but still configuring Katherine as an incestuous figure, she can be placed in a broader context of incest narratives. Our definitions may change across cultures and times, but incest (in its varied definitions) is an act that is near-universally taboo. Moreover, Katherine of Aragon is far from Gregory’s only incestuous heroine. Gregory’s Wideacre trilogy contains frequent instances of incest in different forms (siblings, cousins, consensual, and rape). The White Princess, for instance, offers Elizabeth of York’s romanticised take on her incestuous relationship with her uncle, Richard II. In Gregory’s depiction of Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall in The Other Boleyn Girl, the execution of Anne for incest is not merely an accusation—it is so heavily alluded to that it is almost overt. This multitude of incestuous depictions might be written off as lazy storytelling on Gregory’s part—a tantalising taboo that promotes controversy and conversation. To label it purely as such, however, might be to deny the potential for incest to offer a framework for questioning other topics, concepts, and ideas: kinship and community, nation-building and national identity, deviance and corruption, and gender-sex(uality) roles, to name a few. Allowing for a slippery definition of incest, we can re-appraise the figure of Katherine under these dove-tailing topics. In seeking to re-appraise Katherine’s story in history, Gregory’s assessment of the English Queen as an incestuous figure reconfigures her story in a manner that places other limits on the character. Historical fiction has its own history of questioning accepted narratives and re-appraising women who have been historically misunderstood.10 I argue, however, that Gregory’s framing of Katherine as a woman capable of incest, while deconstructing The Betrayed Wife archetype, requires a conservative approach to many other aspects of her character to retain sympathy for Katherine. While attempting to disrupt the stagnant portrayal of Katherine in history, Gregory can be seen to re-affirm and contribute to confining, problematic tropes and ideologies. Gregory’s disruptions of Katherine’s perceived archetype can be seen to successfully draw attention to the limitations of how her story has been told while at the same time limiting the

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telling of her story by conforming to new problematic cultural imaginaries. This is done through the exploration of Gregory’s re-­conceived ideas of Katherine’s youth and beauty, her romance with Arthur, and Gregory’s omission of Katherine’s frequently adapted speech at the Blackfriars court. A recurring argument states that the Tudors’ popularity lies in the ease with which their story can be told; each Tudor has a set character, and we are taught their lives through handy rhymes and easy archetypes. British children are taught to rhyme “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived” to remember each wife’s end. They are all remembered by their ends, but Katherine’s is the only beginning not born from another of the six’s “ends.” Their lives are understood in simplistic terms, which Antonia Fraser describes as: The Betrayed Wife, The Temptress, The Good Woman, The Ugly Sister, The Bad Girl, and The Mother Figure.11 Jessie Childs argues that “The Tudors are very clearly defined for children … They are like a boyband: each has an identity,”12 with these personalities often being  limited variations on the narratives that have been told by historians for centuries. In spite of (often feminist) historians working to complicate these narratives, the succession of these archetypal wives is an idea and a storyline that continues in popular documentaries, non-fiction, and biographical fiction. Lucy Worsley, Historian and Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, described the six wives as each representing an “archetype of femininity.” Katherine of Aragon is seen to represent the “the angry older dumped woman.”13 Worsley herself does not in fact follow this archetypal portrayal of Katherine in her three-part BBC series, Six Wives with Lucy Worsley (2016), but the description speaks to the public understanding of Katherine—and to the usual focus on the end of her life, which ignores the decades in which she was young, sought after, and married. These less-considered decades form the focus of Gregory’s The Constant Princess. In these times, Gregory’s Katherine is often angry, and for many of the years, she has been dumped—not by her husband, but by her father and father-in-law, as they fight over what to do with her when she is widowed. However, at this point she is young with nothing dull or unattractive about her in her desertion. Gregory works hard to separate her Katherine from the Katherine of the cultural imaginary. She does not depict Katherine as dutifully dull in comparison to the seductive Anne Boleyn but creates a character that existed before anyone could know there would be five more wives—or even that she would be the first of Henry’s. This separation from Anne’s story is fundamental in her

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conception as a character. In Susan Bordo’s study of the historiography and cultural creation of Anne Boleyn, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: In Search of the Tudors’ Most Notorious Queen, Bordo details the necessity of Katherine in the cultural creation of Anne: “the collective fantasy of ‘virtuous, patient Katherine’ versus ‘self-seeking, impatient Anne.’”14 The reverse can also be argued: the binary opposition of the two Queens allows Anne to define Katherine as much as Katherine defines Anne. Katherine is rendered old and piously dull through the privileging of Anne’s youth and ambition. This doubling is also included in Gregory’s own novel of Anne Boleyn, The Other Boleyn Girl, where Anne counters her sister’s declaration that Katherine is “a beautiful woman” and the “finest Queen in Europe” with “She’s an old woman … Dressed like an old woman in the ugliest clothes in Europe, from the stupidest nation in Europe.”15 Gregory’s introduction of Anne in The Other Boleyn Girl initially presents her as the binary opposite of her sister, Mary—“dark and French and fashionable and difficult” versus “sweet and open and English and fair.”16 However, as many readers will know how their story progresses, and as nationality (real or perceived) becomes foregrounded, the Boleyn sisters are also collectively opposed to Katherine through their youth, fertility, and beauty. Katherine and Anne are also positioned against one another in their relationship to Henry: only one can be wanted by and wed to him. The Katherine of The Constant Princess, however, is not Henry’s wife but Arthur’s. Gregory’s Katherine is so far removed from our cultural understanding of Katherine that she is not even called Katherine but is called by the name her parents gave her: Catalina. This change in name reflects the change in character, or at least the change in emphasis: it is about the woman/Princess before she became one of six Queens. The use of the name given to her at birth also stresses her Spanish identity, adding to the construction of her exoticised beauty as excitingly foreign. Henceforth, I will refer to Gregory’s character as Catalina while reserving the name Katherine for the historical figure. One aspect of Catalina that is continually emphasised through The Constant Princess, distinguishing her from Katherine, is her beauty. The reader sees Catalina through her future father-in-law’s eyes: “She was an utter beauty: a smooth, rounded face, a straight, long nose, a full, sulky, sexy mouth. Her chin was up, he saw; her gaze challenging.”17 Catalina is not pretty or passable, she is stunning. Her beauty is not passive but disarming, a challenge that demands a response. This is further emphasised

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by the repeated references to the colour of Catalina’s hair. Where often dark in other fictional depictions, Catalina’s hair in Gregory’s version is auburn. She is bestowed with a—historically accurate—hair colour that is far rarer and culturally signifies fire, passion, and boldness. The continuous emphasis of Catalina’s beauty is made all the more dynamic by its implicit comparison to Katherine, whose typical portrayal would be familiar to many readers. Catalina’s beauty not only effects a distancing and re-telling of Katherine but enables Gregory’s story to unfold by tying it to other incestuous stories. Acts of incest have often been associated with both monstrosity and beauty. The paradigm of the monstrous has played a part in constructing the horror of the act itself, the consequences of the act when children are produced,18 and the character of those who engage in the act. Images of monstrosity are particularly prevalent in the context of the most common form of incest—non-consensual and inter-generational, with the abusive parent figure framed as a monster.19 However, the act of incest is not always associated with monstrosity, it is also associated with ideas of both beauty and exceptionalism. Novelist Cassandra Clare argues, when defending her use of incest in her writing, that committing incest can be a sign of godliness.20 This point of view was not only used in literature but widely cited by historians and anthropologists until the mid-twentieth century. Leslie A. White discusses endogamy as the cause of Cleopatra’s beauty and intelligence.21 Exceptionalism by virtue of beauty and blood makes incest not only palatable, but occasionally desirable. Catalina’s beauty—and Arthur’s attractiveness—contribute to the construction of a romance that excuses the incestuous act Arthur later requests of Catalina, and which Catalina engages in. In the diegetic world of Arthur and Catalina, the cultural entangling of beauty and goodness seem to sanctify the incestuous act when it is committed by two attractive people; in this sense, their beauty means it cannot be monstrous. Catalina’s beauty cannot simply be defined solely as a means of making her sin more palatable—it is also a site of danger and threat. Catalina’s attractiveness is first, and most clearly, brought to light through the eyes of her father-in-law, Henry VII.22 Here, the incestuous desire is not presented as a selfless or beautiful act, but encoded with threat. Upon viewing her, Henry VII begins to imagine Catalina’s wedding night with Arthur, imagining his son as fumbling and unskilled.23 His displeasure at the idea is not rooted in a belief that Catalina deserves pleasure, but that her beauty is “wasted” on Arthur. Henry VII perceives his daughter-in-law’s

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attractiveness as both benefit and detriment: “It was good that she was desirable, since she would be an ornament to his court; but it was a nuisance that she should be so very desirable to him.”24 This quote not only speaks to the duality of beauty as a space of desire and deviance, but also foreshadows Katherine’s later place in history: no longer a beauty and ornament to either Henrys’ (VII or VIII) court. In Henry VII’s imagination, Catalina’s role as Queen is limited to pleasing and being a vessel for others’ pleasure and power (through the production of heirs) rather than occupying these spaces for herself. At this early point in their meeting, Catalina’s body as an object of his desire can exist only in Henry VII’s imagination. As his son’s wife, she is not available to him. After the death of both Henry VII’s wife, Elizabeth, and Arthur, however, Henry VII pursues the idea of marrying Catalina. Henry VII’s thought of marrying Catalina fulfils three key roles in the novel: it places boundaries on the idea of “acceptable” incest and demonstrates both Catalina’s political ambition and naivety, once again separating her from the figure of Queen Katherine. Although Catalina’s marriage to Henry is sought by varying characters in the novel (most notably Arthur, Catalina, and occasionally her parents), argued to be an “easy” answer to the problem of Arthur’s death, the possibility of Henry VII marrying Catalina is near-universally reviled—at least initially. Catalina’s companion, Donna Elvira, declares it to be “against nature”25 and the Spanish ambassador has to hide his shock that “this old man, who had just buried his wife, should marry his dead son’s bride.”26 The first person who hears the idea out loud is Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. When discussing the future, second Tudor husband for Catalina, there is a miscommunication as to who is being proposed—Margaret is talking about the future Henry VIII, and Henry VII is talking about himself. The realisation of what her son is proposing is not met positively: “Of you for the Infanta?” she asked incredulously. He felt himself flush again. “Yes.” “Arthur’s widow? Your own daughter-in-law?” “Yes! Why not?” Lady Margaret stared at him in alarm. She did not even have to list the obstacles.27

Margaret is quickly persuaded of the sense in Henry VII’s proposal, won over by the idea that with either marriage the Tudor crown could keep

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Catalina’s dowry and avoid the payment of her widow’s jointure. Expediency, for Margaret, trumps the initial distaste she feels and which is also voiced or thought by other characters. The fictional interaction and difference in response to these differing proposals of incestuous relationships evoke the often fluid boundaries of incest in Early Modern England, where it was a “highly flexible, extremely powerful political tool.”28 The proposed marriage to an in-law can be seen either as a horror to be overcome or as a welcome answer to the difficulties posed by Arthur’s death. The novel’s exploration of the proposal that Catalina could have married Henry VII instead of Henry VIII purifies the incestuous nature of her marriage to her dead husband’s brother. Whether the marriage is moral or good, it is better than its alternative—marriage to her dead husband’s father. As argued earlier in the chapter, Gregory does not aim to offer an alternative reading of history through her depiction of Catalina’s lies. However, she offers us a glimpse of a truly alternative history: a history in which Catalina/Katherine was never Henry’s wife and instead married his father. In exploring some of the routes Katherine’s story could have taken through the construction of Catalina, Gregory not only makes the chosen incest more permissible in the logic of her characters but re-frames the inevitability of Catalina/Katherine’s story. Points of choice and explorations of options again re-enforce the idea of Katherine having lived a life beyond the concluding “chapters” so many people know. What eventually inhibits the marriage of Henry VII and Catalina is not, however, the idea of paternal incest. Catalina’s parents declare that she cannot marry Henry VII, and Gregory presents the decision as theirs, but she also dedicates space to Catalina’s own declarations that she does not want to marry Henry VII. This is not, in fact, her initial reaction. Catalina initially agrees to Henry VII’s proposal and even kisses him. However, as their conversation progresses, she learns what he expects of her as Queen— “Your task will be to fill the royal nurseries and your world will stop there”29—and that Henry VII will never place their children ahead of Henry. Catalina’s initial acquiescence and subsequent horror demonstrate both her political ambition (she is seductive and encouraging towards her father-in-law when she believes that marriage to him may suit her purposes) and her naivety. To readers, it may be hard to imagine that Catalina would not know the laws and customs of inheritance in a land she has been “destined” to rule since childhood. However, Gregory works through the novel to demonstrate Catalina’s youth by filtering her knowledge of what it means to be a monarch through the limited experiences of her

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childhood. The knowledge that enables her to be the “finest Queen in Europe,”30 as Mary describes her in The Other Boleyn Girl, is shown to have been hard-won. Catalina’s political expediency combines with her immaturity to contrast with the Katherine of the cultural imaginary. Upon learning that she will have to work harder to get what she wants— to rule as Queen of England and give birth to a future King of England— Catalina undergoes a transformation that is witnessed by the Ambassador to Spain: “She did not look like a damsel in distress, she looked like a woman trying to outwit a most dangerous protagonist. She was not endearing … She was formidable, but not pleasing.”31 The description is notable for how it adheres to twenty-first century depictions of Anne Boleyn.32 Anne’s actions are often written as machinations where Katherine is most often portrayed as acting in pious faith that all will be well. As Catalina becomes more politically aware, Gregory reconfigures not only Katherine but also the usual dichotomy between her and Anne Boleyn. Anne is not counter to Catalina but similar to her; not only the successor on her throne but equally cunning in her desire to get there. This demonstrates how a work of biofiction can not only re-appraise the position of the figure it focuses on, but how the changes create a ripple effect that re-appraises the position of historical figures excluded from the work itself. Catalina’s decision to marry Henry is not, however, justified only through the presentation of a worse alternative. Fundamental to understanding her desire to become Queen of England is the romance Gregory constructs between Arthur and Catalina. One could argue that there was no “need” for this romance; Gregory could have had an entirely loveless marriage between the pair and had Catalina still lie in order to gain her place as Queen of England. However, Gregory re-frames Catalina’s decision by making it Arthur’s. On his deathbed, Arthur entreats Catalina to marry Henry to ensure that England has a great Queen. To her horror, he demands that she lies to say that he was “unmanned” and shifts the burden of the promise he asks of her to himself, whispering: “Let me do this … Let me keep England safe through you. Let me live through you.”33 Catalina’s promise to do so is made out of love for her husband, which has been formed as they have made plans for how they would rule England. This deathbed scene offers a greater purpose for Catalina’s placement as Queen than her own ambitions. Prince Henry is declared not to be trusted and must be tempered by Catalina’s intelligence and sense of right. The loving stage of Catalina and Arthur’s romance lasts only a few pages in the novel, with most of their relationship dedicated to building to

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this loving point. Despite its brevity in the novel, Gregory is able to bolster their short relationship with a generic structure. The narrative of misunderstanding upon misunderstanding, eventually resulting in contented romance, is an old story. Catalina and Arthur’s romance is mostly built through their discussions of the differing Monarchical rules they have grown up with, which lead them to making plans for how to rule England. They plan fair courts, good roads and markets, churches, and schools. They draw on the idea of Camelot, which they both enjoyed reading about as children. The choice does not only reflect their preferred reading, though. The entwining of the Tudor era with grand narratives of what it means to be English began in the Tudor times, with Camelot being a frequent point of reference. This attempt at creating a mythology that would withstand the centuries has been documented extensively, beginning with the formation of Henry VII’s court, the naming of Arthur, and his christening at Winchester.34 Its success can be seen in how many books about the Tudors refer to the era as a “Golden Age.”35 Catalina and Arthur plan for a new Arthurian age: a kingdom ruled “with justice, with the consent of the people, which is more than a fairy tale.”36 Their vision for England can be seen to anticipate an idealised or utopian version of present-day England, blurring the distance between the novel’s setting and the reader’s contemporary world. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short argue that settings for historical fiction are chosen either for their similarities to the time in which they are written or for their difference.37 Gregory draws attention to the difference by having Catalina and Arthur envision a world that chimes with values from the reader’s own time, highlighting the difference between the times but the similarities between the characters. Positioning Catalina and Arthur as forward-­ thinking and progressive in this capacity38 arguably creates empathy for their character and their goals, as well as for their relationship. Consequently, Catalina’s vow to Arthur legitimises her ambition and desire to be Queen, and the means by which she achieves this. Softening the harsh edges of a woman who wants power, Gregory seeks to give Catalina a selfless reason for pursuing the throne that just so happens to dovetail with her own wishes and the wishes of her family. The commendable desire for a fairer society becomes a means of explaining the inexplicable: Catalina’s choice to marry her deceased husband’s brother. The analogies Gregory establishes between her novel’s setting and the time of its writing not only “modernises” Catalina but allows for a re-­ thinking of the legacy of the Tudors in the contemporary age. Tudor

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history and stories continue to be a vehicle for nationalism and specific views of what it means to be English. The era’s construction in opposition to the darkness of the Middle Ages,39 along with the Tudors’ position as the last Monarchical house before the Union of the Crowns with Scotland in 1603, renders them a popular source of English pride. Catalina and Arthur’s plans offer the reader the chance to consider the similarities and gaps of Catalina’s Arthurian dream and the Golden Age that is so frequently alluded to in popular, contemporary discourse. Driving this Arthurian dream is Catalina’s desire to be a part of social progress and to take action. As such, Gregory’s protagonist provides a stark contrast to the standard representation of Katherine of Aragon as The Betrayed Wife who is hardly an agent of change. Major events in Katherine’s depiction by historians and fiction writers—such as her being expelled from Court, imprisoned, and forbidden to visit her daughter— represent her as a passive victim acted upon by others. In accounts focussed on the later years of her life, she refuses to move from her position as Queen but does little to move the story forward. This fortitude is often praised but positioned as dull in comparison to the bright excitement and disruptive force of Anne’s journey to becoming Queen. However, one moment of action in this passage of Katherine’s story can be considered a mainstay of Tudor stories surrounding Katherine’s displacement: her public denial of the consummation of her marriage to Arthur at the Legatine court in Blackfriars in 1529. The Legatine court was assembled to discuss what has been commonly described as the King’s Great Matter—his marriage to/separation from Katherine of Aragon. The courtroom scenes have become a backbone of the story of Katherine’s removal from her position as Queen. The court was led by Henry’s advisor, Thomas Wolsey, and attended by not only Pope Clement II’s representative, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, and Henry but also Katherine herself. Katherine’s public speech at the court forms a key point of Katherine’s activity in so many Tudor stories. Katherine is detailed as having risen from her chair, knelt at Henry’s feet, and pleaded her case directly to him. Ignoring the rules of the court, she is reported to have given an impassioned speech that claimed her innocence, spoke of the loyal and true wife she had been, and committed her cause to God. “When ye had me at first, I take God as my judge, I was a true maid, without touch of man. And whether it be true or no, I put it to your conscience.” Attesting to the legitimacy of their marriage, Katherine refused the legitimacy of the court and strode out of the room, ignoring the calls

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to return. James Anthony Froude describes it as a scene “too well known to require further description,”40 something anyone with more than a cursory interest in Tudor historical fiction and dramas would probably agree with. The scene is a mainstay of TV dramas, films, and novels of the period and is so prevalent as to appear virtually compulsory.41 It is understandable why so many storytellers would include it. The spectacle of the courtroom; the theatre of Katherine’s plea, kneeling before Henry; and the drama of her exit and refusal to adhere to the court’s rules make for a dramatic, captivating scene. Katherine demanded her argument be included in the record, and Henry Kelly notes that nothing else said by her or on her behalf was to be recorded in this way again.42 Catalina, however, never appears in the court, kneels before Henry, or delivers the speech that appears as her single most important utterance in so many Tudor fictions. Instead, this stock scene in Katherine’s story acts as an unwritten coda to Catalina’s. Gregory ends the novel just before Catalina walks into the court; the final, short chapter a reflective moment about how Catalina has found herself in this position. She centres the lie she has told and decries those who would question her and her will, strong in her faith that her marriage to Henry will be upheld and certain that he will not have the courage to continue with the proceedings. The preceding chapter, the penultimate of the novel, is set in 1513, sixteen years before the Legatine court and the novel’s conclusion. It focuses on Catalina’s regency of England and role in the English victory at the Battle of Flodden. It positions her as a warrior Queen, like her mother, and foregrounds her triumph and proof of the success of both her marriage to Henry and her promise to Arthur: “I have everything I ever wanted— except you. I have won a victory for this kingdom that will keep it safe for a generation. I have conceived a child and feel certain that this baby will live.”43 Readers familiar with Katherine’s life will know that Catalina is wrong—the baby does not live, and the kingdom’s safety remains shaken by the lack of male heir. The novel could have ended with this—Catalina’s presumed victory—but Gregory chooses to end with Catalina’s preparations for Katherine’s iconic scene. Gregory details Catalina’s cunning and certainty that Henry will not dare to say that her marriage to Arthur was consummated if he is forced to meet her eye. In this final scene, Gregory draws attention to the time that has passed and how Catalina’s image has changed at court, centring on how Catalina exists in Anne Boleyn’s mind: “She knows me as Katherine, the old Queen of England, devout, plump and dull. She has no idea that inside, I am still

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Catalina, the young Infanta of Spain. I am a princess born and trained to fight. I am a woman who has fought for every single thing I hold, and I will fight, and I will hold, and I will win.”44 It is not, however, only Anne’s perception of Catalina that is challenged through this scene, but many readers’ perception of Katherine as they know her from history and popular culture. That the novel ends with Catalina stepping forward into the court— “This is me. This is my moment. This is my battle cry.”45—and does not depict her within it can be understood in two ways. It firstly ensures that Catalina is never made to publicly deny her marriage to Arthur in the context of Henry’s removal of her. Catalina’s denials of Arthur are thus presented as a means of her gaining power, rather than retaining it. They are positioned as her choice and plan with Arthur, rather than a necessary refutation to remove the threat of Henry’s dissolution of their marriage and Anne Boleyn’s ascent. The denial of the consummation of her relationship with Arthur becomes proactive rather than responsive, configuring Catalina’s portrayal of the (lack of) consummation of their marriage as a story she tells as well as one she refutes. This distinction serves to re-­ enforce the idea of Catalina as an active participant in the story, stressing her agency. Secondly, it ties together Gregory’s Catalina with the common cultural portrayal of Katherine. In placing Catalina adjacent to a highly familiar Tudor scene, offering her perspective, it allows Gregory to show how the cultural image of Katherine can sit alongside and be disrupted by her Catalina. One component of the Blackfriars scene is often Katherine’s exit, which is usually accompanied by cheers from the London crowd. Gregory re-situates Catalina/Katherine’s position of strength in the scene at Blackfriars. Instead of bestowing victory in the external reactions of the crowd outside or the members/attendants of the court inside, Gregory focuses on Catalina—centring her fortitude, grit, and confidence in herself over the perception of others. That Catalina is not seen in the court but instead steps into it allows her to haunt the depictions of the latter part of Katherine’s story. Gregory ends the novel with the line “I step forward.”46 Catalina steps forward not only into the court but into the part of her story she is best known for. I would argue that the scene is not shown because it is so well known, allowing for any readers well-versed in cultural products surrounding the Tudors to re-play or re-create the scene, imagining it in the light of the Catalina Gregory has presented rather than the Katherine they may have known before reading the novel. As the Author’s Note, which

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immediately follows the novel’s ending, details Gregory’s belief in Katherine’s lie, it seems that Gregory proposes her fictional version of the events as a possible framework for what might actually have occurred. In not portraying the Blackfriars scene, Gregory allows the reader to apply this framework to both their imagining of the scene and others’ narratives of it. When (re-)reading, (re-)watching, or (re-)considering the stories of Anne Boleyn and the King’s Great Matter, readers can then view other depictions of Katherine in light of Gregory’s biofiction. In 1855 Henry William Herbert wrote in his Memoirs of Henry the Eighth of England with the Fortunes and Characters of His Six Wives: “If anything mortal could be perfect, that mortal thing, as far as man may judge, was Katherine of Aragon.”47 While ideas of perfection may vary, Herbert’s description of the “perfect” Katherine of Aragon speaks to a long-standing tradition of Katherine as dutiful and pious. Gregory’s (re-) imagining of this Katherine as Catalina, casting her as an ambitious woman who lies in order to enter into an incestuous marriage, may be seen as a transgressive revision of Katherine’s place in history. Gregory uproots and overturns the archetype of The Betrayed Wife that Katherine is so often popularly imagined to embody. The “constancy” in the novel’s title alludes to that image but assumes an alternative significance in Gregory’s narrative. With Katherine’s constancy having been constructed by so many as something almost staid—a Christian ideal but not the mark of a dynamic heroine—Gregory’s Catalina offers constancy not in relation to Henry, but to herself, her ambitions, and the lie she told for the man she loved. Gregory’s re-configuration undermines the binary opposition traditionally envisioned between Katherine and Anne Boleyn, and the Madonna/ Whore dichotomy women are so frequently forced into. However, the transformation of Katherine into the incestuous, lying Catalina seems to foreclose the possibility of further transgressions—at least if the popular reader is to empathise with Gregory’s heroine. Catalina’s transformation must come with a cost. Her beauty and passion must be tempered by the incestuous threat of a controlling paternal figure. Her ambition cannot exist for its own sake but must be tied to and justified by the love of her husband. The sins she chooses—both the lie and the incestuous marriage she enters into—must constantly be softened and romanticised. Diana Wallace argues that “our ideologies of the past tell us a good deal about the most powerful ideologies of the present.”48 Following Wallace, I would argue that Gregory’s portrayal of Catalina demonstrates the limitations to our re-appraisal and re-assertion of the role of women in history.

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If Katherine/Catalina is “allowed” to transgress the social norms of her own day (incest) and ours (dishonesty, female ambition), the reason must be palatable: she must have done it for the man she loved.

Notes 1. Henry William Herbert, Memoirs of Henry the Eighth of England: With the Fortunes, Fates, and Characters of His Six Wives (New York: Cornell University Library, 1855), https://archive.org/details/cu31924027959372. 2. Antoania Fraser, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London: Orion Publishing, 1992). 3. David d’Avray, Dissolving Royal Marriages: A Documentary History, 860–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 296. 4. Philippa Gregory, The Constant Princess (London: Harper Collins, 2005), 485. 5. The question of whether to study historical fiction and biofiction separately has recently received attention in biofiction scholarship, See, for instance, Michael Lackey, “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 33–58, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1092290. In this chapter I understand historical fiction broadly as fiction that engages with the past in its varied facets. This broader definition includes biofiction and its engagement with historical lives. Allowing that not all historical fiction is biofiction—and vice versa—there is sufficient overlap that scholars of each genre can draw on each other’s insights. 6. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3. 7. Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 8. Jenny DiPlacidi, Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 9. Examples of this in modern culture are numerous. The Kardashians are often accused of incestuous acts/capitalising on the sexualising of incestuous fantasies. See, for instance, Ishani Ghose, “Kourtney Kardashian’s Recent ‘Incest’ Photo with Sisters Khloe and Kendall Is Shocking and Disturbing, Receiving Severe Backlash Online,” MEAWW, February 7, 2020, https://meaww.com/kourtney-­kardashian-­incest-­picture-­khloe-­ kardashian-­kendall-­jenner; Wendy Michaels, “Critics Think Kylie and Kendall Jenner Look ‘Incestuous’ in Makeup Collab Photos,” Showbiz Cheatsheet, June 21, 2020, https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/

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critics-­think-­kylie-­and-­kendall-­jenner-­look-­incestuous-­in-­makeup-­collab-­ photos.html/. There has been similar controversy over David Beckham’s relationship with his daughter, Harper Seven. See Meghan C. Hills, “David Beckham Just Caused Controversy with This Instagram Post,” Marie Claire, June 5, 2017, https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/celebrity-­ news/david-­beckham-­harper-­beckham-­512049. When Presley Gerber, model and Cindy Crawford’s son, got a tattoo dedicated to Kaia, model and his younger sister, the internet seemed split over whether it was “#brothergoals” or incredibly creepy, using fictional references from Game of Thrones and Flowers in the Attic to express their concerns. See “Presley Gerber Gets His Younger Sister Kaia’s Name Inked On His Left Arm To Show His Love For Her, Earning Him the Title ‘Best Big Bro Ever’ From His Sister,” AceShowbiz, February 17, 2018, https://www.aceshowbiz. com/news/view/00117591.html. News articles that focus on intertwining married/blood families may not outright accuse participants of incest, but they are nonetheless positioned as strange or abnormal, designed to provoke a reaction from the reader. See, for instance, Jessica Lester, “SEEING DOUBLE: We’re Sisters Who Married Two Brothers—Our Kids Will Be ‘Double Cousins’ and Could Look Like Twins,” The Sun, July 20, 2019, https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/9546298/ two-­sisters-­married-­two-­brothers-­double-­cousins/. 10. See, for instance, Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, eds., The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 11. Fraser, The Six Wives, 2. 12. Jessie Childs quoted in Charlotte Higgins, “Tudormania: Why Can’t We Get Over It?” The Guardian, May 4, 2016, https://www.theguardian. com/news/2016/may/04/tudormania-­why-­can-­we-­not-­get-­over-­it. 13. Lucy Worsley quoted in ibid. 14. Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: In Search of the Tudors’ Most Notorious Queen (London: Oneworld Publications, 2014), 314. 15. Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 6. 16. Ibid., 8. 17. Gregory, The Constant Princess, 28. 18. It is worth noting that this motif appears in many of Gregory’s own novels. Anne and George discuss the limitations of the belief that their sexual relationship could cause a monstrous child in The Other Boleyn Girl. Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl, 482. In The Favoured Child (1989), Richard’s monstrosity as a rapist and abuser is partially attributed to his having been born from an incestuous sibling relationship. The cultural idea that incest

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­ roduces monsters is both evoked and countered in this novel, his sister p Julia also having been conceived through incest and acting as a foil to Richard, symbolising goodness and light. This pairing of “good” and “bad” incestuously produced siblings is commonly found in contemporary culture. See, for example, the Targaryens and the children of Cersei and Jaime in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–) series and its television adaptation Game of Thrones (2011–2019). Many narratives place the offspring of incestuous parents in this opposing dynamic to underline the entwined nature of beauty and monstrosity when discussing incest. 19. Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault, and the Law (London: Routledge, 1993). The construction of the abuser as a monster has been criticised for refuting the idea that these acts of abuse are committed by seemingly regular or normal people. Diane Payne, Kimberly Lonsway, and Louise Fitzgerald, “Rape Myth Acceptance: Exploration of Its Structure and Its Measurement Using the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale,” Journal of Research in Personality 33, no. 1 (1999): 27–68, https://doi. org/10.1006/jrpe.1998.2238. 20. Cassandra Clare, “On Incest in Literature/TMI,” Tumblr, 2014, https://cassandraclare.tumblr.com/post/68288387799/on-­incest-­in-­ literature-­tmi. 21. Leslie A. White cited in Arthur P. Woolf, Incest Avoidance and the Incest Taboos: Two Aspects of Human Nature (Stanford: Stanford Briefs. 2014), 12. 22. As two different Henrys appear in the novel as father and son, it will be Katherine/Catalina’s eventual husband Henry VIII I am referring to when I speak of “Henry,” unless clarification is necessary. His father, and King for much of the novel, will only be referred to as Henry VII. 23. Gregory, The Constant Princess, 37. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 264. 26. Ibid., 255. 27. Ibid., 248. 28. Bruce T. Boehrer, Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship and Kingship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 3. 29. Gregory, The Constant Princess, 271. 30. Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl, 6. 31. Gregory, The Constant Princess, 281. 32. Bordo, Creation of Anne Boleyn; Stephanie Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 33. Gregory, The Constant Princess, 191.

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34. John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 2007). 35. See, for instance, Jane Bingham, The Tudors: Kings and Queens of England’s Golden Age (London: Arcturus, 2012); Josephine Ross, The Tudors: England’s Golden Age (New York: Putham, 1979). 36. Gregory, The Constant Princess, 164. 37. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, “Histories and Heroines: The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–20. 38. In many aspects of the novel, Catalina and Arthur remain true to their time. Arthur has a limited capacity for understanding a woman’s ability to govern, and Catalina often displays vastly Islamophobic thinking. Their opinions are changed, and their thinking expanded throughout the novel, but they are far from constructed as entirely modern, progressive thinkers. 39. Higgins, “Tudormania.” 40. James Anthony Froude, The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon (New York: Scribner, 1891), 99, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo1.ark:/13960/ t7pn9p46v. 41. To cite every depiction of this scene would be near-impossible. In recent years, versions of this scene have been included in the TV series The Tudors (2007); Alison Weir’s Six Tudor Queens: Katherine of Aragon, The True Queen (2016); another of Gregory’s novels, The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) and its Hollywood adaptation (2008); and although the speech itself is not included in Hilary Mantel’s critically acclaimed Wolf Hall (2009), it is featured in its BBC adaptation (2015). 42. Henry Kelly, The Matrimonial Trials of King Henry VIII (Eugen, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004). Kelly acknowledges that if anything else said by Katherine was recorded, it was not included by Watkins and Clayburgh in the acts compiled by them four years later. 43. Gregory, The Constant Princess, 478. 44. Ibid., 482. 45. Ibid., 484. 46. Ibid. 47. Herbert, Memoirs of Henry, 317. 48. Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, xi.

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References “Presley Gerber Gets His Younger Sister Kaia’s Name Inked on His Left Arm to Show His Love for Her, Earning Him the Title ‘Best Big Bro Ever’ from His Sister.” AceShowbiz, February 17, 2018. https://www.aceshowbiz.com/ news/view/00117591.html. Bell, Vikki. Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault, and the Law. London: Routledge, 1993. Bingham, Jane. The Tudors: Kings and Queens of England’s Golden Age. London: Arcturus, 2012. Boehrer, Bruce T. Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship and Kingship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Bordo, Susan. The Creation of Anne Boleyn: In Search of the Tudors’ Most Notorious Queen. London: Oneworld Publications, 2014. Burrow, John. A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century. London: Penguin, 2007. Clare, Cassandra. “On Incest in Literature/TMI.” Tumblr, 2014. https://cassandraclare.tumblr.com/post/68288387799/on-­incest-­in-­literature-­tmi. Cooper, Katherine, and Emma Short, eds. The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ———. “Histories and Heroines: The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, 1–20. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. D’Avray, David. Dissolving Royal Marriages: A Documentary History, 860–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. DiPlacidi, Jenny. Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Fraser, Antonia. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. London: Orion Publishing, 1992. Froude, James Anthony. The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon. New York: Scribner, 1891. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo1.ark:/13960/t7pn9p46v. Ghose, Ishani. “Kourtney Kardashian’s Recent ‘Incest’ Photo with Sisters Khloe and Kendall Is Shocking and Disturbing, Receiving Severe Backlash Online.” MEAWW, February 7, 2020. https://meaww.com/kourtney-­kardashian-­ incest-­picture-­khloe-­kardashian-­kendall-­jenner. Gregory, Philippa. The Constant Princess. London: Harper Collins, 2005. ———. The Favoured Child. London: Harper Collins, 1989/2006. ———. The Other Boleyn Girl. London: Harper Collins, 2001. ———. Wideacre. London: Harper Collins, 1987/2006.

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———. The White Princess. London: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewelyn. Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Herbert, Henry William. Memoirs of Henry the Eighth of England: With the Fortunes, Fates, and Characters of His Six Wives. New York: Cornell University Library, 1855. https://archive.org/details/cu31924027959372. Higgins, Charlotte. “Tudormania: Why Can’t We Get Over It?” The Guardian, May 4, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/may/04/ tudormania-­why-­can-­we-­not-­get-­over-­it. Hills, Megan C. “David Beckham Just Caused Controversy with This Instagram Post.” Marie Claire, June 5, 2017. https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/ celebrity-­news/david-­beckham-­harper-­beckham-­512049. Kelly, Henry. The Matrimonial Trials of King Henry VIII. Eugen, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004. Lackey, Michael. “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 33–58. https://doi. org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1092290. Lester, Jessica. “SEEING DOUBLE: We’re Sisters Who Married Two Brothers— Our Kids Will Be ‘Double Cousins’ and Could Look Like Twins.” The Sun, July 20, 2019. https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/9546298/two-­sisters-­ married-­two-­brothers-­double-­cousins/. Michaels, Wendy. “Critics Think Kylie and Kendall Jenner Look ‘Incestuous’ in Makeup Collab Photos.” Showbiz Cheatsheet, June 21, 2020. https://www. cheatsheet.com/entertainment/critics-­think-­kylie-­and-­kendall-­jenner-­look-­ incestuous-­in-­makeup-­collab-­photos.html/. Payne, Diana, Kimberly Lonsway, and Louise Fitzgerald. “Rape Myth Acceptance: Exploration of Its Structure and Its Measurement Using the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale.” Journal of Research in Personality 33, no. 1 (1999): 27–68. https://doi.org/10.1006/jrpe.1998.2238. Ross, Josephine. The Tudors: England’s Golden Age. New York: Putham, 1979. Russo, Stephanie. The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Woolf, Arthur P. Incest Avoidance and the Incest Taboos: Two Aspects of Human Nature. Stanford: Stanford Briefs, 2014.

CHAPTER 6

Jean Plaidy and Philippa Gregory Fighting for Gender Equality Through Katherine Parr’s Narrative Alison Gorlier

Educated, intelligent, Reformist, scholarly, Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth wife from 1543 until his death in 1547, was the first woman in English history to write and publish a book under her own name, emulating the likes of Christine de Pisan and Margaret of Navarre.1 Katherine Parr2 was an influential female regent and stepmother to Henry’s children, Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI. In her own time period, she used her status as Queen of England to promote education for women as well as the English vernacular for preaching and praying by first publishing Psalms or Prayers, a selection of John Fisher’s translated prayers, then Prayers or Meditations in 1545 and The Lamentations of a Sinner in 1547 under her own name. Likewise, in association with several notable scholars, including the princesses Mary and Elizabeth, she edited an English translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases of the Bible. As a Protestant scholar, Katherine encouraged Reformist thinkers to come to her private chambers, where

A. Gorlier (*) Université d’Artois, Arras, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_6

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Protestant preachers such as Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Nicholas Shaxton would deliver sermons which would frequently be followed by debates. Those debates were part of a movement often called the New Learning started by, among others, Margaret Beaufort, Henry VIII’s grandmother. Equally, for the short time during which she was named Regent and took full political power, while Henry was at war in France in 1544, Katherine ruled the court with remarkable efficiency. Her influence in these fields was impressive and, according to historian David Starkey, this leadership had a great effect on Elizabeth, as “she witnessed Katherine’s masterful conduct of business and the effortless ease with which she, a mere woman, imposed her authority in and on a masculine world.”3 This chapter studies two biographical novels whose main character is Katherine Parr. Jean Plaidy (one of Eleanor Hibbert’s pseudonyms, used for her Tudor series4) published The Sixth Wife in 1953. It is written in the third person with an omniscient narrator. Philippa Gregory’s novel, The Taming of the Queen in 2015, is a first-person narrative of Henry VIII’s sixth wife. Both female authors chose to recount the story of Katherine Parr’s marriage to the Tudor King. They also chose to present her as a woman who exhibits agency and courage, and who embodies feminist values which resonate with their contemporary readerships. The character of Katherine Parr lends herself well to historical novels that portray women’s resilience and feminist actions in an era when feminism as we understand it today did not yet exist. As Sahara Rós Ívarsdóttir states: “The historical novel has become a prominent platform for female authors to rewrite women into history from which they have often been excluded. It takes its attention from ‘his-story’ and focuses on ‘her-story.’”5 As both novels recount—although fictionally—the life of the historical woman Katherine Parr from the moment Henry VIII decides to make her his future wife, they can be considered to fall within the subgenre of biographical fiction.6 The two biofictions featuring Katherine Parr allow their female authors to engage with a set of ideas that might be alien to the sixteenth century but which are relevant to women readers of their own day seeking an imaginative space in which to explore feminist issues. Alexandra Black et al. define a feminist as “someone who fights for equality, who challenges prejudices, discrimination and sexism,”7 a definition which applies to both fictionalised Katherines in their respective narratives, though in subtly different manners, as the following analyses will demonstrate.

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Katherine Parr as a Sixteenth-Century Feminist Activist

From the 1940s, when she started her career as a novelist, to the 1990s, Jean Plaidy, under different pseudonyms, witnessed and participated with her novels in the different feminist movements from New Feminism after World War I to post-second-wave feminism.8 The Sixth Wife, among Plaidy’s other Tudor novels, can be read as inciting young women of Plaidy’s own day to seek beyond the cult of domesticity and continue to fight for independence and equality. Plaidy’s popularity stems from her careful research in wellknown available histories written by Agnes Strickland, Alexander Fraser Tytler, James Anthony Froude, and John Speede9 as well as from the clarity of her prose and her relatable narrators, which Susan Higginbotham describes as telling their stories “just as ordinary women might tell them”—even though they “wear crowns on their soon-to-be-forfeited heads.”10 Plaidy’s work fits within the frame of the New to second-wave feminist movements which promoted women’s further emancipation in post-war Britain. The New Feminism started in Britain once World War I was over11 and some women over thirty gained the right to vote thanks to the 1918 Representation of the People Act. Along with the 1919 Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act, the New Feminists of the twentieth century campaigned for women’s rights to have children and work. This model was notably embodied by Labour MP Eleanor Rathbone, whose book The Disinherited Family (1924) argued, among other things, that the concept of a “family wage” was a “patriarchal policy … used to justify unequal pay between men and women.”12 In 1928 the Equal Franchise Act gave women, along with men over twenty-one, a voice in political matters. Women, through pressure groups such as The Six Point Group and Women’s Freedom League, fought for birth control, emancipation, and equal pay. By the 1950s marriage was no longer considered as a necessary and sufficient end in itself for women; they could aspire to more. That decade saw, however, a decline in feminism as women were encouraged to pursue a life of domesticity rather than a career, a tendency reinforced by some measures introduced by the government in the wake of the Beveridge Report of 1942. The report had declared marriage and childrearing to be women’s vocation, describing their domestic roles in terms of both their work and their natural place.13 Elizabeth Wilson, in her analysis of the Beveridge Report, focuses on the centrality of gender roles within welfare state ideology. She remarks: “[T]he State defines femininity and … this definition is

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not marginal but is central to the purposes of welfarism. Woman is above all Mother, and with this vocation go all the virtues of femininity: submission, nurturance, passivity.”14 In her novel, Plaidy subverts these expectations by highlighting their impracticable and unsatisfactory nature and showing how they devalue women. In The Sixth Wife, to conform to the king’s expectations and those of Early Modern society, Katherine Parr must be in possession of the above-­ mentioned feminine virtues and more. She must be the embodiment of the perfect woman; her identity is stripped away as she must incarnate her gender’s attributes according to men, and especially the King, who, at the beginning of the novel, is searching for a new wife: He wanted a Queen. … He wanted a woman—not too young and frivolous, not the sort who might hanker after younger men. She need not be a beauty if she were comely enough. … Yes, she must have all those qualities [of his previous wives] and she must be a good and faithful wife, a consort of whom one could be proud, a gentle, serene lady to soothe him when necessary, to enchant him, to make him feel young again, to be a stepmother to the children he had, and a mother to those he might yet have.15

Plaidy imagines a Katherine who feels completely imprisoned in her marriage to Henry VIII and in her role as wife: “There was no longer hope of escape. The King was close. His breath scorched her. The nuptial ring was being put on her finger. No. No longer hope. The King in that tragic moment had made Katherine Parr his sixth wife.”16 Katherine, in this novel, is a woman who desires marriage but who also wants respect and equality in the relationship. By this token, Plaidy projects feminist values and models of relationship into the sixteenth century, an era that long predates modern concepts of gender equality. This fictional Katherine’s marriage to the King is, however, anything but equal and desired. Henry frightens, almost bullies, her into his sixth marriage, giving her no alternative but to become his wife: She was really frightened. He, who was accustomed to speaking with the ministers of his own government and the ambassadors of others knew how to imbue his words with deep meaning. He was telling her that it was not for her to say whether or not she would have him. He was the best judge, and he it would be who made the choice.17

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Katherine’s role in her marriage to Henry VIII is not what she dreamt of with Thomas Seymour, whom she loves, at the beginning of the novel, nor what she experienced with her first two husbands, Edmund Borough and John Neville, Lord Latimer. In her relationship with Henry, Katherine’s submission is reinforced by her marriage to the King, whose subject she is. The narrative repeatedly underlines Katherine’s subservient place. Although she has acceded to the highest rank for a woman in Henry VIII’s reign, she must submit to the King’s will: “Oh, I have been a most unhappy man, for those I loved deceived me. I am a simple man, Kate—a man who asks but little from his wife save fidelity … love … obedience. ‘Tis not much for a man … for a King … to ask.”18 Henry, as King and husband, rules over her. Besides, what some women would wish for in a happy marriage—children—is forced on Katherine as a command from the King, one she must fulfil or risk her life: Oh God, help me, she prayed silently. Now he talks of sons. Thus must he have talked to the first Queen Katherine, to Anne Boleyn, to Jane Seymour. And then those continuous disasters. Two girls and one sickly boy was all he had in spite of his endeavours. Here was a tragic pattern starting again. A son! A son! I want a son. And if you cannot provide one, there is always the axe or the sword to remove you, to make room for another who will give me sons.19

Where pregnancies would have fulfilled the role designed for her by the patriarchal society in which she lived, their lack marked her as a victim of the old King’s temper and his prisoner: It was nearly three years since their marriage, and there had not been even one pregnancy. Moreover, it was remembered that she had had two husbands and not a child from either of them. Three years of these alarms— three years when she must submit to the King’s caresses and the King’s anger, and accept all with a meek endurance. Three years that seemed thirty!20

In this fictionalised version of her life, Katherine Parr serves as a reminder to women of the 1950s that domesticity was not the goal feminists of earlier generations had fought for. Along with numerous historical romance novels of the twentieth century which, as Jerome de Groot has remarked,21 centre on female subjectivity and the private/public dichotomy, Plaidy’s novel creates a dissonant space in which her intended readership may find feminist values attuned to their own time period. The lexical

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fields of fertility, barrenness, and obedience to one’s husband tied with Katherine’s fear and sense of entrapment underscore the predicament women still faced in marriage in the 1950s. As Diana Wallace argues, “Plaidy’s novels suggest that history has been full of unhappy women, who discovered once the honeymoon was over that marriage was not at all what they had been promised.”22 Katherine’s situation as a married woman is presented as unenviable throughout the entire novel, even when she is married to the man she desires, Thomas Seymour. In love with him even before she marries the King, Katherine is devastated to learn that her marriage to him is not founded on trust and respect: When she had married the King, she had known that her life would be filled with dangers; and she had not been deceived in that. But now, that marriage which was to have brought glorious fulfilment to her life, which was to have made everything that had gone before worth while since it was to have led to perfection, was proved to be utterly false, a fabrication, a fantasy which did not exist outside her own imagination.23

Thomas Seymour is caught kissing the princess Elizabeth, Katherine’s ward, while Katherine herself is pregnant with Thomas’s child. None of Katherine’s marriages brings her joy or fulfilment; instead, each places her in an entrapped position which runs contrary to what she expected. In the 1950s marriage was presented to women as their destiny: they would care for husband, children, and house while their husbands would be the “breadwinner” and head of the household. Within this system of thought, unmarried women represented a difficulty for the state: The [Beveridge] Report presented “women” as a universal grouping irrespective of class. Any woman falling outside the category of dependent “housewife” was designated a “problem”: “There was also the problem of the woman whose marriage ceased, not through the death of her husband but through divorce, separation or desertion.”24

Plaidy’s novel can be seen to denounce the deterioration in women’s conditions from earlier decades that was evident at the time of the novel’s publication. The new welfare state of the 1950s gave more importance to the identity of women as potential wives and mothers than as workers and “their public position as full citizens was guaranteed as a result of their private duties of mothering.”25 Many women’s lives followed the model of

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dependence on a husband advocated in the Beveridge Report. In The Sixth Wife, marriage is unequivocally depicted as an entrapping situation in which women cannot fulfil their potential. The novel is intensely concerned with women’s submissive place and with forces that prevent them from acting of their own volition, speaking their minds and desiring things for themselves. Marriage is viewed as an impediment to self-­determination: “She had been taught that it was a wife’s duty to follow her husband in all things.”26 Katherine Parr sees no choice but to fearfully obey her husband the King while Anne Askew, the famous Protestant martyr, is portrayed as “the victim of an undesirable marriage,”27 a situation with which Katherine can identify. In the novel, Plaidy imagines Anne Askew meeting Katherine Parr several times to discuss the Bible during the preaching sessions that she held in her royal apartments. Askew recounts in stark terms her forced marriage to Thomas Kyme: Resignation came to her at length, but Mr Kyme did not wish for resignation. There were angry scenes. “Unnatural!” That was the word he had flung at her. … He had not been, she was sure, more brutal, more unkind than any man would have been. “I will not let you go,” he had stormed at her. “You are my wife and you shall be my wife.”28

Askew’s rejection of domestic life was considered unnatural even for women in the 1950s,29 despite the 1923 Equal Divorce Act. Stephanie Spencer’s research on gender, work, and education in Britain in the 1950s reveals that “women’s domestic activity as wife and mother was variously described as ‘natural.’”30 The question arises whether Anne Askew is presented as a martyr for her faith in The Sixth Wife, which historically she was, or whether she is martyred for her choice to be celibate. In the narrative, Askew is not officially condemned for her desire to separate from her husband and remain single. She is, however, the victim of conservative men (Bishop Stephen Gardiner and Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley) who see independent women as a threat to their well-established patriarchal society. The novel depicts them as actively wishing to torture to death a woman who speaks her own mind, an attitude which symbolically echoes the State’s wish to confine women to their domestic role: “It is easy for the fanatical woman to say these things, and to die quickly is easy. But to die slowly, … lingeringly … horribly … that is not so simple. The bravest men cry out for mercy on the rack.” “But … this is a woman.”

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Gardiner’s thin lips smiled faintly. “This, dear Chancellor,” he said, “is our enemy.”31

Askew’s wish to learn and to preach as well as her rejection of the married state are represented as detrimental to her image and standing in society. Her character in Plaidy’s novel can be read as a reflection and critique of the ideology of maternal-domestic femininity, which in the 1950s declared work and higher studies undesirable for women:32 female career choices were constricted by the seemingly universal opinion that woman’s place would be in the home, an expectation much confirmed by a younger age of marriage and motherhood. The vast majority of girls left school at 15 and after, at most, a brief training period, entered employment only to leave once married.33

The real Katherine Parr is notably famous for having published several books and as a supporter of learning and scholarship. Indeed, she was a patroness of translations which would help to disseminate the scriptures and their understanding, such as Erasmus’s Paraphrases of the Bible from Latin to English. Equally, she appointed eminent scholars to positions of high responsibility.34 The desire to learn also drove Katherine to discuss the Bible or theology in general with the King. She even dared to push him to accept some of Cranmer’s Protestant reforms,35 although this almost back-fired when Henry became angry with her, arguing that she had become a doctor to instruct him rather than be instructed by him.36 Repeatedly, in The Sixth Wife, the King claims his own intellect, and the intellect of all men, to be superior to that of his wife and other women: “‘It is not for women to teach us our business,’ he said. ‘We agreed with St Paul on this matter: “Let your women keep silent in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience.”’”37 The King seems intimidated by Katherine’s ability to think well and on her own. As she exposes her thoughts, it seems that she becomes a threat to his manhood and authority: It had occurred to him that Katherine, his wife, was a little too clever with her tongue. He did not like clever women over-much. The thought made him mourn afresh for little Catherine Howard. The ambassadors and emissaries from other countries seemed to find pleasure in the conversation of this present Queen, and this appeared to delight her. He fancied she gave herself airs. She would have to learn that they paid homage to her because

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she was his Queen and not because of her accomplishments. He wished to show her that though he had raised her up, he could put her down.38

Although Jean Plaidy is often classified as a historical romance writer,39 she focused on “women of integrity and strong character” who were also “struggling for liberation, fighting for their own survival.”40 In light of the gender roles promoted in Plaidy’s day, her novels’ critique of women’s predicament in the Tudor era can be read as a critique of normative gender expectations of the 1950s. Wallace has argued that Plaidy’s Tudor novels “demonstrate that it is a matter of historical fact that women have been locked up, mistreated, violently abused, raped, and even killed, often by their husbands.”41 Through Katherine Parr’s narrative, The Sixth Wife urges women to keep fighting for women’s liberation, education for women, and self-determination. In that sense, Plaidy anticipated some major arguments of the second-wave feminist movement which would emerge a few years after the novel’s publication. She especially foreshadowed the campaigns for equal education, planned pregnancies, and women’s growing independence.



Katherine Parr as a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Campaigner

Born in 1957, Philippa Gregory has lived through the so-called secondand third-wave feminist movements which started in the early 1960s and early 1990s respectively. While second-wave feminism may be defined as a campaign for equal pay, equal education and opportunity, and free contraception and reproductive rights,42 third-wave feminism offers a critique of the continuing sexual objectification of women43 and has been carried by women who “grew up with the expectation of achievement and examples of female success as well as an awareness of the barriers presented by sexism, racism, and classism.”44 Shortly after Gregory’s tenth birthday, women were celebrating fifty years of equal franchise with men. As Martin Pugh remarks, however, the commemoration of the winning of the vote rather highlighted women’s still unequal access to certain careers, equal pay, and the obstacles to their entering university. Women’s roles in society were circumscribed by stereotypes imposed by men, and they were still often the victims of rape and marital violence.45 In the 1990s the postmodernist movement, coupled with third-wave feminism, led writers like

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Gregory to re-write history by putting women centre stage, asserting their personalities, and fighting for feminism’s as yet unattained goals. In an article titled “White Queen Author Philippa Gregory: I Didn’t Set Out to Be a Feminist Writer,” Gregory argues: The temptation to see women in stereotypical forms is obviously part of the way history has approached women. … It’s only in the last 30 or 40 years that people have started saying, “There must be more to them than this. There must be more to women’s history than just who gives birth and who marries whom.”46

It has been Gregory’s self-declared mission to rescue the women “hidden from history,”47 though she does not embrace the label of feminist novelist. Gregory has always been interested in writing about “women’s history—women as a group and individual women.”48 It is evident in her historical novels that she wishes to trouble conventional representations of women in history and to expose their maltreatment by men. She denounces domestic violence and women’s subjection to men, especially through the stories of the six wives of Henry VIII. Women of the sixteenth century were raised in a patriarchal tradition of male domination. They learned to see themselves as inferior beings, subject to men’s rule. Gregory focuses on this aspect of Henry’s ideal wife particularly in her last Tudor novel, The Taming of the Queen, whose title points to a Shakespeare play centred on a violent marital relationship—a play denounced by many critics and academics as “barbarous, offensive and misogynistic.”49 The main character’s first name also recalls Shakespeare’s Katherina, drawing further parallels between the two works. The aftermath of the well-known moment when Henry VIII became angry at Katherine Parr for persistently urging the King to carry his reforms of the Church further was translated in Gregory’s book into a scene of humiliation and submission for the queen: “‘kneel to me.’ … ‘Kiss the rod. As a sign that you accept your punishment.’ … ‘Kiss it, Katherine, and say that you have learned wifely obedience.’”50 That is what the King demands before beating Katherine’s bare buttocks with the rod until she bleeds and then smashing her teeth against his bejewelled codpiece. Although wife-beating was common in the sixteenth century, there is no evidence that Henry VIII ever beat any of his wives. Gregory specifically wrote a scene that carries a strong “symbolic truth,” as discussed by Michael Lackey in his introduction to Truthful Fictions (2014). The mistreatment of Katherine Parr at the hands of her

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husband in the novel provides a subtextual “truth” of domestic violence. In her “Author’s Note,” Gregory makes this explicit: The private humiliation that I describe is fiction—we are rarely told what went on behind the closed bedroom doors of the past. I wanted to write a scene in which the legally-permitted beating of a wife, and the symbolism of Henry’s codpiece, came together to show how men dominate women with their legal powers, with their violence, with their sexuality and with the myth of their power, then—and now.51

The fact that Katherine, a woman of privilege by birth and the Queen of England by marriage, receives such treatment weakens her self-image and self-respect, especially when the treatment comes from an impotent, morbidly obese, and tyrannical king who threatens to execute her if she does not comply with the punishment (which sexually arouses him). It does not break her however, and her resilience grows with each humiliation the King makes her suffer. Gregory has argued that the writing of this book and the choice of its title are “a tribute to a woman who lived with a tyrant in his court and his bed and came out completely unbowed.”52 To Gregory, feminism is “a kind of way of being. So of course, I stand on my own two feet, I earn my own living, I expect respect from men and I expect equal rights and equal opportunities for me and for all women.”53 This egalitarian vision of feminism as autonomy is reflected in The Taming of the Queen when Katherine makes significant contributions to scholarship and creates in her court a hotbed of debate about religion. Historically, only three of Henry’s wives supported scholars. The first two were Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. As soon as Katherine Parr was Queen, she enthusiastically supported humanist scholarship and had a compassionate and caring influence over the court,54 especially over the King’s children. In Gregory’s novel, scholarship is emphatically presented as a genderless occupation equally feasible for both men and women but unjustly restricted to men. Since the novel is narrated by Katherine herself, the injustice is revealed in biting terms: They don’t know that Lady Elizabeth has now read every single one of Bishop Fisher’s psalms and even translated lines under my supervision. They don’t think of either young woman as anything but an empty figurehead for their supporters. They don’t realise that we are all women with minds of our own.55

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The novel bears echoes of twentieth-century equal opportunity and equal education campaigns as Katherine strives for her research and writing to be published and then recognised. Archbishop Cranmer, who is surprisingly open-minded and feminist in the novel, contests Katherine’s stated intention to publish her translation of Bishop Fisher’s Psalms and Prayers anonymously: “I think it’s a pity,” he says frankly. “These are fine translations with the ear of a musician, the heart of a true believer and the language of a serious writer. Anyone—I mean any man—would be proud to publish them under his own name. He would boast of them. It seems unfair that you have to deny that you have such a gift. The king’s grandmother collected translations and published them.”56

This mirrors Gregory’s admiration of Katherine Parr as “an incredible contributor to the culture of the country. She is an incredible contributor to the history of women because she is the first woman to publish under her own name in England.”57 While it must be noted that other women had in fact written books before Parr did, such as Julian of Norwich (fourteenth century), Margery Kempe (early fifteenth century, through dictation), and Margaret Beaufort (late fifteenth century, known translator), Parr’s own publications in print under her own name were certainly exceptional in her day and immediately popular among court members.58 Beyond presenting a remarkable woman, the novel also calls out to modern readers to reflect on the ways men have restricted women throughout history because they believe them to be inferior, especially intellectually. Katherine Parr stands as a model of scholarly success and fulfilment in a period when women tended not to be recognised for their intellectual capacities. Gregory’s Katherine states in the novel: Centuries of male priests and men teachers, monk scholars and bullying fathers, have told her and me—told every woman in England—that a woman cannot preach. But under my hand I have the Bible in English, given by my husband to the people of England, which says that Jesus came for everyone—not just for male priests and men teachers, monk scholars and bullying fathers.59

Another feminist aspect underscored in The Taming of the Queen is Katherine’s ability to rule. Without copying her husband’s example, she skilfully supervises the government by maintaining order and peace and by

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advancing the reforms she most believes in. In creating her character, Gregory has brought out Katherine’s remarkable efficiency. The author has stated: One of the reasons I am surprised by her, and I think other people are going to be surprised by her, is that the reputation she has in history is not particularly interesting. People still repeat the old fashioned view of her as Henry’s nurse and wife in his declining years. But in fact she was incredibly influential.60

During her regency, the historical Katherine Parr exerted significant political power. She efficiently managed court and kingdom, as did her predecessor Catherine of Aragon. The example she set for the ten-year-old Elizabeth marked a crucial step in the future queen’s development. As Linda Porter states: The period [Elizabeth I] spent with Katherine in the summer and early autumn of 1544 provided her with an experience that was much more formative than the schoolroom. It gave her a unique opportunity to observe a woman ruler in action. For, as queen regent, Katherine’s time was taken up with much more than maternal obligations and sporting pastimes. While Elizabeth watched, Katherine governed England. This practical lesson was far more valuable than anything her tutors could have devised, and it left an indelible impression.61

In the novel, Katherine revels in her short time as queen regent and uses it to prove that she, as a woman, is capable of fulfilling what is considered a “male” occupation. Katherine especially wants to use that time to impress upon the younger generation of future monarchs that a woman can rule a country and can do so wisely and competently: They will see a woman rule a country, they will see that it is possible. It is one thing to tell them that a woman is capable of judgement and holding power, it is another to see their stepmother, a woman of thirty-two years, actually running a kingdom. I fear that I cannot do it, and yet I know that I can.62

Elizabeth is particularly eager to learn how to rule the way Katherine does and especially how to command respect from her male councillors:

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“I want to know how you learned to do this,” she says shyly. “How I learned to do what?” “How you learned what you should do. You were not born a princess and yet you know when you should listen, and when you should command, how to make sure that they understand you, how to make sure that they do as they are told. I didn’t know that a woman could do it. I didn’t know that a woman could rule.”63

The Taming of the Queen forms part of Gregory’s Tudor saga, which explores Henry VIII’s relationships with his wives and, from the point of view of these women, recounts the King’s quest for the ideal wife. While in The Constant Princess (2011), Henry seeks a mother figure in the person of Katherine of Aragon who would bring him security and counsel as his mother, Elizabeth of York, and his grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, did, by the end of the series, he wishes for an obedient and submissive wife. In The Taming of the Queen, the reader is presented with a king who wishes to mould his last wife, Katherine Parr, into his own perfect queen: “I am going to teach you to be Queen of England,” Henry says quietly into my ear. “You shall look at these wealthy and powerful men and know that you command each and every one of them; I have set you above them. You are my wife and my helpmeet, Katherine. I am going to make you into a great and powerful woman, a true wife to me, the greatest woman in England, as I am the greatest man.”64

Katherine chooses, however, to become the queen she wants to be. Gregory portrays her as someone not easily manipulated.65 But even her intellect could not allow her to escape the schemes of the King who tricks, frightens, and shames her. Towards the end of the novel, he makes her think she will be arrested for heresy by letting his councillors Gardiner and Wriothesley draw her arrest warrant. When they come to arrest her with an escort of guards, the King sends them back vehemently but not without first letting Katherine fear for her life. This is all very amusing to him: “What’s the title of the play, Kate?” he pants still laughing. … “You who are so clever? So widely read? What is the title of my play? […] The Taming of the Queen!” he shouts. … “I am the dog-master,” he says, abruptly abandoning his joke. “I watch you all. I set you all at each other’s throats. Poor curs. Poor little bitch.”66

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While Gregory’s Katherine is willing to make her own choices and to advocate for education for women, the novel does not grant its feminist heroine a victory at the end. Though Katherine survives the King, she feels tainted as a person by the experience of marriage to him: “I feel as if I am soiled, I feel as if I am foul and I can never be washed clean. I know that I am broken.”67 Katherine may be beaten by her husband and king, she may identify with Tryphine and Henry VIII with Blue-Beard the wife-killer,68 she nevertheless fights for women to be educated, respected, and considered equal to men. Yet, the novel as a whole does not always come across as a feminist work. It is worth mentioning that “Gregory’s methods in writing historical novels have many readers questioning her success in staying true to her description of herself as a feminist.”69 Katherine may fight for respect and equality for women but her own personal behaviour sometimes runs contrary to her values. Indeed, Katherine is strongly influenced by the highly macho Thomas Seymour in the novel, in ways that undermine her independence. She bows to his plans for his advancement even though they would lead to her own unhappiness. When he wants her to support his marriage proposal to the Princess Elizabeth, Katherine thinks only of him and complies to his wishes: “With painful clarity I can see the logic of it for the Seymours. It is a brilliant match for them, and Princess Elizabeth, when she is told of it, will pretend to obedience but will be delighted.”70 In addition, Gregory’s female characters are only ever shown in constant competition with each other, not just in The Taming of the Queen but in all of Gregory’s books—a representation which undermines the advocacy of women’s welfare and female solidarity embraced by her heroines.



Conclusion

Through the story of Katherine Parr, both The Sixth Wife and The Taming of the Queen highlight the importance of women’s rights and of the fair and equal treatment of women. Both novels can therefore be seen in dialogue with the different feminist movements of the periods in which they were written. The Sixth Wife recounts Katherine Parr’s story from the death of her second husband in 1543 to her own death in 1548. Plaidy’s Katherine is the archetype of the captive woman who uses all her will and determination to gain greater wisdom and freedom through the experience of adversity. Influenced by the New Feminists, Plaidy’s novel

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advocates women’s rights at a time when the women’s movement in Britain had lost momentum. The Sixth Wife focuses critically on marriage, the cult of domesticity, domestic violence, and the right for women to have both a family and a career. Plaidy’s sixteenth-century protagonist is recognisably fashioned after the New Feminism of the early twentieth century, in her longing for independence and recognition in similar terms to men. Plaidy uses her biographical novel to “expose women’s victimisation in history,”71 and she uses the motif of the captive woman who is always imprisoned, if not physically then emotionally, intellectually, or spiritually, by virtue of the restrictions placed upon her because of her gender. She is a victim of her gender; or, more specifically, of the patriarchal values which undervalue and repress her, foisting upon her expectations and demands which feel unnatural and unjust.72

The Taming of the Queen was written more than fifty years later. Narrated in the first person by Queen Katherine, Gregory’s novel resonates specifically with women’s goals and achievements in a postfeminist era. The Taming of the Queen addresses the issue of violence against women, especially within marriage. At a time when femicide is more and more frequently brought to public attention and openly denounced as the consequence of a possessive patriarchal mindset, the strong determination of Gregory’s Katherine to assert her independence despite her ordeals at the hands of her husband seems in tune with the rising global movement for women’s rights and with contemporary efforts to combat (sexual) violence against women. In Gregory’s novel, Katherine’s intellect and her love of scholarship make her a wise regent influencing the young impressionable Elizabeth. Katherine definitely wants to learn and think for herself. Notwithstanding such resonances with feminist goals in The Taming of the Queen, the novel’s eroticism also places it in proximity to the twenty-­ first-­century bodice-ripper genre, which is often considered antithetical to feminism. As Victoria Kennedy argues: Gregory’s novels […] foreground romance and eroticism, sometimes bending or outright disregarding historical facts to allow for the creation of romance narratives. It is precisely because of its [sic] use of romance formulas and tropes that one must be cautious about too liberally applauding Gregory’s novels as examples of feminist historiography.73

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Thus, while both novels endorse values relevant to twentieth- and twenty-­ first-­century feminist movements, their depiction of the protagonist shifts in response to the social conditions and prevalent (post-)feminist themes of their respective periods. Taken together, Plaidy’s and Gregory’s biofictions testify to the continuous appeal of royal consorts—and particularly the wives of Henry VIII—as figures for negotiating the limits and possibilities of female subjectivity.

Notes 1. Christine de Pisan (1364–c. 1430) is best remembered for defending women in The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, while Margaret of Navarre was an author and a patron of humanists and reformers. She wrote The Heptameron and Mirror of the Sinful Soul. 2. For ease of reading, Katherine Parr’s name will always be spelt thus. 3. David Starkey, Six Wives, the Queens of Henry VIII (London: Vintage, 2004), 742. 4. Hibbert published under eight different pennames, including Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, Ellalice Tate, and Philippa Carr. The use of different pennames served its purpose in the marketing of her novels: readers came to expect a particular “brand” or genre of novel according to the name under which it was published. 5. Sahara Rós Ívarsdóttir, “The Most Happy Feminist Witch,” On The Tudor Trail, March 3, 2019, https://onthetudortrail.com/Blog/2019/03/04/ the-­most-­happy-­feminist-­witch/. 6. For a discussion of biofiction’s intersection with specific segments of historical fiction, see also Julia Novak, “Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels: Biography and the Dictates of ‘Genre Literature,’” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 3 (November 2014): 373–90. 7. Alexandra Black et  al., Feminism Is … (London: DK Publishing, 2019), Kindle. 8. Jenna Elizabeth Barlow, “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature” (PhD diss., Stellenbosch University, 2014), 69. 9. Richard Dalby, “All About Jean Plaidy,” Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert “Queen of Romantic Suspense,” 1993, https://jeanplaidy.tripod.com/ id17.htm. 10. Susan Higginbotham, “The Queen of Historical Fiction,” Solander, a Historical Novel Society, November 2007, reprinted by permission on the BBC website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00x3jfz. 11. Sue Bruley, Women in Britain Since 1900 (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 59.

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12. Ibid., 79. 13. Stephanie Spencer, Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 26. 14. Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London: Tavistock, 1977), 7, quoted in Spencer, Gender, Work and Education, 26. 15. Jean Plaidy, The Sixth Wife (London: Arrow, 1953/2006), 14–15. 16. Ibid., 70. 17. Ibid., 58. 18. Ibid., 233. 19. Ibid., 61. 20. Ibid., 134. 21. Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 68. 22. Diana Wallace, The Women’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 137. 23. Plaidy, The Sixth Wife, 347. 24. Spencer, Gender, Work and Education, 24. 25. Ibid., 47. 26. Plaidy, The Sixth Wife, 5–6. 27. Ibid., 73. 28. Ibid., 180. 29. It must be noted that the ideal of feminine domesticity promoted in the 1950s obfuscates the large number of women in the British work force in that decade; see, for example, Helen McCarthy, “Social Science and Married Women’s Employment in Post-War Britain,” Past & Present 233, no. 1 (November 2016): 269–305, https://doi.org/10.1093/ pastj/gtw035. 30. Spencer, Gender, Work and Education, 26. 31. Plaidy, The Sixth Wife, 178. 32. Spencer, Gender, Work and Education, 7. 33. Ruth Watts, “Review of Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s,” Reviews in History, no. 689 (October 2008): https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/689. 34. Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London: Vintage, 2007), 515. 35. Ibid., 519. 36. Weir, Six Wives, 519; Starkey, Six Queens, 761; Linda Porter, Katherine the Queen (London: Pan Macmillan, 2010), 256. 37. Plaidy, The Sixth Wife, 152. 38. Ibid., 116. 39. Jean Plaidy’s Tudor novels fall within the categories of historical romances in bookstores and online. 40. Bruce Lambert, “Eleanor Hibbert, Novelist Known as Victoria Holt and Jean Plaidy,” The New  York Times, January 21, 1993, https://www.

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nytimes.com/1993/01/21/books/eleanor-­hibbert-­novelist-­known-­as-­ victoria-­holt-­and-­jean-­plaidy.html. 41. Wallace, Women’s Historical Novel, 137. 42. Bruley, Women in Britain Since 1900, 149. 43. Jane Spencer, “Afterword: Feminist Waves,” in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. Stacy Gilis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 301. 44. Laura Brunell, “Feminism,” Encyclopædia Britannica, February 8, 2019, h t t p s : / / w w w. b r i t a n n i c a . c o m / t o p i c / f e m i n i s m / T h e -­t h i r d -­ wave-­of-­feminism. 45. Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1999 (London: Macmillan, 2000), 312. 46. Ellie Walker-Arnott, “White Queen Author Philippa Gregory: I Didn’t Set Out to Be a Feminist Writer,” Radio Times, August 13, 2015, https:// www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-­0 8-­1 3/white-­q ueen-­a uthor-­ philippa-­gregory-­i-­didnt-­set-­out-­to-­be-­a-­feminist-­writer/. 47. Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin, and Michael Jones, Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 4. 48. Ibid., 5. 49. Maddy Costa, “The Taming of the Shrew: ‘This Is Not a Woman Being Crushed,’” The Guardian, January 17, 2012, https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2012/jan/17/taming-­of-­the-­shrew-­rsc. 50. Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen (London: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 376. 51. Ibid., 429. 52. Philippa Gregory, “Philippa Gregory Introduces The Taming of the Queen,” Simon and Schuster Books, YouTube video, July 29, 2015, 3:10, https:// youtu.be/_KwBIgYlQ3M. 53. Philippa Gregory, “Philippa Gregory on Feminism,” interview by George Stroumboulopoulos, Strombo, YouTube video, December 6, 2011, 1:42, https://youtu.be/930DFyonVDQ. 54. Alison Weir, Henry VIII, King and Court (London: Vintage, 2008), 468. 55. Gregory, The Taming of the Queen, 104. 56. Ibid., 99. 57. Gregory, “Introduces The Taming of the Queen.” 58. Janel Mueller, Introduction and Commentaries, in Katherine Parr, Complete Works and Correspondence, ed. Janel Mueller (Chicago University Press, London, 2011), 31. 59. Gregory, The Taming of the Queen, 190. 60. Walker-Arnott, “White Queen.” 61. Porter, Katherine, the Queen, 199.

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62. Gregory, The Taming of the Queen, 146. 63. Ibid., 150. 64. Ibid., 90. 65. Ibid., 148. 66. Ibid., 383. 67. Ibid., 380. 68. Ibid., 371. 69. Rós Ívarsdóttir, “The Most Happy Feminist Witch.” 70. Gregory, The Taming of the Queen, 341. 71. Wallace, The Women’s Historical Novel, 149. 72. Barlow, Women’s Historical Fiction “After” Feminism, 72. 73. Victoria Kennedy, “Feminist Historical Re-Visioning or ‘Good Mills and Boon’?: Gender, Genre, and Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl,” Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought 5, no. 1 (2016): 48.

References Barlow, Jenna Elizabeth. “Women’s Historical Fiction ‘After’ Feminism: Discursive Reconstructions of the Tudors in Contemporary Literature.” PhD diss., Stellenbosch University, 2014. Black, Alexandra, Laura Buller, Emily Hoyle, and Megan Todd. Feminism Is …. London: DK Publishing, 2019. Bruley, Sue. Women in Britain Since 1900. New York: Macmillan, 1999. Brunell, Laura. “Feminism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, February 8, 2019. https:// www.britannica.com/topic/feminism/The-­third-­wave-­of-­feminism. Costa, Maddy. “The Taming of the Shrew: ‘This is Not a Woman Being Crushed.’” The Guardian, January 17, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2012/jan/17/taming-­of-­the-­shrew-­rsc. Dalby, Richard. “All About Jean Plaidy.” Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert “Queen of Romantic Suspense,” 1993. https://jeanplaidy.tripod.com/id17.htm. De Groot, Jerome. The Historical Novel. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Gregory, Philippa, David Baldwin, and Michael Jones. Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother. New  York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Gregory, Philippa. “Philippa Gregory Introduces The Taming of the Queen.” Simon and Schuster Books, YouTube video, July 29, 2015. https://youtu.be/_ KwBIgYlQ3M. ———. “Philippa Gregory on Feminism.” Interview by George Stroumboulopoulos. Strombo, YouTube video, December 6, 2011, 1:42. https://youtu. be/930DFyonVDQ.

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———. The Taming of the Queen. London: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Higginbotham, Susan. “The Queen of Historical Fiction.” Solander, a Historical Novel Society, November 2007. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00x3jfz. Kennedy, Victoria. “Feminist Historical Re-Visioning or ‘Good Mills and Boon’?: Gender, Genre, and Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl.” Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought 5, no. 1 (2016): 42–74. Lackey, Michael. “Introduction: The Rise of the American Biographic Novel.” In Truthful Fictions, edited by Michael Lackey, 1–25. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Lambert, Bruce. “Eleanor Hibbert, Novelist Known as Victoria Holt and Jean Plaidy.” The New  York Times, January 21, 1993. https://www.nytimes. com/1993/01/21/books/eleanor-­hibbert-­novelist-­known-­as-­victoria-­holt-­ and-­jean-­plaidy.html. McCarthy, Helen. “Social Science and Married Women’s Employment in Post-­ War Britain.” Past & Present 233, no. 1 (November 2016): 269–305. https:// doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw035. Mueller, Janel. Introduction and Commentaries. In Katherine Parr, Complete Works and Correspondence, edited by Janel Mueller. London: Chicago University Press, 2011. Novak, Julia. “Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels: Biography and the Dictates of ‘Genre Literature.’” Contemporary Women’s Writing 8, no. 3 (November 2014): 373–90. Plaidy, Jean. The Sixth Wife. London: Arrow, 1953/2006. Porter, Linda. Katherine the Queen. London: Pan Macmillan, 2010. Pugh, Martin. Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1999. London: Macmillan, 2000. Rós Ívarsdóttir, Sahara. “The Most Happy Feminist Witch.” On The Tudor Trail, March 4, 2019. http://onthetudortrail.com/Blog/2019/03/04/the-­most-­ happy-­feminist-­witch/. Spencer, Jane. “Afterword: Feminist Waves.” In Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, edited by Stacy Gilis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford 298-303. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Spencer, Stephanie. Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Starkey, David. Six Wives, the Queens of Henry VIII. London: Vintage, 2004. Walker-Arnott, Ellie. “White Queen Author Philippa Gregory: I Didn’t Set Out to Be a Feminist Writer.” RadioTimes, August 13, 2015. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-­08-­13/white-­queen-­author-­philippa-­gregory-­i-­didnt-­ set-­out-­to-­be-­a-­feminist-­writer/. Wallace, Diana. The Women’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

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Watts, Ruth. Review of Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s. Reviews in History, no. 689 (October 2008): http://www.history.ac.uk/ reviews/review/689. Weir, Alison. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. London: Vintage, 2007. ———. Henry VIII, King and Court. London: Vintage, 2008. Wilson, Elizabeth. Women and the Welfare State. London: Tavistock, 1977.

CHAPTER 7

Australian Women Writing Tudor Lives Kelly Gardiner and Catherine Padmore



Introduction

“Why am I, an Australian writer, so obsessed about the Tudors?” This question, asked by historical novelist Wendy J. Dunn,1 shapes our discussion in this chapter, alongside a pair of propositions about how historical fictions might render relationships between the represented past and the lived present. The first is posed by Jerome de Groot in The Historical Novel: “History is other, and made familiar through the illusions of fiction. The history of another nation is further distanced from the reader. … This double othering inflects our reading of historical novels about other cultures and societies.”2 In the context of Australians writing fiction about Tudor-era women, we consider whether such “double othering” holds for the writing as well as reading of historical fictions and how the writers we examine navigate these poles of proximity and distance. Our second proposition comes from Elodie Rousselot, who writes of another kind of doubling in historical fictions: “Although set in the past, neo-historical fiction is therefore very much aimed at answering the needs and preoccupations

K. Gardiner • C. Padmore (*) La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_7

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of the present. This is particularly true of the latter’s persisting fascination with visiting—and consuming—past historical periods as a way of dealing with modern-day concerns.”3 Here, the emphasis is on the dialogue between the fictional evocation of past lives and times and their parallels with issues in the present. Our discussions are shaped, then, by these complex interactions between self and other, past and present. We will consider Dunn and three other Australian writers who evoke Tudor times and people in their fiction, analysing various paratexts they have produced to outline their interest in re-writing women’s lives in the Tudor era. The paratexts include interviews, blog posts, and other author statements, as well as the ways in which the novels are presented to the reading public. This methodology for discussing biofiction and its subjects has been usefully employed by scholars such as Bethany Layne.4 Our interest lies in how our chosen novelists conceptualise and articulate their relationship to figures from a past that is distant in time, in cultural tradition, and in place, and whether they do indeed see their work as a project concerned as much with the present as the past. We examine whether there is anything distinctly Australian or postcolonial in these motivations or works; something that suggests the “double othering” or past-present nexus of writers evoking people and places from beyond their own shores. What needs do these representations fulfil in contemporary Australia as the country struggles to come to terms with the postcolonial relationship to Britain? The four novels considered here feature protagonists who carry the name of a real-life historical figure and thus could be considered as biofiction, following Michael Lackey’s definition of the form as “literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure.”5 Recent engagements in this field have proposed biographical fiction as a separate genre from historical fiction, with different aims and outcomes, and a constrained sense of what can be considered within it.6 Key aspects of this proposed distinction involve the protagonist’s possible agency in relation to historical forces and the work’s potential to effect change in the present. Lackey, for example, works with the Marxist framework for historical fiction suggested by György Lukács in his landmark study The Historical Novel (originally published in 1937), using this as a definition of the genre against which to compare biofiction. We suggest, however, that the historical novel and our understanding of it has manifestly changed and expanded since the publication of Lukács’s critique, and certainly since the publication of the nineteenth-century novels with which he is largely concerned,

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such as those of Walter Scott. Lukács argued that a historical novelist’s pseudo-scientific approach to writing the past meant that authors such as Scott, when creating a protagonist, “always presents us with the personality complete. Complete, yet not without the most careful preparation. This preparation, however, is not a personal and psychological one, but objective, social-historical.”7 Lukács’s framework for the protagonist in historical fiction has drawn criticism from writers such as Lackey, who suggests therefore that the characters of historical novels lack agency, where those of biofiction do not, and that “biofiction, historically speaking, represents the power of fictional narrative to empower humans by enhancing, promoting, and advancing human agency,”8 where historical fiction, as defined by Lukács, cannot. Elsewhere, Lackey claims, “the protagonist of a historical novel is a representative symbol or figure from a specific time and place in the past, while the protagonist of a biographical novel is an exceptional model of originality and/or agency for the present and future.”9 From our perspective, historical novels with both real and imagined protagonists can provide personal and psychological insights into their characters, as well as social and historical, even ideological, understandings of past and present. The very notions of re-imagining, of re-inventing, of giving agency in fiction to those whose thoughts and experiences are rarely documented in the historical record—along with the influence of feminism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and queer—have long undermined Lukács’s deterministic definition of historical fiction. We suggest that the desire to re-imagine women’s history in particular has often led authors who write about past lives to develop multiple approaches to these issues, with an eye to changing perceptions of the past while challenging issues that remain in the present. As Sharon Marcus has noted: Women writing historical fiction evince a willingness, typically associated with men, to tackle abstract questions of history, economics, and power, which they combine with an affinity, usually considered female, for portraying everyday life and personal relationships … women writers are rewriting history from below, drawing attention to the sexual and racial politics of narrative, and placing previously marginalized figures at the center of representation.10

We argue that this sophisticated approach to addressing both structural issues and individual psychological and emotional lives is a key component

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of revisionist fiction by women and focused on past women’s lives, which includes some of the most popular and acclaimed novels of recent decades, whether they are based on real women or portraying imagined characters in an historical setting. The historical novel, then, as Diana Wallace writes, has specifically “allowed women writers to re-imagine women’s history,”11 and it has often done this by re-writing the real lives of women from the past, suggesting that the use of biofiction as a tool has been a conscious element in the feminist project to “re-imagine women’s history”12 through fiction to influence as well as entertain a wide readership. As Jesse Blackadder has said, “While historical fiction isn’t always historically correct—and doesn’t claim to be—it influences our world view, and restores women as active participants in history.”13 This context complicates Lackey’s efforts to position the two forms as distinct and with competing aims. For our purposes, then, it is not productive to consider historical and biographical fictions as separate. A broader definition of biofiction, its aims and outcomes, and its relationship to historical fiction, is helpful to analyse the manifold ways biographical material might be deployed by authors in the service of their artistic aims. Authors writing past lives can fruitfully draw on the influences of all these forms, and many others in life writing and in fiction, to produce compelling, creative, and illuminating stories of real people. In this context, the term most useful for our investigation is “historical biofictions,” which Ina Bergmann uses “in order to emphasize the connection between historical fiction and biographical narrative.”14 This usage locates our considerations within the rich and diverse field of historical fiction studies while also emphasising the novels’ close engagement with particular women from the Tudor period. Doing so means that our analyses can draw parallels between biographical and other historical fictions, looking at shared impulses and creative decisions, and at the imaginative, cultural, and ideological work performed by such novels.

The Novels In our initial survey, we have chosen four works of historical biofiction written by contemporary Australian women about Tudor-era women. Jesse Blackadder’s The Raven’s Heart (2011) centres around the character of Alison Blackadder, who has lived since the age of eight disguised as a boy. She befriends Mary, Queen of Scots on her return to Edinburgh in 1561, becoming involved in the complicated machinations of the

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Scottish court. The narrative traverses the death of Darnley, Mary’s marriage to Bothwell, and her imprisonment in Loch Leven, ending with Alison leaving for Denmark in 1567. This is the author’s only Tudor-era novel—others examine the first women in Antarctica and a more recent family tragedy. She also wrote for children. The Raven’s Heart was published in Australia by Fourth Estate, the literary imprint of HarperCollins. Jane Caro’s trilogy—Just a Girl (2012), Just a Queen (2015), and Just Flesh and Blood (2018)—traces the life of Elizabeth I. In this survey, we concentrate on Just a Queen, as it focuses on the long battle of wits between Mary, Queen of Scots, and her cousin, Elizabeth, reflecting on their vastly different parallel lives. Caro is a well-known broadcaster and columnist, and an outspoken feminist, and these—her first novels—are positioned by the publisher University of Queensland Press as commercial historical fiction aimed at young adult (YA) readers (although as a protagonist, Elizabeth is only a young adult in the first book). Michelle Diener’s In a Treacherous Court (2011) has dual protagonists, both historical figures: the Flemish artist Susanna Horenbout and King Henry’s man, John Parker, who becomes her love interest. It begins in 1525, with Parker awaiting Horenbout’s arrival from Flanders, and is firmly located in the crime genre, with the body count starting before Susanna’s boat even docks. Together, the pair try to unravel a conspiracy against the King. This novel is the first in a trilogy featuring Horenbout and Parker, blending elements of romance and mystery genres, and published internationally by Simon and Schuster. Diener also writes speculative fiction. She currently lives in Australia but was born in London and grew up in South Africa.15 Wendy J.  Dunn’s The Light in the Labyrinth: The Last Days of Anne Boleyn (2014) is told from the perspective of Kate Carey, niece of Anne Boleyn. It uses third person perspective interspersed with diary entries to recount the years from 1535 to Anne’s execution in May 1536. Kate is fourteen when the novel opens. She accompanies Anne to the Tower and witnesses her execution, carrying her severed head from the site and then turning her attention to the young Elizabeth. This work is Dunn’s second published novel of four set in the Tudor period. It is marketed as a young adult book, published by a small press. In looking to women at the heart of one of the world’s most powerful courts, these Australians who write about the Tudor and Stuart queens and their confidants reflect a broader fascination with women of power and influence beyond the grave through their continuing cultural

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afterlives. This preoccupation is evident in the recent “explosion of the women’s historical novel and its interest in writing strong female characters,”16 in which historical biofictions about real women’s lives form a significant proportion of the market. Such novels are part of an enormous international ecosystem of recent materials about the women of the Tudor courts—wildly popular TV series and films (including consciously ahistorical portrayals such as The Tudors [2007–2010], Elizabeth [1998] and Elizabeth: The Golden Age [2007], Mary, Queen of Scots [2018]), fan fiction, children’s books, biographies, graphic novels, documentary series, musicals, and endless merchandise such as Christmas decorations of Henry VIII and his wives, or tote bags proclaiming “Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived.” Our readings of these Australian novels and their paratexts has led us to examine thematically the authors’ self-described relationship to these Tudor-era women. A similar approach is taken by Anne Stevens when analysing the ways in which prefaces of early historical novels set up reading practices.17 Three themes emerge from our readings of the authors’ own words about the work and the historical figures they portray: obsession, advocacy, and connection.

Obsession Three of the writers surveyed describe an early obsession with this period in European, and particularly English, history and its key female players. Something in these stories of long-dead women reached out to these girl-­ children living far beyond British shores and lodged deep in their psyches. Diener, for example, writes of an enduring fascination with the Tudor period: “It has always interested me, since I can remember being aware of it. And I LOVED reading novels like the Shardlake series by C.J. Sansom and The Other Boleyn Girl and The Queen’s Fool by Philippa Gregory.”18 She describes how this interest later led to the development of her Horenbout story: “The inspiration for my starting a novel of my own set in this period came about when I found a reference to Susanna Horenbout in a work of historical reference. Something about her interested me deeply, and I started digging deeper into the facts available for her. My story grew from there.”19 Like Diener, Dunn recalls that her Tudor obsession began at an early age.20 As she has written, “The tragic story of Henry VIII’s second wife first ignited my imagination in childhood and embarked me on a lifelong

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journey to learn about her and her times.”21 For her these stories from Tudor history bridged the gulf of time and space and spurred her later reading and writing. The young Dunn read about Elizabeth I and later recalled: Watching my bearded, scowling father behead another one of our chooks for the Sunday roast, it seemed I watched Henry VIII, a man also good at putting an axe to a bloody use. I thought, Elizabeth triumphed over her dark times, why can’t I? That changed my life and began my lifelong desire to learn and then write about the Tudors.22

Here, the past and the present are brought into proximity, with explicit links made between the author’s circumstances and Elizabeth Tudor’s. In articles, papers, and interviews, Dunn often discusses this notion of her particular connection to long-dead women who were monarchs, with whom, in many senses, the child had little in common beyond gender. Her sense of personal salvation through history echoes Margaret Atwood’s statement, “The past no longer belongs only to those who once lived in it; the past belongs to those who claim it, and are willing to explore it, and to infuse it with meaning for those alive today. The past belongs to us, because we are the ones who need it.”23 Similarly, Caro describes an abiding fascination with the Tudors, and an identification with Elizabeth as a heroine: “She’s always been someone I was completely obsessed with and I’ve read everything about her.”24 Caro’s “obsession with Elizabeth has never waned.”25 Her interest centres on the Tudor queen as a much-needed exemplar for her own modern readers, especially women, and in particular on the role gender plays in their lives, the previous portrayals of Elizabeth, and her own representations of this queen: She [Elizabeth]—almost alone among female historical figures—had earned what I still regard as the most valuable thing of all: respect. … It is my hope that women of all ages who read these books will see what I saw when I first discovered Elizabeth Tudor. She is a role model for female wisdom, courage and discipline; a woman to be reckoned with. Because, of course, there can be no real love without respect.26

This fascination and its consequences are, of course, not exclusive to Australian authors; they are echoed by many others around the globe. Californian author Robyn Maxwell writes in her “Acknowledgements” section of The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn: “This book is the result of twenty-five years of passionate interest in the brilliant world of Tudor

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England. My indoctrination began with a pair of novels by Norah Lofts that introduced me to the two female titans of the early sixteenth century, Anne Boleyn and Katherine of Aragon.”27 In these accounts, gender is the key link between the author as past reader, the imagined historical figure, the author who creates a new version of her, and the woman reader to whom the author directs this portrayal consciously, as a role model for both author and reader. The descriptions of early reader interest and teenage obsession also chime with Alison Light’s descriptions of how fictions about powerful women from the past affected her as a young woman. For Light, growing up in post-­ war Britain with a new and young Queen Elizabeth II on the throne, it was significant that “these heroines are able to take up what would usually be seen as the masculine reins of public power and sexual autonomy.”28 All these writers are reflecting too on the experience of reading—on the connections made with women from the past through the process of reading fiction, and through the emotion that fiction stirred inside them. As Light recalls, “Like Catherine Morland [of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey], I was ‘in training for a heroine’ and historical novels gave me a history I could appreciate. The focus within them is ultimately upon individuals, but especially upon femininities, upon women’s lives and loves, their families and their feelings.”29 Diana Wallace recognises that “women often look to literary texts for a female history which is left out of history books.”30 The female history discovered through reading is often circulated within communities of women readers. De Groot notes that authors Alison Light and Alison Weir have both described the influence of reading experiences shared with mothers and grandmothers, which offers “places of feminine solidarity … of female becoming independent of masculinised institutions (schools, Whig history), and sites of the creation and inspiration of an historical imagination.”31 Reading such works, either individually or collectively, establishes what de Groot and Wallace describe as a “matrilineal genealogy” of women’s historical fiction,32 and these can be seen in the similar claims made by our surveyed writers about the influence of historical writing generally on their early thinking, identity making, and later writing of historical biofictions. While the authors surveyed do not mention shared reading practices within their families in the paratexts we have encountered, we propose that public discussion of their own reading obsessions and inspirations in online interviews and forums works in a similar way within communities of fans and readers. Historical biofiction about women

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(or “herstorical biofiction,” as Bergmann33 describes it) functions especially powerfully in this way—the women whose stories are told and re-­ told by contemporary authors are incorporated into this genealogy, with readers developing strong attachments to the stories of particular women’s lives. Stephanie Russo has noted, for example, the recent popularity among young readers of young adult novels presenting Anne Boleyn’s story in a high school setting: The appeal for many of these young women is that her situation is recognizable by them: she was a woman whose legendary sex appeal and charm changed the world, quite literally, yet the very roots of her downfall were contained within those same qualities. For young women living in a world that tells them that they must look and act a certain way, and punishes them for any deviation from this path, while simultaneously insisting that they are free and equal—the discourse of postfeminism—Boleyn’s plight seems strangely familiar.34

Like these young readers, three writers surveyed here recall engaging passionately with the stories of Tudor women from an early age, with some also making that “strangely familiar” connection to a woman from a far-­ distant time and place. The stories provided heroic exemplars, models of how to survive and even triumph over adversity, alongside tragic examples of what can happen to women in a male-dominated milieu. The “plight” of Boleyn, and other characters similarly treated by history, drives writers (including those noted here) to find different ways to tell women’s stories, emphasising the constraints within which these lives were lived and re-­ contextualising their triumphs and tragedies.



Advocacy

As Hayden White has noted: “If every fully realized story is a kind of allegory, points to a moral, or endows events, whether real or imaginary, with a significance that they do not possess as a mere sequence, then it seems possible to conclude that every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats.”35 Motivation for the authors considered here often includes a moral aspect— to emphasise the struggle for female agency, not only for their heroic leads but also for those characters who are less powerful, or positioned as observers, and to redress the perceived injustices of history. Dunn tries to

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re-imagine Anne’s last days in the Tower of London, and Blackadder reignites ancestral property claims and evokes a powerful and sensual Mary, Queen of Scots. Caro reminds her readers of the greatness of Elizabeth’s reign and Diener brings into focus a neglected artist whose vocation was often questioned by male observers. In many ways, these four novels function as celebrations of female victories while highlighting past injustices. In each of them, the imperative is to reconstruct through fiction those voices silenced or marginalised by other historical narratives, to imagine new possibilities for the women represented. They do this through avowedly revisionist techniques that seek to rehabilitate or restore the reputations of the women about whom they write. “This sense of the rewriting of history is common to revisionist feminist histories of the last three decades,” says de Groot, “and situates female historical fiction writers as ‘writing back,’ bringing their subjects from darkness to light.”36 Of course, this is not a simple process. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short recognise: Any consideration of the “real” historical female figure must acknowledge the contested nature of narratives surrounding her, as it is she who has been manipulated by male-authored and/or patriarchal accounts of history.37

Revisionist renderings of certain women thus sit side-by-side with other accounts, each presenting another possible interpretation of the same documented historical life while contradicting or corroborating others. In Anne Boleyn’s myriad cultural afterlives, for example, she has been re-­ imagined as everything from an unholy bitch to a fierce Protestant reformer.38 As Emily Sutherland has written of Anne: “Both interpretations of her character cannot be correct.”39 Readers and writers, then, must pick their way through the various possibilities, guided by what matters most in their particular time and place. The process of writing to bring these influential women to life again, furthermore, is not as simple as celebration. Alison Light recognises the dual nature of such representations of historical figures: “The transposition into a historical past is necessarily double-edged … precisely because they are not ‘ordinary’ women, and this is not realism, such figures are self-proclaimed as ‘escapist’: as romantic fantasies, they are compensating registers of profound discontent, whilst remaining mediated and distorted expressions of it.”40 Despite these challenges, revisionist historical biofictions offer a potent sense of imaginative possibility. Julie Crane has described how such representations talk back to the finality of Anne Boleyn’s execution, presenting

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other understandings or outcomes, or delaying the inevitable: “Only for a moment on a May morning could that sword from Calais hover before it struck with all the precision of historical accuracy, but every remaking of the story is a kind of reprieve.”41 The poignancy of this thought is compelling—writing the women’s lives differently presents the possibility that their ends may have differed as well. The Australian writers surveyed here discuss a strong sense of moral responsibility when choosing which stories to tell in their fictions. Dunn describes hers in very personal terms, especially towards Boleyn: I as a fiction writer wish to advocate for my female main characters, characters who were also people in their own right. I feel ethically compelled to take up the cry for justice I hear in the poem believed written by Anne Boleyn waiting for death in the Tower.42

“My way to rehabilitate and give justice to Anne Boleyn’s memory,” she says, “is to enable her voice by fiction.”43 Of course, this impulse to recreate the silenced voice of the dead through fiction is impossible, as is justice for the long-dead, but what interests us here is the desire to attempt it. As Colin Davis writes (about Paul de Man’s discussion of the rhetorical technique of voicing the dead through prosopopoeia): “the danger … is that what the dead say may only be the projections of what we want to hear”44— or of what the authors want to say, we might add. Of course, despite the illusions of fiction, it is always the author’s voice we hear and not that of their subject. Dunn is conscious of the impossibility: “No matter how much I research the Tudor period, I can only hope to interpret, recreate the past and construct my makebelieve through the prism of a writer who belongs to and is constructed by the present.”45 She does ask, “What gives me the right to fill the silences with my fictional imaginings?”46 and yet assumes this right—for Dunn the desire “to write [Tudor women’s] stories and to act as their advocate”47 is the more powerful impulse. In The Light in the Labyrinth, she uses the lesser-known figure of Kate Carey as a lens through which to filter Anne’s experience. The gesture has a double effect, drawing attention to, and potentially re-evaluating, both women’s stories. Caro’s choice to write from the often-rendered perspective of Elizabeth I may seem at first to differ from these intentions to reveal or create a hidden or under-represented aspect of the lives of Early Modern queens, but she phrases her narrative choices in similar terms: “I felt that she had always been seen from the outside in, and very rarely looked upon as a person. She was sort of a brand, like an icon and not a real

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person at all. And I thought: what must it have been like to be her?”48 While in fact there have been many novels written from Elizabeth’s point of view, and the ground is well-trodden, Caro consciously chooses to fictionalise Elizabeth Tudor to provide her readers with a historical role model of a woman in a position of great power, responsibility, and significance, battling against male courtiers and advisors and their expectations.49 Both Diener and Blackadder have chosen to highlight other neglected aspects of past women’s lives—the creative and the queer stories—alongside revisiting well-worn story paths about famous or infamous queens. Diener’s creative interest was piqued by a female figure of influence in Tudor times whose reputation faded in the intervening centuries so her life story had been neglected. In a number of interviews, she describes her discovery of the marginal figure of Horenbout: I knew a bit about the period and I’d never heard of Susanna Horenbout before. Yet Albrecht Durer [sic] praised her work, and she was called a “master of illumination” by a number of Italian masters on her death. I was immediately intrigued. It also seemed that she’d been very much overlooked by art historians in favour of her brother and father, but records showed she had been at Henry’s court well before Gerard and Lucas Horenbout got there … The more I discovered, the more intrigued I became, and I ended up writing a historical fiction series with Susanna as the main character.50

Diener seeks out and reveals the life of an artist whose life story has been overlooked in comparison with male colleagues, and further, as a Flemish artist in the English court: Horenbout is an outsider on several counts. The revisionist feminist imperative is also important for Blackadder. “Historical fiction is one place where so much reclamation of female history is happening—authors are finding snippets, hints, rumours of lost female history, and writing to bring it to life again,” Blackadder has said.51 She “was intrigued by the idea of powerful women in a male-dominated society,”52 and her discovery that Mary, Queen of Scots was known to cross-dress brought a new perspective on the royal figure: “If they’d taught this kind of history at school I might have paid more attention.”53 Blackadder takes an indirect approach to representing the famous queen in The Raven’s Heart, so that the reader sees Mary through the eyes of a speculative version of her own ancestor, Alison, who is presented as Mary’s servant and companion. Here the protagonist in this novel is indeed named after a real person, but everything else about the character is

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invented, as very little is known of the life of Alison Blackadder. The Raven’s Heart thus imagines a narrative—and a queer life story—for her, so that the story it tells is almost wholly imagined. It is an approach other novelists, such as Hannah Kent, have used, and one that Kent describes as “speculative biography.”54 The lives Alison Blackadder narrates are her own and her queen’s, creating a dual biofictional focus similar to Dunn’s that is likewise told from the perspective of the marginal figure. Blackadder queers the past in several ways, writing of the Queen’s cross-dressed forays into Edinburgh and creating a sympathetic portrayal of a charismatic Bothwell that makes sense of Mary’s apparent obsession with him. This is not the imagined, theatrical Scotland of Sir Walter Scott but a bleak, troubled political swirl, positioned in grim opposition to the England of Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth. We suggest that The Raven’s Heart further supports a broader definition of biofiction within the category of historical fiction: its narrator carries the name of a historical figure but with a mostly fictionalised biography, thus exerting pressure on Lackey’s definition of biofiction as “literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure”;55 its creative aim is the fictionalising of specific past lives; its mostly imagined narrator grows, learns, and enacts agency in ways that its other biographical subject, Mary, Queen of Scots, cannot (compared to Lackey’s description of biofiction’s protagonist as “an exceptional model of originality and/or agency for the present and future”);56 and its author lays claim to it being part of the process of using historical biofiction as a means of reclaiming women’s history. In these endeavours, then, the surveyed writers are making direct and revisionist interventions in the historical reputations of their female characters. What comes through equally strongly is how these figures might function as exemplars for or mirrors to the present. The authors see the preoccupations of women in the modern world reflected in these lives of the past, suggesting that a historical understanding of the strength and ability of these women in the face of structural and cultural restrictions on their lives might inspire and connect to women readers now, just as they themselves have felt inspired since childhood. Cooper and Short draw our attention to the importance of the dual temporal dimension described by Mariadele Boccardi,57 as an aspect of writing and reading, “which both lends the women depicted in these novels their own particular characteristics, and which influences the ways in which their stories are re-told and the unique emphases in each retelling.”58 The feminist “moral” of these stories functions not only to revise readers’ sense of the past but also to

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draw attention to the ways gender is performed and herstories are rendered through the centuries to the present. The idea of advocacy is not just retrospective, but also directed at the present and future—called “topicality” by Tatiana String and Marcus Bull in their study of Tudorism.59 As Cooper and Short have noted: Deprived of any real point of reference, of any original, the female historical figure exists beyond any authenticating force, and is consequently able to become the central character in a range of narratives which do not rely on an accurate portrayal of the past. As such, she can be shaped to fulfil the needs and desires of a contemporary audience, and becomes once again a reflection of the moment in which she is written.60

The four novelists considered here recognise this topicality, but in varied ways. Some draw parallels between their own experiences and the historical figures they render. For Dunn and Caro in particular, Tudor women’s life narratives produce an allegory of female experiences through the centuries and a means to advocate for changes to how these women are remembered. All of these authors acknowledge, in their interviews and blog posts, that they bring their own perspectives and their own ideologies to the work of fictionalising real people from the past. This reflects a pattern common in biographical novels about women by women, described by Lucia Boldrini as driven by “a personal relationship between historical individuals whose lives have been directly touched and touch us, whose experiences shape and affect our lives despite their historical distance.”61 As described earlier, Dunn makes sense of her own family story through these figures, and her own life story and gendered identity in particular: Writing has taught me that I use historical fiction as a way to tell my own story, as a woman who has lived the experience of being shaped by her culture, who also has known oppression and—in her growing up years—being deemed to have less value than the males in her world. A woman who believes in writing as a space that creates and builds empathy—not only for the reader, but for the writer, too.62

She also extends this out to contemporary female experience more broadly: “Through writing about female characters I cannot help reflecting about my own life as a woman and the lives of women in my own times.”63 As Dunn has said: “I hope to show that the fictional revising of Anne Boleyn’s

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story engages female authors with a feminist standpoint relevant to women today.”64 Caro reflects this connection to the present in a slightly different way. She describes her experience while writing the novel as a kind of reverse method acting, attempting to inhabit the consciousness of a fictional Elizabeth by projecting her own experiences, world view, and sensation into the character she creates: I just start, you know? I think I approach writing characters a bit the way actors approach playing a part. I imagine myself as that person and so they respond the way I would respond. I describe what I would see. They smell what I might smell. It’s an act of imagination, and I think it’s an act of empathy, of empathetically imagining what it might be like [to be that person] and then writing from that perspective. I never set out to write her as a teenager or an old woman. I don’t think about that. In the same way as in life, you don’t think, “Oh, I’m a teenager … Oh, now I’m an old woman”. You are just you, and so you just write as you.65

These fictional representations of past women are, then, inextricably connected in different ways to the material conditions of the writers in the present and their own process of identity formation. These writers recognise the limits of their embodied, present selves on their ability to imagine the past as Other, but in some cases their work, and their public comments about the work, both acknowledge and deny the tensions inherent in this approach, such as retrofitting anachronistically modern feminist attitudes to powerful women from the past, or projecting the worldview and preoccupations of the modern writer or reader onto the historical figure, even where that overrides her documented beliefs. This presentism66 is evident in the statements by Dunn and Caro, and while they have both noted their self-awareness of how their research and writing are artefacts of the present, and recognise this distance between present and past, they suggest it can be overcome. For them, the Otherness of the past seems to be “made familiar through the illusions of fiction,”67 enabled by the authors’ sense of connection to their historical subjects.

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Connection It must be said that a strong affinity with Anne Boleyn or her daughter Elizabeth, for example, is both common and yet felt to be unique. Susan Bordo compared various screen portrayals of Anne with the historical record and speculates about why this might be so: Identification with such tensions—between convention and individuality, femininity and drive, love and self-actualization—and the bravery required to remain one’s own contradictory self in a world that still trades in victims and vixens—may be one reason why contemporary female audiences have taken so eagerly to recent films about historical figures like Elizabeth … Elizabeth, Austen, and others, speaking safely from other times but in language that still communicates powerfully to women, dramatize the struggles that we don’t like to admit endure. But that surely do.68

Anne’s tragic story is told and re-told in different ways; generations of young women have felt an affinity that often informs, in later life, their own fictional version of her. As we have seen, this has led to an explosion of interest in, and cultural representations of, Henry VIII’s doomed second wife. Julie Crane argues that this affinity is both troubled and productive: It is impossible to “be” Anne Boleyn, it is ludicrous to want to be her—and yet … in the defeated form of the Queen, an emerging reader and writer of fictions perceives a tragic but suggestive role model. Unable to be a writer herself—except in those poignant, charged love letters between herself and the King who eventually destroyed her, and the dubious poems from the Tower proclaiming her innocence—Anne is nevertheless felt to be an embryonic writer herself, a commentator on the events of her own life, and an endless source of narrative possibility, offering to later writers the possibility of transforming her.69

For the writers surveyed here, the connection they articulate to their historical subjects is initially that familiar experience of the reader of historical biofiction identifying strongly with a woman from the past. The experience of reading about her experiences and her fictionalised life does not feel distant or othered but, conversely, generates a sense of intimacy—a connection strong enough to last, in some cases, a lifetime, in spite of

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significant geographical and cultural distances, and leading to later attempts to replicate that experience for their own readers. In addition to this, other links to the present suggest to these authors a perceived sense of connection across time and space. Dunn, for example, discusses a very specific manifestation. Despite recognition of her own position as rooted firmly in the present, and the impossibility of truly rendering her characters’ experiences, she also suggests an almost spiritual connection between herself, her ancestors, and the Boleyn family. In the biographical area of her website, variant versions of which appear elsewhere online, she describes this (in third person): While she [Dunn] continues to have a very close and spooky relationship with Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder, serendipity of life now leaves her no longer wondering if she has been channeling Anne Boleyn and Sir Tom for years in her writing, but considering the possibility of ancestral memory. Her own family tree reveals the intriguing fact that her ancestors—possibly over three generations—had purchased land from both the Boleyn and Wyatt families to build up their own holdings. It seems very likely Wendy’s ancestors knew the Wyatts and Boleyns personally.70

Here, the genealogical fact of historic co-location offers the author a sense of proximity to her subject through speculated interactions between the families.71 Blackadder, too, describes a family connection to her subject. Her inspiration for her novel came partly with the discovery of her family’s ancestral castle. “By complete chance I found myself at the gatehouse of the original 5,000-acre Blackadder estate,” she told Candida Baker in an interview for The Guardian. “I stopped to take photographs, and the current owners asked me in. They told me the story of Alison Blackadder, who was widowed in 1513 by the Battle of Flodden.”72 She also discovered William Blackadder, part of the household of Mary, Queen of Scots, and arrested on suspicion of the murder of Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley. The knowledge brought with it a powerful sense of connection: “It was almost as if I’d been handed the story on a plate, and at the same time there was the curious feeling of connection, both to Scotland and to these people who had lived so long ago.”73 The family connection catalysed the novel for her: When I uncovered a real link between the Queen and the Blackadder family, (with one of the Blackadders being implicated in the murder of Lord

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Darnley), the moment of creative alchemy occurred. The story of the Queen of Scots and the story of my ancestors would come together through a fictional character, Alison Blackadder, disguised as a boy from a young age to protect her from kidnapping. When Alison went into Mary’s service to petition for the return of Blackadder Castle, how could she not fall in love with the charismatic Queen of Scots?74

Blackadder’s journey to the land of her ancestors provided a genuine link to their histories, and a story conceived of as a kind of inheritance (“handed the story on a plate”). In her paratexts Blackadder also described the need to build upon this ancestral link with a physical connection to the landscape of her story and characters: “I’m a writer who likes to use my two feet. Walking in my character’s footsteps, in the places where the story takes place, is the most important research for me.”75 Walking the land thus affirmed this sense of connection. Diener does not describe such a genetic or epigenetic connection, but her prior knowledge of the geographic locations did inform her writing in a similar way to Blackadder. “I was born in London and have returned to the city many, many times over my life,” she writes, noting that “I did use my familiarity with London to orientate myself while I was writing.”76 Interestingly, Diener migrated from England and grew up in South Africa before settling in Australia, which echoes Horenbout’s own migrant status but, in the paratexts searched so far, Diener makes no overt reference to this connection. Through paratexts these authors communicate different but deeply felt connections to their Tudor characters and source material, through either biographical or thematic resonances. Reading these expressions of connection in the context of the writers’ identities as Australians is a productive means to unpack some of the tensions evident when writers seek to represent real people who are temporally, geographically, and culturally distant.



Writing Tudors from the Colonies

As the novelist Patricia Duncker has written, “The past is a quilt of traces and texts, ambiguous and often incoherent fragments, out of which we make stories. We make up history as story, and until we do, it does not exist. But the past existed, and we are the proof of its passage. The past is written into us.”77 The writers under consideration here, all identifying as non-Indigenous, describe close connections to character, as well as to

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specific places in the British Isles, or to moments in a past to which they feel a cultural affinity in spite of geographic and temporal distance. These stated familial or migratory connections suggest that rather than read these historical biofictions from Australian writers as doubly othered, we might consider them in terms of a perceived double ownership, where the writers feel enabled through these connections to access both Australian and British histories. The kinds of connections described might also be read as offering a justification for selecting subject matter so far out of time and place—as if the author didn’t choose the story, but was chosen by it, for example, or knew some aspect of it well enough to be able to write it. The stated connections underscore the authority to write these stories. For several of these writers, educated in the 1960s and 70s, British and European history was the default setting, as they were part of the generations of Australian children who were taught British (largely English) history and literature as part of the school curriculum. Australian history, other than its early invasion by British forces and the later Gold Rush, was not valued as highly in school curricula until the late 1970s and early 1980s, and knowledge of Indigenous peoples and cultures was not part of a comprehensive national curriculum until 2011.78 Even now, the stories about Australia most likely to be published are historical works by white novelists and academics, rather than Indigenous writers. As Larissa Behrendt has noted: When a colonising culture seeks to find its place in a country that is not theirs, how do they deal with the presence of the original inhabitants? Do they seek to silence the Aboriginal inhabitants so that their own story of conquest will not be challenged or undermined? Or do they find a way to incorporate the narratives of those they have displaced into their own story? There are no absolute truths when it comes to history. It is a process, a conversation, a constantly altering story.79

None of these texts are overtly positioned as part of that ongoing conversation about how narratives of Australian colonisation are articulated. The works are located firmly in the historical fiction tradition, with very little separating these Australian novels from their British counterparts. The fiction itself conforms with accepted genre conventions, apparently no more othered than works from the “mother country.” Specific epitexts for the works examined here—book design, packaging, and marketing—are self-­ consciously similar to Tudor fiction published by authors from the

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UK.  Caro and Diener’s covers, for example, feature the familiar visual trope of a young woman in an elaborate gown, with the book’s edge cropping off the top of her head. Dunn’s cover features a young woman wearing a pointed hood. For their readers, there is little peritextual indication on the books themselves that the authors hail from the distinctly non-­ Tudor Antipodes. Diener’s back-cover biography identifies that she was born in London and raised in South Africa. The American edition of Blackadder’s novel states the author lives in Australia, but more is made of this in the Australian version, as if offering the reader a uniquely Australian connection to the Scottish queen. In terms of the presentation of the texts to the reader, though, very little distinguishes these books from their northern hemisphere cousins. Yet Dunn’s earlier question (“Why am I, an Australian writer, so obsessed about the Tudors?”)80 suggests this sense of double ownership is not wholly secure. It could be interpreted as a level of anxiety about the choice of subject matter so far removed from her own time and place. The question also separates “Australian” and “Tudor” into distinct categories and emphasises the gulf between them; implicitly, it interrogates the relevance of one to another. What needs of an Australian present might the Tudors address for authors from this region who deploy them in their fiction? Clearly, there is a perceived distance between these writers living in a settler society and the historical past of another country. Certainly, there are particular tensions when Australians write the Tudors. Novels set in the so-called Golden Age of the Tudor monarchs have long been associated with ideas of Britishness and particularly English nationalism, an issue only Blackadder approaches, with her focus on Stuart Scotland’s tense negotiations with Tudor England. As Light has noted: “Elizabeth’s reign is taken as the beginning of the establishment of law and order: the point at which the real England begins … It is one which assumes the superiority of the English as well as enumerating a catalogue of outsiders, excluded from both Englishness and democracy.”81 Frances Johnson goes so far as to suggest that “The late-modern historical novel in the Australian setting is still inextricably linked to tropes of empire.”82 Is the sense of connection expressed by authors such as Dunn and Caro simply that the history of a colonising power has been incorporated into the consciousness of its subjects? Recent criticism often considers the postcolonial historical novel only in terms of those representing colonial encounters. Hamish Dalley, for

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example, argues that postcolonial historical fictions (in which he includes Australian historical biofictions such as Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River) engage with the colonial past and present, where “memories of past conflict must be negotiated as an ongoing challenge to the coherence of the postcolonial nationstate.”83 Other scholars suggest that postcolonial historical or biographical fictions are generally experimental in style or fragmentary in form.84 While these novels do exhibit some of the other characteristics of postcolonial biofictions as noted by Daria Tunca and Bénédicte Ledent (e.g. a focus on portraying the interiority of figures neglected by the traditional historiography and particularly marginalised artists),85 nothing in these novels or the associated paratexts suggests that  the authors are approaching their content from a consciously postcolonial perspective, and nor are they experimental in style: the novels by Caro, Diener, and Dunn, in particular, align more closely to commercial historical fiction in form. Here, though, we might consider two related observations from Diana Wallace. The first: that it is sometimes difficult to see connections between an historical novel and its moment of writing.86 The second: that it is important to recognise three key time periods when dealing with historical novels—the time of the setting, the time of writing, and the time of reading.87 The third category emphasises the role of the reader in these works, highlighting the reader’s context and choice of interpretive strategy or framework. This approach chimes with that taken by Tunca and Ledent,88 who situate the terms “biofiction” and “postcolonial” more as critical methods than generic categories. To read these Tudor fictions through a postcolonial lens is a productive exercise that makes clear parallels between Tudor England and contemporary Commonwealth countries. It draws attention to the importance of this period and its rulers in the developing sense of English national identity, its colonial expansion into Ireland, ongoing tensions with Scotland and Wales, attempts at conquest in the “New World,” and what would later become the United Kingdom and driver of imperial enterprises. All these elements are deeply relevant to contemporary Australia, its colonial past, and attempts to find ways to address or come to terms with this past. A postcolonial reading of these novels might consider the unconscious pull of the mother country for non-Indigenous writers in postcolonial nations. The long tradition of the Australian cultural cringe, of artists and writers leaving to make a creative life for themselves beyond

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our shores, was for many decades fuelled by a compelling sense that Britain is “Home” and that our country’s creative centre is located on the other side of the globe. Caro’s work embodies this strange double pull— she has written three novels in the voice of “the real England,” inhabiting and celebrating Tudor monarchy, and yet she is a devout Republican.89 Intended by the authors or not, Tudor fiction written by Australians raises myriad questions about this nation’s relationship to Britain and to Empire, about how we might be connected to both here and there.

Conclusion For the four authors whose novels are analysed here, the primary interest in re-writing the lives of women from the past in historical biofiction is a gendered one, often with a dual focus on re-interpreting the cultural memory of the chosen female subject while simultaneously drawing parallels to issues that remain unresolved for women in the present. The authors’ accounts of their creative decision-making and motivations describe a sense of both proximity and distance to their subjects’ lives and times, but without a demonstrable sense of “double othering”90 when writing about the past of another country. The stated motivations of these writers, especially those with a clear feminist agenda and those conscious of a past-present nexus, do not differ radically from those provided by UK writers who pick this period in which to set their works. In this, though, there might be a distinctly postcolonial edge to the characters chosen. Do these authors look beyond our shores for heroines because Australia’s own history, particularly the written story of the colony, features so few women, especially women of power? A few popular twentieth-century Australian historical biofictions focused on real (mostly white) women from the convict era, such as Catherine Gaskin’s Sarah Dane (1954) or Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves (1976), on the shipwrecked Eliza Fraser. In recent years, historical fictions tend to consider the difficult questions of dispossession and genocide, most controversially in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2006), in which the massacre of Aboriginal people is carried out by men, with women—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—barely featuring. The women many Australians learnt and read about as children were often not homegrown heroines, but those of the coloniser’s past, and they were presented, as Blackadder has made clear, in very specific, sanitised, ways.91 Jane Caro notes, “When I was young, there were very few female

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heroes. You could choose between self-sacrificing, saintly women like Joan of Arc or Nurse Edith Cavell or heinous, manipulative bitches. Both types generally came to a sticky end.”92 She longed for a role model,93 but her only heroic options were French or English, and she fixated on Queen Elizabeth. Blackadder, Caro, Dunn, and Diener articulate similar influences in childhood reading to Alison Light or Alison Weir. So, for the feminist project of writing powerful women leaders, perhaps it is not surprising that non-Indigenous authors look to the British or European past. As Patricia Duncker has noted, “Every writer who attempts the project of remaking history must have, whether they are aware of it or not, a quite concrete notion of what history is, what it means and what its ultimate significance must be to us, the past’s inheritors.”94 These authors have chosen subjects that are significant to them, through connection, obsession, and a desire for advocacy, rather than as a consciously postcolonial take on the Tudors. Their subjects lived not just in the past, but also in a foreign but familiar country, and it is possible that this doubled othering enhances their perception of significance, as it does for many other authors of historical biofictions. We suspect and hope that this focus on the foreign past is changing— not in any nationalist sense, but in the light of more recent history writing and education about the lives of women and about Indigenous leaders who were neglected or not fully recorded in the colonial record. An expanding literature by acclaimed Indigenous Australian writers is rapidly changing public perceptions of the recent and the ancient past. In the meantime, while we may have more questions than answers, the obsession with and connection between writers from Australia and long-dead women from the past continues as part of one of the most popular feminist literary projects of recent years. Acknowledgements  This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Dr Jesse Blackadder, who died in June 2020. We acknowledge that this chapter was written on the traditional country of the Wurundjeri people, and we pay our respects to their Elders past and present.

Notes 1. Wendy J.  Dunn, “Writing the Rainbow,” Wendy J.  Dunn, last modified 2016, https://www.wendyjdunn.com/wendy-­writes/187-­2/. 2. Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 94.

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3. Elodie Rousselot, “Introduction: Exoticising the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction,” in Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-­ Historical Fiction, ed. Elodie Rousselot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 5. 4. Bethany Layne, “Biofiction and the Paratext: Troubling Claims to ‘Truth,’” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 93 (2018). 5. Michael Lackey, “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction,” a/b: Auto/ biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 3, https://doi.org/10.1080/0898957 5.2016.1095583. 6. See Michael Lackey, “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1092290; Michael Lackey, Biofiction: An Introduction (Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2021), 9–17, ProQuest Ebook Central; Michael Lackey, Ireland, the Irish, and the Rise of Biofiction (New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2021), 15–32. 7. György Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans.  Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 38. 8. Lackey, Biofiction, 16. 9. Lackey, Ireland, 10. 10. Sharon Marcus, “Feminist Criticism: A Tale of Two Bodies,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 121, no. 5 (2006): 1727. 11. Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 227. 12. Ibid. 13. Jesse Blackadder, “Jesse Blackadder on Women, Writing and Antarctica,” interview by Walter Mason, Walterblog, February 8, 2013, http://www. waltermason.com/2013/02/jesse-­b lackadder-­o n-­w omen-­w riting-­ and.html. 14. Ina Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2021), 134. Other scholars using the term include Ariella Van Luyn, “(In)Famous Subjects: Representing Women’s Criminality and Violence in Historical Biofiction,” New Writing: The International Journal of Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 16, no. 1 (2019): 67–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2018.1439510; Stephanie Russo, “The Poet and the Queen: Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn in Historical Biofiction,” a/b:  Auto/biography Studies 36, no. 1 (2021): 65–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1775986. 15. Michelle Diener, “About the Author,” Michelle Diener, last modified 2021, https://www.michellediener.com/about/. 16. De Groot, The Historical Novel, 76.

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17. Stevens’s approach is described by  Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons, “Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the Present,” in Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past, ed. Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4. 18. Michelle Diener, “Q & A with Michelle Diener,” interview by Natalie Grueninger, On the Tudor Trail, 2013, http://onthetudortrail.com/ Blog/book-­talk/author-­interviews/q-­a-­with-­michelle-­diener/. 19. Ibid. 20. Gillian Polack, History and Fiction: Writers, Their Research, Worlds and Stories (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2016), 16. 21. Wendy J.  Dunn, “Revising Anne Boleyn: Why Does the Story of Anne Boleyn Draw So Many Women Writers Across the Threshold into the Realm of Imagination?” (conference paper, Minding the Gap: Writing Across Thresholds and Fault Lines, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, 30 November–2 December 2014): 2, http://hdl.handle. net/1959.3/396308. 22. Dunn, “Writing the Rainbow.” 23. Margaret Atwood, “In Search of Alias Grace: Writing Canadian Historical Fiction,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1516. 24. Jane Caro, “The Emotional Journey of Writers: Jane Caro,” interview by L. J. M. Owen, L.J.M. Owen, February 14, 2018, https://www.ljmowen. com/blog/2018/2/3/the-­emotional-­journey-­of-­writers-­jane-­caro. 25. Jane Caro, “Why This Married Republican Loves a Virgin Queen,” Mamamia, May 6, 2015, https://www.mamamia.com.au/jane-­caro-­books/. 26. Ibid. 27. Robyn Maxwell, The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn (London: Hachette, 2011). 28. Alison Light, “‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up,” Feminist Review, no. 33 (1989): 66, https://doi.org/10.2307/1395214. 29. Ibid., 59. 30. Diana Wallace, Female Gothic Histories: Gender, Histories and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 135. 31. De Groot, The Historical Novel, 69. 32. Ibid.; Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 227. 33. Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed, 138. 34. Stephanie Russo, “Contemporary Girlhood and Anne Boleyn in Young Adult Fiction,” Girlhood Studies 13, no. 1 (2020): 21, https://doi. org/10.3167/ghs.2020.130103. 35. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 17. 36. De Groot, The Historical Novel, 70.

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37. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short,  “Introduction: Histories and Heroines: The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5. 38. Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006,” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007). 39. Emily Sutherland, “The Evil that Men Do Lives after Them, and the Good Is Oft Interred Within Their Bones,” in Integrity and Historical Research, ed. Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland (New York: Routledge, 2011), 82. 40. Light, “Young Bess,” 66. 41. Julie Crane, “‘Whoso List to Hunt’: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 89. 42. Dunn, “Revising Anne Boleyn,” 4. 43. Wendy J. Dunn, “Speaking the Silences: Writing, Advocacy and Enabling Voice” (conference paper, The Ethical Imaginations: Writing Worlds conference, Southern Cross University, Byron Bay, Australia, 23–25 November 2011): 4–7, http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/429270. 44. Colin Davis, “Can the Dead Speak to Us? De Man, Levinas and Agamben,” Culture, Theory & Critique 45, no. 1 (2004): 78, https://doi.org/10.108 0/14735780410001686469. 45. Dunn, “Speaking the Silences,” 2. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 6. 48. Caro, interview by Owen. 49. Caro, “Virgin Queen.” 50. Diener, interview by Grueninger. 51. Blackadder, interview by Mason. 52. Jesse Blackadder, “Jesse Blackadder on The Raven’s Heart: A Prize-­ Winning Ancestral Journey,” interview by Candida Baker, The Guardian, September 11, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-­ culture-­blog/2013/sep/11/jesse-­blackadder-­ravens-­heart-­interview. 53. Jesse Blackadder, “The Queen of all Drag Kings,” Women and Words, February 26, 2013. https://womenwords.org/2013/02/26/the-­queen-­ of-­all-­drag-­kings-­by-­jesse-­blackadder/. 54. Hannah Kent, “Fictions of Women,” interview by Kelly Gardiner, in Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions Across the Globe, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 105. 55. Lackey, “Locating and Defining,” 3. 56. Lackey, Ireland, 10.

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57. Mariadele Boccardi, The Contemporary British Historical Novel: Representation, Nation, Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 5. 58. Cooper and Short, “Introduction: Histories and Heroines,” 7. 59. Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, “Introduction,” in Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 8. 60. Cooper and Short, “Introduction: Histories and Heroines,” 8. 61. Lucia Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2012), 159. 62. Wendy J. Dunn, interview by Louise E. Rule, The Review, September 5, 2014, http://thereview2014.blogspot.com/2014/09/louise-­e-­rule-­ interviews-­australian.html. 63. Dunn, “Speaking the Silences,” 7. 64. Dunn, “Revising Anne Boleyn,” 3. 65. Caro, interview by Owen. 66. David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). 67. De Groot, The Historical Novel, 94. 68. Susan Bordo, “Anne Boleyn: Victim or Vixen?” The Chronicle of Higher Education 54, no. 30 (2008). 69. Crane, “Whoso List to Hunt,” 83. 70. Wendy J. Dunn, “About Me,” Wendy J Dunn, last modified 2016, https:// www.wendyjdunn.com/about/. 71. Of course, Dunn is not alone in this. See Catherine Padmore, “The Paradox of Writing the Dead: Voice, Empathy and Authenticity in Historical Biofictions,” Writing in Practice 3 (2017), National Association of Writers in Education, https://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/wip-­editions/ ar ticles/the-­p aradox-­o f-­w riting-­t he-­d ead-­v oice-­e mpathy-­a nd-­ authenticity-­in-­historical-­biofictions.html. 72. Blackadder, interview by Baker. 73. Ibid. 74. Blackadder, “Drag Kings.” 75. Jesse Blackadder, “On Inspiration: Jesse Blackadder,” interview by Elisabeth Storrs, Elisabeth Storrs Historical Novels, March 6, 2013, https:// www.elisabethstorrs.com/on-­inspiration-­jesse-­blackadder/. 76. Diener, interview by Grueninger. 77. Patricia Duncker, “Fictions and History,” in Integrity and Historical Research, ed. Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland (New York: Routledge, 2011), 60. 78. Michael Westaway, “Why Our Kids Should Learn Aboriginal History,” The Conversation, March 13, 2014, https://theconversation.com/ why-­our-­kids-­should-­learn-­aboriginal-­history-­24196.

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79. Larissa Behrendt, Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2016), 191. 80. Dunn, “Writing the Rainbow.” 81. Light, “Young Bess,” 69. 82. Frances A. Johnson, Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage: Making and Unmaking the Postcolonial Novel (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 2. 83. Hamish Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel: Realism, Allegory, and the Representation of Contested Pasts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 201. 84. See Dalley, The Postcolonial Historical Novel or Daria Tunca and Bénédicte Ledent, “Towards a Definition of Postcolonial Biographical Fiction,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55, no. 3 (2020): https://doi. org/10.1177/0021989419881234. 85. Tunca and Ledent, “Postcolonial Biographical Fiction,” 5–10. 86. Diana Wallace, “Difficulties, Discontinuities and Differences: Reading Women’s Historical Fiction,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 207. 87. Ibid., 211. 88. Tunca and Ledent, “Postcolonial Biographical Fiction,” 5–10. 89. Caro, “Virgin Queen.” 90. De Groot, The Historical Novel, 94. 91. Blackadder, “Drag Kings.” 92. Caro, “Virgin Queen.” 93. Ibid. 94. Duncker, “Fictions and History,” 48.

References Atwood, Margaret. “In Search of Alias Grace: Writing Canadian Historical Fiction.” The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1503–16. Behrendt, Larissa. Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2016. Bergmann, Ina. The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2021. Blackadder, Jesse. “Jesse Blackadder on The Raven’s Heart: A Prize-Winning Ancestral Journey.” Interview by Candida Baker. The Guardian, September 11, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-­culture-­blog/2013/ sep/11/jesse-­blackadder-­ravens-­heart-­interview.

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———. “Jesse Blackadder on Women, Writing and Antarctica.” Interview by Walter Mason. Walterblog, February 8, 2013. http://www.waltermason. com/2013/02/jesse-­blackadder-­on-­women-­writing-­and.html. ———. “On Inspiration: Jesse Blackadder.” Interview by Elisabeth Storrs. Elisabeth Storrs Historical Novels, March 6, 2013. https://www.elisabethstorrs. com/on-­inspiration-­jesse-­blackadder/. ———. “The Queen of all Drag Kings.” Women and Words, February 26, 2013. https://womenwords.org/2013/02/26/the-­q ueen-­o f-­a ll-­d rag-­k ings-­ by-­jesse-­blackadder/. ———. The Raven’s Heart. Sydney: HarperCollins, 2011. Boccardi, Mariadele. The Contemporary British Historical Novel: Representation, Nation, Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Boldrini, Lucia. Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2012. Bordo, Susan. “Anne Boleyn: Victim or Vixen?” The Chronicle of Higher Education 54, no. 30 (2008). Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth. “The Fictional Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: How to Do Things with the Queen, 1901–2006.” Clio 37, no. 1 (2007): 1–26. Caro, Jane. Just a Girl. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2012. ———. Just a Queen. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2015. ———. Just Flesh and Blood. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2018. ———. “The Emotional Journey of Writers: Jane Caro.” Interview by L. J. M. Owen. L.J.M. Owen, February 14, 2018. https://www.ljmowen.com/ blog/2018/2/3/the-­emotional-­journey-­of-­writers-­jane-­caro. ———. “Why This Married Republican Loves a Virgin Queen.” Mamamia, May 6, 2015. https://www.mamamia.com.au/jane-­caro-­books/. Cooper, Katherine, and Emma Short. “Introduction: Histories and Heroines: The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, 1–20. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Crane, Julie. “‘Whoso List to Hunt’: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, 76–91. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Dalley, Hamish. The Postcolonial Historical Novel: Realism, Allegory, and the Representation of Contested Pasts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Davis, Colin. “Can the Dead Speak to Us? De Man, Levinas and Agamben.” Culture, Theory & Critique 45, no. 1 (2004): 77–89. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14735780410001686469. De Groot, Jerome. The Historical Novel. New York: Routledge, 2010. Diener, Michelle. “About the Author.” Michelle Diener. Last modified 2021. https://www.michellediener.com/about/. ———. In a Treacherous Court. Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 2011.

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———. “Q & A with Michelle Diener.” Interview by Natalie Grueninger. On the Tudor Trail, 2013. http://onthetudortrail.com/Blog/book-­talk/author-­ interviews/q-­a-­with-­michelle-­diener/. Duncker, Patricia. “Fictions and History.” In Integrity and Historical Research, edited by Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland, 48–64. New  York: Routledge, 2011. Dunn, Wendy J. “About Me.” Wendy J. Dunn. Last modified 2016. https://www. wendyjdunn.com/about/. ———. Interview by Louise E.  Rule. The Review, September 5, 2014. http:// thereview2014.blogspot.com/2014/09/louise-­e -­r ule-­i nter views-­ australian.html. ———. “Revising Anne Boleyn: Why Does the Story of Anne Boleyn Draw So Many Women Writers Across the Threshold into the Realm of Imagination?” Paper presented at Minding the Gap: Writing Across Thresholds and Fault Lines conference, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, November 30– December 2, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/396308. ———. “Speaking the Silences: Writing, Advocacy and Enabling Voice.” Paper presented at The Ethical Imaginations: Writing Worlds conference, Southern Cross University, Byron Bay, Australia, November 23–25, 2011. http://hdl. handle.net/1959.3/429270. ———. The Light in the Labyrinth: The Last Days of Anne Boleyn. Metropolis Ink, 2014. ———. “Writing the Rainbow.” Wendy J. Dunn. Last modified 2016. https:// www.wendyjdunn.com/wendy-­writes/187-­2/. Fischer, David Hackett. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Grenville, Kate. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. Johnson, Frances A. Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage: Making and Unmaking the Postcolonial Novel. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Kent, Hannah. “Fictions of Women.” Interview by Kelly Gardiner. In Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions Across the Globe, edited by Michael Lackey, 105–18. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Lackey, Michael. Biofiction: An Introduction. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. ———. Ireland, the Irish, and the Rise of Biofiction. New  York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2021. ———. “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction.” a/b: Auto/biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/0898957 5.2016.1095583. ———. “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 33–58. https://doi.org/10.108 0/08989575.2016.1092290.

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Layne, Bethany. “Biofiction and the Paratext: Troubling Claims to ‘Truth.’” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 93 (2008): 18–21. Light, Alison. “‘Young Bess’: Historical Novels and Growing Up.” Feminist Review, no. 33 (1989): 57–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/1395214. Lukács, György. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Marcus, Sharon. “Feminist Criticism: A Tale of Two Bodies.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 121, no. 5 (2006): 1722–28. Maxwell, Robyn. The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn. London: Hachette, 2011. Mitchell, Kate, and Nicola Parsons. “Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the Present.” In Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past, edited by Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons, 1–18. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Padmore, Catherine. “The Paradox of Writing the Dead: Voice, Empathy and Authenticity in Historical Biofictions.” Writing in Practice 3 (2017). National Association of Writers in Education, https://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/wip-­ editions/articles/the-­p aradox-­o f-­w riting-­t he-­d ead-­v oice-­e mpathy-­a nd-­ authenticity-­in-­historical-­biofictions.html. Polack, Gillian. History and Fiction: Writers, Their Research, Worlds and Stories. Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2016. Rousselot, Elodie. “Introduction: Exoticising the Past in Contemporary Neo-­ Historical Fiction.” In Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction, edited by Elodie Rousselot, 1–16. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Russo, Stephanie. “Contemporary Girlhood and Anne Boleyn in Young Adult Fiction.” Girlhood Studies 13, no. 1 (2020): 17–32. https://doi.org/10.3167/ ghs.2020.130103. ———. “The Poet and the Queen: Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn in Historical Biofiction.” a/b: Auto/biography Studies 36, no. 1 (2021): 65–91. https://doi. org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1775986. String, Tatiana C., and Marcus Bull. “Introduction.” In Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, edited by Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, 1-12. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Sutherland, Emily. “The Evil that Men Do Lives after Them, and the Good Is Oft Interred Within Their Bones.” In Integrity and Historical Research, edited by Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland, 65–85. New York: Routledge, 2011. Tunca, Daria, and Bénédicte Ledent. “Towards a Definition of Postcolonial Biographical Fiction.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55, no. 3 (2020): 335–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989419881234. Van Luyn, Ariella. “(In)Famous Subjects: Representing Women’s Criminality and Violence in Historical Biofiction.” New Writing: The International Journal of

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Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 16, no. 1 (2019): 67–76. https://doi. org/10.1080/14790726.2018.1439510. Wallace, Diana. Female Gothic Histories: Gender, Histories and the Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013. ———. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ———. “Difficulties, Discontinuities and Differences: Reading Women’s Historical Fiction.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, 206–21. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Westaway, Michael. “Why Our Kids Should Learn Aboriginal History.” The Conversation, March 13, 2014. https://theconversation.com/ why-­our-­kids-­should-­learn-­aboriginal-­history-­24196. White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 5–27.

PART III

Writing the Writer: History, Voyeurism, Victimisation

CHAPTER 8

Biofiction, Compulsory Sexuality, and Celibate Modernism in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author Paul Fagan

This chapter interrogates biofictional representations of male celibacy in Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004). I explore how each biographical novel diverts the “celibacy plots” of Henry James’s work and life away from a Jamesian aesthetic and ethics of indeterminacy and towards symptomatic readings and presentist constructions of masculinity and compulsory sexuality. My argument proceeds in four interrelated movements. First, I trace the debates about the author’s sexuality in key James biographies and demonstrate how they influence Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictions. Second, I introduce an alternative theorisation of Jamesian celibacy through Benjamin Kahan’s concept of celibate modernism. Kahan critiques symptomatic readings and presentist constructions of James by historicising

P. Fagan (*) Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_8

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the role of the nonsexual in the author’s fiction amid a time of radically shifting gender codes in which, as Eric Haralson demonstrates, the modern meanings of male homosexuality were still being formed. In place of the psychoanalytic and queer readings that have dominated the debate, Kahan proposes a depthless hermeneutic that does not read James’s fiction and correspondence suspiciously or try to decode them symptomatically but rather engages their representation of celibate life on its own terms. Such a mode of reading allows us to hold celibacy co-present with queer desires and pleasures without foreclosing either, while also allowing for slippage between gender roles. Third, I analyse two central sequences in Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictions for how they frame and construct a specific narrative about their subject’s relationship to celibacy: the failed premiere of Guy Domville and James’s relationship with the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson. Through these set pieces, I show how Tóibín and Lodge read James’s celibacy symptomatically as always either a perversion of or a mask for other sexual identities.  This observation allows me to contrast their depictions with a Jamesian concept of celibacy which, once historicised, emerges as a fluid and potentially transgressive sexual, artistic, and political identity. The fraught relationship between genre and life representation that I perceive in these novels sparks a closing reflection on how the biofictional mode could accommodate a depthless account of James’s life. Such a queering of Jamesian celibacy beyond sexual binaries (heterosexual or homosexual, latent or patent, consummated or renounced), I propose, will better position critics to raise pointed formal and ethical questions regarding the use of the biofictional mode to disclose secrets and reveal truths about lives lived on the borders of desire.

Jamesian Biography: Celibacy as the “Path of Safety” Comparative analyses variously situate The Master and Author, Author in proximity to biographical, realist, modernist, and postmodernist sensibilities through two interrelated questions: “Why does the attention that James attracts result in fictional biographies/biographical novels? What is it  about James or his reception that  induces creative writers to take up hybrid forms?”1 Miranda Seymour’s 1988 study of James concedes that the indeterminacy produced by his celibacy is the major fascination for biographers, and, indeed, that sexual relations lie at the heart of the genre of biography itself: “When a man has neither wife nor mistress and leads a

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life which is both orderly and prudent, he does not invite the conventional biographical approach.”2 The implication that the disclosure of sexual scandal is the driving force behind biography, and that it is the absence of such scandal that draws multiple biographers and biographical novelists to James as their subject, is reiterated by Michiel Heyns, the author of The Typewriter’s Tale, another 2004 biographical novel with James as its subject. Heyns acknowledges: “There are more luridly eventful lives than that of Henry James to choose from: a man who had, in the received opinion, no consummated sexual relationships, who lived an exemplary life, and who avoided scandal at all costs does not seem a promising fictional subject.”3 He reflects that Tóibín, Lodge and he himself found an “irresistible story in the very absences of James’s life,” and that each author focused, consequently, on the lacunae of James’s “homosexuality, generally assumed to have been unconsummated” and his “relationship with the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, who committed suicide in Venice in 1894.”4 The narrative coordinates of James’s unconsummated  queer desires and platonic relationships with women are established by the primary biographical sources that Lodge and Tóibín identify as their key sources. Lodge’s five-page postscript to Author, Author, “Acknowledgements, etc.,” provides an extensive scholarly list of biographies, correspondences, and studies that served as his sources and identifies exactly which parts of his novel are supported by research and which are invented.5 In contrast, Tóibín’s single-page “Acknowledgements” offer a much more concise list of the biographical sources that informed his biofiction. Tóibín concedes that his work mixes imaginative fiction and biographical fact but does not clarify when and where this collusion occurs in the novel. 6 The distinctions between Tóibín’s and Lodge’s paratexts bear out J. Russell Perkin’s claims that “Tóibín’s practice in The Master is to treat the historical record more freely than does Lodge” and that “Lodge’s practice is closer to that of the biographer.”7 Yet, both approaches raise categorical and ethical questions about the biofictional form that, in Lodge’s words in his preface to Author, Author, “use[s] a novelist’s license in representing what [historical figures] thought, felt, and said to each other; and … imagine[s] some events and personal details which history omitted to record.”8 To establish the coordinates of this debate, I will demonstrate how both instances of James-centred biofiction respond to the legacy of specific James biographies that, between them, stage a series of fundamental

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disagreements not only about the biographer’s remit but also about core fundamentals concerning their shared subject. The coordinate of celibate artistry—the idea that James decided “to sublimate eros in the service of art”9—was established as a staple of Jamesian biography by Saul Rosenzweig in his 1943 essay “The Ghost of Henry James,” wherein Rosenzweig attributes James’s “precious overqualification of style and restraint of sexual passion” to “the repressed pattern of his life.”10 It is Rosenzweig, then, who initiates James’s reputation as the “high priest of Art”11 with all the connotations of celibate vocation that phrase suggests. At the same time, Rosenzweig’s psychoanalytical rhetoric of repressed sexual passion was instrumental in encouraging subsequent James biographers’ efforts to read their subject’s life and art symptomatically. The influence of Leon Edel’s towering five-volume James biography (1953–72) in cementing the psychoanalytical framework for debate on James’s life is crystallised in the “greater attentiveness to the subject’s sexuality” that Bethany Layne notes in the 1985 single-volume digest of Edel’s Henry James: A Life.12 Elsewhere, Sheila Teahan observes that the index to this abridged version, “whose major headings under James, Henry, Jr include ‘illness,’ ‘psychosexual problems,’ ‘homoeroticism’ and ‘sexual diffidence,’ reads as a plot summary of” Edel’s biography.13 Across the biography’s scope, Edel diagnoses James, in Teahan’s evaluation, as “a passive and repressed observer. Entertaining homoerotic and quasi-incestuous feelings towards William and haunted by ‘his primitive fear of womanhood, a symptom of his own troubled sexuality,’ he is unable to act on or fully acknowledge his own impulses.”14 Departing from the image of the “autonomous, unitary, originating and decidedly masculine genius”15 that James constructs for himself in the eighteen prefaces to the New York Edition of his work, the biographical turn in James studies fashions rather a deeply repressed figure whose celibacy functions to closet a panoply of socially taboo sexual perversions and anxieties that James’s own psyche cannot control. Fulfilling the role of James’s psychoanalyst as much as his biographer, Edel identifies the origin of the author’s supposed renunciation of love, sexuality, and companionship in his youthful encounter with “the parental relationship which remained with him throughout his life.” Here, even before the biofictional turn in Jamesian life writing, we might question any strict delimitation between the biographer’s and the novelist’s approach to life representation, given that Edel presents the young James’s reflections

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on the gendered power relations between his parents through free indirect discourse: What happens to anyone who gives himself to another? To love—was that not self renunciation? Did not the mother give all of herself? Is the man therefore a threat to the woman in a love relationship? (It was clear enough to Henry that the woman could be a threat to the man). Would the man collapse and become weak (like the senior Henry) if he ever allow himself to love a woman? To be a man and to take a woman for wife—was that not something to be feared? … To be led to the marriage bed was to be dead. Henry James accordingly chose the path of safety. He remained celibate.16

In the passage we observe the tired trope of women as drains on the wellspring of male creativity, a commonplace to which we will return in the discussion of the Fenimore Woolson sequences from Tóibín’s and Lodge’s novels. But for now I should like to draw attention to Edel’s motivated equation of celibacy with “safety,” an articulation which is especially suspect within a nineteenth-century heteronormative context in which bachelors were “often seen as violating gender norms.”17 If the homoerotic subtexts of Edel’s biography appear as elements in a greater profile of the sexual neurotic, they come to the fore in Richard Ellmann’s 1987 biography of Oscar Wilde, in which James appears as not only a closeted but a latent homosexual. The turn is crystallised in Ellmann’s pithy diagnosis: “James’s homosexuality was latent. Wilde’s was patent.”18 Fred Kaplan’s Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (1992) further foregrounds James’s latent homosexuality by drawing biographical attention to “the mid-1890s, and more frequently in the next decade” when he “fell in love a number of times … with a younger man.” It is in this period, Kaplan asserts, that James begins to establish “intimate relationships, beyond his usual friendships, that for the first time provided him with the feeling of being in love,” even as “he placed the emphasis on friendship, not on physical consummation, which remained as dangerous, as threatening, as morally and culturally difficult for him as it had always been.”19 Kaplan presents a James who is “gay but celibate, entertaining a series of unconsummated romantic relationships and sublimating his sexual impulses into his art.”20 Thus James’s celibacy starts to be cast as a closet for taboo sexual desires that not only protects his art from distraction and responsibility, but which produces that art through psychological processes of sublimation.

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Sheldon Novick’s Henry James: The Young Master (1996) insists that the “absence of passion and jealousy” in James’s life “has been treated as a vacuum and filled in all sorts of ways”21 to “avoid dealing with the evidence of his homosexuality.”22 Novick asserts James’s “distaste for celibacy” and his “ease” with “closeted sexual relations among many of the men he knew.”23 Thus, while Kaplan’s James declines to act upon his desires in favour of cloistered dedication to his art, Novick’s James “underwent the ordinary experiences of life,”24 including a sexual relationship at Cambridge with Oliver Wendell Holmes. Novick arrives at this conclusion by reading the following reminiscence by James suspiciously: “The point for me (for fatal, for impossible, expansion) is that I knew there, had there, in the ghostly old C …. l’initiation première (the divine, the unique) …. Ah, the ‘epoch-making’ weeks of the spring of 1865.”25 The critical debate that emerged around Novick’s biography was focussed not only on the truth of Novick’s claim that James enjoyed sexually active, if closeted, relationships with men (although opinions differed here greatly) but more so on the methodological, meta-biographical question of how to read the evidence of James’s life and writing in terms of surface and depth, manifest and latent content. Philip Horne, for instance, dismisses Novick’s interpretation of the reminiscence as a form of paranoid reading that hinges upon a syllogistic fallacy: ( 1) James writes about the unnameable. (2) Homosexuality has often been spoken of as unnameable. (3) James therefore means homosexuality when he refers to something unnameable.26 Horne’s critique provided fertile ground for critics and biographers unsettled by queer readings of James. Not least among these is Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and his Art (1998), whose critique of the nature of James’s relationships with Minnie Temple and Fenimore Woolson influences both Tóibín’s and Lodge’s representations of same. In the biography, Gordon explicitly cites Horne’s argument as having “demolished scaffolds of supposition constructed without one firm fact”27 and critiques Novick for basing his assertion that James consummated his homosexual desires not “on provable evidence but on a tissue of supposition.”28 John R.  Bradley, taking stock of the debate, concedes that Novick’s interpretation of the passage is “plausible” but not “indisputable.”29

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Bradley insists, however, that the specifics of this disagreement are secondary to the need to address the “hostility” evidenced in the “defensive or dismissive tone often adopted by Jamesians when they are presented with criticism exploring homoerotic undercurrents in James’s life and writing.”30 In particular, he highlights the “antagonistic” rhetoric that Gordon deploys of demolishing queer readings.31 Indeed, Gordon’s insistence on the need for “firm facts” before even entertaining a queer reading of James contradicts the assertion made at the outset of her biography that “James’s awareness of buried possibilities, the gifts of the obscure, and gaps between the facts, invites the infinite challenge of his own life,”32 or indeed her reflection at the biography’s close that “[e]verything in James … suggests that documentary truth is limited and needs the complement of imaginative truth.”33 An understanding of the Jamesian power of imaginative truth “underpin[s] Gordon’s subsequent speculation” concerning James’s relationships with Temple and Fenimore Woolson,34 yet, as Bradley observes, the same understanding is withheld from speculation about James’s male relationships. Gordon protests that “[i]nformed scholars will know that [James] wrote also in ardent tones to women,” and, as such, “[w]e cannot safely demarcate his sexuality.”35 Here Gordon obfuscates her own bias by presenting queer readings as having “a predetermined political or critical agenda”36 while characterising her resistance to these readings as non-ideological. Furthermore, her word choice is suspect: why “safely demarcate his sexuality” instead of “precisely,” “accurately,” or some such? The word choice echoes Edel’s description of James’s sexual renunciation as a “path of safety” and that phrase’s articulations of celibacy with defence and protection, whether from James’s readers or his own psyche, whether from the injunctions of responsibility or the dangers of desire. Robert Kusek takes stock of the diverse Henry Jameses that have been produced across this biographical arc: James inhibited and endangered by women …; James the ‘high priest’ of art; James the manipulative egotist who brutally ruins the lives of women who fall in love with him and, subsequently, uses the experience for the sheer purpose of writing fiction; James who shares the culture-wide panic over changing gender and profession roles; James who practices sexual abstinence both to forestall nervous collapse and to conserve energy for work.37

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For each of these accounts of James’s life, the relationship between sexual  desire and conduct mirrors and thus  reveals the intersection  of fictional/imaginative truth and biographical/documentary truth. I should like to establish two interrelated presuppositions that  arise from this observation: 1. Despite their surface differences, the distinct Jameses of Rosenzweig’s, Edel’s, Ellmann’s, Kaplan’s, Novick’s, and Gordon’s biographical accounts are produced by a shared symptomatic, psychoanalytical reading of his celibacy as a form of repression or sublimation; and 2. The suspicious hermeneutics of these James biographies shape, and in certain ways determine, Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictional approaches to representing James as a celibate. The  influence of these psychoanalytic  biographical  studies of James on Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictional novels resonates with Michael Lackey’s theorisation of biofiction as a genre that narrativises the “growing understanding of the subconscious” as an object of representation in biography.38 In my intervention into this critical conversation, I propose that the question of James’s celibacy remains under-theorised and under-­ historicised as an organising problematic of both twenty-first-century biofiction’s formation and its critical legacy.

Historicising the Nonsexual: The Jamesian Celibacy Plot In an exchange in the Times Literary Supplement with Millicent Bell, whose review of The Young Master accused the author of paranoid reading and bad scholarship, Novick asserts that James’s homosexuality has been an open secret for at least a century.39 Yet, as D. A. Miller theorises, the closet itself functions according to the principle of an “open secret,” in which the “function of secrecy … is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge.”40 In such a logic, the “phenomenon of the ‘open secret’ does not, as one might think, bring about the collapse of [the] ideological effects” of homophobic censorship but rather attests to their endurance.41 As Alan Sinfield posits, the “open” secret of the closet rather “helps to constitute the public/

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private boundary—the binary that seems to demarcate our subjectivities—and thus facilitates the policing of that boundary.”42 To sidestep or advance beyond this double bind, in which strategies of secrecy and selfcensorship “enforce the internalization of the cultural policing of the self,” it becomes necessary to trouble the binaries upon which this logic is founded by thinking silence not as a site of oppression but rather “as a space of possibility.”43 What happens if we think of James’s celibate poetics in these terms? In his 2013 study Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life, Kahan challenges the critical tendency “to read ‘celibacy’ as repression.”44 For Kahan, when historians and theorists of sexuality “refer to the celibate as a ‘latent,’ ‘closeted’ or ‘unconscious’ homosexual who has detrimentally internalized homophobia,” they employ a too strong hermeneutic that “continues to construct the closet as an essentially private relation rather than one that … is publicly ‘produced by the heteronormative assumptions of everyday talk.’”45 As such, if “the epistemology of the closet is an epistemology of the open secret, celibacy offers an epistemology of the empty secret.”46 While acknowledging the difference between a motivated queer presumption that seeks to recover hidden histories and a hegemonic heterosexist presumption that seeks to keep them closeted, in Kahan’s estimation the field has failed to internalise Michel Foucault’s assertion that “[t]here is not one but many silences.”47 By “interpret[ing] ‘absence’ (preterition, silence, the closet, the love that dare not speak its name …) always as ‘evidence’ of same-sex eroticism,” standard readings cover “over our ability to read actual absences of sex” as “a coherent sexual identity rather than as a ‘closeting’ screen for another identity.”48 By “employing a paranoid hermeneutic that ‘reads through’ censorship” to ensure that “sexual identities, desires and pleasures never fall victim to suppression,” presentist criticism of past celibate identities and lives “inadvertently reduces possible connotations into a single denotative reality … and leaves no room for sexuality that does not aspire to normative sexual acts.”49 Consequently, “queer reading” has been privileged “over celibate reading because celibacy has no constituency” in current critical conversations, in so far as “the celibate is no longer a recognizable identity” as it was for James and his contemporaries.50 To counter this trend, Kahan traces an alternative genealogy that “pluralize[s] the realm of the nonsexual” in the modernist imaginary.51 Shattering its popular image as a psychological distortion or perversion of healthy sexuality that emerges solely from prudish, repressive, religious,

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conservative, or reactionary attitudes to sex, Kahan rediscovers celibacy as a now forgotten instrument of the American political Left—from the First-Wave Feminism of Margaret Fuller and Susan B.  Anthony, which advocated celibacy as a tool of women’s independence, to Black reform movements and the Stonewall riots—and a thematic crux of modernist writing from James to Marianne Moore and W.H. Auden. Indeed, Kahan gestures beyond the borders of his American modernist corpus to highlight that “[d]espite its allergy to celibacy, modernist scholarship has always charted figures who were sexually recalcitrant, indifferent, alienated, unattached, lonely, and lifelong or periodic celibates … who take celibacy as an explicit subject matter.”52 By historicising celibacy, Kahan’s study “recasts the histories of homosexuality, the women’s movement and modernism”53 and challenges critics to rethink the realm of the nonsexual in the emergent modernist moment as a spectrum of sexual, political, and artistic identities. The question becomes how to read out of biographical gaps and silences, mindful that reading in is always an imposition, even if it is sometimes a necessary one. Kahan’s critique of overly strong hermeneutic frameworks for reading historical instances of celibate identity anticipates the recent critical turn towards “weak theory.” While the concept entered the wider critical conversation through Paul Saint-Amour’s 2018 special issue on weak theory in Modernism/modernity,54 it was first formulated in Wai Chee Dimock’s 2013 article on Tóibín’s The Master, in which Dimock calls for a less sovereign and controlling theoretical framework and a more tentative mode of analytical reading that pursues “relational threads” as they emerge without determining outcomes in advance.55 Within this framework of strong and weak theories for reading celibacy, a brief reflection on Kahan’s historicisation of the celibacy plots of James’s own writing will establish the coordinates against which we might evaluate Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictional reframing of James’s celibacy plots as a function of his presumed homosexuality. Kahan identifies the emergence of modernist celibate identity with James’s novel The Bostonians (1886), in which Olive Chancellor and her cousin Basil are “romantic rivals” for Verena Tarrant, “a young and beautiful feminist lecturer.”56 Olive courts Verena “by tutoring her in women’s history” and inducting her into what Hugh Stevens describes as a “feverish cult of virginity”57 through the models of Joan of Arc and figures in the work of Goethe, but loses out, ultimately, to her cousin.58 The Bostonians identifies Olive explicitly as “so essentially a celibate,”59 yet most

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present-­day criticism reads this identifier as code for lesbianism, as it does the term “Boston marriage” that is evoked in the novel’s title. Kahan, however, positions The Bostonians within a now largely forgotten nineteenth-­century genre of the Boston marriage novel—exemplified in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Florence Converse’s Diana Victrix (1897) and Gertrude Stein’s Fernhurst (1904)— which is structured around a “celibacy plot” that charts a character’s development not towards marriage, dependence, and integration into patriarchal social structures, as in the “marriage plot,” but rather towards celibacy, independence, and a rejection of the limits that such structures place upon the self and particularly upon women. As such, Kahan reads “Olive’s courtship of Verena less as a failure than as a spur helping Olive to deploy her celibate independence to become a successful feminist speaker,” a narrative arc which “marks celibacy’s key role in the campaign for suffrage.”60 Kahan emphasises how, in these fictional texts but also in contemporary reporting on Boston marriages, the categories of celibacy and lesbianism are not exclusive: “a celibate way of being in the world, a being towards independence, is essential to the production of Boston marriage, whether or not such an arrangement encompasses lesbian sexual acts.”61 Both closeted homosexual relationships and same-sex celibate relationships in James’s milieu, “share a social identity with celibacy.”62 In his reading of James’s novel, then, Kahan insists upon “the methodological necessity of holding The Bostonians’s avowed celibacy co-present with its lesbianism without foreclosing either.”63 In his own correspondence, James foregrounds the necessity of historicising the biographical subject in order to avoid presentist representations, enjoining historical novelists to imagine “the old consciousness … of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world, were non-existent.”64 In his call for a more fully historicised understanding of Jamesian models of masculinity, Haralson charges that the twentieth century’s “overdetermined discourse of sexuality and its corresponding desiderata, if not dictates, for masculine performance” is such an instance of an anachronistic and presentist projection onto James and his milieu.65 Haralson critiques the ways in which Jamesian biographies have thus rerouted the “organic structuring of character and plot” towards a fixed image of the “celibate ‘hardened bachelor.’”66 Such depictions fail to take into account that it is only around the turn of the century that the Anglophone cultural definition of the celibate changed from an unmarried person to “someone who is ‘bound or resolved not to marry or

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have sexual intercourse’”—as Michael O’Sullivan notes, this is a “semantic shift” that “charts linguistically the perception and acknowledgement of a greater willingness to dissociate sexual relations from marital relations.”67 Once returned to their historical contexts, Haralson contends, “the same intonations we now hear as prudish or anxious” in James’s work are understood to be “not only personally but culturally expressive of a superseded view of ‘romantic’ options apart from the scene of sexuality.”68 Relieved of the need to conform to anachronistic sexual discourses and identities, James’s The Ambassadors (1903), for instance, reveals a different understanding of the ways in which celibacy, sexuality, relationship, companionship, friendship, romance, and desire signify and function in the social and literary contexts of James’s art. In this reading, the novel’s narrative arc does not conform to emergent gender codes and discourses of sexuality, but rather queers them through a rejection of compulsory sexuality. Haralson, for instance, rejects the presentism that he perceives in many contemporary readings of the novel’s representations of romantic passion. He asserts that the protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether’s “exit from the text and thus from romantic possibility marks his departure from the script of masculinity just when that script was being suffused with a potent new logic of sexualized being.”69 In his “Project for The Ambassadors,” James asserts that “it’s not in the least that [Strether] has fallen in love with [Marie de Vionnet], or is at all likely to do so”; indeed, “her charm is independent of that for him, and gratifies some more distinctively disinterested aesthetic, intellectual, social, even, so to speak, historic sense” in Strether.70 A presentist reading occludes the ways in which “an earlier age … might have taken at face value the author’s conceit” that Marie de Vionnet stimulates in Strether “not a sexual shudder but a frisson historique.”71 Returning the novel to its original contexts thus “situate[s] Strether as teetering just on the cusp of a new century in which ‘passion’ reduces to ‘sex’ … and ‘“to live” … in essence means to live sexually.’”72 In this context, James’s celibacy plot appears designed to resist the Freudian repressive hypothesis of sexuality as the secret of identity. Concomitantly, for Haralson, it refuses normative gender codes, in so far as “Strether’s process of becoming ‘changed and queer’ is pointedly one of ‘quiet inwardness,’ occurring ‘deep down’ …—a traditionally feminized space and drama that should not, however, be reserved for women.”73 It is significant, here, that Kahan identifies the “empty secret” of “celibacy” as a gender neutral term that at this time offers a “crucial modality of gender bending,”74 in which both Olive and Strether can negotiate or reject the

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dominant gender and sexual codes that policed the boundaries of public and private life. The views of the mature James on the representation of sexual passion in literature are laid out in his 1904 review essay on Gabriele D’Annunzio. In the essay, James avers that any representation of sex that “depends on itself alone for its beauty … endangers” the “poetically interesting” ways in which passion “finds its extension and consummation only in the rest of life”—when “shut out from all fruition and assimilation,” sexuality bears “no importance” to literature.75 As Bradley reflects, “James clearly did not criticize the depiction of sex acts merely because of sexual inhibition” but rather considered a “sole focus on the ‘detached pictures’ of ‘sexual passion’ to be an imaginative failure” that is unable to capture how they are assimilated (rather than sublimated) into and spread across diverse forms of nonsexual social and artistic life.76 James’s understanding of sexuality anticipates Foucault’s rejection of the Freudian repressive hypothesis in favour of a sexual dispositif that is manifested across the social sphere in a diversity of extended discourses, practices, and ways of living. It also resonates with Kahan’s more capacious view of celibacy, which, appropriating Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terms, “impacts ‘the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities.’”77 To the extent that James’s art figures and thematises a historically contingent depiction of the celibate as a conscious commentary on the changing gender and sexual norms of the time, how should we understand the insistence in Jamesian biography and biofiction on representing his celibacy as the index of repression? Kahan’s position that James’s celibacy plots interrogate the gender politics of his day and initiate a certain strand of celibate modernist expression allows for an alternative perspective on the symptomatic and presentist modes through which Tóibín and Lodge construct their subject.



Author, Author, The Master, and the Problem of Celibacy

The refraction of James as a biographical figure and literary protagonist that has been traced in the present chapter is carried over into Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictions, in which, as Perkin observes, “each novelist gives us a Henry James in his own image.”78 The opening page of Author, Author establishes an ostensibly clear and agentic conceptualisation of James’s

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sexuality: “He has had deeply rewarding friendships with both men and women. If he has never experienced sexual intercourse, that was by his own choice.”79 There is a suggestion of irresolution in the “If” upon which Lodge’s narrator hinges their claim; however, as Layne perceives, “[e]ven in imagination,” Lodge’s James “stops short of ‘performing any of these acts.’”80 The rhetoric of “choice” hints at an understanding of James’s celibacy as a coherent, volitional identity; yet, in The Year of Henry James, his essay on the genesis, composition, and reception of Author, Author, Lodge characterises James as lacking “a clearly defined sexual identity.”81 John Harvey detects “the ghost of a possible gay susceptibility” in Author, Author.82 Yet, the novel itself explicitly addresses, and apparently buffers its protagonist against, such a reading through the figure of John Addington Symonds, who is presented as a foil “in the contemplation of whose life [James] was able to clarify his own position regarding the delicate question of affectionate relationships between men.”83 James learns that “Symonds was by temperament, and probably in practice, a Uranist, or, to use a term that had just begun to circulate, a homo-sexual,” who had published “a plea for love between men, citing the precedent of such relationships between mature citizens and youths in Plato’s Athens.”84 Lodge’s omniscient narrator grants the reader the illusion of access to James’s thoughts: Henry found the Athenian or Platonic model of mentor and ephebe an appealing one for his own relations with his young admirers, but only up to a point that stopped well short of the grossly physical …. [S]omething fastidious in him recoiled from any thought of intimate sexual contact involving nakedness, the groping and interlocking of private parts, and the spending of seed. Admittedly (though he would only admit it to himself, in his most secret self-communings) he found it easier to picture himself thus engaged with a beautiful youth than with a beautiful maiden, but that only strengthened his resistance to any possible temptation to act out such disturbing fantasies. If there were men attracted to other men who found it impossible to detach love from sensuality then let them indulge the latter in private …—that was Henry’s considered opinion.85

Here, the “open” secret of Symonds’s sexuality functions not to subvert but to reinforce the cultural policing of public and private behaviour in ways that Lodge’s James appears to endorse. The injunction to renounce is emboldened through a faint awareness of “disturbing”  homoerotic

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desires that James consciously labours to resist. Layne perceives that the novel’s strong implication that James has never experienced or desired sexual intercourse is “seemingly calculated to rebut” Sheldon Novick’s claim that James was sexually active with other men.86 This reticence is followed through to the novel’s closing time-travel fantasy, in which the narrator returns to speak to the Master on his death bed but reflects it “wouldn’t be tactful to mention … that he would be adopted by a branch of academic criticism known as Queer Theory.”87 This ironised display of narratorial discretion and decorum moves to protect James from queer readings while flashing a knowing wink to the reader who is aware of the author’s critical afterlife. It is significant, then, that Lodge’s acknowledgements cite the influence of Horne’s demolishing critique of Novick’s claims that the biographical James was sexually active with other men, while Tóibín’s do not.88 Relatedly, both Tóibín and Lodge explicitly acknowledge the influence of Gordon’s biography, which sides with Horne against ‘speculative’ queer readings of James’s life to discredit Novick’s assertion of James’s consummated homosexuality; however, this debt takes on different inflections. While Lodge is “deeply indebted” to Gordon’s “remarkable book,”89 “Tóibín has said that reading Gordon’s book at an early stage of his own novel’s development provided an incentive for what he intended as a less judgmental view than hers of James’s life.”90 By contrast to Lodge’s picture of James as a bottled-up touch-me-not, Tóibín explicitly represents James’s body in an embrace with Wendell Holmes91 and returns to “male nakedness [as] a recurring motif” for encounters that “would have to remain secret to him.”92 Yet, in both Lodge’s depiction of a James recoiling from it and Tóibín’s of a James drawn towards it, the naked male body figures the intersection of unconcealed truth, privacy, and sexuality that each novel labours to capture and disclose. Tóibín’s explicit and implicit challenges to Gordon’s and Horne’s discomfort with homosexual readings of James contrast with Lodge’s deference to their accounts. Tóibín “centers his biographical work around the question of James’s gender identity”93 as it is shaped and haunted by relationships on the edge of the sexual, while Lodge offers a less haunted and more ironised exploration of male rivalry through the contrasting fates of James’s Guy Domville and George du Maurier’s Trilby. Yet, critics disagree on how Tóibín’s representation of James aligns with the methodological and ideological positions assumed in his biographical sources. Ágnes Zsófia Kovács posits that The Master “re-enacts Leon Edel’s biography” while paying greater attention than Edel to “James’s ambiguous

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performance of gender.”94 By aligning Tóibín’s James with Edel’s, Kovács foregrounds the novel’s depiction of a figure haunted by “his own troubled sexuality” who is thus “unable to act on or fully acknowledge his own impulses.”95 Laura E. Savu, by contrast, prioritises Kaplan’s emphasis on the mature James’s love for younger men as the “germ” for Tóibín’s James. By aligning Tóibín’s James with Kaplan’s, Savu foregrounds the homoerotic desires that The Master hints at but does not resolve in the text itself.96 Elsewhere, the relationship between Tóibín’s James and Wendell Holmes is clearly indebted to Novick’s account, thus suggesting a James who is sexually active but closeted. By drawing on each of these accounts without resolving their discrepancies, Tóibín creates a James who is more fully imbued with homoerotic desire and sexual irresolution than Lodge’s depiction. His novel crowns the biographies’ cumulative transformation of “the pompous figure of James as master of the novel … into the vulnerable, sexually anxious and lonely writer struggling with the new modern art and new age he had helped make possible.”97 The Master opens by drawing an apparent distinction between symptomatic and depthless readings of social life. Tóibín locates these hermeneutics to the cities of Paris—where everyone “carried with them the aura of another life which was half secret and half open, to be known about but not mentioned”—and London—where “people allowed themselves to believe that you had no hidden or secret self unless you emphatically declared to the contrary.”98 Yet, a suspicious Freudian framework for excavating James’s own “half secret” life is foregrounded on the second page, where we witness James’s attempt to retrace a fading dream: “No matter how hard he tried to remember, he was still not sure if he had a companion; perhaps he did, or perhaps it was merely someone who walked behind him.”99 Establishing the novel’s thematic concern with forms of companionship that must remain latent or hidden, the passage is soon complemented by a subtle reference to the theme of renunciation in the aside that James “had refused all invitations.”100 Yet, this “shadowy, intermittent presence”101 in James’s mental life is almost immediately given a more clearly defined form in the memory of a night with Paul Joukowsky, a “name that, once, had meant everything to him” and the partner in a “story which could never be written, no matter how secret the paper or how quickly it would be burned or destroyed.”102 Tóibín’s novel thus commits fully to the repressive hypothesis, as his James “learn[s] never to disclose anything” and reflects that “[i]t seemed strange, almost sad, to him that he had … rendered so much that was private, and yet the thing

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that he most needed to write would never be seen or published, would never be known or understood by anybody.”103 From this repressive set­up, Kovács argues, Tóibín’s novel traces how the “Master is born because of personal and professional anxieties that trigger his new way of writing” and which specifically emerge out of, and reflect, James’s “unresolved sexual identity.”104 Drawing out the ethical stakes of Tóibín’s narrative arc, Caitríona Ní Dhúill critiques The Master’s “troubling” suggestion that “a life marked by emotional coldness and deliberate self-isolation … is the price exacted not only by Henry James’s repressed homosexuality …, but also by his dedication to literature, and that the one cannot be extricated from the other.”105 Male celibacy becomes, for Tóibín and Lodge, a fraught signifier of the ways in which a renunciation of both sexual relationships (whether compulsory heterosexuality or forbidden homosexuality) and responsibility to others, is necessary for and productive of a literary vocation. Despite their common project of rendering James’s life by fusing the novelist’s tools for representing the quality of subjective experience with the unified objective perspective of the third-person biographical narrator, Layne summarises that “Tóibín’s troubled victim of heteronormative society is barely recognizable as Lodge’s unconcerned celibate.”106 Yet, their biofictions are united, Renate Brosch insists, in their comparable “effort to sexualize [James’s life] from a present-day perspective.”107 As Lodge fashions a James who lacks “a clearly defined sexual identity”108 and Tóibín writes of James’s “sexual almostness,”109 both authors refuse an understanding of the fin-de-siècle celibate as inhabiting a historically contingent and coherent, if wilfully indeterminate, identity or persona which has been cultivated to negotiate normative gender and sexual roles. Instead, they opt for a biofictional approach that crafts a James suffering under the very discourse of sexuality which his celibacy plots consciously interrogate and oppose. In different but related ways, Tóibín’s and Lodge’s texts employ “the novel’s techniques for representing subjectivity”110 as a means of surpassing the supposed biographical limit or impasse of male celibacy. I propose that a historicist queer reading of late Victorian and early modernist modes of the nonsexual can put the formal and ethical validity of this project to the test. The debacle of the 1895 Guy Domville premiere, “dispensed with in the opening pages of The Master, is central in both positioning and import to Author, Author,”111 which is “[s]tructured more fully around James’s disastrous flirtation with the theatre” than Tóibín’s text.112 While both

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novels frame Guy Domville as an artistic crisis that sets into sharp relief the incompatibility between dedication to artistic mastery and popular success, it is also significant that the play stages a male-centred version of The Bostonians’s celibacy plot. Tóibín characterises Guy Domville as “the story of a rich Catholic heir who must choose whether to carry on the family line or join the monastery”; it is a “drama about the conflict between the material life and the life of pure contemplation” as narrativised through a character who, “despite his vast wealth and golden future, decided to renounce the world and devote himself to a life of contemplation and prayer in a monastery.”113 Once again, the biofictional representations of the event are shaped and, in part, determined by their biographical sources. The Guy Domville humiliation is central to the fourth volume of Edel’s biography, The Treacherous Years: 1895–1901, which presents the play’s reception as the nadir of an artistic crisis that James endured on his way to the Major Phase of his career. Kaplan’s biography more fully incorporates Guy Domville’s celibacy plot as a model for his own biographical narrative of James as a celibate artist who “‘renounced marriage in favor of an ideal’ and substituted friendship for physical consummation, which he found ‘dangerous’ and ‘threatening.’”114 Following Kaplan, Tóibín almost explicitly relates the play’s plot to the author’s own biography in the image of James, booed by the public, “ready to suppress whatever his own urges and needs might be.”115 In their focus on the Guy Domville affair, each novel equates James and his play’s protagonist within a presentist framework, in which the choice to live as a “celibate” is cast as a closeting self-­ renunciation in the face of a hostile, heteronormative public and a key step in James’s sublimation of repressed sexuality into literary mastery. Neither biofiction conceives the choice to live as a “celibate”—whether made by James or his characters—as a coherent organisation of desires or pleasures. While presenting James as a celibate artist, neither Tóibín nor Lodge grants James himself the full potential of celibate artistry, at least insofar as it would relate to an identity in its own right, as distinct from a site of sublimation. Celibate artistry in both novels amounts to the ability to divert stymied sexual impulses into artistic endeavour, rather than the freedom to fully inhabit and capitalise upon the category of the celibate per se, for example, by exploiting its indeterminacy to achieve a certain independence, albeit compromised, from the injunctions of contemporary gender and sexual codes and norms. Both Tóibín and Lodge focus on James’s attendance at Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895) to avoid being present at the premiere of his own

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play, but the emphasis that each text places on situating James as Wilde’s spectator is telling. In Lodge’s rendering of the scene, James is “inattentive,” unable to follow the plot as he agonises over the reception of his own play.116 In Tóibín’s more tersely presented scene, James is not only attentive but sharp and barbed in his critique of Wilde’s “feeble and vulgar” comedy and the audience’s cheap, hedonistic laughter in contrast to Guy Domville: “His drama was about renunciation, he thought, and these people had renounced nothing.”117 The fact that the scene follows closely on James’s reflections on his unwritable relationship with Joukowsky encourages Tóibín’s reader to infer undertones of male homosexual panic in James’s contempt at the “mockery” of Wilde’s “obvious and shallow and glib” play, and particularly his consolation that “there was no sign of Wilde himself, loud and large and Irish as he was, or his entourage” at the performance.118 Ellmann’s Wilde biography is not included in Tóibín’s acknowledgements but Ellmann’s speculative characterisation  of the latent  James’s revulsion  at Wilde’s patency  nevertheless reverberates in Tóibín’s depiction of the scene. Ellmann writes: We must imagine Henry James revolted by Wilde’s kneebreeches, contemptuous of the self-advertising and pointless nomadism, and nervous about the sensuality. He [… called Wilde …] “a fatuous fool, tenth-rate cad,” “an unclean beast.” The images are so steamy as to suggest that James saw in Wilde a threat. For the tolerance of deviation, or ignorance of it, were alike in jeopardy because of Wilde’s flouting and flaunting …. It was as if James, foreseeing the scandal, separated himself from this menace in motley.119

Ellmann’s implication is fleshed out in Chapter 4 of Tóibín’s novel, in which the Wilde Trial has rendered the unspoken spoken in London. Edmund Gosse urges James to flee to Paris (the city of the open secret) to protect himself from the moral purge that is sweeping London in the trial’s wake, only to be met with flat-out denial: “I wondered if you, if perhaps …” Gosse began. “No.” Henry turned sharply. “You do not wonder. There is nothing to wonder about.”120

Uranian activist Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson, writing in 1908, critiqued “Wilde’s type of Uranianism” as being “in no sense classic,” falling “far below the level of idealism” as his “sexual instincts were concentrated

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on vulgar boy-prostitutes of the town.”121 Prime-Stevenson’s tone and its implications for changing discourses and views of the “open secret” of male homosexuality, resonates with the representation of Gosse and James’s discussion of Wilde in Tóibín’s novel, in which Symonds is raised briefly as a contrasting model of nineteenth-century Uranian identity. Tóibín’s James, awaiting the first night of his play about the renunciation of the romantic in favour of celibate life, recalls his erotic encounters with Joukowsky and feels a rising panic at how Wilde’s increasingly public displays of homosexual identity, shorn of the private intellectualism of Symonds’s Uranian ideals, will necessitate his own further closeting and exile from a London where previously “people allowed themselves to believe that you had no hidden or secret self.”122 Lodge’s James, by contrast, spends the nervous build-up to the Guy Domville premiere reflecting on Fenimore Woolson’s suicide. Heyns observes that Tóibín and Lodge, drawing on Gordon’s biography, both place the relationship with Fenimore Woolson “at the centre of their recreation of James’s emotional life” as “one of his few relationships with women amenable to fictional speculation.”123 Heyns’s summary frames the relationship, as represented in both biofictions, in terms of a compulsory (hetero)sexuality that I suggest is revealing of their tragic conceptualisations of celibacy: “she wished for more of his company than he was able or prepared to give her. The friendship is intriguingly like a James novel, with its heroine pining away quietly for the love of a more or less unresponsive male.”124 This attribution of a compulsory sexuality to Fenimore Woolson—or at least, James’s anxieties about her expectations from him—is bluntly foregrounded by Lodge as his James awaits the Guy Domville premiere: “He lived in dread of finding a suicide note saying, in effect, ‘I am going to kill myself because Henry James doesn’t love me.’”125 In Lodge’s presentation, the heteronormative pressure on James to consummate his friendship with his fellow author romantically or sexually through marriage is a social one that he declines with tragic consequences. Lodge’s James imagines his sister Alice writing to Fenimore to insist that she “was the only woman she could imagine Henry marrying,” and worries that such a letter “would have raised Fenimore’s hopes to a pitch which might have made his subsequent failure to realize them too much to bear.”126 Tóibín’s James undergoes the same pressure from Francis Booth and his refusal to buckle to it likewise traps Fenimore Woolson “in a large misunderstanding, not only in the snare of his solitary, sedentary exile, but also

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in the idea that he was a man who did not, who would never, desire a wife.”127 This presentation of James and Fenimore Woolson’s relationship in terms of compulsory sexuality, particularly in Lodge’s more blunt depiction, reflects, I suggest, a legacy of a mode of modernist criticism which has lost touch with the complex roles that celibacy played in nineteenth-­ century feminist, progressive, and artistic movements. The conventional narrative of modernism’s relation to sexuality concerns a generation of writers who led what Joseph Allen Boone terms a “modernist rebellion against sexual censorship” through overlapping acts of formal and sexual experimentation.128 This rhetoric has long informed and ordered modernist criticism: as liberation from the cultural norms of the Victorian age was increasingly cast in sex-positive terms, celibacy came to be positioned as freedom’s opposite, a paralytic remnant of prudish values and oppressive religious discourses that stood as an obstacle to modernity. My speculation is that Lodge, a known Joycean, and to some extent Tóibín are both influenced by critical readings of James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” as a model for the James-Woolson affair—with the rigid celibate Mr Duffy serving as a template for James and the jilted Mrs Sinico, pushed to suicide by her love for an unfeeling man, as a template for Fenimore Woolson. Indeed, critical approaches to Joyce’s celibate characters in Dubliners follow the common narrative of modernism as a progressive challenge to sexual repression and renunciation. Representatively, Richard Brown determines that “Joyce’s portraits of … ‘celibate’ Dubliners” are directed towards the “identification of the sexual problem of celibacy,”129 while Robert Spoo asserts, in normative terms that imply a compulsory sexuality, that Joyce’s celibates “all suffer from a painfully ingrown virginity which has caused them to submit to … a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture.”130 Thus, standard readings of “A Painful Case” frame Duffy’s “rejection of Mrs. Sinico” as “the refusal of a mutual, reciprocal sexual attraction,”131 borne out in a tragically “belated discovery of what he has lost.”132 A similar commitment to the Freudian hypothesis of Victorian repression and modernist sexual liberation is palpable in the reflection that Lodge attributes to his James that “Fenimore had left a message for him after death, saying in effect: you have not fully lived.”133 Tóibín’s assertion that “James was convinced marriage was fatal to a writer”134 is applicable to each novel’s handling of James’s companionship with Fenimore Woolson and her subsequent suicide. However, by using James as their sole point of focalisation, both authors fail to imagine

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Fenimore Woolson’s own celibacy as a manifestation of her celibate artistry or mastery, figuring it only as a lack. Writing in The Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review in 1911, G. R. S. Taylor summarises the diversity of opinion articulated in G. B. Shaw’s 1908 play Getting Married: “there is represented every possible kind of view on the sex relationship—the only thing that is left out, as if unnatural, is a woman who believes in celibacy.”135 The stakes of Shaw’s stance that “Marriage remains practically inevitable”136 for women become clearer when we note that the elision of the female celibate from his play has political consequences, given that throughout the nineteenth century, female celibacy played a central role for suffragette and progressive liberal movements in Europe and America. As Erin Williams writes, the concept of female celibacy advocated by Victorian-era British feminists and social reformers such as Josephine Butler, Annie Besant, and Harriet Taylor Mill “attained the level of social menace in the mid-1890s, a period when women activists and New Women novelists not only enumerated the injustices of marriage but also employed socialist rhetoric in calling women to organize themselves in the manner of a trades union in order to abstain from marital union altogether.”137 The protagonist of Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) refuses to run away with the man she loves out of a binding sense of female solidarity, and Rhoda Nunn in George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) chooses not to marry in order to serve the burgeoning community of independent women that she has fostered—and, as we have seen, James’s own Olive Chancellor chooses a life of celibate independence that frees her from certain gender norms, a choice George Moore’s “Mildred Lawson” would also pursue, albeit in a more ironised presentation, in his collection Celibates (1895). Given the importance of the ‘celibate plot’ for New Women authors and characters in this social and cultural moment, what are we to make of the fact that the potential of celibate artistry is granted to James in Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictions, but denied to Fenimore Woolson as a literary or political identity? Celibate artistry, it seems, is accorded only to male authors in this model (although, as I have attempted to show, even for male authors only a partial and qualified conception of celibate artistry as sublimation is allowed). Tóibín and Lodge arrive at this depiction, I claim, because they are reading historical celibate literary aesthetics and subjectivities through a twenty-first-century lens that is less able to perceive celibacy as a coherent sexual, political, and artistic identity which allows for cross-gender negotiations of the fin-de-siècle codes of femininity and masculinity. By suspending the subject’s determination

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within systems of marriageability and dependence, celibacy emerges for a certain transitional period in the late Victorian and early modernist eras, as an identity that is conceived not as a tragic or neurotic lack but rather as allowing for a liberating, albeit partial, slippage between gender norms that attempts to sidestep their limitations and appropriate their freedoms without foreclosing any potential organisation of pleasure. It is this conception of the celibate that is absent from Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictions, and which is, perhaps, precluded by the formal and ideological specifics of the genre itself.



Conclusion: Biofictional Celibacies/ Celibate Biofictions

As Perkin demonstrates, critiques of biofiction generate both formal and ethical questions that are concerned with the problem of the limit: “How much should the novelist be bound by the documentary evidence? Is there a point at which the ‘imaginative exploration’ becomes ethically illegitimate”?138 In the present chapter, I have shown how Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictions fall subject to the urge to read the nonsexual in James’s works and life symptomatically in terms (closeted homosexuality, misogyny, safety, artistry, mastery) that they have inherited from the tradition of Jamesian biography. These components have been drawn out by comparison to a differently historicised model of Jamesian celibacy, presented by Kahan and Haralson, that rejects the repressive hypothesis in favour of an understanding of celibacy as a volitional aesthetic and sexual identity. By placing these ways of understanding Jamesian celibacy into conversation with each other, I have argued that Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictions fail, by turns, to capture the historical celibate as a coherent identity, to understand modernist celibate artistry outside of the psychoanalytical framework of sublimation, or to conceptualise the celibacy plot as a rejection, rather than a manifestation, of cultural repression. This enquiry and its findings thus raise a series of interrelated, narrower questions that are correlates of Perkin’s framing of the ethics of biofiction as a question of good measure: is the absence of this conception of the celibate in Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictions a shortcoming of each author’s respective approach or a consequence of the formal and ideological specifics of the genre of biofiction itself? If the former, what would a biofictional mode look like that refuses a “symptomatic reading” of James’s and Fenimore Woolson’s

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celibate lives for a “depthless reading” that “does not try to decode queer content” or choose between celibate and queer “hermeneutic practices,” but rather contemplates its subject “with both lenses simultaneously”?139 Is such a mode compatible with biofiction’s project of introducing internality to the biographical subject by moving from the objective to the omniscient, from surface to depth? In her study Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction, Lucia Boldrini theorises heterobiography (first-person novels which “are presented as if they were the autobiographies of historical personages”) as foregrounding a “double I” approach to the construction of the auto/biographical subject which places the contradictions of the genre “firmly in the reader’s view.”140 The conceit of writing in the autobiographical first person, while simultaneously pulling the rug out from under  this pretence through the attribution of the text to a different author’s name, “bring[s] into focus precisely the thinness of the dividing line between … the historical (the protagonists are recognizable individuals whom we know to have lived) and the fictional (they exist within texts that are not bound by any duty of fidelity to facts).”141 By thus exposing the fluid limits between “generic boundaries,” the “double I” of heterobiography raises challenging “questions concerning the nature and status of the subject in and of writing” and foregrounds the ethical dilemma of speaking on behalf of an other by simultaneously claiming to do so and exposing this claim to be a ruse.142 In other words, it is a mode that endeavours to contemplate its subject “with both lenses simultaneously.” The Master and Author, Author are not heterobiographies; as such, it may be tempting to speculate that it is their formal adherence to the omniscient narration and free indirect discourse of the third-person biographical mode that determines their drive to read in rather than out. Counter-intuitively, such an argument might go, by exceeding the propriety of respectful distance and good measure through claiming to speak not about or for but as James, the “double I” of a blended “fictional narrator and historical person” (rather than a blended fictional narrator and historical biographer) offered under the name Colm Tóibín or David Lodge would transform their Jameses into “the site of an encounter, a stage where the intricate relations between historical, fictional and authorial subjectivities are played out and explored.”143 Yet, is a simple change of perspective from third to first-person narration all that is preventing Tóibín’s and Lodge’s representations of the historical celibate from more

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fully and consciously deconstructing the ideological structures and hermeneutic modes of Jamesian biography? My wager is that it is by returning to Jamesian celibacy as a historically contingent yet sexually, artistically, and politically coherent identity that we can access and interrogate the ideological structures and the formal and ethical limits of Tóibín’s and Lodge’s biofictions and their receptions. Such a move not only exposes the presentism of the two novels in question but also invites a slightly different theorisation of the formal features and aesthetic potential of biofiction as a hybrid genre. Indeed, Cora Kaplan suggests, in biofiction’s union of the biographical and the novelistic modes, there always remains “something stubbornly insoluble in what separates the two genres and that prevents them from being invisibly sutured; the join will always show.”144 Already contained within biofiction’s neither/nor-but-both-at-once status, then, is an aesthetic framework with the potential to approximate the indeterminacy of a mode of celibacy which “outplays, outsmarts, parries and fakes out the hetero/homo binary by occupying neither term and both terms simultaneously.”145 It is by historicising and multiplying the permeable limits not only between literary genres and narratological vantages but also between and within late Victorian and early modernist gender and sexual identities that we might better encounter not the “double I” but the “multiple I” of the celibate lives that evade Tóibín’s and Lodge’s solid discourse, yet which themselves mirror biofiction’s fluid modalities. Acknowledgements  I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Brigitte Grahsl for her research assistance in the composition of the present chapter, as well as to the editors, external readers, and my colleagues David Conlon and Eugenie Theuer for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of the work.

Notes 1. Lucy Biederman, “After the Year of Henry James: The Undermining of Authority in Short Fictions by Cynthia Ozick and Joyce Carol Oates,” The Henry James Review 38, no. 1 (2017): 88, https://doi.org/10.1353/ hjr.2017.0009. 2. Miranda Seymour, A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and His Literary Circle, 1895–1915 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988), 13. 3. Michiel Heyns, “The Curse of Henry James,” Prospect, September 26, 2004, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/thecurseofhenryjames.

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4. Ibid. 5. David Lodge, Author, Author (London: Penguin, 2005), 387. 6. Colm Tóibín, The Master (London: Picador, 2005), 369. 7. J. Russell Perkin, “Imagining Henry: Henry James as a Fictional Character in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author,” Journal of Modern Literature 33, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 118, https://doi. org/10.2979/jml.2010.33.2.114. 8. Lodge, Author, Author, n. pag. 9. Robert Kusek, “The Many Lives of Henry James: Biographers, Critics and Novelists on the Master,” Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 6, no. 1 (2011): 78, https://doi.org/10.4467/2084393 3ST.11.006.0304. 10. Saul Rosenzweig, “The Ghost of Henry James,” Partisan Review 11 (Fall 1944): 454. 11. Ross Posnock, “Affirming the Alien: The Pragmatist Pluralism of The American Scene,” in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 224. 12. Bethany Layne, Henry James in Contemporary Fiction: The Real Thing (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 12. 13. Sheila Teahan, “Autobiographies and Biographies,” in Henry James in Context, ed. David McWhirter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 64. 14. Ibid. 15. David McWhirter, “‘The Whole Chain of Relation and Responsibility’: Henry James and the New  York Edition,” in Henry James’s New  York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, ed. David McWhirter (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1995), 3. 16. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (London: Collins, 1987), 15–16. 17. Katherine V.  Snyder, Bachelors, Manhood and the Novel, 1850–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4. 18. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 171. 19. Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 401–02. 20. Teahan, “Autobiographies and Biographies,” 64. 21. Sheldon M.  Novick, “Introduction,” in Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, ed. John R. Bradley (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 8. 22. John R.  Bradley, Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 5. 23. Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Young Master (New York: Random House, 1996), 324. 24. Ibid., xii.

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25. Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 238. 26. Philip Horne, “Henry James: The Master and the ‘Queer Affair’ of ‘The Pupil,’” Critical Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 80. 27. Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and his Art (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), 434. 28. Ibid., 391. 29. Bradley, Permanent Adolescence, 3. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Gordon, A Private Life, 5. 33. Ibid., 370. 34. Bradley, Permanent Adolescence, 4. 35. Gordon, A Private Life, 391. 36. Ibid. 37. Kusek, “The Many Lives,” 80. 38. Michael Lackey, “Introduction: The Rise of the American Biographical Novel,” in Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, ed. Michael Lackey (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 14. 39. Millicent Bell, ‘The Divine, the Unique,’ Times Literary Supplement, 6 December 1996, 3–4; Sheldon M. Novick, ‘Henry James’s Life and Work,’ Times Literary Supplement, 27 December 1996, 17. See Bradley, Permanent Adolescence, 3. 40. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 206. 41. Ibid. 42. Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading (New York: Routledge, 2005), 47. 43. Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Sheena Malhotra, “Still the Silence: Feminist Reflections at the Edges of Sound,” in Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound, ed. Sheena Malhotra and Aimee Carrillo Rowe (London: Palgrave, 2013), 2. 44. Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 2. 45. Ibid., 2–3, quoting Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 52. 46. Kahan, Celibacies, 3. 47. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 27. 48. Kahan, Celibacies, 3, 2. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Ibid., 3.

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51. Ibid., 1. 52. In a partial list, Kahan identifies Gustave Flaubert, Emily Dickinson, Baron Corvo, George Santayana, Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry, Rainer Maria Rilke, E.  M. Forster, Franz Kafka, Edna Ferber, Edith Sitwell, T. E. Lawrence, Henry Darger, Josef Sudek, J. R. Ackerley, Jorge Luis Borges, Langston Hughes, Joseph Cornell, Eudora Welty, May Sarton, Comte de Lautréamont, George Moore, Pauline Hopkins, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Marcel Duchamp, Henry de Montherlant, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner. Ibid., 9. 53. Ibid., 1. 54. Paul Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” Modernism/ modernity 25, no. 3 (2018): 437–59, https://doi.org/10.1353/ mod.2018.0035. 55. Wai Chee Dimock, “Weak Theory: Henry James, Colm Tóibín and W. B. Yeats,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 4 (2013): 732–53, https://doi. org/10.1086/671354. 56. Kahan, Celibacies, 41. 57. Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97. 58. Kahan, Celibacies, 41. 59. Henry James, The Bostonians, ed. Pierre A. Walker (New York, Modern Library, 2003), 17. 60. Kahan, Celibacies, 52. 61. Ibid., 41. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Henry James, Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 360 (emphasis in original). 65. Eric Haralson, “Lambert Strether’s Excellent Adventure,” in The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, ed. Jonathan Freedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 187. 66. Ibid., 179. 67. Michael O’Sullivan, “Singular Celibates: Narrative Seduction in Moore and Joyce,” in George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds, ed. Mary Pierse (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 209. 68. Haralson, “Excellent Adventure,” 179. 69. Ibid., 178. 70. Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 392. 71. Ibid., 179. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 178.

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74. Kahan, Celibacies, 12. 75. Henry James, Notes on Novelists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 231. 76. Bradley, Permanent Adolescence, 1–2. 77. Kahan, Celibacies, 30, quoting from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1. 78. Perkin, “Imagining Henry,” 114. 79. Lodge, Author, Author, 3. 80. Layne, Real Thing, 40. 81. David Lodge, The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel: With Other Essays on the Genesis, Composition, and Reception of Literary Fiction (London: Penguin, 2007), 38. 82. John Harvey, “Lessons of the Master: The Henry James Novel,” The Yearbook of English Studies: From Decadent to Modernist: And Other Essays 37, no. 1 (2007): 78, https://doi.org/10.2307/20479279. 83. Lodge, Author, Author, 171. 84. Ibid., 172. 85. Ibid. 86. Layne, Real Thing, 13. 87. Lodge, Author, Author, 375. 88. Ibid., 385. 89. Lodge, Year of Henry James, 6. 90. Perkin, “Imagining Henry,” 115. 91. Tóibín, The Master, 100. 92. Perkin, “Imagining Henry,” 120. 93. Ágnes Zsófia Kovács, “Recanonizing Henry James: Colm Tóibín’s The Master,” Americana 3, no. 1 (Spring 2007): http://americanaejournal. hu/vol3no1/kazs. 94. Ibid. 95. Teahan, “Autobiographies and Biographies,” 64. 96. Laura E. Savu, Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), 179. 97. John Carlos Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), xxiv. 98. Tóibín, The Master, 5. 99. Ibid., 2. 100. Ibid., 3. 101. Ibid., 2. 102. Ibid., 10. 103. Ibid., 5. 104. Kovács, “Recanonizing Henry James,” n. pag.

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105. Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 41. 106. Layne, Real Thing, 229. 107. Renate Brosch, “The Figure of the Artist in David Lodge’s and Colm Tóibín’s Biofictions of Henry James,” in Portraits of the Artist as a Young Thing in British, Irish and Canadian Fiction After 1945, ed. Annette Pankratz and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2012), 300. 108. Lodge, Year of Henry James, 38. 109. Colm Tóibín, “A More Elaborate Web: Becoming Henry James,” The Henry James Review 30, no. 3 (2009): 233, https://doi.org/10.1353/ hjr.0.0062. 110. Lodge, Year of Henry James, 8. 111. Layne, Real Thing, 36. 112. Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 67. 113. Tóibín, The Master, 3, 13, 11–12. 114. Teahan, “Autobiographies and Biographies,” 64. 115. Tóibín, The Master, 14, 19. 116. Lodge, Author, Author, 231. 117. Tóibín, The Master, 17. 118. Ibid., 16. See also Dimock, “Weak Theory,” 743–44. 119. Ellmann, Wilde, 170–71. 120. Tóibín, The Master, 77. 121. Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson, The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 363. 122. Tóibín, The Master, 5. 123. Heyns, “The Curse of Henry James,” n. pag. 124. Ibid. 125. Lodge, Author, Author, 208, 211. 126. Ibid., 211. 127. Tóibín, The Master, 237–38, 255. 128. Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 281. 129. Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 128 (emphasis added). 130. Robert Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus’s Nightmare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 23. 131. Christopher M. DeVault, “Love and Socialism in Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’: A Buberian Reading,” College Literature 37, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 79.

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132. Roberta Jackson, “The Open Closet in Dubliners: James Duffy’s Painful Case,” James Joyce Quarterly 50, no. 1/2 (Fall 2012–Winter 2013): 284, https://doi.org/10.1353/jjq.2012.0074. 133. Lodge, Author, Author, 212. 134. Colm Tóibín, “Single Minded,” The Guardian, April 28, 2007, https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/28/fiction.colmtoibin. 135. G. R. S. Taylor, “The Gospel According to Shaw,” The Freewoman 1, no. 2 (November 1911): 27–28. 136. G. B. Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (London: Constable, 1932), 182. 137. Erin Williams, “Female Celibacy in the Fiction of Gissing and Dixon: The Silent Strike of the Suburbanites,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 45, no. 3 (2002): 259–79. 138. Perkin, “Imagining Henry,” 118. 139. Ibid., 5, 42. 140. Lucia Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–2. 141. Ibid., 2. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid. 144. Cora Kaplan, Victoriana, 65. 145. Kahan, Celibacies, 145.

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Saint-Amour, Paul. “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism.” Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (2018): 437–59. https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2018.0035. Savu, Laura E. Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Seymour, Miranda. A Ring of Conspirators: Henry James and His Literary Circle, 1895–1915. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988. Shaw, G.  B. The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet. London: Constable, 1932. Sinfield, Alan. Cultural Politics – Queer Reading. New York: Routledge, 2005. Snyder, Katherine V. Bachelors, Manhood and the Novel, 1850–1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Spoo, Robert. James Joyce and the Language of History: Dedalus’s Nightmare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Stevens, Hugh. Henry James and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Taylor, G.  R. S. “The Gospel According to Shaw,” The Freewoman 1, no. 2 (November 1911): 27–28. Teahan, Sheila. “Autobiographies and Biographies.” In Henry James in Context, edited by David McWhirter, 58–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Tóibín, Colm. The Master. London: Picador, 2005. ———. “A More Elaborate Web: Becoming Henry James.” The Henry James Review 30, no. 3 (2009): 227–36. https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.0.0062. ———. “Single Minded.” The Guardian, April 28, 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/28/fiction.colmtoibin. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Williams, Erin. “Female Celibacy in the Fiction of Gissing and Dixon: The Silent Strike of the Suburbanites.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 45, no. 3 (2002): 259–79.

CHAPTER 9

In Poe’s Shadow: Frances Sargent Osgood Ina Bergmann



Historical and Herstorical Biofiction

Over the last decades, life narratives have enjoyed a veritable renaissance,1 which has been hailed as the “biographical turn.”2 The renewed popularity of biographical forms can be explained along the lines of a need for life to have value and meaning, even in a world of increased disharmony and conflict.3 Another, yet similar explanation might be that “true stories” seem to offer holding points in a chaotic and confusing world. David Shields describes twenty-first-century culture as both “desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice.”4 With regard to literature, Lev Grossman similarly asserts that readers crave “true stories,” but that there is no “corresponding willingness … to give up the quirky characters and vivid details and sexy twists and pleasing, rounded endings they’re used to in fiction.”5 Contemporary “reality hunger”6 is paired with the desire for ‘good stories.’ These expectations are met by hybrid texts that blend the genres of biography and novel.

I. Bergmann (*) Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_9

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‘Life writing’ is an umbrella term that not only encompasses multiple types of auto/biographies and memoirs, but also includes certain types of fiction. Various scholars attest a general generic closeness between biography and the novel.7 Yet, the fact/fiction dichotomy is paradoxically stabilised by current criticism, which establishes a boundary between fictional and factual narratives by continuing to conceptualise that boundary in generic terms.8 While most of the texts subsumed under life writing seem to blur generic boundaries between auto/biography, memoir, and fiction, there seems to be a demand to adhere to traditional understandings of genre when trying to define life writing in scholarly meta-language. This development is part of the so-called generic turn9 of literary theory. John F. Keener proposes “a continuum of biographical narratives, from factual to fictional,”10 which includes “a wide range of texts, connoting any narrative in any discipline or genre—novels, drama, film, history, biography, autobiography or journalism—whose subject is the life of an historical (or ‘real’) individual.”11 There have been numerous attempts to define the new hybrid genres.12 A wide variety of terms are in use to label the fictional biographical narrative: invented biography,13 “new fiction biography,”14 “fictional biography,”15 fictive biography,16 “memographiction,”17 “metafictional biography,”18 “biographical fiction,”19 “novel of biographical quest, or bioquest novel,”20 “autobiografiction,”21 and many more.22 The most convenient and widely accepted umbrella term is probably “biofiction.”23 Julia Novak provides a basic definition which describes biofiction as “a narrative based on the life of a historical person, weaving biographical fact into what must otherwise be considered a novel.”24 Michael Lackey emphasises that the genre of biofiction should be analysed “through the lens of fiction rather than biography.”25 Ansgar Nünning provides a categorisation of what he labels “postmodern biofiction.”26 He proposes a “typology of biofictions,” consisting of five types: “‘documentary fictional biographies,’ ‘realist fictional biographies,’ ‘revisionist fictional biographies,’ ‘fictional metabiographies,’ and … ‘biographic metafiction.’”27 I adopt the term ‘biofiction’ for the discussion of this category of fictional life writing. However, in order to emphasise the connection between historical fiction and biographical narrative, that is, the twofold generic bases of the respective texts, I have modified the term by adding the adjective ‘historical.’28 Historical biofiction is a subgenre of the new historical fiction and shares its trajectories of recovery and revision.29 This marks not the rise of one genre and the fall of another,30 but rather the development of the “classical”31 or “traditional

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historical novel”32 towards “new historical fiction,”33 the evolution of a literary genre towards genre hybridity.34 In the history of biofiction as a genre, the close relationship between biographical narrative and historical subjects has been central, yet with a male focus. Only recently have women begun to step out of the shadow of those eminent men and into their own biofictions. Many of these texts are “feminist interventions into traditional historical discourses,”35 but often it is still “the relation of the woman to the male subject” that is “of central concern.”36 Frequently, biographical subjects are “the wives and consorts of great men throughout history,” “the female friends, relatives, partners and spouses of culturally prominent (usually male) subjects.”37 Examples of such novels are Ellen Feldman’s Lucy (2003), the story of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s long-time lover Lucy Mercer; Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank (2007), about architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s affair with Mamah Cheney; and T. C. Boyle’s The Women (2009), also about Wright’s lover as well as his three wives. As is well known, Virginia Woolf called as early as 1928 for a rewriting of history from a gendered perspective. She lamented the fact that women too often only featured in the background in “the lives of the great.”38 She postulated a history that focused on women’s domestic experiences. Woolf’s claims mirror the aims of social history, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, which furthered the feminist revision of historiography by challenging “the narrative line of political history (‘white men make history’).”39 The traditional definition of history as “[g]reat deeds of great men; chronological accounts of battles and borders, treaties and territories”40 had positioned women as mere by-standers in the historical process.41 Hegemonic history excluded women as well as the female sphere. ‘Herstory’ is a trend that, since roughly the 1970s, has sought to compensate for the absence of women in historiography.42 The term defines a reformulation of history with the aim of addressing imbalances and blind spots.43 Herstory shifts the focus towards recovery and revision, recognising that women cannot simply be added on to history.44 Necessarily, such a perspective also questions the traditional concepts or, rather, the conceptual limits of history.45 Feminist historiography is a transformative endeavour: we change what we see by changing what we look for. It also seems necessary to produce an imbalance in historiography towards herstory for a time,46 to set the record straight. Herstory emerged in the context of the resurrection of previously neglected and almost forgotten women writers (with an emphasis on the

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nineteenth century) and the feminist attempts at reshaping or redefining the literary canon during the second phase or wave of feminism.47 In literature, as in history, women had until then at best played minor roles in a male-dominated discourse. With the rise of feminist literary studies, interest not only in the writings but also in the lives of the women writers of the past increased. In terms of genre, this gendered perspective also “led to the re-valuation of personal or life narratives—journals, letters, confessions, biographies, autobiographies, self-portraits”48—in literary studies and beyond. Contemporary writers of fiction take up the concept of herstory, aiming, like historians and literary historians, at a feminist revision of history, but doing so by writing historical biofiction centring on women. In her study The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Fiction (2005) Jeannette King discusses, among others, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1988) and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) and asserts that “[b]y making female experience central to their narratives such novels gave women back their place in history, not just as victims but as agents.”49 Indeed, “[w]omen writers’ impulse to reassess not only their own position in history but also the nature of that history’s right to represent the ‘truth’ has coincided with a wider cultural challenge to what constitutes ‘History.’”50 Diana Wallace observes in The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (2005) that the novels of the 1990s are less like a nostalgic retreat into the past than a complex engagement with the ways in which representations of history change over time … The novels … contest the idea of a single unitary and linear history. They emphasise the subjective, fragmentary nature of historical knowledge through rewritings of canonical texts, through multiple or divided narrators, fragmentary or contradictory narratives, and disruptions of linear chronology.51

Jörn Rüsen broadly asserts that “historical narratives are a medium of the human quest for identity.”52 Especially in texts by female authors, the issue of identity construction becomes a pari passu theme along with historical representation.53 Texts that depict the construction of women’s identities and approach herstory through personalised history can be seen as “gendered memories.”54 This notion implies that gender-specific modes of remembrance exist and that concepts of gender and their conjunction with the social power (im-)balance and societal values preform cultural

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memory.55 These texts are media “for the personal or individual transmission of cultural memory.”56 What I label “herstorical biofiction,”57 a subset of historical biofiction, makes “an attempt to rehabilitate historical women,” trying to rectify “the injustice of women who, for whatever reason, have not been accorded a historical voice.”58 These specific instances of historical biofiction criticise the “silenced discourse”59 of women and may well be described as “project[s] of giving historical figures a voice.”60 This notion of ‘giving voice’ refers to the potential to articulate oneself. It must be read as an instance of agency and emancipation. Such “narrative power,” as Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle observe, is often “the only strategy left for the weak and dispossessed: without narrative power, they may not be heard.”61 Constructing a voice for historically silenced figures can be understood as a form of cross-temporal empowerment in the service of a more gender-­ conscious cultural memory. What Martin Middeke asserts apropos the rewriting of Romantic lives in contemporary British fiction holds true for American herstorical biofiction as well. The texts “are concerned with the hermeneutical problem of juxtaposing, correlating, and, after all, understanding our own experience in relation to the received experience of the past.”62 Or, as King states more specifically with regard to contemporary feminist historical fiction: Revisiting Victorian women’s lives provides an opportunity to challenge the answers which nineteenth-century society produced in response to “the Woman Question.” But the novelists … are not merely carrying out a historical exercise. Their interest is … in what the Victorian period can add to the modern reader’s understanding of gender.63

There are numerous new historical novels that tell herstory of the nineteenth century in the US. Some of them are Valerie Martin’s The Great Divorce (1994) and Property (2003), Jane Smiley’s The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998), Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), Lauren Belfer’s City of Light (1999), Susan Sontag’s In America (2000), David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife (2008), Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), Jacqueline Sheehan’s Truth (2003), Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea (2003), Peter Rushforth’s Pinkerton’s Sister (2004), and Geraldine Brooks’s March (2005). John May’s Poe & Fanny (2004) and Lynn Cullen’s Mrs. Poe (2014) are two further American titles which can be specifically classified as herstorical

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biofiction and illustrate the capacity of literature to contribute to the work of historical revision and cultural recovery.

 John May’s Poe & Fanny (2004) and Lynn Cullen’s Mrs. Poe (2014) John May’s Poe & Fanny (2004) and Lynn Cullen’s Mrs. Poe (2014) are just two of many contemporary novels that find their subject in the lives of nineteenth-century writers. Literary productions of this kind have been labelled “author fictions”64 and been identified as fiction at the “crossroads between the historical novel, biography, and the Künstlerroman.”65 This kind of novel has become so ubiquitous in contemporary literature in English that the author figure has even been dubbed “postmodernism’s stock character.”66 There is a gender imbalance towards male subjects in biofiction, and biofictions of Edgar Allan Poe are especially numerous. The attraction of Poe’s life for fictionalisation can be explained by the enduring appeal of his works, his fascinating character, or by the fact that Poe’s life, with its well-­ known excesses, scandals, mysteries, and feuds, simply is “the stuff of fiction.”67 A seemingly endless list of novels is proof of this, to name but a few: Andrew Taylor’s An American Boy (2003), Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye (2006), Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow (2006), and Joel Rose’s The Blackest Bird (2007). There are fewer texts that focus on the lives of female historical characters, let alone female writers. And female Künstlerromane are rarely the subject of literary studies.68 Against this backdrop, biofictions about Frances Sargent Osgood reveal the potential of the genre to redress a historical imbalance. Osgood (1811–1850) was one of the most popular and acclaimed female poets in the US in the nineteenth century. Yet, she was relegated to oblivion soon after her early death and her literary achievements were eclipsed by her personal relationship with one of the most prominent American poets—Poe. To date, no book-length biography of Osgood exists; there is no collected edition of her works; and the two handful of scholarly articles published about her mostly revolve around the uncertain nature of her connection to Poe.69 Remarkably, it is two contemporary biographical novels which seek to reclaim for Osgood her place in American literary history. Whether historical women are interesting as subjects of biofiction only because of their connection to eminent men will be tested

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against a reading of Poe & Fanny and Mrs. Poe. I will discuss how these texts rework Osgood’s biography into fictional narratives; whether they can be approached for knowledge about Osgood’s life and work; whether their purpose is recovery and revision or nostalgia and voyeurism; and whether they are representative or symptomatic of contemporary herstorical biofiction in the US. In short: I will discuss whether the two books really tell herstory instead of his. Osgood was a celebrated poet at the apex of her fame when she first met Poe in 1845.70 Poe, who had just published his most famous poem “The Raven” (1845), was equally at the height of his literary career. Both poets had long admired each other’s work. Following their first encounter in New York City, Poe and Osgood published flirtatious poems to each other in magazines until this created a scandal because both of them were married. Elizabeth Ellet, a fellow admirer of Poe’s, threatened to ruin Osgood’s reputation by making public that their relationship was not platonic. Osgood sent her friends Anne Charlotte Lynch and Margaret Fuller to make Poe return her letters to her. She eventually reconciled with her estranged husband and gave birth to a child.71 Whether Osgood and Poe were only playfully admiring one another or whether theirs was a consummated love affair will never be known. It is also possible that their poetic dialogue was a publicity stunt, a possibility which does not appear too far-­ fetched in light of Poe’s fondness for literary hoaxes.72 May’s Poe & Fanny portrays the period in both authors’ lives from the time they first met until the ending of their relationship, meaning it is mainly interested in Osgood in her relation to Poe. A paratext to the novel, an afterword based on historical facts,73 wraps up the remaining years of both poets’ lives until their respective deaths in 1849 and 1850. May’s debut and to date only novel is a “realist” or “traditional fictional biography”: “Realist fictional biographies … represent the life of a real historical individual, using conventional fictional devices and foregrounding the plot against the backdrop of some identifiable historical context.”74 May is most interested in the details of Poe and Osgood’s entanglement where there are no facts available75 and he uses Osgood’s and Poe’s poems as well as their other works as evidence for the alleged love affair. Excerpts of Osgood’s and Poe’s flirtatious poems to each other are keystones of the story line as the romance unfolds. An appendix to the novel76 contains some of these poems by Osgood and Poe. Poe’s masterpiece “The Raven,” most important for this period and for Osgood’s initial attraction to him, is also a recurring intertextual device throughout the novel. Poe knocks at

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the door and Fanny is reminded of the effects of the tapping sound in the poem. She even identifies the poet himself with the bird of his creation.77 Similarly, Osgood’s “Ida Grey” (1845), an autobiographical short story in which the protagonist is in love with a married poet and, because she cannot marry him, ultimately retreats to a convent, not only serves as a model for Fanny’s retreat to Providence, where the affair is consummated, but its publication is also presented as one of the reasons for her withdrawal.78 The climax of May’s fictional account of the poets’ relationship is the suggestion that Osgood’s third daughter Fanny Fay was Poe’s child. This proposition feeds readerly sensationalism, yet there are certain historical facts which make a physical relationship between Poe and Osgood credible. Poe’s young wife Virginia was already gravely ill at the time and Osgood’s husband, the painter Samuel Stillman Osgood, had temporarily abandoned Fanny. Poe and Osgood had much in common. Both were natives of Boston now living in New York, cities rivalling for hegemony in intellectual matters in the nineteenth century, and, more importantly, both were passionate poets and seemingly headstrong characters. Moreover, Osgood’s appearance seems to match what has often been described as Poe’s ‘type.’ Pictures of her show a delicate dark beauty with large eyes. When she met Poe, she may also have been at an early stage of the consumption to which she succumbed in 1850. Her childlike appearance and frailty bear strong resemblance to all the women Poe loved throughout his life.79 Most of the chapters in the novel are told alternatingly from either Poe’s or Osgood’s perspective. But there are also chapters that are narrated from the perspective of Maria Poe Clemm, Poe’s aunt and the mother of his young and dying wife Virginia, and from the point of view of Nathaniel Parker Willis, a famous journalist of the time and a friend of Poe’s. With the use of the figural narrative situation, the various characters serve as reflector figures or focalisers for different chapters. As Sigrun Meinig observes, “[c]haracter focalisation promotes a subjective view of history, while narrator-focalisation has a tendency towards an overview of historical events and conditions.”80 Homodiegetic narration, often found in historical biofiction, is typically used to stage individual memory,81 while multiple perspectives are often applied to represent a collective past. The juxtaposition of the four accounts creates a narrative of multiple perspectives on the relationship between Poe and Osgood. Though different viewpoints in fiction are often used to create a diversity of perspectives on

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or different versions of the same tale, here this device serves to create a consistent picture and to affirm the credibility of the fictionalised story. All four perspectives give a positive impression of Poe. He is presented as a troubled man. May draws an almost likeable and pitiable picture of Poe. In Poe & Fanny it is not Poe himself, with his alcoholism and his temper, that is his own worst enemy, but the hypocritical society of New York City and its social rules, which are too constraining for a genius of his calibre. In the chapters dedicated to her, we encounter Fanny wavering between the two alternative roles available for women at her time. When she meets Poe, she is a renowned ‘poetess,’ but also a mother of two young daughters, and has only recently separated from her husband. She yearns to conform to the rules of society to be a good wife and mother, a “true woman,”82 but she longs to be independent and fulfil her calling as a poet, too. Though fascinated by the man, Fanny first wants to win Poe as her mentor, and then gradually becomes entangled in a love affair with him. When the liaison has ended and she realises that she is pregnant, Fanny must find a way to conceal this shame. As a ‘fallen woman,’ she has no other choice than to try to save her reputation by returning to her husband and placing her fate in his hands. Social and financial constraints make her choose this path. The incompatibility of the traditional role of wife and mother with the emerging image of the “new woman”83 lend the passages about Fanny a certain topicality, as they mirror present-day concerns. The chapters told from Willis’s perspective offer a glimpse of the nascent American literature industry and its discontents at a time when Ralph Waldo Emerson labelled Poe a “jingle poet” and Poe called the Transcendentalists “frogpondians.”84 Poe & Fanny is thus also a portrait of the pre-Civil War literary class and the intellectual feud between New York and Boston. The fourth point of view provides Poe’s personal context. Muddy, Poe’s aunt, interestingly also reflects his wife Virginia’s point of view. Virginia is not given a voice of her own, and she seems more like a figure who could have stepped out of Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838) or “Lenore” (1843), a ghost that haunts Poe, rather than a real person and wife who would stand in his and Fanny’s way. Judging from the title of the book, Osgood, through the intimate and diminutive usage of her nickname, appears as an appendage to Poe, the famous American writer. And the inclusion of only the Poe family tree at

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the beginning of the book suggests the same.85 Yet, there is the epigraph to May’s novel, a quotation from Osgood’s poetry: Ah, if the clarion tones of fame Shall ever ring for me, They shall not drown—my heart shall hear The praise I won from thee!86

It suggests that Poe & Fanny aims at a rediscovery of the poet and her contribution to literature. Cullen’s Mrs. Poe is also a “realist” or “traditional fictional biography.”87 Mrs. Poe portrays the crucial period from winter 1845 until winter 1847 in both authors’ lives. The novel is structured into six parts of differing lengths, plus an “Author’s Note,”88 which similarly to May’s afterword wraps up the rest of the authors’ lives until their death and is especially concerned with Poe’s legacy. Cullen’s novel, too, is based on the assumption that Osgood’s third daughter, Fanny Fay, was Poe’s child. Some aspects of Cullen’s story differ from May’s, though. The published love poems are presented as love messages which speak of the lovers’ yearning for each other when they try to stay apart and avoid an affair.89 Later, the affair is consummated, only once, in Boston, prior to Poe’s famous fiasco at the Boston Lyceum on October 16, 1845. The infamous love letters Osgood supposedly sent Poe are a forgery by, so the suggestion, Rufus Griswold, Poe’s rival both in literary fame and in Osgood’s attentions. Extending the time frame of her novel to 1847 allows Cullen to include a final, sentimental meeting between Poe and Fanny, where she can reveal to him that Fanny Fay is their mutual daughter. Cullen refers to the Osgoods’ marital reunion as a “marriage of convenience,”90 too. Cullen, much more than May, peoples her novel with a ‘who’s who’ of the celebrities of the time: Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, William Cullen Bryant, and John Jacob Astor, among others. Intertextual references abound as well. There are “Nevermore” quotes and tapping sounds throughout the book that point to Poe’s “The Raven.” Among the many other texts by Poe that are mentioned or referenced are “William Wilson” (1839), “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), “The Oval Portrait” (1842), “The Black Cat” (1843), and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845). Very few of Osgood’s writings are part of the text and only “So Let it Be” (1845) is printed in

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full length. Clearly, Cullen is less concerned with presenting Osgood’s writing to her readers than is May. The story is narrated by Osgood herself. She is an autodiegetic narrator: her character is a narrating as well as an experiencing I. The narrative situation strongly supports Cullen’s impetus of recovery. Similarly to May, she presents Osgood as a woman of precarious social standing, who has been abandoned by her husband, is dependent on friends for food and lodging for herself and her two young daughters, and is desperate to make a living from her writing. Poe, in Cullen’s book, is the stereotype of the ‘tortured’ romantic hero. He is gentlemanly, but also mysterious and taciturn. Strong emotions seem to torment him beneath a calm surface. He stops drinking when he meets Osgood.91 He is also never presented directly as the literary “Tomahawker,”92 “madman,”93 or hot-tempered character that he is said to have been. Cullen describes him simultaneously and repeatedly as a poor, traumatised “orphan”94 or “a wounded beast.”95 All in all, he is a Heathcliff to Osgood’s Cathy. His dying wife, Virginia, is depicted as jealous, and Fanny suspects her to be mad and evil when mysterious incidents accumulate. Fanny nearly drowns when she is pushed out of a boat,96 and her temporary home almost burns down when there is a gas leak during one of Virginia’s visits.97 The climax of the story is played out on the Trinity Church bell tower,98 where an attack on Fanny leaves her believing that Poe himself, not his wife Virginia, is plotting her death, in keeping with his favourite literary theme, the death of a beautiful woman.99 In the end, though, it is revealed that Virginia’s mother, Poe’s aunt, is mad and hoping to transfer her dying daughter’s soul to Fanny’s body.100 The title of Cullen’s book seems to reduce Osgood’s standing even more than the title of May’s novel. Firstly, it literally refers to Poe’s actual wife, Virginia.101 But the term ‘Mrs. Poe’ is introduced in the novel to refer to Osgood, too. First, it is meant in a writerly way. A publisher suggests that she write poems and stories for ladies, in the vein of Poe, to meet the current public taste, even before she has ever met Poe. She jokingly replies that this suggests that she should become a kind of “Mrs. Poe,”102 stressing the epigonality. When Osgood and Poe visit Barnum’s American Museum together, they are mistaken for husband and wife.103 Elizabeth Ellet viciously addresses Osgood as “Mrs. Poe”104 when she meets her after the affair has become public gossip. Later, when checking into a Boston hotel together, they, of course, do so as “Mr. & Mrs. Poe.”105 And

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finally, the sobriquet also applies to Osgood as the wife of Poe’s heart, his soulmate.106 All in all, for Osgood to be identified as Mrs. Poe points towards her dependence on Poe, first, concerning his writing style, and then, on him as the ‘master of her heart.’ That Osgood is an interesting subject only in relation to Poe also seems to be proven by the fact that Poe’s “The Raven” is printed in full length before the novel even starts. But the poem is followed by the actual, extremely favourable descriptions of Poe by Osgood, from an 1850 letter to Griswold, and of Osgood by Poe, from his “The Literati of New York” (1846), which relativises this first impression. Furthermore, the book ends with a reprint of Osgood’s “Fanny’s First Smile” (1847), a poem about her third daughter. And Cullen, who drew inspiration for her depiction of Osgood from her own life,107 thematises in her novel the compatibility, or incompatibility, of motherhood and artistic ambition, the struggle with writer’s block, and most notably, how the affair with Poe eclipses Osgood’s writing. Interestingly enough, it is Osgood’s husband Samuel, the painter, who in the book points out the fact that Osgood almost entirely ceased to be creative from the time of her involvement with Poe and that the little work that she was able to produce is, at least in his view, only second rate.108 It seems that through her relationship with Poe, she has lost her voice. Similarly, in reality, Osgood’s personal relationship with Poe reduced interest in her as a poet in her own right and ultimately led to a neglect of her work in literary history.

Stepping out from under the Shadow Among the driving forces behind the craze for historical biofiction in the twenty-first century are revision and recovery. Historical biofiction revisits history and revises the historical record. The genre displays strong topicality when it comes to marginalised voices and social conflicts. Yet, revisionism and the quest for (historical) truth are juxtaposed with fictionalisation and pseudo-authenticity. Historical biofiction also tends to nostalgia, sentimentalism, and escapism. And often, the filling of blank spaces in the lives of historical personages serves readerly voyeurism and sensationalism. May’s and Cullen’s novels do partly revise the two poets’ biographies. Yet, they do not revise “the conventions of biographical fiction.”109 Thus, they cannot be labelled “revisionist fictional biographies.”110 They creatively fill blank spaces in the life stories of historical characters. May’s aim

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is not so much revision but recovery, especially with his inclusion of Osgood’s poems in the appendix. May’s novel salvages an almost forgotten poet and her work from historical oblivion and revisits a literary relationship between two nineteenth-century poets. May’s self-declared motivation was to bring to light Osgood and her work, whom he had first encountered in a literary seminar. But by attempting to prove a consummated love affair, May’s novel also turns out to be somewhat voyeuristic and sensationalist. The latter also holds true for Cullen’s novel, whose fantasy runs riot with the known facts even more than May’s. She takes inspiration from Poe’s tales and turns the whole book into a piece of gothic fiction, with Osgood as the ‘damsel in distress,’ with Virginia as the supposed and Mrs. Clemm as the real ‘villain,’ and, of course, with Poe as the ‘knight in shining armour.’ Cullen admits that her idea for the novel started with Poe, not Osgood. Although she thematises female authorship, she includes only very few of Osgood’s works in her book. While her novel does not itself perform the task of recovering Osgood from oblivion, she may still inspire readers to hunt for Osgood’s writing. The scandal of the supposed love affair serves as the trigger to resuscitate Osgood’s memory and renew interest in her work. The novels thus become media of cultural memory.111 May’s and Cullen’s novels cannot compensate for the lack of a biography of Osgood or of an edition of her collected works. Overall, it remains debatable whether the texts should be categorised as truly herstorical biofiction. Another fitting label for the categorisation of these texts might be “relational biofiction,” which can be derived from the term “relational biography,” a term Caitríona Ní Dhúill suggests in her study Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (2020).112 Relational biographies “foreground interpersonal connections, networks or ‘constellations’, allowing figures who are shadowy or peripheral … to come into view and be seen in their own right.”113 While this applies to May’s and Cullen’s biofictions, the notion that “[r]elational biographies decentre the prominent subject, highlighting the structures of interdependency within which his work was produced”114 does not. Poe & Fanny and Mrs. Poe do not “resituate prominent (male) figures within familial and social relationships, showing how individual achievement is enabled by divisions of labour along class and gender lines.”115 Osgood neither was, nor is she presented in the novels, as Poe’s “helpmeet.”116 Thus, I suggest the term “double historical biofiction,”117 as the texts focus on the life and work of both Poe and Osgood as well as on their relationship with each other in equal measure. But what

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draws readers to the texts in the first place is undeniably Poe’s renown. May’s and Cullen’s versions of Osgood are therefore still somewhat overshadowed by Poe’s presence, yet Poe & Fanny and Mrs. Poe allow Osgood to take at least a first step out from under Poe’s shadow.

Notes 1. Nassim Winnie Balestrini and Ina Bergmann, “Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies: A Brief Introduction,” in Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Nassim Winnie Balestrini and Ina Bergmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 1–8. 2. Hans Renders, Binne de Haan, and Jonne Harmsma, The Biographical Turn: Lives in History (New York: Routledge, 2017), 3. 3. Ira B. Nadel, “Narrative and the Popularity of Biography,” Mosaic 20, no. 4 (1987): 136. 4. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage, 2011), 5. 5. Lev Grossman, “The Trouble with Memoirs—An Author is Accused of Making up Key Parts of his Best-selling Life Story: Does Truth Really Matter?” Time Magazine, January 23, 2006, 3, http://content.time. com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1149383,00.html. 6. Shields, Reality Hunger. 7. Phyllis Rose, “Biography as Fiction,” Tri-Quarterly 55 (1982): 111; Ina Schabert, In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography (Tübingen: Francke, 1990), 58; John F. Keener, Biography and the Postmodern Novel (Lewiston: Edwin Mellem, 2001), 5. 8. Keener, Biography, 1; Marjorie Perloff, “Introduction,” in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 4. 9. Julijana Nadj, “Towards a Theory and Typology of Fictional Metabiographies: Forms and Functions of a New Genre,” in Anglistentag 2005 Bamberg: Proceedings, ed. Christoph Houswitschka, Gabriele Knappe, and Anja Müller (Trier: WVT, 2006), 411. 10. Keener, Bibliography, ii. 11. Ibid., 1. 12. Ansgar Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies and Metaautobiographies: Towards a Definition, Typology and Analysis of Self-Reflexive Hybrid Metagenres,” in Self-Reflexivity in Literature, ed. Werner Huber, Martin Middeke, and Hubert Zapf (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2005), 195, 209.

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13. Herbert Grabes, Erfundene Biographien: Vladimir Nabokovs englische Romane (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1975), my translation. 14. Naomi Jacobs, “Michael Ondaatje and the New Fiction Biographies,” Studies in Canadian Literature 11, no. 2 (1986): 2–18. 15. Schabert, In Quest. 16. Annegret Maack, “Charakter als Echo: Zur Poetologie fiktiver Biographien,” in Klassiker-Renaissance: Modelle der Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. Martin Brunkhorst, Gerd Rohmann, and Konrad Schoell (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1991), 247–48, my trans. 17. Annegret Maack, “Das Leben der toten Dichter: Fiktive Biographien,” in Radikalität und Mässigung: Der englische Roman seit 1960, ed. Annegret Maack and Rüdiger Imhof (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1993), 169–88. 18. Wolfgang Hochbruck, “Metafictional Biography: Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” in Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, ed. Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1994), 447–63. 19. Stephanie Bird, Recasting Historical Women: Female Identity in German Biographical Fiction (Oxford: Berg, 1998). 20. Jon Thiem, “Cultural Memory in the Novel of Biographical Quest,” in Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory, ed. Hendrik van Gorp and Ulla Musarra-Schroeder (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 421–32. 21. Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2010). 22. Julia Novak, “Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction,” in Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction, ed. Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 2. 23. Alain Buisine, “Biofictions,” Revue des Sciences Humaines 224 (1991): 7–13. See also Martin Middeke, “Introduction,” in Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama, ed. Martin Middeke and Werner Huber (Rochester: Camden House, 1999), 1–25. 24. Novak, “Experiments in Life-Writing,” 9. 25. Michael Lackey, “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction,” a/b: Auto/biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 8. 26. Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies,” 200–1. 27. Ibid. 28. Ina Bergmann, “Historical Biofiction: Writing Lives in Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart (2003) and John May’s Poe & Fanny (2004),” in The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts—Literary Developments—Critical Analyses, ed. Michael Basseler and Ansgar

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Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2019), 309–11; Ina Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction, Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York: Routledge, 2021), 134. 29. Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed, 131–38. 30. Michael Lackey, “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel,” a/b: Auto/biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 33–58. 31. Ibid., 33. 32. Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed, 3. 33. Ibid., 2. 34. Ibid., 44–46. 35. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, eds., The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 13. 36. Bird, Recasting Historical Women, 5. 37. Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 173 and 194. 38. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1928/1989), 45. 39. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), 21. 40. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, “History,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R.  Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997), 855. 41. Susanne Rothaug, Autorinnen des amerikanischen Südens: Geschichte und Geschichtenerzählen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), 40. 42. Claudia Öhlschläger, “Gender/Körper, Gedächtnis und Literatur,” in Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft: Theoretische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 241; Ina Schabert, “Gender als Kategorie einer neuen Literaturgeschichtsschreibung,” in Genus: Zur Geschlechterdifferenz in den Kulturwissenchaften, ed. Hadumod Bußmann and Renate Hof (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1995), 181. 43. Bird, Recasting Historical Women, 16; Julia Tofantšuk, “Time, Space and (Her)Story in the Fiction of Eva Figes,” in Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing, ed. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 59. 44. Linda Anderson, “The Re-Imagining of History in Contemporary Women’s Fiction,” in Plotting Change: Contemporary Women’s Fiction, ed. Linda Anderson (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), 130. 45. Anderson, “Re-Imagining of History,” 130; Linda Gordon, “What’s New in Women’s History?” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (London: Macmillan, 1986), 28.

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46. Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 101. 47. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, “Introduction: Feminism and Postcolonialism,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), 249; Rothaug, Autorinnen des amerikanischen Südens, 39–40; Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, “Introduction,” in Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing, ed. Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3; Linda Nicholson, The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997). 48. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 160. 49. Jeannette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3. See also Heilmann and Llewellyn, “Introduction,” 2. 50. Heilmann and Llewellyn, “Introduction,” 3. 51. Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 204. 52. Jörn Rüsen, Grundzüge einer Historik. Vol.1: Historische Vernunft: Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1983), 57, my translation. See also David Harlan, “Historical Fiction and the Future of Academic History,” in Manifestos for History, ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow (New York: Routledge, 2007), 126. 53. Rothaug, Autorinnen des amerikanischen Südens, 16. 54. Öhlschläger, “Gender/Körper,” 227. 55. Astrid Erll and Klaudia Seidel, “Gattungen, Formtraditionen und kulturelles Gedächtnis,” in Erzähltextanalyse und Gender Studies, ed. Ansgar and Vera Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004), 184–85; Öhlschläger, “Gender/Körper,” 228. 56. Hendrik van Gorp and Ulla Musarra-Schroeder, “Introduction: Literary Genres and Cultural Memory,” in Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory, ed. Hendrik van Gorp and Ulla Musarra-Schroeder (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), v. 57. Bergmann, “Historical Biofiction,” 311; Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed, 137. 58. Bird, Recasting Historical Women, 1. 59. Rothaug, Autorinnen des amerikanischen Südens, 34 and 72. 60. Bird, Recasting Historical Women, 1. 61. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory (London: Prentice Hall, 1995), 47.

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62. Middeke, “Introduction,” 18–19. 63. King, The Victorian Woman Question, 6. See also David Glover and Cora Kaplan, Genders (London: Routledge, 2000), 18. 64. Laura E. Savu, Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009), 9. 65. Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars, “The Author as Character: Defining a Genre,” in The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature, ed. Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999), 18. 66. Aleid Fokkema, “The Author: Postmodernism’s Stock Character,” in The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature, ed. Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999), 41. 67. Nancy Pate, “‘Evermore’: Poe Lives On in His—and Others’—Tales,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 14, 2004. See also Steven Hockensmith, “Evermore: The Enduring Influence of Edgar Allan Poe,” Mystery Scene 99 (2007): 17. 68. Linda Huf, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature (New York: F.  Ungar. 1983); Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “To ‘Bear My Mother’s Name’: Künstlerromane by Female Writers,” in Tell Me a Riddle, ed. Tillie Olsen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 243–69. 69. Buford Jones and Kent Ljungquist, “Poe, Mrs. Osgood, and ‘Annabel Lee’,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1983): 275–80; Mary G. De Jong, “Lines from a Partly Published Drama: The Romance of Frances Sargent Osgood and Edgar Allan Poe,” in Patrons and Protégées: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. by Shirley Marchalonis (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 31–58; Burton R. Pollin, “Frances Sargent Osgood and Saroni’s Musical Times: Documents Linking Poe, Osgood, Griswold,” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism: History, Theory, Interpretation 23, no. 2 (1990): 27–36; Burton R.  Pollin, “Poe and Frances Osgood, as Linked through ‘Lenore’,” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 46, no. 2 (1993): 185–97; Mary G. De Jong, “‘Read Here Thy Name Concealed’: Frances Osgood’s Poems on Parting with Edgar Allan Poe,” Poe Studies/ Dark Romanticism: History, Theory, Interpretation 32, no. 1–2 (1999): 27–40; Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2004). 70. John May, Poe & Fanny (New York: Plume, 2004), 297. 71. John Evangelist Walsh, Plumes in the Dust: The Love Affair of Edgar Allan Poe and Fanny Osgood (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1980). 72. De Jong, “Lines,” 56.

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73. May, Poe & Fanny, 293–98. 74. Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies,” 201. 75. May, Poe & Fanny, 297. 76. Ibid., 299–321. 77. Ibid., 167. 78. Ibid., 201. 79. De Jong, “Lines,” 32. 80. Sigrun Meinig, Witnessing the Past: History and Post-Colonialism in Australian Novels (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2004), 50. 81. Birgit Neumann, “Literatur, Erinnerung, Identität,” in Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft: Theoretische Grundlegung und Anwendungsperspektiven, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 165–67. 82. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 152. 83. Angelika Köhler, Ambivalent Desires: The New Woman Between Social Modernization and Modern Writing (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004); Ina Bergmann, “Working Girls: The New Woman in Juvenile and Adult Fiction by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E.  Wilkins Freeman,” LWU (Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht) 42, no. 4 (2009): 259–66. 84. May, Poe & Fanny, 221 and 228. 85. May, Poe & Fanny, n. pag. 86. Ibid. 87. Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies,” 201. 88. Lynn Cullen, Mrs. Poe (New York: Gallery Books, 2014), 311–14. 89. Cullen, Mrs. Poe, 186. 90. Ibid., 301. 91. Ibid., 98. 92. Ibid., 11. 93. Ibid., 42. 94. Ibid., 271. 95. Ibid., 23. 96. Ibid., 178. 97. Ibid., 262. 98. Ibid., 293. 99. Ibid., 113. 100. Ibid., 293. 101. Ibid., 22. 102. Ibid., 6. 103. Ibid., 89. 104. Ibid., 247.

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105. Ibid., 251. 106. Ibid., 268. 107. Ibid., n. pag. 108. Ibid., 235. 109. Nünning, “Fictional Metabiographies,” 201. 110. Ibid. 111. Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, trans. Sara B.  Young (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 144–71. 112. Ní Dhúill, Metabiography, 175. 113. Ibid., 192. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid., 193. 116. Ibid., 195. 117. Bergmann, “Historical Biofiction,” 315; Bergmann, The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed, 158.

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Rothaug, Susanne. Autorinnen des amerikanischen Südens: Geschichte und Geschichtenerzählen. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006. Rüsen, Jörn. Grundzüge einer Historik. Vol.1: Historische Vernunft: Die Grundlagen der Geschichtswissenschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1983. Saunders, Max. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: OUP, 2010. Savu, Laura E. Postmortem Postmodernists: The Afterlife of the Author in Recent Narrative. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009. Schabert, Ina. “Gender als Kategorie einer neuen Literaturgeschichtsschreibung.” In Genus: Zur Geschlechterdifferenz in den Kulturwissenchaften, edited by Hadumod Bußmann and Renate Hof, 162–205. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1995. Schabert, Ina. In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography. Tübingen: Francke, 1990. Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New  York: Columbia UP, 1988. Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Vintage, 2011. Thiem, Jon. “Cultural Memory in the Novel of Biographical Quest.” In Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory, edited by Hendrik van Gorp and Ulla Musarra-­ Schroeder, 421–32. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Tofantšuk, Julia. “Time, Space and (Her)Story in the Fiction of Eva Figes.” In Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing, edited by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, 59–72. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Walsh, John Evangelist. Plumes in the Dust: The Love Affair of Edgar Allan Poe and Fanny Osgood. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1980. Warhol, Robyn R., and Diane Price Herndl. “History.” In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 853–59. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997. Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860.” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1989.

CHAPTER 10

Stanisława Przybyszewska as a Case of Posthumous Victimisation: On the Ethics of Biofiction Ksenia Shmydkaya

You write: “sacrifice to which she became a victim …”. Well, in my opinion, mother was too strong an individual, too vital, to be—in any sense, even in the best one—considered a victim. Oh no! In her life there was no inertia, no miserable submission to fate. … And motherhood was her calling, God’s unexpected grace, not a burden. One couldn’t victimize that woman.1

In October 1901, the painter Aniela Paja ̨k gave birth to a daughter, named Stanisława after her father, the renowned writer Stanisław Przybyszewski, who had no intention of marrying Paja ̨k. Forced to leave Lwów with the Research for this chapter was supported by a European Research Council Starting Grant (TAU17149) “Between the Times: Embattled Temporalities and Political Imagination in Interwar Europe.”

K. Shmydkaya (*) Tallinn University, Tallinn, Estonia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_10

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child, Paja ̨k moved between European cities, relying on a modest income from painting and occasional support from her patrons. She died in Paris in 1912. For Stanisław Helsztyński, a literary historian who studied Polish modernism, Aniela Paja ̨k was a victim of her fate, as he indicated in a letter to Stanisława Przybyszewska in 1933. She, however, saw the matter differently. The letter quoted above was written in Polish, but for the last quoted line she switched to English, so the emphasis could hardly be clearer. In one short paragraph she offered not only her interpretation of Aniela Paja ̨k’s character but also a key to reading her own life-story. Stanisława Przybyszewska’s life, like her mother’s, was neither easy nor conventional. After Aniela’s death she attended several European boarding schools and lived in Kraków, Poznań, and Warsaw. In 1923 she moved to Gdańsk (then the free city of Danzig) with her husband, who died two years later. There she lived in growing isolation from the outside world, dedicating all her time to writing. Today she is mostly known as a playwright with a particular interest in the French Revolution. However, her creative legacy is much more extensive and includes numerous prose drafts that have only recently been published. She died in 1935 from sickness and malnutrition. The combination of her unrecognised talent, complicated family history, drug addiction, and early death made her life vulnerable to sensationalism; when simplified to these elements, it easily becomes a cautionary tale of a doomed writer. The stage became the most prominent setting for Przybyszewska’s afterlives.2 My selection of theatrical texts for the following analysis, while far from constituting an exhaustive corpus, is representative of the traits that persist  in texts created in different decades and cultural contexts: Anna Schiller’s Stacha was written in Polish and staged in Łódź in 2001; Pam Gems’s The Snow Palace was performed in front of a British audience in 1998; finally, Olimpia z Gdańska (Olympe from Gdańsk) is an opera by Polish composer Zigmunt Krauze, with a libretto by the Polish-French couple Krystyna and Blaise de Obaldia, performed in Gdańsk in 2015. I present them in this order for two reasons: first, because their narratives form a chronological sequence of Przybyszewska’s life, and second, because it allows me to move from a text rooted firmly in the Polish context to its opposite, the “Westerner’s vision,” and to finish with a synthesis of the two. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, drawing on life-writing scholarship, I attempt to uncover the processes through which the stereotypical

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narrative of female victimhood is created in biotexts about unconventional women and to single out the elements that make Przybyszewska’s case particularly prone to these tendencies. Second, by means of this case study, I will explore larger questions about (the legitimacy of) ethical criticism in biofiction studies.



Women’s Afterlives

When writing a biographical account, an author has a series of important choices to make that are likely to affect their subject’s posthumous reputation. On the one hand, the biographer reduces the life to a few “biographemes”3 found within the life that is being thus reduced; on the other hand, one cannot ignore the fact  that the act of biographical writing happens “within cultural and social sex-gender systems,” that provide specific “gendered scripts and plots.”4 The dualistic nature of biographemes (specific to the biographical subject but chosen within a particular social context) requires us to consider existing trends in discussions about women authors who do not fit within the confines of “proper” femininity. “With the growing popularity of the literary biopic and fictional reimaginings in the form of novelizations, writers’ lives often risk becoming sensationalized, reconstructed beyond recognition,”5 argues Emma Short. Her focus is on three significant literary figures of the twentieth century (Woolf, Plath, and Rhys), whose posthumous representations “recreate a cultural impression or memory of these authors as tragic victims of their own mental instability,” which, in its turn, “reveals an implicit fear of female authorship and creativity within contemporary culture.”6 “When the subject of a biography is a suicided woman (Plath, or Anne Sexton, or Virginia Woolf),” writes Hermione Lee, “biography is liable more than ever to try to ‘tidy up’ these lives, to sit in judgement on its subjects, attempting to establish the grounds and the justification of their fears.”7 In the biography-as-trial, moreover, the subject can be pronounced either a passive victim or a destructive culprit.8 The latter alternative can be reconsidered as yet another variation of victimhood: in the first case, the woman is the victim of outside forces, and in the second, she is the victim of forces within herself. This broader understanding of victimisation implies a narrative that strips the protagonist of agency, making her not an active participant but rather a hopeless observer, whether in the hands of other people or her own “irrationality.”

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Suicide is, perhaps, one of the most impactful events for a female author’s afterlife. Such an ending might push the biographer to give the whole narrative a teleological colouring, to view every action through the lens of the suicide that is yet to happen. The end of Przybyszewska’s life, while not a suicide, holds the same fascination for later writers, as a symbol of her existential failure. Closely related to the problem of victimisation and relevant for Przybyszewska’s case are two other troubling  trends in narratives of women’s lives. First is the relationality of many biographical accounts: the subjects are “conceptualised and portrayed primarily with reference to their relationships,” and these biographies come “dangerously close to affirming the historical definition of women in terms of their relation to men.”9 Second is the blurring of the boundary between the woman’s life and work, whereby knowledge of the subject’s life is either uncritically projected onto her text (life used to explain fiction) or extrapolated from it (fiction used to explain life). The latter trend, it can be argued, does not depend on the biographical subject’s gender. Indeed, many male writers have suffered a similar fate. What makes the situation of women writers particularly precarious, however, is the concurrence of all tendencies discussed above: the artistic script is intertwined with the gendered one. As I will demonstrate with the example of Przybyszewska, their simultaneous prominence in biofiction contributes to the creation of the victim narrative.



Biofiction and the Issue of Ethics

Michael Lackey has advocated the creative freedom of authors of biofiction, who might “take liberties with the established facts in their effort to represent [more substantive truths].”10 While I agree that the truth-pact between the author of biofiction and their reader is different from that of the “proper” biographer, there is another pact to consider: the one between the author and their protagonist’s historical prototype. Frédéric Regard insists on the existence of this ethical link between the biographer and the subject: the former, he states, “must remain true to [the latter’s] truth, to the singularity of the author who constitutes the event by which the biographer is set into motion.”11 My suggestion is, then, to consider how the notion of this “ethical link” could be applied to biofiction. When the author chooses to fictionalise a life without changing the name of their protagonist, the name is important: it grounds the narrative

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in reality, connects it to a specific historical context and all related extra-­ textual information, and—last but not least—attracts readers. If the author relies so heavily on their subject’s ontological status, this has to engender at least some reciprocal responsibilities. Furthermore, if the author assumes the right to speak in the other’s voice—what Lucia Boldrini aptly named “the heterobiographical first person”—the act of representation, even if prompted by an ethical impulse, becomes, simultaneously, an act of appropriation, further complicating the relationship between the writer and their subject.12 Women authors, it appears, are often very conscious of this fact. Kate Moses, for instance, speaks about “a sense of deep responsibility to the real Plath, to her work, and to the facts of her life.”13 Hannah Kent echoes her sentiment: “I think that every writer who borrows from real life or even takes someone’s name, from the smallest extent to the largest, has ethical obligations.”14 Their statements indicate an understanding that, by the act of writing, they add “their own truth to the ‘cumulative biography’ of a given historical figure,”15 thus influencing the ways in which she is posthumously perceived. The power of biofiction is such that both the woman and her work can be affected. Demonstrating how the novel The Hours and its cinematic adaptation fictionalise the creation of Mrs Dalloway, Olivia Wood argues that it does, in fact, affect the reader’s approach to the book.16 Moreover, it is not just the interpretation of the novel that is distorted, “The Hours also romanticizes and emphasizes Woolf’s illness and suicide above her achievements as a writer,”17 thereby influencing how the “historical” Woolf is seen. If each instance of representation, even a fictional one, can contribute to a certain accepted image of the subject, then, as Ursula Canton points out, “the insight that no absolute historical or biographical Truth exists does not lead to a situation in which ‘everything goes.’”18 Canton’s functional approach to the medium of biographical theatre highlights the social nature of knowledge, which “suggests that the theatre can become one of the places where the construction of our life world knowledge is negotiated.”19 The insight that factuality and fictionality are not the inherent properties of textual references but rather the qualities attributed to them within particular discourses20 allows us to maintain the distinction between fact and fiction and make it the object of analysis and criticism. Canton’s study of the reception of the selected biographical plays demonstrates how the transfer of information between performance and extra-­ theatrical reality happens: “Motivated by the style of the production and

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the consistency of the new pieces of information with their previous ideas, the participants incorporated elements of the play into their ‘knowledge’ about the [historical figure].”21 Depending on the topic of the play, this “capacity to change its audience’s ideas about [the subject]”22 can be considered to carry a varying degree of ethical responsibility. In her analysis of biofictional representations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Julia Novak pinpoints two pertinent questions: what they do to and with her.23 The ethical approach to biofiction, which I try to advocate in this chapter, subjects the second question to the first one. The limits to what writers can do with a historical figure have to be drawn with due consideration for the possible impact their work might have on her image. Thus, these limits are not set once and for all: they depend on the existing narratives around the subject and can change with time. If the subject is a well-known historical figure, there is already a wider general knowledge about her, and the writer of biofiction is less likely to cause “serious damage”; in contrast, the fictionalisation of more obscure figures imposes a greater ethical obligation, because of the potential influence on their afterlives.



Przybyszewska: A Perfect Victim?

Przybyszewska’s afterlife is a peculiar case, since she is neither a completely obscure figure nor a world-famous author. There are very few biographical accounts of her life and only one of them is available in English.24 The situation in Polish is not much better,25 and even though Przybyszewska might appear as a perfect figure for women writers to reclaim as a part of their creative genealogy—especially since her “rediscovery” in the 1970s coincided with the rise of feminist scholarship and the growing interest in forgotten women’s histories—she did not receive such treatment at that time. This may be largely due to the specificity of Przybyszewska’s own writing, which resists feminist readings.26 As a result, the master narrative that has been established over the decades treats her as the exemplum of a writer who observed and documented her own tragedy: a “doomed, fey, mad victim.”27 Przybyszewska remains the primary—and sometimes sole—witness of her own life. Due to Przybyszewska’s manner of letter-writing (she confesses: “whenever I feel the need to formulate some ideas that demand to be clearly stated, I write a letter”),28 her letters capture, sometimes in painful detail, her inner monologues; through them she testifies about her life.

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The problem is, as Leigh Gilmore observes, that “telling a dissonant story … will place marginalized subjects at greater risk of being doubted.”29 People who use Przybyszewska’s letters as a basis for their narratives often distrust her testimony, treating her as an unreliable, even inadequate narrator of her own story. Let us take, for instance, these two quotes from Przybyszewska’s letters to her aunt written in 1929: How am I doing? That depends on your point of view. At least I can’t say “just average”. From the standpoint of practical common sense, I have nothing whatsoever to be proud of. But from the standpoint of eternal values, it could be said that I’m even doing quite well.30 It has just dawned on me today … that my life, without entertainment, without friends, without sex, without the possibility of spending money on luxury items, is much, much richer than the lives led by ninety-nine per cent of the people. The many joys, thrills and revelations that I experience in a single month are beyond the reach of most in the course of an entire lifetime.31

These passages encapsulate, I argue, Przybyszewska’s position vis-à-vis her situation: just as she insisted that her mother should not be pitied, she does not invite pity for herself, taking full responsibility for the way of life she has chosen. However, readers armed with some previous knowledge of key episodes of Przybyszewska’s life are willing to “read into” her text the signs of trauma they expect to find there. As a result, Przybyszewska’s direct plea for understanding and respect is read as the expression of the pride or self-delusion of a sick woman, and such a reading finds its way into stage representations of her life.

Staging the Playwright’s Life (and Death) Before passing to the case studies, a few additional notes should be made. First, I am primarily concerned with the texts as mediators of the relationship between the authors and Przybyszewska, therefore the elements introduced by the directors and/or actors remain outside the scope of my study. Second, short of conducting a detailed inquiry into the influence these plays had on the viewers and their perception of the “real” Przybyszewska, I rely on Canton’s insights that such transfer of

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knowledge is possible, which justifies ethical criticism of the works. Third, apart from the plays, I draw on all available paratexts: theatrical programmes, interviews with the authors, and other materials. When Przybyszewska’s own words, truth-claims made by the authors in the paratexts, and the fictional narratives clash, the issue of “illegitimate falsehoods”32 becomes most prominent. Fourth, in order to distinguish between Stanisława Przybyszewska as a character and as a historical figure, I will refer to the former by her first name, Stanisława, and to the latter by her last name, Przybyszewska. Anna Schiller’s one-act play Stacha was staged in celebration of Przybyszewska’s hundredth birthday. For Schiller, previously known as a poet and a theatre critic, it was her first attempt at playwriting, and this fact, unfortunately, undermines a promising attitude of the author. In one interview Schiller demonstrates her awareness of the ambiguities and seeming contradictions in the narratives about her protagonist. The question she claims to pose in her play is: “did life take Przybyszewska by surprise, implementing a scenario unknown to her, or on the contrary, did she consciously provoke fate?”33 The choice of additional material in the theatre programme works to highlight multiple aspects of Przybyszewska’s life. An essay by Polish writer and literary scholar Izabela Filipiak openly compares the writer to Athena, an “unwomanly” woman born out of her father’s head. Despite some questionable claims made in the text, Filipiak ends with a forceful message: “However, let us not feel sorry for Przybyszewska, since she did not feel sorry for herself. She did not expect pity, only respect.”34 Furthermore, the programme provides a more neutral chronological account of Przybyszewska’s life and a variety of excerpts from her letters, thus giving the audience some access (however limited) to her own words. The story covers the period from before Stanisława’s birth to after her husband’s death. In the first scene, as heavily pregnant Aniela paints her future child, what seems to be the main theme of the play is revealed in the voice of the yet unborn Stanisława: her disdain for the role assigned to women in society.35 In the rest of the text, however, no social aspects that prevent woman’s creativity are explored. Instead, all obstacles Stanisława faces on her way to writing are connected to particular men, whom she loves (her father), tries to love (her first fiancé Wacław), or settles down with (her husband Jan). Among the three, moreover, only Wacław is shown to systematically undermine her intellectual ambitions.36 With each of the men, Stanisława has two scenes, and as they form a sequence, one

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has the impression that she simply passes from one to another, making very few choices. When she finally begins writing her play, it is also a matter of chance: Jan’s death in Paris liberates her from the last of the ties to the “men’s world.” The only clear decision she makes is at the very end of the play. The doctor comes with a dose of morphine meant for her husband, and Stanisława blackmails him into giving the drug to her. She, who earlier in the play spoke of how destructive the drug was for creativity, now begs for it, believing that she “will not write anything without it.”37 If Schiller tried to leave the question of Stanisława’s involvement with her fate without an answer, such intended ambiguity is lost, as she fails to depict her protagonist’s development convincingly. After trying to portray Stanisława overcoming the limits of her gender, Schiller concludes on a different issue altogether. The conflict between womanhood and creative work is never resolved but simply abandoned. The triumph of freedom to govern her own life is unconvincing, because, even as Stanisława reclaims her agency, the absence of motivation in how she chooses to exercise it ultimately negates what could otherwise be a story of self-liberation. This lack of narrative coherence is the primary reason why Stacha fails as a bio-­ drama both artistically and ethically; inadvertently, it seems, Schiller did not avoid writing Przybyszewska as a victim. The case of Pam Gems’s The Snow Palace is strikingly different from Schiller’s, both as regards her experience as a playwright and her attitude towards the subject. Celebrated as one of the most prominent women playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century, Gems has authored numerous  works about notable women, such as Queen Christina, Piaf, and Marlene. Gems once proclaimed her position as follows: “And it seems an obvious thing to me if you’re writing as a woman, that you want to explode some of the grosser myths that have been erected by men; …. If art isn’t truth, what is it? And there are such gross untruths at the moment.”38 What she subsequently does with Przybyszewska, however, amounts to the creation of yet another myth. A decade before writing The Snow Palace, Gems was invited to adapt Przybyszewka’s opus magnum, The Danton Case (turned into The Danton Affair), for the British stage. The excerpts from her diary of that period are very telling of her attitude towards Przybyszewska and her work: “I’m beginning to know her. She’s reticent, and horribly arrogant, which usually means wounded. No stagecraft whatsoever. And I hate her making Danton’s young wife detest him (not true) … she wouldn’t use such a cheap dramatic device now.”39 This sympathy with Danton (later

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confirmed in the preface to the publication of The Snow Palace)40 and her contempt for Przybyszewska’s craft as a playwright led to drastic alterations of The Danton Case, including cutting the play from six hundred pages to a mere one hundred. There are two reasons why I am highlighting this episode. First, because this adaptation found its way into Gems’s play about Przybyszewska: dialogues between Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Danton occupy a significant part of the script but bear only limited similarity to the original; the viewer is therefore likely to take Gems’s text (being written by Stanisława on stage) as Przybyszewska’s own. Second, the condescending curiosity Gems expressed towards her while working on The Danton Affair is maintained in The Snow Palace. Gems is fascinated with the image of a freezing woman isolated from the world, and she even claims: “She died, in the end, of hypothermia, in her thirties, in her unheated hut, leaving notes of her travail as she began to freeze to death.”41 This is a fascinating image indeed, were it not for the inconvenient fact that Przybyszewska died in August. The quote is taken from the introduction to the first edition of the play, and it reflects the readiness with which Gems bends the facts of Przybyszewska’s life (in the paratext, which usually implies a non-fictional level of discourse) to fit the myth she is creating, whether consciously or not. It is a myth of a “brave, lonely woman,”42 who is also a foreigner to the British audience and specifically to Gems. Przybyszewska’s Polishness is named by Gems as one of the elements that had drawn her to rewriting The Danton Affair.43 The visit to Poland and the research on Przybyszewska in the process of writing The Snow Palace did little to alter her perspective: that of a Westerner looking to the East. On numerous occasions throughout the play, being Polish is equated with such qualities as madness, complete self-dedication to one’s calling, and pride.44 Introducing these motives could be justified if Gems had actually explored the implications of Przybyszewska’s nationality for her artistic marginality and her complicated perception of self;45 instead, they remain mere decorations to the narrative. Stanisława’s creative process constitutes the core of the plot: she is shown at her table, writing The Danton Case, fighting cold and hunger, and reminiscing about her past. Switching between memories and lines from the play, Gems unequivocally endorses the idea that The Danton Case is first and foremost an act of sublimation of Stanisława’s family drama; the elaborate philosophical system Przybyszewska had developed and the

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ideals she had expressed in her play are overlooked by Gems in favour of re-­staging it as a Freudian tragedy. In order to do that, Gems exacerbates the hardships of Stanisława’s childhood; her parents become a pair of clichés: the alcohol-addicted and neglectful mother who regrets having a child and the demonic, sadistic father, a model for her Danton, just as brutal and hedonistic. The parallels Gems draws between Przybyszewski and Danton are numerous: from the use of the same word to describe the men (“lecher”)46 to them being played by the same actor. In a moment of anger at her father Stanisława cries out: “You’re a pig! I know all about Danton!”47 It is no coincidence that the claim to knowledge about the character in her play comes at the time when she loses her last illusions about Przybyszewski. Thus, the obsessive need of Stanisława to recreate Danton’s downfall and execution are shown to be stimulated by something other than intellectual or political ideas; it is her way of surviving and avenging the harm her father has done to her. In the final scene of Act I, Przybyszewski rapes Stanisława. Act II opens with Stanisława’s aunt Helena regretting not persecuting him: “You should have let me go to law. You could at least have had justice.”48 The next scene of The Danton Case, imagined by Stanisława, is one in which Danton is violent towards his young wife and then is arrested; the two events have no direct correlation, but this sequence has obvious implications: getting no justice in real life, Stanisława claims it in her text. Imposing a biographical reading on The Danton Case is only half of the violation Gems commits; the other half is her choice to make Przybyszewski rape his daughter. Most likely she borrowed that idea from Kosicka and Gerould’s biography of Przybyszewska, which claims that during one of their meetings, father and daughter gave “free rein to the incestuous longings that enveloped them.”49 To my knowledge, there is no tangible evidence of that claim. Their short meeting in June of 1921 was interrupted by the sudden arrival of Przybyszewski’s wife Jadwiga; Przybyszewska left in a hurry, and Przybyszewski had to appease Jadwiga by renouncing his daughter. Lewandowski calls this episode a “strindbergian finale” to a “family psychodrama”50 but gives no indication that anything beyond a scandal caused by Przybyszewski’s deceit of his wife (who was openly jealous of the attention he paid to his young daughter) happened. Kosicka and Gerould, however, choose to interpret Jadwiga’s anger as a reaction to something more sinister. It is very likely that Przybyszewska’s play 93, in which the daughter struggles with her ambivalent feelings towards her father and tries to frame him as a counter-revolutionary, influenced their

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reading of the scene. Gems’s decision not only to include the incest episode into the play but also to turn it into rape is understandable from a narrative point of view; from an ethical standpoint, however, it is more than questionable, as it perpetuates a hurtful stereotype of rape as a catalyst for a woman’s actions—and her creativity. Another ethically dubious element of Gems’s play is how the author uses its potential for meta-commentary: instead of questioning what has been written about her biographical subject and challenging the “gross untruths,” she presents Stanisława as delusional by juxtaposing the words she is saying or writing with the horrible conditions of her existence. The very first line she utters (while writing a letter to her aunt) is: “nonsense, a lie, untrue … (Looks round briefly, shivers without noticing from the cold.) … to the contrary, I’m very comfortable.”51 The stage direction incorporated into her monologue undermines her claim, and the last-­ minute addition to the letter (“I—am—well.”)52 is contrasted with the long description of how she struggles to melt some snow into water. It is not that these conditions are imaginary—Przybyszewska wrote openly about them—but that Gems chooses to present them in an extreme fashion, demonstrating how cold and hunger make Stanisława lose her humanity—or at least dignity—bit by bit, while she is too proud to admit it. On the rare occasion where Gems uses Przybyszewska’s actual words, they become a source of irony, thus invalidating her direct speech. By the end of the play, Danton is executed. Stanisława seemingly got her revenge and creative satisfaction. There is, however, no triumph in this conclusion. Przybyszewska sits side-by-side with Robespierre. He declares the work finished and leaves the room, but Przybyszewska does not move, “frozen to her chair, her arm frozen in the act of writing, seemingly turned towards ROBESPIERRE’s chair in a permanent gaze. Whiteout.”53 Bearing in mind Gems’s introduction, such an ending can be read as a final act of rewriting: the rewriting of Przybyszewska’s death. Finishing her life’s work, Stanisława finishes life itself. She is not even a martyr to her craft, as martyrdom implies agency, and there is very little of that in the play; she is only a victim—of her parents and of her ambitions. Reviewing the play for the Financial Times, Ian Shuttleworth calls it a “muddle,” and explains that the problem “is not that Gems, Pogson or director Janet Suzman lack control of their material …; rather, it is simply that Stanisława’s own life and work seem to form a single unruly mass.”54 What he misses, ironically, is that this unruliness stems from Gems’s control—and creative reimagining—of the biographical material. But his error is insightful, as it

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confirms that any “knowledge” the audience gains about Stanisława does get projected onto Przybyszewska. As Paul Taylor remarked in his review, raising the issue of the author’s ethical responsibility to her subject, “It seems hard that, after leading such an arduously idealistic life, Przybyszewska should be remembered, not as an independent creative intellect, but as a Freudian case study.”55 A more triumphant approach to the writer’s death is proposed in Olimpia z Gdańska; the authors of the libretto, Krystyna and Blaise de Obaldia, explore the parallels between Przybyszewska and Olympe de Gouges, a prominent figure of the French Revolution. Olimpia was written for and produced at Opera Bałtycka and then adapted into a comic book. The whole project reflects how Przybyszewska has come to occupy a more prominent (though still quite limited) place in cultural consciousness: she is a heroine of both “high” (opera) and “low” (comics) genres; she is more international than ever before (not insignificantly, the libretto switches between Polish and French); she is also appropriated as a “local” writer by Gdańsk authorities and artists, despite her open dislike for the city.56 The authors are no longer dealing with a blank page, as audiences have some preconception of Przybyszewska’s life. They face, therefore, a choice: to challenge that preconception or to go along with it. In my view, they do both. On the one hand, they base their narrative on a more or less known image of Przybyszewska: Krystyna and Blaise de Obaldia quote Hilary Mantel, for instance, who, fifteen years earlier, “diagnosed” Przybyszewska as “the maddest of all female Robespierrists” and “the woman who died of Robespierre.”57 Zygmunt Krauze, the composer, calls her “drug-addict, her father’s lover, possessed by her imaginary love for Robespierre.”58 On the other hand, they add a creative “what if” twist in the figure of Olympe de Gouges, thus transforming the final stage of Przybyszewska’s life into a narrative of empowerment. Przybyszewska is shown struggling towards the end of her life to write a novel about Olympe de Gouges. Over time she comes to identify more and more with her heroine while simultaneously becoming disenchanted with the two men who constrain her—Przybyszewski and Robespierre. In the librettists’ words: “In order to liberate herself from them, as well as from the morphine, Stanisława needs Olympe. Olympe’s death liberates Stanisława from the toxic relationship with her father and Robespierre. Then she can finish her novel and find peace.”59 The opera, therefore, attempts to place side-by-side two stories of female emancipation. While one woman struggles with the external limitations imposed on her by

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society, the other has to fight her inner demons and in doing so she uses the example of the first woman as an inspirational model. In the end both die but are reunited in death. “After all Stanisława’s difficulties,” the composer explains, “her liberation comes. … Her lips utter the words that everyone can end their story—their life—beautifully, so I wanted the ending to be gentle, illuminated, and happy.”60 If the opera has an affirmative and optimistic conclusion, in which a woman writer finds freedom to create through identification with her female predecessor, why criticise it, then? One major flaw of the story is that while it works as a “staged feminist biography,”61 its symbolic dimension overpowers the biographical element, and the authors venture onto the territory of what I would qualify as “illegitimate falsehood.”62 Two key elements of the opera are Stanisława’s interest in Olympe de Gouges and her rejection of Robespierre. Both would have been unthinkable for Przybyszewska. First, she had little interest in the women of the French Revolution and never even mentioned de Gouges in her letters. Second, and more importantly, Przybyszewska’s fidelity to Robespierre was truly overwhelming. The distortion of the latter aspect is where the limit between legitimate and illegitimate falsehood lies, as Robespierre was more than a simple infatuation with a long-dead man for Przybyszewska: he—or rather her vision of him—accumulated the ideas most significant for her understanding of the world. Przybyszewska identified with Robespierre because he exemplifies the ideal of intellectual progress, the promise of the mental development of individuals and of humanity.63 The De Obaldias take a patronising attitude towards their subject when they claim: “Robespierre was a dictator. … Stanisława was in love with Robespierre, she saw him as the ideal of a man. How wrong she was! … In our libretto, thanks to Olympe, Stanisława begins to see Robespierre as he really was.”64 Stanisława’s altered fate is meant to “fix” Przybyszewska’s blindness that clearly frustrates the librettists. Saving their heroine, they victimise the historical prototype by refusing to explore the philosophical dimension of her obsession with Robespierre. While one cannot deny the authors’ right to turn their characters into symbols in order to explore issues of contemporary significance, one still has to raise the question of how legitimate it is to employ a historical woman’s name and image in a narrative which distorts something more significant than historical facts: namely, the subject’s belief system.65

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A Strategy for More Ethical Biofiction

In 1931 Przybyszewska wrote to her aunt: Specifically, your mistake regarding me can be encapsulated in two short sentences (in French, because the word is untranslatable): je ne suis ni un enfant, ni un raté. And you consider me (maybe not knowingly, but that doesn’t change the fact) as both; and hence your concern for me—hence its depressive hopeless character (italics mine).66

Neither a child, nor a failure—ironically, the image of Przybyszewska that has been reproduced over decades is largely defined by these two traits. She is either an irrational child who should be saved from herself or a tragic artist who failed to fulfil what she saw as her calling (or both). The reason for this, I believe, is that the authors who have engaged with her story have failed to be “adequate witnesses,” that is, to “receive testimony without deforming it by doubt, and without substituting different terms of value for the ones offered by the witness herself.”67 Following Gilmore’s observations on tainted witnessing, the solution would be to approach Przybyszewska’s letters with an open mind. Such a strategy would allow us not only to appreciate the philosophical underpinnings of her self-­ representation, but also to consider her reflections on the posthumous reconstruction of women’s lives, which, in turn, can provide a theoretical template for more ethical biofiction. While Przybyszewska had some valuable observations on the problems of the historical and biographical fiction of her time, much more insightful for contemporary biofiction are her thoughts on other people’s perception of her mother, as they provoke far-reaching questions on how unconventional women are perceived. First, she calls out the pity people feel towards such women: Talking to my father, I felt his hidden pity for [my] mother … and I recognised, truly dazzled, the same shades of feeling—its sound or colour—which I had already seen several times in my close friends towards myself. It is a vague and very subtle regret about [her] elusiveness. This word describes it best. Regret that our (in this case, the father’s about the mother) assumptions about a given person’s nature resist being verified; that we try in vain to understand [her] thoroughly; that [she] torments us with her incomprehensibility—her strangeness.68

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Second, she opposes hiding certain facts of a biography in order to “whitewash” her image. Przybyszewska asks Helsztyński, “for my mother’s sake and for my own, to refrain from discretion in your treatment of the matter. Mother’s life was such that she might have as well lived in a house of glass. There is nothing here that would be better to pass over, to tone down. On the contrary! Oh no, [my] mother doesn’t need discretion.”69 And the follow-up letter affirms the sentiment: “the silence must be abandoned. This timid discretion casts a shadow of assumptions over the person’s memory …—instead of protecting her. And in this case there is no need to protect at all, but only to illuminate.”70 When applied to biofiction, Przybyszewska’s ideas resonate with Emma Short’s theoretical search for adequate reconstructions of women writers’ lives that neither victimise them nor downplay their struggles; these are the reconstructions “which do not focus on the tragic or the sensational, but which acknowledge and indeed celebrate them as authors—reconstructions which recognize that their individual characters, relationships and personal battles are integral to their creativity, and which comprehend the unity of the writer and her experiences.”71 The basis for these alternative herstories can be found in the act of “listening” to the subjects’ testimonies, whatever form they have survived in. “I hate the word ‘ethics,’” Przybyszewska once wrote, “at the same time, I believe that we should strive with all our strength to resurrect the words of the dead.”72 Even being suspicious of ethical demands, she recognises their absolute necessity when it comes to people who can no longer speak for themselves. It is only fair to extend the same recognition to her—and to other women on the margins of history.

Notes 1. Przybyszewska to Stanisław Helsztyński, September 4, 1933, in Listy, vol. 2, ed. Tomasz Lewandowski (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1983), 496. All translations from Polish are mine, unless stated otherwise. 2. See Elwira Grossman, “‘The Woman Who Died of Robespierre’: The Stage Afterlife of Stanislawa Przybyszewska,” in Omagiu Profesorului Contsantin Geambasu La 65 De Ani, ed. Antoaneta Olteanu (Bucharest: Editura Universităt ̧ii din Bucureşti, 2013), 124–36.

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3. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 9. 4. Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 187. 5. Emma Short, “Making Up, or Making Over: Reconstructing the Modern Female Author,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 41. 6. Ibid., 41–42. 7. Hermione Lee, “Am I Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, in Writing the Lives of Writers, ed. Warwick Gould and Thomas F.  Staley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 225. 8. Ibid., 226. 9. Ní Dhúill, Metabiography, 203. 10. Michael Lackey, introduction to Biographical Fiction: A Reader, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 10. 11. Frédéric Regard, “The Ethics of Biographical Reading: A Pragmatic Approach,” The Cambridge Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2000): 406. 12. See Lucia Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2012), especially the discussion of Anna Banti’s Artemisia in Chapter 5. Even though Boldrini argues that in biographical plays “the character is staged as him- or herself, and the categories of the subject, of history, of reality, of biography and autobiography are not really in question,” her insights prove to be relevant for my study, particularly in the case of Pam Gems’s substituting her rewriting of Przybyszewska’s play for the original text. 13. Kate Moses, “Re-Composing a Life in the Biographical Novel,” in Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, ed. Michael Lackey (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 165. 14. Hannah Kent, “Fictions of Women,” interview by Kelly Gardiner, in Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 118. 15. Valentina Vannucci, “The Canon and Biofiction: The Subjects of History and New Literary Worlds,” in Biographical Fiction, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 384. 16. Olivia Wood, “Time, Place, and ‘Mrs. D’: Uptake from Mrs Dalloway to The Hours,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (Spring/Summer 2018): 26. 17. Ibid., 28. 18. Ursula Canton, Biographical Theatre: Re-Presenting Real People? (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 111. 19. Ibid., 174.

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20. Ursula Canton, “We May not Know Reality, but It Still Matters—A Functional Analysis of ‘Factual Elements’ in the Theatre,” Contemporary Theatre Review 18, no. 3 (2008): 325. 21. Ibid., 326–27. 22. Ibid., 327. 23. Julia Novak, “The Notable Woman in Fiction: The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 102. 24. Jadwiga Kosicka and Daniel Gerould, A Life of Solitude: Stanisława Przybyszewska, a Biographical Study with Selected Letters (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989). 25. Tomasz Lewandowski, Dramat Intelektu: Biografia literacka Stanisławy Przybyszewskiej (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1982); Krystyna Kolińska, Córka smutnego szatana (Warsaw: Twój styl, 1993). While a number of interesting theoretical works on her thought has been published, those are aimed at quite a narrow academic readership. 26. See Monika Świerkosz, “O ‘niekobiecości’ jako problematycznej kategorii w czytaniu literatury kobiet. Na marginesie recepcji biografii i twórczości Stanisławy Przybyszewskiej,” in Sporne postaci polskiej krytyki feministycznej po 1989 roku, ed. Monika Świerkosz (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Katedra 2016), 17–45. 27. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 55. 28. Przybyszewska to Helena Barlińska, March 19, 1929, in Listy, vol. 1, ed. Tomasz Lewandowski (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1978), 433. Translation: Kosicka and Gerould, A Life of Solitude, 138. 29. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 9. 30. Przybyszewska to Helena Barlińska, January 16, 1929, in Listy, vol. 1, ed. Tomasz Lewandowski (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1978), 352. Translation: Kosicka and Gerould, A Life of Solitude, 127–28. 31. Przybyszewska to Helena Barlińska, March 5, 1929, in Listy, vol. 1, ed. Tomasz Lewandowski (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1978), 383. Translation: Kosicka and Gerould, A Life of Solitude, 133–34. 32. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate falsehoods is elaborated by Michael Lackey in Conversations with Biographical Novelists (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 248. 33. Anna Schiller, interview by Małgorzata Terlecka-Reksnis, Twój Styl, no. 10 (October 2001), http://www.encyklopediateatru.pl/artykuly/119102/ w-­pulapce-­przeznaczenia. 34. Anna Schiller, Stacha, theatre programme (Łódź: Teatr Nowy, 2001), VIII. 35. Ibid., 3–4. 36. “You’re a woman … Simply a woman …” Ibid., 39.

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37. Ibid., 60. 38. Pam Gems, interview in Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1997), 91–92. 39. Pam Gems, “The Danton Affair (A Writer’s Diary),” Drama: The Quarterly Theatre Review, no. 3 (1986): 5. 40. “I’d had a weakness for Danton for years, and a picture of his ugly mug hung halfway up the stairs.” Pam Gems, The Snow Palace (London: Oberon Books, 1998), 8. 41. Ibid., 9. 42. Ibid. 43. Gems, “(A Writer’s Diary),” 6. 44. Gems, The Snow Palace, 21, 42, and 50 respectively. 45. “In the whole of Europe there is a single opinion about us, which we sadly deserve: that we are a funny bunch of undisciplined, unreliable in all matters, megalomaniac fools. I have to admit that I share this opinion; I must even shamefully confess that two times already I have lied like an utter snob, when asked about my nationality. I claimed being ‘half-Russian’ without, however, explaining what the other half is made of.” Przybyszewska to Iwi Bennet, February 19, 1928, in Listy, vol. 3, ed. Tomasz Lewandowski (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1985), 30. 46. Gems, The Snow Palace, 21, 27. 47. Ibid., 45. 48. Ibid., 50. 49. Kosicka and Gerould, A Life of Solitude, 28. 50. Lewandowski, Dramat Intelektu, 46. 51. Gems, The Snow Palace, 13. 52. Ibid., 14. 53. Ibid., 71. 54. Ian Shuttleworth, review of The Snow Palace, Tricycle Theatre, London, opened 1 December, 1998, written for the Financial Times, accessed February 21, 2022, http://www.cix.co.uk/~shutters/reviews/98072.htm. 55. Paul Taylor, review of The Snow Palace, Independent UK, December 19, 1998, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/theatre-­ reviews-­the-­snow-­palace-­1193349.html. 56. See, for instance, the introductions by the city mayor and the opera’s artistic director. Olimpia z Gdańska, theatre programme (Gdańsk: Opera Bałtycka, 2015), 4–5. 57. Hilary Mantel, “What a Man This Is, with His Crowd of Women Around Him!”, review of Robespierre, eds. Colin Haydon and William Doyle, London Review of Books 22, no. 7 (30 March 2000): 3–8, https://www. lrb.co.uk/v22/n07/hilary-­mantel/what-­a-­man-­this-­is-­with-­his-­crowd-­

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of-­women-­around-­him. These two formulae have been referenced multiple times since. De Obaldia use the second expression in Olimpia z Gdańska, 19. 58. Zygmunt Krauze, “Prapremiera opery ‘Olimpia z Gdańska,’” Facebook, November 20, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/events/157909047 895220/. 59. Olimpia z Gdańska, 18. 60. Ibid., 12. 61. Ryan M. Claycomb highlights the following elements, typical of the genre: “the reclaimed historical performance as site of feminist praxis for both biographical figure and actor, the performance of historical reclamation itself, and a replaying of the eliding processes of history that makes such a reclamation possible and necessary.” Ryan M. Claycomb, “Playing at Lives: Biography and Contemporary Feminist Drama,” Modern Drama 47, no. 3 (2004): 527. 62. See Boldrini’s observation that “if Banti’s aim were simply to make a feminist point, then she would indeed sacrifice the integrity of her subject as an individual, make her subservient to an abstract category (‘woman’).” Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 163. 63. Przybyszewska’s reflections on Robespierre are scattered all over her letters and too numerous to choose from. For a thorough analysis of her philosophy and Robespierre’s place in it, see Kazimiera Ingdahl, A Gnostic Tragedy: A Study in Stanislawa Przybyszewska’s Aesthetics and Works (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1997). 64. Olimpia z Gdańska, 19. 65. The novelist Sabina Murray explained this idea very convincingly: “The belief system is provable. My father’s belief system would generate that thought, so it belongs with his thoughts … that would be a thought that he could have, and that could coexist with his other thoughts without creating conflict.” Sabina Murray, “Complex Psychologies in the Biographical Novel,” interview by Michael Lackey, in Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, ed. Michael Lackey (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 190. 66. Przybyszewska to Helena Barlińska, May 13–17, 1931, in Listy, vol. 2, ed. Tomasz Lewandowski (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1983), 342. 67. Gilmore, Tainted Witness, 5. 68. Przybyszewska to Stanisław Helsztyński, July 14-August 16, 1933, in Listy, vol. 2, ed. Tomasz Lewandowski (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1983), 484. Throughout the paragraph Przybyszewska uses the word “żal,” which I translate as “pity” and “regret.” 69. Ibid., 479.

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70. Przybyszewska to Stanisław Helsztyński, September 9, 1933, in Listy, vol. 2, ed. Tomasz Lewandowski (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1983), 496. 71. Short, “Making Up,” 56. 72. Przybyszewska to Helena Barlińska, March 5, 1929, in Listy, vol. 1, ed. Tomasz Lewandowski (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1978), 393–94.

References Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Boldrini, Lucia. Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2012. Canton, Ursula. Biographical Theatre: Re-Presenting Real People? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. “We May Not Know Reality, but It Still Matters—A Functional Analysis of ‘Factual Elements’ in the Theatre.” Contemporary Theatre Review 18, no. 3 (2008): 318–27. Claycomb, Ryan M. “Playing at Lives: Biography and Contemporary Feminist Drama.” Modern Drama 47, no. 3 (2004): 525–45. Gems, Pam. Interview. In Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting, edited by Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, 88–97. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1997. ———. “The Danton Affair (A Writer’s Diary).” Drama: The Quarterly Theatre Review, no. 3 (1986): 5–8. ———. The Snow Palace. London: Oberon Books, 1998. Gilmore, Leigh. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Grossman, Elwira. “‘The Woman Who Died of Robespierre’: The Stage Afterlife of Stanislawa Przybyszewska.” In Omagiu Profesorului Contsantin Geambasu La 65 De Ani, edited by Antoaneta Olteanu, 124–36. Bucharest: Editura Universităt ̧ii din Bucureşti, 2013. Ingdahl, Kazimiera. A Gnostic Tragedy: A Study in Stanislawa Przybyszewska’s Aesthetics and Works. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1997. Kent, Hannah. “Fictions of Women,” interview by Kelly Gardiner. In Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, edited by Michael Lackey, 105–18. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Kolińska, Krystyna. Córka smutnego szatana. Warsaw: Twój styl, 1993. Kosicka, Jadwiga, and Daniel Gerould. A Life of Solitude: Stanisława Przybyszewska, a Biographical Study with Selected Letters. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989.

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Krauze, Zygmunt. “Prapremiera opery ‘Olimpia z Gdańska.’” Facebook, November 20, 2015. https://www.facebook.com/events/157909047895220. Lackey, Michael, ed. Biographical Fiction: A Reader. New  York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. ———. Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Lee, Hermione. “Am I Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” In Writing the Lives of Writers, edited by Warwick Gould and Thomas F.  Staley, 224–38. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. ———. Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Lewandowski, Tomasz. Dramat Intelektu: Biografia literacka Stanisławy Przybyszewskiej. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1982. Mantel, Hilary. “What a Man This Is, with His Crowd of Women Around Him!” Review of Robespierre, edited by Colin Haydon and William Doyle. London Review of Books 22, no. 7 (30 March 2000): 3–8. https://www.lrb.co.uk/ v22/n07/hilary-­m antel/what-­a -­m an-­t his-­i s-­w ith-­h is-­c rowd-­o f-­w omen-­ around-­him. Moses, Kate. “Re-Composing a Life in the Biographical Novel.” In Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, edited by Michael Lackey, 161–77. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Murray, Sabina. “Complex Psychologies in the Biographical Novel,” interview by Michael Lackey. In Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, edited by Michael Lackey, 181–94. New  York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Ní Dhúill, Caitríona. Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Novak, Julia. “The Notable Woman in Fiction: The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 83–107. Olimpia z Gdańska, theatre programme. Gdańsk: Opera Bałtycka, 2015. Przybyszewska, Stanisława. Listy, edited by Tomasz Lewandowski. 3 vols. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1978–85. Regard, Frédéric. “The Ethics of Biographical Reading: A Pragmatic Approach.” The Cambridge Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2000): 394–408. Schiller, Anna. Interview by Małgorzata Terlecka-Reksnis. Twój Styl, no. 10 (October 2001). http://www.encyklopediateatru.pl/artykuly/119102/ w-­pulapce-­przeznaczenia. ———. Stacha, theatre programme. Łódź: Teatr Nowy, 2001. Short, Emma. “Making Up, or Making Over: Reconstructing the Modern Female Author.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, 41–59. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Shuttleworth, Ian. Review of The Snow Palace, Tricycle Theatre, London, opened 1 December 1998. Written for the Financial Times. Accessed February 21, 2022. http://www.cix.co.uk/~shutters/reviews/98072.htm. Świerkosz, Monika. “O ‘niekobiecości’ jako problematycznej kategorii w czytaniu literatury kobiet. Na marginesie recepcji biografii i twórczości Stanisławy Przybyszewskiej.” In Sporne postaci polskiej krytyki feministycznej po 1989 roku, edited by Monika Świerkosz, 17–45. Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Katedra, 2016. Taylor, Paul. Review of The Snow Palace, Tricycle Theatre, London. Independent UK, December 19, 1998. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­ entertainment/theatre-­reviews-­the-­snow-­palace-­1193349.html. Vannucci, Valentina. “The Canon and Biofiction: The Subjects of History and New Literary Worlds.” In Biographical Fiction, edited by Michael Lackey, 380–407. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Wood, Olivia. “Time, Place, and ‘Mrs. D’: Uptake from Mrs. Dalloway to The Hours.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 93 (Spring/Summer 2018): 26–28.

PART IV

Creativity and Gender in the Arts and Sciences

CHAPTER 11

Re-visiting the Renaissance Virtuosa in Biofiction on Sofonisba Anguissola Julia Dabbs

In recent years biofiction authors have frequently  turned to the lives of historical women artists for inspiration, such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, and Georgia O’Keeffe. It is relatively easy to understand why: these women struggled to gain acceptance as artists in the male-­dominated realm of the art world; they demonstrated creative brilliance and personal investment in their new approaches to artistic expression; and their personal lives were beset by challenges such as rape, chronic physical pain, and divorce. In some cases, such as those of Kahlo and O’Keeffe, there is the added attraction of name-recognition outside of the art world, which could spur the reader’s interest in the subject.1 Yet somewhat surprisingly, the woman artist who currently is one of the most frequently written about in contemporary biographical fiction,2 Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1535–1625), does not meet many of these standard pre-requisites. Her art is known to a rather limited audience, and when compared to Gentileschi’s dramatic history paintings, Anguissola’s

J. Dabbs (*) University of Minnesota, Morris, Morris, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_11

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portraiture can seem much less compelling, at least at first glance. She had to train with a male artist beyond the safe domain of her family’s home, but nothing untoward is said to have happened—quite unlike the situation of Gentileschi, who was raped by her drawing instructor. To our knowledge, Anguissola was not involved in any turbulent relationships— although she did marry twice, with the first marriage having been arranged by the Spanish court, which she served as a lady-in-waiting and portrait painter from 1559 to 1573. So, what might account for Anguissola’s dominant position as an artist-­ subject for writers of biographical fiction? In this chapter I would like to explore this question through a comparative analysis of two early modern vite of the artist written by Giorgio Vasari and Raffaelle Soprani in 1568 and 1674 respectively and two examples of contemporary biofiction written by Donna DiGiuseppe and Chiara Montani. Anguissola’s popularity as a subject of biofiction can, I believe, be traced back to the early modern (i.e., 1400–1800) period, when she was included in more works of collective biography on artists than other prominent women such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabetta Sirani.3 What has secured Anguissola’s enduring literary fame, and how do the novels of DiGiuseppe and Montani both relate to and transform the image of the artist as presented in these early modern vite in order to make her relevant for a contemporary audience? In exploring these questions, I will consider how the exceptional woman artist is characterised in ways that defy, as well as reinforce, historical stereotypes of the gifted female. Through this unique synthesis of art history, life-writing, and biofiction analyses, I seek to add a new, cross-disciplinary perspective to the growing scholarship about women artists as subjects of biofiction.4

 The Seeds of a “Life”: Vasari’s Renaissance Praise of Anguissola Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori [The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects], published first in 1550 and then in an expanded 1568 edition, has the important distinction of being the first collective source of life stories of artists, in this case primarily central Italian artists who lived between c. 1300 and 1550. Following the prosopographical models from ancient and medieval writers who wrote about the lives of philosophers and saints,5 Vasari, who

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was a painter and architect as well as an historian, especially sought to raise the status of artists in society from that of common, unacknowledged artisans to more cultivated fine artists, thereby putting them on par with esteemed court poets and musicians. Other goals were to inform readers about these individuals and their creations; to celebrate those artists from one’s region or city-state; to entertain; and to provide exemplary characters and actions that could inspire the reader.6 As we will see, a number of these goals are shared by biofiction authors, which, I believe, allows for a productive comparison across centuries and literary forms. Since early modern artists’ vite, as part of collected works, tend to be relatively brief, they are significantly shorter than biofiction novels in which an artist is the main protagonist. Yet regardless of length, early modern vite were, like biofiction, a seamless blend of fact and fiction.7 Patricia Rubin has aptly termed this process of early modern life writing a “literary re-creation,” in which the subject is portrayed as the author wanted that person to be seen.8 Thus, artistic license was commonplace, especially in the frequent instances of missing biographical information. The fact that Anguissola was even included in Vasari’s Vite, given that she had been skillfully painting for only some fourteen years, is testimony to her increasing fame in the late Renaissance, especially since only sixteen women artists are included out of a total of approximately three hundred artists. Owing to these two factors (i.e., being early in her career and being a woman), Vasari does not give Anguissola a full-fledged vita, but instead includes extended comments about her life and work in two separate chapters. The first passages occur at the end of the chapter for Renaissance sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi, where various other women artists are also briefly mentioned, while a longer commentary (amounting to a few pages) occurs in a chapter on Northern Italian (male) artists.9 Katherine McIver has suggested that this dual placement was to celebrate the “noble status” of Anguissola, which indeed it does, since Vasari makes much of her associations with the Spanish court in both contexts.10 Yet more broadly, I believe this duality demonstrates the indeterminacy of how a “great” woman artist might be written about in that period, or perhaps any period: is she a woman who is a great artist, or is she simply a great artist, and thus capable of being discussed in the context of male artists? Including Anguissola in the “women artist” chapter allows her to be compared only to women, and in this restrictive context, Vasari discusses Anguissola with greater ambivalence than he does in the broader context. For example, Vasari states that Sofonisba’s11 aptitude for the “difficulties of design”

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exceeds that of other women artists; yet then he adds that she acquired these skills through “labour” and great study, making it quite apparent that they were not innate or God-given gifts, as would be presumed for great male artists of the period.12 He similarly undermines Anguissola’s painting abilities, stating that she has done well in copying from nature or from other works of art, which were tropes often used to circumscribe the abilities of Renaissance women artists.13 Yet Vasari, who had seen some of Anguissola’s drawings and paintings in person, cannot entirely reduce her skill to the “good for a woman” category; he adds that the “labored” drawings of the artist demonstrate “better grace” than those of other women. Grazia, that quality that improves upon nature, was a buzzword of art writing in the 1500s and, as Fredrika Jacobs has pointed out, was associated with male artists of genius (or ingegno).14 Even higher praise is given to some of Anguissola’s paintings, which are described by Vasari as not only “very choice and beautiful,” but also done by “herself alone.”15 Here, as Jacobs has noted also, Anguissola is demonstrating her invenzione, or inventiveness, another key concept associated with the male artist of genius.16 Indeed, McIver has argued that in this passage, “Anguissola is almost equal to the male artist.”17 Further ambivalence toward this talented woman artist appears in Vasari’s subsequent discussion of Anguissola’s invitation to the Spanish court, which is given significant attention by the biographer-historian. He notes that Sofonisba was escorted “in great honour” to the court, where she was given a “rich allowance”18 and was admired by all. Vasari typically praised any artist given a court position, since for him, that validation by nobility was considered proof of excellence and a key means of elevating the artist’s status in society.19 Anguissola was the first Italian woman artist to hold a court position, and so Vasari’s praise of her is on par with that of male artists—yet with one egregious exception: the biographer indicates that the court considered Anguissola’s excellence as a portraitist to be a “miracle.” Although this might initially seem to be high praise, it in fact reinforces the Renaissance belief that any woman who excelled at something considered the domain of men (such as painting or sculpting) was doing something unnatural, or beyond belief.20 Vasari also discusses Anguissola’s life and art in a chapter on various male artists associated with the region of Lombardy, and surprisingly, he writes at even greater length here.21 As a segue to this discussion, Vasari quite exceptionally compares Anguissola to male artists, mistakenly stating that she was the student of Giulio Campi (instead it was his half-brother

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Bernardino Campi) and brought him “more honour” than any of his male students due to the excellence of her painting. He identifies her parents, indicating that they “belong to the most noble families in Cremona,” thus establishing the artist’s social prominence and suggesting that she did not need to paint for economic reasons. Vasari, who had been to the Anguissola home in 1566,22 then praises the verisimilitude of some of the “marvels” that he saw there, such as Sofonisba’s remarkable painting of her sisters in The Chess Game (Muzeum Naradowe, Poznan, Poland). He next reiterates comments about the artist’s distinguished life and artistic creations at the Spanish court, noting once more that her portraits were “cosa maravigliosa,” things to marvel at.23 However, new material concerning Anguissola’s character is found in the form of an exchange of letters between the artist and Pope Pius IV, who had requested a portrait of the Queen by Anguissola. By including this authentic epistolary evidence, which DiGiuseppe does as well in her Lady in Ermine novel, Vasari provides a more direct sense of the subject’s character, even if this is somewhat muffled by the formal rhetoric of aristocratic letter-writing. In her letter Sofonisba adroitly accepts the commission from the Pope, adding that she had first asked Queen Isabel for permission to do so, demonstrating her loyalty and respect for the sovereign. Then, Sofonisba confidently asserts that the Queen’s portrait will be created with all the abilities in her power and knowledge, “in order to present the truth to your Holiness.”24 This is a rather radical statement given the standard idealisation of aristocratic individuals in portraiture of the period, and it tells us that Anguissola was an atypical court portraitist since she evidently believed that visual truth was more important than a beautiful deceit. In turn, the Pope praises Anguissola for her “marvelous” portrait of the Queen, but also seems to recognise that there is more to this woman than her artistic skills, since he adds: “and commending this your art, … we understand to be the least of the many gifts that are in you.”25 This praise for “the many” gifts of Anguissola may have had some truth to it, for other historical sources tell us that she also served as a dressmaker to the Queen, and a teacher to the royal children. These additional roles seem plausible for a lady-in-waiting, yet this notion of the multi-talented woman artist is also a paradigmatic aspect of biographical and courtesy literature in the 1500s.26 Fredrika Jacobs, in her theoretical analysis of biographical writing from the Cinquecento about women artists, notes that such diverse skills are an essential aspect of the “Renaissance virtuosa,” which she identifies in distinction to the notion of the male

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virtuoso.27 For the male artist, this exceptionality would be demonstrated in his “virtuous demeanor and virtuosity in his art.”28 For the female artist, virtuous behavior might also be achievable, but virtuosity in the visual arts (as defined by male artists) was problematic for women given expectations that were usually beyond societal restrictions placed upon them, such as the inability to receive an academic education and the inability to solicit patronage. Perhaps this was why other qualities, such as musicality, domestic talents, and beauty, were substituted by male biographers about female artists, simultaneously reinforcing the Renaissance social status quo for noblewomen. Vasari’s sketch of Anguissola’s early life thus aligns with the concept of the Renaissance virtuosa in terms of her noble, respectful, and loyal character; there is surprisingly no mention made of appearance, even though it is likely that the author saw at least one of her numerous early self-­portraits. Greater attention is appropriately given to Anguissola’s artistic skills, albeit in a gendered fashion by emphasising her “labour” or her ability to copy the work of others. Yet perhaps most remarkably, Vasari also associates Anguissola’s talents with the male virtuoso when noting her ability to “invent” compositions, or to draw with the ineffable quality of grazia. Albeit incomplete, the Renaissance biographer’s exceptional treatment of Anguissola’s talents established a precedent that other early modern authors, and later contemporary authors, would further explore.



Soprani’s Vita of Anguissola

One of the writers inspired by Vasari’s example was historian Raffaele Soprani of Genoa, who published Le Vite de’ pittori, scoltori, e architetti Genovese in 1674. Given that he was also a legislative senator, Soprani no doubt felt a sense of patriotism and duty to commemorate artists who had worked in the region of Genoa since Vasari had excluded them entirely. Although there are only six women included out of a total of 155 artists in Soprani’s volume, he does include Sofonisba Anguissola, for, although she was not born there, Anguissola and her second husband lived in Genoa for thirty-four years (from 1581 to 1615), where she continued to paint. Anguissola is distinguished by being the only woman artist afforded her own chapter in the biographical compendium.29 Soprani’s vita of Anguissola, although still relatively brief, is the most complete, and first posthumous, early modern account of the artist’s career. Although he makes use of (and acknowledges) previous sources

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such as Vasari and Pedro de Ribera’s Le glorie immortali of 1609,30 Soprani is also said to have obtained some of his information on the artist from Genoese relatives of Sofonisba’s second husband.31 Like Vasari, he first emphasises the artist’s “very noble birth,” but soon departs from the earlier biographer by giving attention to Sofonisba’s education and training. He notes that “by means of excellent teachers, [she] was put on the path of every sort of skill,” including painting, adding that Sofonisba (as he consistently refers to her) “made herself outstanding among women because of the varied knowledge (‘le varie scienze’) she possessed.”32 Although we cannot be certain what Soprani meant by “varied knowledge,” it is significant enough to set her apart from how other women were educated, and thus might be intended to link Anguissola to the broader education received by young men in the period. In terms of her artistic training, the biographer perpetuates Vasari’s error in stating that she studied with Giulio (rather than Bernardino) Campi, but surprisingly adds that Anguissola quickly “was made very knowledgeable by him in perspective, and so expert in the difficulty that is inherent to the exercise of the brushes, that seeing with what boldness of hand she drew on paper, her unusual ideas caused not a little marvel.”33 Thus, the skillful early modern woman artist still was perceived as an astonishing, unbelievable “marvel” in the seventeenth century. But there is a new emphasis here on the intellectual aspect of Anguissola’s achievement. Perspective typically was not taught to women due to the mathematical component, nor were women generally said to have “unusual ideas” concerning art. Anguissola’s compositional originality is then specifically discussed in relation to some of her early drawings, such as her Old Woman with Laughing Girl (Florence, Uffizi), which Soprani sums up as a “truly lively conception.” These drawings, even though by a young artist, are furthermore evident of Anguissola’s “boldness of hand,”34 demonstrating a virtuoso manner of confidence and independence that, although not usually associated with female artists, will coincide with aspects of Anguissola’s character to be discussed below. Soprani additionally fleshes out Vasari’s brief biographical sketch of the artist by mentioning that the praise she received for her early artworks encouraged Sofonisba to continue “with greater courage the profession she undertook.”35 How did he know the artist’s inner feelings about her career path? Is there any documentation to that effect? None that is known to us today. Instead, Soprani has interjected what he imagined Sofonisba felt, which is rarely evidenced in other early modern life stories of women

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artists. From a literary standpoint, the insertion serves to develop the characterisation of Anguissola, engendering the reader’s sympathy by showing that as an artist (and especially a woman artist, as he might be implying), Anguissola valorously overcame this first critical challenge. But beyond a strategic intention, it is possible that Soprani’s unusual empathy might stem from his own experiences as a young man, when he had to give up an artistic career in pursuit of greater economic stability. Soprani, like Vasari, emphasises the nobility of his artist-subject by describing the regal quality of the entourage that accompanied her to Spain. She soon began painting portraits of the royal family members, which were well-received according to the author. But just as importantly, Soprani states that “the virtuous lady conducted herself with skill and prudence”36 to such a degree that she was asked, in preference to any other court lady, to take care of the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia. Anguissola excelled in this role too, resulting in the King’s request that she be permanently settled in Spain through an arranged marriage. However, according to Soprani, Sofonisba opposed the King’s command, and “humbly begged” that this arranged marriage occur with an Italian, so that she could return to her homeland.37 Anguissola’s contrariety, a clear rejection of the Renaissance woman’s requirement to be submissive to men, was apparently not perceived negatively by the King. Her counter-proposal was “very quickly accommodated,” and in addition to being wed to an Italian nobleman, Sofonisba was given a generous annual pension, along with jewels, rich clothing, tapestries, and more money. Yet this would not be the only time that Anguissola defied the Spanish King’s wishes, according to Soprani. For after her husband died some years later, the court generously asked the artist to return to their service; but Anguissola, who is said to be “desirous of seeing her homeland,” said no, or rather “very sweetly rejected” the invitation, per the biographer.38 He then relates that while travelling by ship to begin her journey to Cremona, the ship’s captain, identified as a Genoese gentleman, is so attentive to Sofonisba that she “offers herself as a spouse.” Signor Lomellini (the Captain) “willingly consented,” and the couple are said to have found “reciprocal satisfaction” in the eventual marriage.39 Soprani concludes the life story by continuing to praise Anguissola’s skills at portraiture, even boldly claiming that her excellence was equal to that of Titian, the great Venetian Renaissance painter. The biographer notes that in her old age, now totally blind, “the virtuous lady” maintained her passion for art by instructing and giving advice to other artists,

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including the young Flemish portraitist Anthony van Dyck.40 Although it was quite unconventional for a woman to instruct a male artist in this period, Soprani eloquently notes that Van Dyck “confessed to having received much greater instruction from the words of a blind woman, than from the works of the most esteemed painters.”41 And with this high praise from a prominent (male) artist, Soprani concludes the life story. Soprani’s four-page vita of Anguissola conforms to some extent with the qualities of the Renaissance virtuosa, as evidenced in the praise for the artist’s virtuous personal conduct and her multi-talented skills. Yet in this vita, too, there is no description of Anguissola’s physical appearance, and her exceptional artistic skills are compared more often to those of male artists rather than female. But the most unique elements for an early modern biography of a woman artist include Anguissola’s risk-taking, her independence, and her willingness to speak truth to power—elements that will be further developed by the two contemporary authors to be discussed below.

 The Renaissance Virtuosa and Recent Biofiction on Anguissola Do these traits of the Renaissance virtuosa, or other qualities associated with early modern women, inform the characterisations of Anguissola in contemporary biofiction, or is she given a complete, modern make-over? For the purposes of this chapter, I have chosen to focus on two recent novels published in English, Donna DiGiuseppe’s Lady in Ermine: the Story of a Woman Who Painted the Renaissance; a Biographical Novel (Bagwyn Books, 2019) and Chiara Montani’s Sofonisba: Portraits of the Soul (translated from the Italian by Verna Kaye; independently published, 2019). Of the ten novels currently published that feature Anguissola as a protagonist, those written by DiGiuseppe and Montani have been chosen as a focus for the current chapter for a number of reasons. First, the authors’ backgrounds seemed especially well-suited to writing about an artist: DiGiuseppe has a Master’s degree in Italian Renaissance history and wrote her thesis on Anguissola, which results in a very well-informed narrative; and Montani has a background in art, art therapy, and design,42 which positively influenced her emphasis on visual and tactile elements throughout the narrative. Coincidentally, this is the first biographical novel to be published by either author, yet reviews were very positive.43 In

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addition, DiGiuseppe’s novel was a “Finalist in Fiction” at the 2016 San Francisco Writers Conference,44 while the original Italian version of Montani’s novel was honoured by being one of ten finalists for the Independent International Literary Prize in 2016.45 Finally, as an art historian who has devoted her scholarly career to writing about early modern women artists (including Anguissola) and who cares deeply about how they are portrayed, I found both novels to be well-written and compelling treatments of Anguissola’s life and career, even though quite different in style and substance.

DiGiuseppe’s Lady in Ermine Donna DiGiuseppe chose to write about Anguissola because she “set out to find a woman whose accomplishments made an impact on history,”46 which is a rather broad parameter but must have been quickly narrowed given her graduate research on the artist. The “Author’s Note” section specifies the key sources she made use of in her research for the novel, most of which are secondary sources (but some of which include primary source documentation). Blog posts demonstrate DiGiuseppe’s familiarity with Vasari’s comments on the artist,47 but no mention is made of Soprani, although given her master’s degree research I would assume she was at least aware of that source, too. The “Author’s Note” section also includes DiGiuseppe’s comments regarding where she intentionally deviated from the historical record for the sake of plot development, a common feature of historical and biographical fiction, as Catherine Padmore and others have noted.48 DiGiuseppe’s transparency in these matters demonstrates that she values the historical record and wishes the reader to be aware of both the novel’s historicity (and the information value to the reader that comes with that) and its creative elasticity. The life story of DiGiuseppe’s Sofonisba (or “Sofi,” as she is informally referred to throughout the narrative) is skillfully traced from youth to old age, with most attention given to the aristocratic context of the painter’s years at the court of King Philip II and Queen Isabel. This focus on court life is an interesting continuance from early modern artists’ vite and might similarly aid in establishing the woman artist’s importance, especially since, to a modern audience, Anguissola would be little known. In addition, the courtly emphasis aligns with the current popularity of aristocratic-themed television period dramas (i.e., The Crown, Bridgerton), which, even if unintended, could draw in readers who might have less interest in an

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artist’s life. Even the cover of DiGiuseppe’s novel reinforces the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” stereotype, as we see an elegant, aristocratic woman wearing a luxurious, ermine-trimmed cloak, clearly the titular subject who one might assume from the subtitle is the artist herself. Although she is not Anguissola (instead, as we read in the novel, it is a presumed portrait by Sofonisba of Caterina Micaela of Spain),49 it seems likely that the author or publisher wanted to pique readers’ curiosity, projecting an image of nobility and beauty in order to suggest that this relatively obscure artist was a kind of historical celebrity. DiGiuseppe creates a protagonist who has much in common with early modern expectations for women: her Sofi is pious, kind, virtuous, and obedient to men in authority. In keeping with a virtuosa, she is not only beautiful but also characterised as exceptional (for a young woman) in her desire to be a professional artist. She faces gossip, slander, and ridicule both in Cremona and at the court in Spain due to that choice. Yet in numerous other ways, this contemporary author’s Sofi is less independent and outspoken than her counterpart in the Soprani life story. DiGiuseppe’s Sofi does not contest the King’s wishes, either in regard to the arranged marriage, or her later invitation to return to the court in Spain. Her Sofi does things to please other people in her life, whether her father, the Queen, or the King, and when she does become independent after the death of her first husband, it does not take long for the artist to be swept off her feet by the Genoese ship captain, who in turn promptly proposes marriage. Yes, he proposes, not Sofonisba as in the Soprani vita, thereby perpetuating the conservative stereotype of the man’s leading role in marriage. Unlike early modern life stories of the artist, DiGiuseppe’s Anguissola is also subjected to negative treatment by a number of men; for example, the court painter Coello is initially opposed to Anguissola’s presence and seeks her dismissal, as does a powerful church cardinal who the artist unintentionally had seen in a compromising position with a physically challenged male servant. Later in the novel, Anguissola’s manipulative first husband takes financial advantage of her dowry in order to settle his own debts. Thus, in contrast to Soprani’s glowing account of the artist’s life, DiGiuseppe creates a more ambivalent narrative that allows us to see a woman who, despite her extraordinary artistic talent, had a complicated, challenging life. Yet by persevering through these difficult situations, her Sofi comes to embody a key modern concept: resilience. Indeed, something must have kept the historical Anguissola continuing to paint into her

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eighties, when she was beset by failing eyesight and other physical ailments. DiGiuseppe herself states that, in choosing to write about Anguissola, she was struck by her tenacity,50 and although the author does not explain what specifically gave her that impression, it seems quite believable given the circumstances of Anguissola’s life as an exceptional, transnational woman artist “who painted the Renaissance.”



Montani’s Sofonisba

Chiara Montani first heard about Sofonisba Anguissola in an undergraduate art history course that she was privileged to take from Anguissola scholar Flavio Caroli. She was drawn not only to Anguissola’s stunning artwork but also to the artist’s “adventurous” life story and strong, non-­ conformist character.51 Like DiGiuseppe, Montani did her research on the artist and lists scholarly sources consulted on the artist; she also provides the standard caveat about the final product being a work of fiction, including imagined characters.52 Montani establishes a less expansive narrative “stage” for her art heroine in comparison to DiGiuseppe, for she focuses on Anguissola’s life from her youth until the year 1579, when she and ship captain Orazio Lomellini begin their relationship. Like Vasari and Soprani, Montani highlights Anguissola’s exceptional artistry throughout the narrative, but delves further into artistic processes, likely reflecting her own background as a professional artist. This identification with the artist may also be why we find a particular sensitivity to what Anguissola might have felt as a woman wanting to be trained and accepted as a professional artist in a period when that was virtually impossible. In a voice that seems particularly “modern,” we hear Sofonisba discuss gender discrimination in the Renaissance art world on a number of occasions, such as when she comments to Queen Isabel: “I would add that this is even more true in the field of art, where its secrets are often kept from us [women] owing to excessive prejudice and a short-sighted tradition, which places all the knowledge in male hands.”53 Montani’s use of first-person narration by Anguissola throughout the novel enhances such comments, allowing the reader to consistently imagine the circumstances and feelings experienced by her protagonist. Another conflict explored by Montani is the broader issue of behavioural and societal expectations of women in the Renaissance. On a number of occasions, and in the presence of men, Sofonisba speaks out when

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she should not have done so; and in another instance, she goes to a ship’s galley to observe men confined to rowing the boat, only to be stopped by a male character who bluntly warns, “You shouldn’t be here. This is certainly not a place for you.”54 This Sofonisba is transgressive yet innocently so, drawn to scenes that are usually hidden to women because of the artist’s need to observe life around her. She is exceptional, like the standard Renaissance virtuosa, but this outsider status seems to enable Anguissola to fight for her independence, such as when she responds to the King’s request that she marry a Spaniard by asserting that her future husband be Italian. Montani’s emphasis on the artist’s desire for independence aligns the protagonist with Soprani’s characterisation of Anguissola, giving the virtuosa agency. Certainly, this quest for independence, whether in the sixteenth or twenty-first century, could be deemed heroic. However, Montani develops Anguissola’s agency in the narrative even further. Inspired by the story of the Carthaginian noblewoman named Sophonisba, who was renowned for her virtue and took action in times of crisis, this Sofonisba similarly takes on the active role of a heroine: for example, she intervenes with the Queen to save a young girl from execution by the Inquisition and later saves a man wounded in a night-time street fight (who in fact is Orazio Lomellini, as she will later learn). And most daringly, during a time of plague (when she should have stayed at home!), Sofonisba manages to enter a city in  lockdown and then schemes to help her husband safely escape from quarantine, which she succeeds in doing. Ironically, through these efforts Montani’s Sofonisba is able to help others gain freedom in some capacity, yet she herself is, for most of the novel, either confined to her position at the Spanish court or kept in a loveless, arranged marriage in which her first husband (Fabrizio) will at times force her to have sex. Even after Fabrizio dies at sea, Sofonisba feels compelled to return to Cremona, given that her dowry is now in the hands of her brother, who has become the head of the Anguissola family. During the return voyage, Sofonisba unhappily admits to the ship’s captain (Orazio) that she is “one of those creatures destined to remain chained to her own oar.”55 Orazio helps her to realise that freedom comes from within, such as in the act of painting, and in the end, Sofonisba decides to break from her family in order to freely join Orazio in marriage. Montani’s virtuosa, then, is not solely a gifted painter, but a woman who boldly takes risks so that she, and others, can break free from repressive societal restrictions. As such, Montani’s protagonist is a woman who seems more of our time than of

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the Renaissance, as often occurs in biographical fiction that seeks to engage the modern reader.

Conclusion Although there are distinctive differences between early modern life stories and contemporary biofiction, I have sought to demonstrate that at their essence, both literary genres blend fact and fiction in order to celebrate the creative life of an exceptional woman artist, a Renaissance virtuosa. In these re-creations Anguissola’s art and patronage are substantial drivers of the narratives, especially her association with royalty at the Spanish court. These elements have a known, historical existence, but what about the artist’s inner life, especially given the absence of any autobiographical writing by Anguissola? Early modern writers sought to convey these more subjective elements to a limited degree, using such means as the inclusion of letters written by the protagonist, or ascribing characteristics attributed to the “ideal” Renaissance woman. Contemporary novelists, though, have the freedom to expand on what is known by imagining the artist’s inner life, resulting (if done well) in a portrait of a more fully embodied, and thus engaging, individual. Anguissola’s “adventurous” life leaves much to the imagination: how did she feel leaving her family to go to a foreign court? What was it like to feel discrimination as an artist, solely because she was a woman? What was it like to be constantly “acted upon” by others, and how does one free oneself from that life? Isolation, injustice, and the desire for independence are compelling and dramatic concepts that are at the heart of Anguissola’s popularity as a subject for biographical fiction, as authors, and readers, seek to explore the inner life of an artist who sought, herself, to explore the souls of her subjects. Rafaelle Soprani was surely right when he predicted long ago that women artists, so often overlooked by history, will “live in the pens of writers.”56

Notes 1. See further Alexandra Lapierre, “The ‘Woman Artist’ in Literature: Fiction or Non-Fiction?” in Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque, ed. Vera Fortunati, Jordana Pomeroy, and Claudio Strinati (Milan: Skira; New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 75–81. 2. Biofiction works on Anguissola that I have identified to date include: Maria Muldoon, The Secret Life of Sofonisba Anguissola (San Francisco: Matta

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Press, 2020); Donna DiGiuseppe, Lady in Ermine: The Story of a Woman who Painted the Renaissance (Tempe AZ: Bagwyn Books, 2019); Chiara Montani, Sofonisba: Portraits of the Soul, a Novel (2016; trans. Verna Kaye, 2019; independently published); Carol Damioli, Portrait in Black and Gold, a Novel (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2013); Lynn Cullen, The Creation of Eve, a Novel (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2010); Lorenzo de Medici, Il Secreto di Sofonisba (Barcelona Publications, 2007); Agnès Sautois, Le jeune fille au clavicorde … roman (Bressoux: Dricot, 2016); Giovanna Pierini, La dama con il ventaglio: romanzo (Milano: Mondatori Electa, 2018); Carmen Boullosa, La Virgen y el violin (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2004); Millo Borghini, Sofonisba: una vita per la pittura e la libertà (Milano: Spirali, 2006). 3. Julia Dabbs, Life Stories of Women Artists, 1550–1800: An Anthology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 455–66. 4. Some studies include (and again, limited to the genre of biofiction and women visual artists): Tina Lent, “‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’: The Fictionalization of Baroque Artist Artemesia Gentileschi in Contemporary Film and Novels,” Literature/Film Quarterly 34, no. 3 (2006):212–18; Lapierre, “The ‘Woman Artist’”; Julia Novak, “Father and Daughter Across Europe: The Journeys of Clara Wieck Schumann and Artemisia Gentileschi in Fictionalised Biographies,” The European Journal of LifeWriting 1  (2012):  41–57; Catherine Padmore, “The Tudor Paintrix in Recent Fiction,” in Recovering History through Fact and Fiction, ed. Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien, and N.A. Sulway (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 158–70; and Julia Dabbs, “The Role of Art in Recent Biofiction on Sofonisba Anguissola,” in Authorizing Early Modern European Women: From Biography to Biofiction, ed. James Fitzmaurice, Naomi Miller, and Sara Jane Steen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022). 5. Patricia Rubin, “What Men Saw: Vasari’s Life of Leonardo da Vinci and the Image of the Renaissance Artist,” Art History 13 (1990): 36. 6. Ibid., 34–36. 7. On the fictitious elements of Vasari’s life writing, see the prolific scholarship of Paul Barolsky, one prime example being his essay “Fear of Fiction: The Fun of Reading Vasari,” in Reading Vasari, ed. Anne B. Barriault et al. (London: Philip Wilson; Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005), 31–35. 8. Rubin, “What Men Saw,” 40. 9. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston C. de Vere (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1568/1996), 1:860, 2:466–68. 10. Katherine McIver, “Vasari’s Women,” in Reading Vasari, ed. Anne B.  Barriault et  al. (London: Philip Wilson;  Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005), 181.

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11. Vasari consistently refers to the artist as “Sofonisba,” and in one instance with the honorific “Signora Sofonisba”; he does refer to other women artists by their given name, but also will refer to male artists in this way, for example, “Michelangelo” or “Raffaello.” 12. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: An Historical Experiment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 50–51. 13. Fredrika Jacobs, Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa: Women Artists and the Language of Art History and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 58. 14. Ibid., 123–56. 15. Vasari, Lives of the Painters, 1:860. 16. Jacobs, Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa, 58–59. 17. McIver, “Vasari’s Women,” 182. 18. Vasari, Lives of the Painters, 1:860. 19. Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (New York: Random House, 1963), 93–95. 20. Jacobs, Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa, 18. 21. Vasari, Lives of the Painters, 2:466–68. 22. Michael Cole, Sofonisba’s Lesson (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2020), 29 and note 61. 23. Vasari, Lives of the Painters, 2:466. 24. Ibid., 2:467. 25. Ibid., 2:468. 26. Such as Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin Books, 1528/1967), 216. 27. Jacobs, Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa. 28. Ibid., 3. 29. Raffaele Soprani, “The Life Story of Sofonisba Anguissola,” in Life Stories of Women Artists, 1550–1800: An Anthology, ed. Julia Dabbs (Farnham: Ashgate, 1674/2009), 112–18. 30. Soprani, “Sofonisba Anguissola,” 117. 31. Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists 1550–1950 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976), 107 note 9. 32. Soprani, “Sofonisba Anguissola,” 112. 33. Ibid., 113. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 115. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 116.

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39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 117. The meeting of these two artists is documented by a Van Dyck drawing and journal entry, now in the British Library: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1957-­1214-­207-­110. 41. Ibid. 42. Chiara Montani, Chiara Montani: Writer and Artist, accessed February 26, 2022, https://chiaramontani.com. 43. Montani has since published Il Mistero della pittrice ribelle (Garzanti, 2021), described as a “romanzo” which features the historical Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca and an imagined female artist in a relationship with him. 44. Donna DiGiuseppe, Lady in Ermine: The Story of a Woman Who Painted the Renaissance—by Donna DiGiuseppe, accessed February 26, 2022, https://ladyinermine.com/. 45. Motani, Chiara Montani. 46. Donna DiGiuseppe, Lady in Ermine: The Story of a Woman Who Painted the Renaissance; a Biographical Novel (Tempe, AZ: Bagwyn Books, 2019), 364. 47. DiGiuseppe, Lady in Ermine, https://ladyinermine.com/. 48. Padmore, “The Tudor Paintrix,” 160. 49. Recent art historical scholarship (see, e.g., Cole, Sofonisba’s Lesson, 191) generally agrees that the subject seen in the “Lady in Ermine” is unknown. In addition, the painting may not even be by Anguissola, although it has been attributed to her in the past. The institution owning the painting (Pollok House, Glasgow, Scotland) believes it is a work by El Greco, whereas curator Leticia Ruiz of the Prado Museum argues that it is by Anguissola’s chief rival at the court of Philip II, Alonso Sánchez Coello (Natividad Pulido, “‘La dama del armiño’: ni del Greco, ni de Sofonisba Anguissola; su autor es Sánchez Coello,” ABC, October 22, 2019, https://www.abc.es/cultura/arte/abci-­dama-­armino-­greco-­sofonisba-­ anguissola-­a utor-­s anchez-­c oello-­2 01910211241_noticia.html). Interestingly, DiGiuseppe changed the cover image to a self-portrait of Anguissola in a slightly later, self-­published edition of the book (Lady in Ermine: The Story of a Woman Who Painted the Renaissance; a Biographical Novel, rev. ed. [n.p.: A Lady in Ermine Press, 2020]). 50. DiGiuseppe, Lady in Ermine, 364. 51. Chiara Montani, email message to author, March 2, 2020. 52. Chiara Montani, Sofonisba: Portraits of the Soul, trans. Verna Kaye (independently published, 2019), 263. 53. Ibid., 75. 54. Ibid., 65. 55. Ibid., 232. 56. Rafaelle Soprani, “Proemio” to Le Vite de’ pittori, scoltori et architetti genovesi (1674), n. pag.

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References Barolsky, Paul. “Fear of Fiction: The Fun of Reading Vasari.” In Reading Vasari, edited by Anne B. Barriault, Andrew T. Ladis, Norman E. Land, and Jeryldene M.  Wood, 31–35. London: Philip Wilson; Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005. Castiglione, Baldesar. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by George Bull. New York: Penguin Books, 1528/1967. Cole, Michael. Sofonisba’s Lesson. New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2020. Dabbs, Julia. Life Stories of Women Artists, 1550–1800: An Anthology. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. ———. “The Role of Art in Recent Biofiction on Sofonisba Anguissola.” In Authorizing Early Modern European Women: From Biography to Biofiction, edited by James Fitzmaurice, Naomi Miller, and Sara Jane Steen, 219–33. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. DiGiuseppe, Donna. Lady in Ermine: The Story of a Woman Who Painted the Renaissance; a Biographical Novel. Tempe, AZ: Bagwyn Books, 2019. ———. Lady in Ermine: The Story of a Woman Who Painted the Renaissance; a Biographical Novel. Rev. ed. N.p. A Lady in Ermine Press, 2020. ———. Lady in Ermine: The Story of a Woman Who Painted the Renaissance—By Donna Giuseppe. Accessed February 26, 2022. https://ladyinermine.com/. Jacobs, Fredrika. Defining the Renaissance Virtuosa: Women Artists and the Language of Art History and Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kris, Ernst and Otto Kurz. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: An Historical Experiment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Lapierre, Alexandra. “The ‘Woman Artist’ in Literature: Fiction or Non-Fiction?” In Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque, edited by Vera Fortunati, Jordana Pomeroy, and Claudio Strinati, 75–81. Milan: Skira; New  York: Rizzoli, 2007. McIver, Katherine. “Vasari’s Women.” In Reading Vasari, edited by Anne B.  Barriault, Andrew T.  Ladis, Norman E.  Land, and Jeryldene M.  Wood, 179–88. London: Philip Wilson; Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2005. Montani, Chiara. Chiara Montani: Writer and Artist. Accessed February 26, 2022. https://chiaramontani.com. ———. Sofonisba: Portraits of the Soul. Translated by Verna Kaye. Independently published, 2019. Padmore, Catherine. “The Tudor Paintrix in Recent Fiction.” In Recovering History through Fact and Fiction, edited by Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien, and N.A. Sulway, 158–70. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

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Pulido, Natividad. “‘La dama del armiño’: ni del Greco, ni de Sofonisba Anguissola; su autor es Sánchez Coello.” ABC, October 22, 2019. https://www.abc.es/ cultura/arte/abci-­dama-­armino-­greco-­sofonisba-­anguissola-­autor-­sanchez-­ coello-­201910211241_noticia.html. Rubin, Patricia. “What Men Saw: Vasari’s Life of Leonardo da Vinci and the Image of the Renaissance Artist.” Art History 13 (1990): 34–46. Soprani, Raffaele. “The Life Story of Sofonisba Anguissola.” In Life Stories of Women Artists, 1550–1800: An Anthology, edited by Julia Dabbs, 112–18. Farnham: Ashgate, 1674/2009. ———. “Proemio” to Le Vite de’ pittori, scoltori et architetti genovesi, n. pag. 1674. Sutherland Harris, Ann, and Linda Nochlin. Women Artists 1550–1950. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Translated by Gaston C. de Vere. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1568/1996. Wittkower, Rudolf, and Margot Wittkower. Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists. New York: Random House, 1963.

CHAPTER 12

The “Mother of the Theory of Relativity”? Re-imagining Mileva Marić in Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein (2016) Christine Müller



Introduction

Historically, women’s scientific achievements have often received little or no attention and acknowledgement.1 This is a well-recognised phenomenon for which the American historian of science Margaret W.  Rossiter coined the notion of the “Matilda Effect.”2 The term refers to the systematic suppression of women’s contributions to scientific research and the frequent crediting of women’s achievements to male relatives or colleagues.3 In the context of the second-wave feminist movement and the rise This chapter constitutes one of the chapters of my dissertation project on biofiction about historical female scientists currently undertaken by me at the University of Bremen. The dissertation project bears the working title: “Reimagining the Herstory of Science: Female Scientists in Contemporary Anglo-American Biographical Fiction.” C. Müller (*) Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_12

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of women’s history, feminist scholars like Rossiter began to examine critically the ways in which women’s contributions to science and their historical representation and thus cultural visibility had been impacted by issues of gender. Due to these efforts, numerous instances of the denial and male appropriation of women’s scientific accomplishments have been revealed: the cases of Austrian physicist Lise Meitner (1878–1968), American pathologist Frieda S. Robscheit-Robbins (1893–1973), and British crystallographer Rosalind E.  Franklin (1920–1958) are just some of the most prominent ones cited by Rossiter to show how history has forgotten, ignored, or misattributed the contributions of historical women to science.4 The little-known Serbian mathematician, physicist, and first wife of the world-famous scientist Albert Einstein, Mileva (Einstein-)Marić (1875–1948),5 has also been repeatedly referred to as one of these “unsung heroines” whose scientific contributions were unjustly subsumed under her husband’s name and who did thus not receive the credit she would have deserved.6 The question of whether and, if so, to what extent Einstein’s wife contributed to his ground-breaking theories is highly contested. Neither publicly nor in her surviving private correspondence with friends and relatives did Marić ever claim to have been her husband’s assistant or collaborator, let alone the (co-)author of his epochal papers, as some proponents of the “Mileva Story”7 have suggested.8 Nor do any ironclad proofs exist to date which would back up the claim that she was more than her husband’s emotional and intellectual supporter, a role that is generally granted to her by the traditional male-oriented historical narrative.9 And yet, given the abundance of cases in which women’s achievements in science have been inadvertently overlooked, purposely suppressed, or strategically misattributed, especially in marital research collaborations, as Rossiter reminds us,10 it is difficult indeed to simply dismiss the existing hints which point to Marić’s possible, even probable, involvement in her spouse’s scientific accomplishments. The controversy surrounding Marić’s scientific legacy has not only found its way into a number of historical and biographical studies but most recently captured the interest of novelist Marie Benedict. In her biographical novel The Other Einstein (2016), a “herstorical biofiction”11 whose title already points to its revisionary purpose, the American author uses both historical facts and creative invention to recover Marić’s little-­known life story, or rather a particular period thereof, as she concentrates primarily on the years that Marić spent at Einstein’s

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side. The novel covers a time span of almost twenty years, from 1896 when they first met up until their separation in 1914. Benedict employs her fictional privileges as a novelist not only to imagine the largely unrecorded interiority of her female protagonist and to fill in some of the lost details about her biography, for instance, regarding the unknown fate of the first child she had with Einstein before their marriage in 1903, a daughter named Lieserl (Benedict imagines that she died of scarlet fever while still a baby). Knowing full well that “the precise nature of Mileva’s contribution to the 1905 theories attributed to Albert is unknown,”12 Benedict utilises her poetic licence to explore within the realm of fiction the “what ifs”13 in the female subject’s story, namely the conceivable yet not provable possibility that Marić had played a substantial if silent and historically invisible part in her husband’s scientific successes and that she, like so many women in science history, was cheated out of the acknowledgement for it by her spouse. Indeed, in The Other Einstein, Marić is depicted not only as Einstein’s most important and intimate conversational partner, a “sounding board”14 for his ideas, but as his equitable research partner, a more skilled mathematician than himself who does the necessary calculations for all of his theories. Moreover, she is portrayed as the true originator and rightful author of what is probably Einstein’s best-known work, at least among laypersons: the special theory of relativity. Furthermore, the novel suggests that Einstein thwarted recognition of Marić’s accomplishments and even prevented her from a Nobel Prize nomination by intentionally omitting her name from their work and thus erasing her from cultural significance and historical visibility in order to foster his own academic ascent. Thus, The Other Einstein not only presents its readers with a new, female viewpoint on what was “a unique event in the history of science,”15 namely Einstein’s “year of miracles.” Within the scope of the fictional world, it changes the established facts about this very event itself. In Benedict’s narrative, Marić conceived of some of these path-breaking ideas and co-wrote all of the scientific papers that have been credited to Einstein, even though there is no conclusive evidence that this was really the case, as Benedict herself points out.16 This chapter takes a closer look at Benedict’s biofictional account of Marić’s life. In my discussion of Benedict’s “herstorical biofiction,” which will be guided by a critical feminist reading of the text, a particular focus shall be placed upon the author’s decision to use her artistic liberties as a

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novelist to explore in fiction the possibility that Marić was, indeed, the “mother of the theory of relativity.” As I will show, for the suggestions that the novel makes about Einstein’s lack of integrity as a scientist as well as the myths it creates around Marić’s scientific accomplishments and the traumatic loss of her daughter, Benedict’s speculative reconstruction of the herstory of science is not only ethically but also gender-politically extremely problematic. I argue that while apparently driven by the feminist desire to reveal Marić’s own intellectual brilliance and scientific productivity, Benedict’s fictional exploration of the “Mileva Story” in The Other Einstein serves one main purpose, namely to foster the tragic victim narrative that she constructs about this female figure in the history of science. Ultimately, this deliberate if fictional “misrepresentation” of history runs the risk of lastingly damaging both Marić’s and Einstein’s cultural afterlives.

 “Lost in Albert’s Enormous Shadow”:17 Shedding Light on Mileva Marić, Einstein’s Forgotten Scientist Wife Mileva Marić can certainly be called a marginalised and neglected figure in androcentric history. Marić had accompanied and supported Einstein both emotionally and intellectually during the difficult early years of his academic career, from his beginnings as a student of mathematics and physics at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in 1896 to his eventual rise to the highest echelons of the scientific community in 1914, when he was named member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and head of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin.18 During that time, she bore him three children.19 Yet, for much of the recent past, Marić has been reduced to a mere footnote in the life story of her famous husband. Little was known about her as a person and her relationship and marriage to Einstein, which lasted from 1903 to 1919, when the couple, who had separated in 1914, were divorced.20 It was only in the late 1980s with the discovery and subsequent publication of Marić’s and Einstein’s private correspondence and the speculation this prompted regarding Marić’s possible involvement in her husband’s scientific achievements that a sudden interest in her story emerged.21 As a qualified mathematician and physicist at a time when women were generally expected to become wives and mothers and universities still excluded women, Marić surely was an

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outstanding character herself and is today rightly celebrated as “one of the pioneers in the movement to bring women into science—even if she did not reap its benefits.”22 Marić was born in 1875 to a wealthy family in Titel, a town in the Vojvodina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Serbia. Her father, a civil servant at the Court of Justice, realised the extraordinary intellectual curiosity and mathematical talent of his daughter and saw to it that she received an education that was unusual for girls and women at that time.23 Miloś Marić moved his daughter from school to school, eventually even receiving special permission from the Ministry of Education to enrol her at the all-male secondary school in Zagreb, where she received top grades and was finally allowed to take advanced classes in mathematics and physics.24 Higher education was closed to women in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A fluent speaker of German, Marić moved to Zurich in 1896 in pursuit of further education as, after France, Switzerland was the second country in Europe to open its universities to female students and many, especially Eastern European, women eagerly embraced the chance to receive further education and degrees there.25 Overcoming the obstacles that patriarchal society had put in her way, she became one of the very first women to study mathematics and physics at the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School (now Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) at the turn of the century; in fact, she was the fifth woman ever to study at the Department VI A: Mathematics and Physics and was the only woman in her year of study.26 Albert Einstein (1879–1955), whose friend and eventually lover she would soon become, had begun his academic path in the same year as she had. Like Einstein, Marić had studied for a teaching certificate for secondary schools. Unlike Einstein’s, however, her dream of a scientific career did not materialise. She failed her final exams twice—the first time due to a low grade in mathematics, the second time apparently because she was suffering from severe emotional and physical distress following her first pregnancy. Having forsaken all plans for her doctoral dissertation due to a disagreement with her advisor and suffered the trauma of losing a child born out of wedlock (either to sickness or adoption), Marić seemed to renounce all of her academic ambitions and became Einstein’s wife and the mother of two further children, supporting her husband’s career from the home but never again taking up scientific work of her own.27 Like a growing number of historical and biographical studies, Benedict’s novel, which forms part of a recent boom of biofictions about women in

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the history of science,28 moves Marić from the margins of the historical narrative to the centre of literary attention. While Benedict’s choice of title, though understandable from a marketing perspective, is not unproblematic from a feminist point of view as it once again casts woman as “other,” it makes clear that this narrative is not, or at least not primarily, about Albert Einstein. The Other Einstein is about the woman who was “forced … into the background of Einstein’s success story”29 for much of history. “Herstorical biofictions” that recount the often untold and thus largely unknown stories of the wives (sometimes also girlfriends or lovers) of history’s “great men” are generally motivated by the feminist desire to “rescue” the chosen woman from the shadows to which she had been relegated both by her famous male partner and by traditional historiography and to rehabilitate her as a historical person in her own right.30 In Benedict’s case this aim is made explicit in the afterword: “The Other Einstein aims to tell the story of a brilliant woman whose light has been lost in Albert’s enormous shadow—that of Mileva Marić.”31 The biographical novel’s revisionist ambition also manifests visibly in its character constellation and narrative situation: Marić is the protagonist; Einstein, while central to the story, is reduced to a secondary character. Furthermore, it is through Marić’s viewpoint that the story is focalised: it is her thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, as Benedict envisions them, to which readers have access in this biofictional account of her life. Authorial and readerly interest in historically sidelined figures is not always (only) rooted in their own life stories but, at times, “stems from the alternative, privileged, or skewed insights and revelations their narratives provide into the (more) noteworthy personalities,” as Marie-Luise Kohlke observes.32 It is therefore not surprising that “retelling men’s lives from a female perspective is … [a] common literary strategy” in contemporary “herstorical biofictions,” as Ina Bergmann notes.33 Yet, Benedict’s narrative setup in The Other Einstein does not employ the shadowy figure of Marić merely as a “privileged insider” on her renowned husband’s story. To be sure, the novel constructs a new, female perspective on the historical person of Albert Einstein which allows for glimpses into an imagined account of his comparatively little-known private life and for the emergence of a very different image of the iconic male scientist from the one prevalent in the public imagination. However, Benedict’s literary text primarily foregrounds Marić herself: her activities, experiences, and relationships are clearly at the centre of the story.

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Benedict imagines her protagonist’s largely unrecorded inner life, which can, if at all, be gleaned in rudimentary form from the few letters in her hand that still exist today,34 and fills in some of the gaps in her story, especially regarding her private conversations and personal memories as well as some of the unknown facts about her life. The author employs her poetic licence as a writer of fiction also to “redistribute narrative power.”35 Indeed, as is not unusual for the genre of the biographical novel, The Other Einstein is written as an “autobiofiction,”36 in which the fictional Marić is bestowed with an imagined voice and granted the authority to tell her own story in the first person. Unfortunately, the voice that Benedict envisions for her protagonist does not sound very authentic when compared to Marić’s actual way of expressing herself in her surviving correspondence. Marić’s relationship to Einstein provides the main focus of this biofictional account of her life. Benedict tracks the development of their relationship in chronological order: the novel shows their first meeting as fellow students at the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School in Zurich in 1896, their developing friendship and scientific partnership, the romantic beginnings of their love and the sudden seriousness of their student life when Marić becomes pregnant, their married life during which they increasingly drift apart, and finally the dramatic ending of their relationship and their eventual separation in 1914, when Marić departs from their home in Berlin with their two sons to move back to Zurich, leaving Einstein behind with his soon-to-be second wife Elsa Löwenthal (1876–1936). For the strong focus that The Other Einstein places on Marić’s relationship to Einstein, Benedict’s “herstorical biofiction” can certainly be described as a fictional version of what Caitríona Ní Dhúill has termed “relational biography.”37 The novelist’s interest in Marić’s and Einstein’s relationship is understandable: “Theirs was a passionate affair and magnificent meeting of the minds that devolved rather dramatically over time.”38 That this biographical novel remembers Marić only in relation to Einstein is not unproblematic, however. Relational representations of historical women are, of course, not uncommon in female-centred biographical fictions, as Stephanie Bird observes.39 Yet, to focus on sidelined female figures by means of their relationships to well-known men, Ní Dhúill argues, “potentially re-situates historical women in the subordinate position they have occupied throughout history in any case.”40 Benedict’s approach to Marić’s life runs the risk of reducing this pioneering female scientist to the role she has been assigned all along: that of Einstein’s tragic wife.

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Re-imagining the Tragic Life of a Pioneering Female Scientist The Other Einstein is presented as Marić’s memoir, a personal recollection of the time she spent together with Einstein. The fictional Marić’s account of her life with Einstein is framed by two fictitious letters in her hand which constitute the novel’s prologue and epilogue and which date from the day of her death on August 4, 1948, suggesting that the female protagonist composed these shortly, indeed only a few hours, before her passing. The motivation for her memoir is not a reckoning with her ex-husband, even though the image that the novel creates of Einstein, as a man and a scientist, is extremely negative. What drives Benedict’s Marić to recall her common past with Einstein so shortly before her death, the novel suggests, is a desire to understand a deep-seated trauma that has haunted the female protagonist for decades, namely the tragic loss of her daughter and the renunciation of her own scientific ambitions, with neither of which she has ever come to terms, as she reveals in the prologue: The end is near. I feel it approaching like a dark, seductive shadow that will extinguish my remaining light. In these last minutes, I look back. How did I lose my way? How did I lose Lieserl? The darkness quickens. In the few moments I have left, like a meticulous archaeologist, I excavate the past for answers. I hope to learn, as I suggested long ago, if time is truly relative.41

Notwithstanding its relatively flat and cliché-laden prose, Benedict’s biographical novel effectively envisions some of the prejudices and difficulties that the historical Marić most likely had to face as an educated woman of Slavic origins, with a physical disability, who sought admittance to the men’s world of science in fin-de-siècle Switzerland. Yet, while alluding to her struggles and the support she received from family and friends to overcome the high hurdles that were put in her way, The Other Einstein is not written in the style of a female “success story,” as the prologue already suggests. Marić surely was a remarkable woman who, in her determination to receive an education and pursue a scientific career, overcame many obstacles at a time when members of her sex were usually not encouraged to develop professional ambitions of their own. Rather than as a pioneering woman in science, Marić has, however, often been remembered as a tragic female figure who, despite her extraordinary scientific and mathematical abilities, an encouraging and supportive family, and the promising relationship to a like-minded fellow physicist, achieved neither

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the professional fulfilment nor the personal happiness for which she had longed and worked so hard. In her biofictional account, Benedict, too, holds on to this tragic image of Marić. What the novel foregrounds is not her feminist triumph against patriarchal oppression, but her tragically failed emancipation and the dramatic failure of her scientific partnership with Einstein. As Marie Benedict herself puts it in the afterword: The Other Einstein tells the—still relevant—story of a scientifically talented and intellectually gifted young woman who is on her way to a promising career in science, but who, after an unplanned pregnancy, exam failure, and marriage, is forced to subordinate her own academic ambitions to her husband’s scientific career.42 Vividly and empathetically, it depicts a woman who gradually loses her own identity and over time succumbs to depression (the historical Marić did indeed suffer from severe depression and was frequently hospitalised in later years). The novel imagines the impact of the unwanted pregnancy on her professional aspirations, the trauma she must have suffered after the loss of her daughter, her loneliness in the roles of housewife and mother, her isolation from the world of academic learning and scientific research after marrying Einstein, as well as her increasing desperation over the maltreatment through her husband and his failure to live up to his promise of equality in love and work. It is the fictional heroine’s constant suffering, the many hardships she has to endure, rather than her extraordinary achievements, that dominate the story. The novel emphatically suggests that Marić might be known today as a great theoretical physicist had she not met and fallen in love with Einstein— not least by the way in which Benedict has chosen to structure her story. Beginning the novel with their fateful meeting indicates that the answer to the heroine’s questions in the prologue lies in her relationship to Einstein. Indeed, while the novel alludes to the misogynistic climate that Marić had lived in, it does not ascribe the failing of her educational and professional ambitions solely to cultural-historical circumstances. Nor does it suggest that it was the loss of her first child, Lieserl, which led Marić to give up her own academic aspirations, even though the novel believably envisions the traumatic effect of this experience on her life. The reasons lie rather, the novel suggests, in Marić’s love for Einstein. “Albert was that force that impressed upon my straight path,” the fictional Marić claims in the end.43 While the female protagonist hints at a certain complicity when she emphasises “I allowed him to trim away all the parts that didn’t fit his mold,”44 the novel largely presents Marić as the victim, with Einstein clearly as the villain. The image of Einstein that the novel paints through the fictional Marić’s eyes is an extremely harsh one, and it certainly

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unsettles the common perception readers might have of him. The historical Einstein was indeed an adulterous husband and a terrible father. His conduct in ending the marriage to Marić was brutal; the letter he wrote to her in which he dictates the conditions under which he would continue living with her can be found among the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein for anyone to read today and evidences the exploitative ways in which he treated his first wife towards the end of their marriage. Yet, Benedict exaggerates, for instance, when she shows Einstein physically harming his wife, as historian of science Alberto A.  Martínez notes in his review of the novel.45 Benedict deliberately opts for this critical stance towards Einstein46 and does not shy away from attributing another vicious and exploitative streak to her “evil version of Einstein”:47 she chooses to portray him not only as a lousy father and husband but, moreover, as a man who steals his wife’s scientific ideas and sells them as his own.

The “Matilda Effect” in Science: Exploring the “What Ifs” in Her Story Benedict’s feminist revisionism manifests visibly in the ways her biographical novel challenges the popular image of Albert Einstein as a “solitary male genius” who single-handedly changed our view of the universe. The Other Einstein closely follows the available biographical evidence about Marić’s and Einstein’s intertwined lives, imaginatively filling in what has not been recorded. The author herself assures her readers that she is “an exhaustive researcher”48 and that “whenever possible, in the overarching arc of the story—the dates, the places, the people—[she] attempted to stay as close to the facts as possible, taking necessary liberties for fictional purposes.”49 While most alterations that Benedict makes are minor ones, the novel also undertakes one rather dramatic departure from the established historical narrative when it depicts Marić not only as the one who provided the familial and domestic circumstances which allowed Einstein to develop his scientific ideas and build his academic career, but also as Einstein’s scientific partner and, furthermore, as the true originator and rightful author of the special theory of relativity. For several decades now, there has been an intensive academic and public discussion about Marić’s possible contributions to Einstein’s professional achievements, especially his path-breaking papers of 1905, which were written during their marriage. Working as a junior civil servant in the

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Swiss Patent Office in Bern at the time, Einstein released four pioneering papers—on Brownian motion (which gave rise to quantum theory), the photoelectric effect, the theory of special relativity, and the matter-energy-­ equivalence (E  =  mc2), respectively. All four papers, which formed the basis of his ensuing academic career, were printed in the prestigious scientific journal Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics) in the same year that he submitted his doctoral dissertation. His paper on the photoelectric effect as well as his services to theoretical physics would later earn him the Nobel Prize in 1921.50 That in this one year a young man of twenty-six years of age, who worked full-time as a patent clerk, published four extraordinary papers that revolutionised the field of physics, altering long-held ideas about space, time, and matter, raised doubts about whether Einstein wrote these papers by himself. Speculations ensued as to whether he perhaps had a secret assistant or collaborator in the form of his wife, who, like him, had been trained in mathematics and physics, as Martínez explains.51 The history of women in science shows that the question of what role Marić had played in Einstein’s scientific successes is indeed a legitimate and justified one. Even though Marić had never claimed that Einstein had deprived her of the professional recognition that was her due, it is well-known today that the contributions of women scientists have been systematically under-­ recognised in the past. The “Matilda Effect” is particularly pervasive among collaborative married couples, Rossiter stresses: when married scientists worked together, it was usually the wife who received less credit than the husband, “either deliberately for strategic reasons or unconsciously through traditional stereotyping.”52 The speculations surrounding Marić’s participation in Einstein’s scientific work gained momentum with the publication of a series of previously undisclosed letters. These so-called love letters which the two fellow students, aspiring scientists, and eventually intimate lovers exchanged between 1897 and 1903 cast a new light on the beginnings of their relationship and marriage. The letters showed that their strong mutual attachment was based not only upon the serious romantic feelings they had for each other, but also on a shared passion for science. Indeed, within these newly found “love letters,” Marić and Einstein’s courtship is interwoven with an intensive academic exchange of ideas about mathematics and physics. In some of the letters, those written around 1900, Einstein briefly alludes to scientific projects that the two of them apparently pursued together. He writes about “our research,” “our paper,” and “our work on relative motion,” among others.53 For many, these statements became

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proof of Marić’s collaboration with Einstein and even her co-authorship of his papers. Yet, proponents of the “Mileva Story” base their arguments not only on the “love letters.” They also point to rumours about Einstein’s apparent need of Marić’s mathematical expertise, Russian physicist Abram F. Joffe’s claim that the signature on the now-lost original manuscripts of the 1905 papers read “Einstein-Marić,” the Einsteins’ divorce decree, which awarded all future Nobel Prize money to Marić, as well as oral testimonies by contemporaries who had witnessed them working together to corroborate the claim that Marić had played a large and significant part in her husband’s scientific work.54 Historians of science as well as Einstein biographers have firmly rejected these claims on the basis of the vagueness and ambiguousness of the statements as well as their frequent hearsay status. For Martínez as well as Allen Esterson and David Cassidy, among others, Marić surely fulfilled the invaluable role of a “sounding board” for Einstein’s ideas and possibly, even probably, supported her husband by proofreading his papers or excerpting research literature for him, but they conclude that the available evidence does not allow us to assume that Marić contributed to Einstein’s work in more significant ways.55 As a novelist, Marie Benedict can use her artistic freedom not only to give her protagonist a voice and to imagine aspects that have not been handed down in historical records as regards Marić’s inner life and the lost details of her life story. Writing biographical fiction and not factual biography, Benedict is also free to imagine what she believes to be a possible, even probable, if not historically provable “fictional truth”56 about her chosen subject. It “is the novelist’s vision of life and the world, and not an accurate representation of an actual person’s life” that is of central concern to the writer of biofiction, according to Michael Lackey.57 In The Other Einstein, Marić continues to be scientifically active in her marriage to Einstein, despite the failure of her studies and the abandonment of her doctoral thesis. She struggles to maintain her identity as a scientist in addition to her roles as mother and (house-)wife. Together with Einstein, she works on some of the most pressing questions of physics and even discovers a new law of physics: that of the relativity of time and space. That Einstein apparently had the sudden inspiration for the theory of relativity, his “Eureka moment,” by staring at the medieval clock towers in Bern which he passed by every day on his way to work is a well-known popular myth.58 Benedict, too, constructs such a myth of origin for Marić: “Given how Mileva saw the world and how desperately she must have loved her daughter, isn’t it possible that the loss of Lieserl could have inspired Mileva

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to create the theory of relativity?”59 From a feminist perspective, the linking of the loss of the child with the idea of relativity may be considered one of the novel’s greatest weaknesses. Even though it is supposed to show Marić’s extraordinary talent and scientific ability, it is not an intellectual effort but an emotional experience that leads her to the theory of relativity. The novel thus not only repeats gender clichés (female science is different from male science), but also draws a problematic link between loss and achievement. When Marić tells Einstein about her idea, he is thrilled: “‘That’s brilliant, Dollie. Brilliant.’ … ‘Shall we write a paper on your theory?’ … ‘Together we could change the world, Dollie.’”60 Marić agrees mainly because she wants to pay tribute to her dead daughter with the article, not because she hopes to “change the world” or gain acceptance in the scientific community and possibly embark on a career for herself after all. Since she has no degree, she knows that she is completely dependent on Einstein and that even if it is her theory, her husband’s name must be on it as well. In the novel Marić collaborates with Einstein on all of the revolutionary 1905 papers: For the past eighteen months, we’d been working on three papers, although the relativity paper was largely my own. The others—an article on the quantum of light and the photoelectric effect, and another article on Brownian motion and atomic theory—were coauthored by both of us. On those two, Albert primarily drafted the theory while I handled the mathematics, although I was familiar with every word and idea.61

What she believes to be their “miracle year,” becomes Einstein’s annus mirabilis. Her husband’s promises of a congenial scientific partnership and a joint publication bearing both their names fades away as soon as the scientific community makes inquiries about his wife’s credentials. Soon Marić realises that Einstein, without fighting for her in the least, has simply removed her name from their joint research, including her paper on special relativity, and presented it as solely his work. “Why does it matter, Dollie? Aren’t we Ein Stein? One stone?” he says.62 Years later, when a Nobel Prize nomination for her paper arrives, Einstein is shown to have the audacity to pretend to be the paper’s creator in front of her: “So the old boys are finally recognizing me.”63 The Other Einstein is unambiguously subtitled “a novel” and Benedict emphasises the fictional nature of her text once more when she notes in

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the afterword that “certainly, speculation exists in The Other Einstein—the book is, first and foremost, fiction.”64 Despite being clearly marked as fiction, Benedict’s decision to make Mileva Marić the “mother of the theory of relativity” and to portray Albert Einstein as a plagiarising scientist who, without batting an eye, removes his wife’s name from their joint research work undoubtedly raises some serious questions about the ethical line between fact and fiction as well as the moral responsibilities of biographical novelists towards their historical subjects. To creatively embellish, supplement, or even change historical facts is the biographical novelist’s privilege, to be sure. Unlike biographers, authors of biofiction are not bound to the narrative conventions that guide the writing of lives in historiographical discourse, as Julia Novak emphasises.65 But when it comes to ethics, how far can authors take their creative liberties when representing historical and especially famous people, like Einstein, in fiction? Benedict stresses that “the purpose of The Other Einstein is not to diminish Albert Einstein’s contributions to humanity and science but to share the humanity behind his scientific contributions.”66 Yet, given the biographical novel’s potential “to shape popular perceptions of the past,”67 this deliberate “misrepresentation” of history, even if presented through the lens of fiction, might raise some serious doubts about Einstein’s true “genius” as well as his professional integrity, thereby running the risk of damaging his reputation and scientific legacy. Reservations about the ethicality of this depiction, as shown, for instance, by Jenni Ogden in her review, are certainly understandable.68 However, the novel runs the risk of creating a false image not only of Albert Einstein, but also of Mileva Marić. Topping the image of the betrayed wife with that of the betrayed researcher undoubtedly fits the narrative of the tragic victim that Benedict constructs in the novel. It certainly adds to the tragedy of Marić’s story. Yet, one might argue that, by making Marić the “mother of the theory of relativity,” Benedict runs the risk of overshadowing the real tragedy of her life, which is that Marić most likely never reached her full potential as a scientist (in the novel she still reaches it even if it is not publicly acknowledged). Furthermore, to suggest that Marić only agreed to publish her ground-breaking idea as a tribute to her dead daughter rather than out of her own ambition “to change the world,” and that she is desperate when her name is not included in the publication only because of the lost honour to Lieserl, certainly harms her reputation as a woman in science. It denies Marić, who had fought hard to enter and stay in the world of science, the will to participate in it for its own sake.

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Conclusion Even today, the history of science is still frequently imagined as a series of masculine achievements and discoveries. While names of scientists like Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, or Albert Einstein are widely familiar, when asked about women in the history of science, too often Marie Skłodowska-Curie is where the conversation begins and ends. With her biographical novel The Other Einstein, Marie Benedict certainly draws attention to a hitherto littleknown historical female figure in the history of science. Yet, the novel creates a rather problematic image of its heroine, rooting its portrayal of Marić in tragic victimhood and patriarchal oppression, and grounding her scientific achievement in emotional upheaval and bereavement, rather than focusing on her scientific genius. What the novel portrays is a woman who was systematically exploited by her husband, not a noteworthy scientist, a pioneer for women in science, who could have accomplished great things.

Notes 1. The phrase “Mutter der Relativitätstheorie” [Mother of the Theory of Relativity] is used by journalist Judith Rauch as the title of an article she had written for the German-speaking magazine EMMA. Rauch, “Mutter der Relativitätstheorie.” EMMA, May 1, 1990/2005. https://www. emma.de/artikel/frauen-der-wissenschaft-mutter-der-relativitaetstheorie263153. 2. The “Matilda Effect” is named for the American suffragist and feminist critic Matilda J.  Cage (1826–1898), who had suffered and first written about this phenomenon in the nineteenth century. Margaret Rossiter, “The Matilda Effect in Science,” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 335ff. 3. Ibid., 325ff. 4. Ibid., 328–30. 5. After their marriage in 1903, Mileva Marić added her husband’s last name to her own and was henceforth called Einstein-Marić or Marić-Einstein (the order of names is handled differently by historians and biographers indeed). Since the biographical novel discussed here covers not only the years after her marriage but also her life before that, I have chosen to refer to her as Mileva Marić throughout this study and to reserve the name Einstein for Albert. 6. See, for example, Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić, Im Schatten Albert Einsteins: Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1988); Senta Troemel-Ploetz, “Mileva Einstein-Marić: The Woman Who Did Einstein’s Mathematics,” Women’s Studies International Forum 13, no. 5

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(1990): 415–32; Evan H.  Walker, “Mileva Marić’s Relativistic Role,” Physics Today 44, no. 2 (1991): 122–23. 7. The notion of the “Mileva Story” is used by Allen Esterson and David C. Cassidy as an umbrella term for the various claims which argue “that Mileva Einstein-Marić contributed substantially to Albert Einstein’s scientific achievements, especially those of his ‘miracle year’ 1905, and that she should have been rightfully listed as a co-author of one or more of these papers.” Esterson and Cassidy, Einstein’s Wife: The Real Story of Mileva Einstein-Marić (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), xviii. 8. See the authors cited in Note 6, among others. 9. See, for example, Esterson and Cassidy, Einstein’s Wife; Alberto A.  Martínez, “Handling Evidence in History: The Case of Einstein’s Wife,” School Science Review 86, no. 316: 49–56; Martínez, Science Secrets: The Truth about Darwin’s Finches, Einstein’s Wife, and Other Myths (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). 10. Rossiter, “Matilda Effect in Science,” 330. 11. Ina Bergmann, “Historical Biofiction: Writing Lives in Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart (2003) and John May’s Poe & Fanny (2004),” in The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts—Literary Developments— Critical Analyses, ed. Michael Basseler and Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2019), 311. 12. Marie Benedict, The Other Einstein (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2016), 313. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 311. 15. Jürgen Renn and Robert Schulmann, Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters, trans. Shawn Smith (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), xii. 16. Benedict, The Other Einstein, 313. 17. This quotation is taken from  the  afterword of  The Other Einstein. See Benedict, The Other Einstein, 314. 18. Esterson and Cassidy, Einstein’s Wife, xii. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., xiii. 22. Gerald Holton, “Of Physics, Love, and Other Passions: The Letters of Albert and Mileva,” in Einstein, History, and Other Passions, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 191. 23. John Stachel, “Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: A Collaboration that Failed to Develop,” in Creative Couples in the Sciences, ed. Helena M.  Pycior, Nancy G Slack, and Pnina G.  Abir-Am (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 207.

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24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Troemel-Ploetz, “Mileva Einstein-Marić,” 421–22. 27. Esterson and Cassidy, Einstein’s Wife, 266. 28. The Other Einstein is, in fact, only one example of what seems to be an unprecedented literary curiosity about the history of women in science. Further examples include Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009), Carrie Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister (2015), and Jennifer Chiaverini’s Enchantress of Numbers (2017). 29. Renn and Schulmann, Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric, xv. 30. “Herstorical biofictions” which seek to reclaim the “lost lives” of historical women who had long been overshadowed by the famous men they had loved and with whom they had spent (part of) their lives seem to be experiencing a veritable boom in recent years. Even a rather cursory search reveals numerous examples that could be cited as evidence here, among them Lynn Cullen’s Mrs. Poe (2013), Anne Girard’s Madame Picasso (2014), Naomi Wood’s Mrs. Hemingway (2014), or Betty Bolté’s Becoming Lady Washington (2020). 31. Benedict, The Other Einstein, 314. 32. Marie-Luise Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus,” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 18, no. 3 (2013): 11. 33. Bergmann, “Historical Biofiction,” 320. 34. A couple of Mileva Marić’s private letters to Albert Einstein as well as to her friend and roommate Helene Kaufler-Savić (1871–1944) have survived and were published. For some of her correspondence with Einstein, see Renn and Schulmann, Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric. For the personal letters she exchanged with Kaufler-Savić, see Milan Popović, ed., In Albert’s Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić, Einstein’s First Wife (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). These letters certainly give an idea of what occupied her emotionally and intellectually. 35. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, “Histories and Heroines: The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction,” in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 14. 36. Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Biofiction,” 6. 37. Caitríona Ní Dhúill, “Gendered Narratives: ‘She’, ‘He’, and Their Discontents in Biography,” in Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 192. 38. Benedict, The Other Einstein, 323. 39. Stephanie Bird, Recasting Historical Women: Female Identity in German Biographical Fiction (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 5.

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40. Ní Dhúill, “Gendered Narratives,” 194. 41. Benedict, The Other Einstein, prologue, n. pag. 42. Benedict, The Other Einstein, 312. 43. Ibid., 308. 44. Ibid., 309. 45. Alberto A.  Martínez, “Marie Benedict [Heather Terrell], The Other Einstein: A Novel,” Physics in Perspective 20 (2018): 211. 46. Benedict, The Other Einstein, 321. 47. Martínez, “Marie Benedict,” 210. 48. Benedict, The Other Einstein, 321. 49. Ibid., 312. 50. Renn and Schulmann, Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric, xxiv. 51. Martínez, “Handling Evidence in History,” 49. 52. Rossiter, “Matilda Effect in Science,” 330. 53. Renn and Schulmann, Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric, 39 and 41. 54. Trbuhović-Gjurić, Im Schatten Albert Einsteins; Troemel-Ploetz, “Mileva Einstein-Marić”; Walker, “Mileva Marić’s Relativistic Role.” 55. Martínez, “Handling Evidence in History”; Martínez, Science Secrets; Esterson and Cassidy, Einstein’s Wife. 56. Michael Lackey, The American Biographical Novel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 67. 57. Michael Lackey, “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction,” a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 7, https://doi.org/10.1080/0898957 5.2016.1095583. 58. Martínez, Science Secrets, 206ff. 59. Benedict, The Other Einstein, 313. 60. Ibid., 217–18. 61. Ibid., 221. 62. Ibid., 235. 63. Ibid., 256. 64. Ibid., 313. 65. Julia Novak, “The Notable Woman in Fiction: The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 85, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1092789. 66. Benedict, The Other Einstein, 314. 67. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, “Taking Biofictional Liberties: Tactical Games and Gambits with Nineteenth-Century Lives,” in Neo-Victorian Biofiction: Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects, ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 3.

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68. Jenni Ogden, “The Thin Line Between Fiction and Fact,” Psychology Today, September 2, 2016, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ trouble-­in-­mind/201609/the-­thin-­line-­between-­fiction-­and-­fact.

References Benedict, Marie. The Other Einstein. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2016. Bergmann, Ina. “Historical Biofiction: Writing Lives in Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart (2003) and John May’s Poe & Fanny (2004).” In The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts—Literary Developments—Critical Analyses, edited by Michael Basseler and Ansgar Nünning, 309–22. Trier: WVT, 2019. Bird, Stephanie. Recasting Historical Women: Female Identity in German Biographical Fiction. Oxford: Berg, 1998. Cooper, Katherina, and Emma Short. “Histories and Heroines: The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction.” In The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, edited by Katherine Cooper and Emma Short, 1–20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Esterson, Allen, and David C. Cassidy. Einstein’s Wife: The Real Story of Mileva Einstein-Marić. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Holton, Gerald. “Of Physics, Love, and Other Passions: The Letters of Albert and Mileva.” In Einstein, History, and Other Passions, 2nd ed., 170–93. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben. “Taking Biofictional Liberties: Tactical Games and Gambits with Nineteenth-Century Lives.” In Neo-Victorian Biofiction: Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Historical Subjects, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, 1–53. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Kohlke, Marie-Luise. “Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus.” Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 18, no. 3 (2013): 4–21. Lackey, Michael. The American Biographical Novel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. ———. “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/0898957 5.2016.1095583. Martínez, Alberto A. “Handling Evidence in History: The Case of Einstein’s Wife.” School Science Review 86, no. 316 (2005): 49–56. ———. “Marie Benedict [Heather Terrell], The Other Einstein: A Novel.” Physics in Perspective 20 (2018): 208–17. ———. Science Secrets: The Truth about Darwin’s Finches, Einstein’s Wife, and Other Myths. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.

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Ní Dhúill, Caitríona. “Gendered Narratives: ‘She’, ‘He’, and Their Discontents in Biography.” In Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography, 171–209. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Novak, Julia. “The Notable Woman in Fiction: The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 83–107. https:// doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2016.1092789. Odgen, Jenni. “The Thin Line Between Fiction and Fact.” Psychology Today, September 2, 2016. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trouble-­in-­ mind/201609/the-­thin-­line-­between-­fiction-­and-­fact. Popović, Milan, ed. In Albert’s Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić, Einstein’s First Wife. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Rauch, Judith. “Mutter der Relativitätstheorie.” EMMA, May 1, 1990/2005. https://www.emma.de/artikel/frauen-­der-­wissenschaft-­mutter-­der-­relativitae tstheorie-­263153. Renn, Jürgen, and Robert Schulmann, eds. Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters. Translated by Shawn Smith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Rossiter, Margaret. “The Matilda Effect in Science.” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 325–41. Stachel, John. “Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: A Collaboration that Failed to Develop.” In Creative Couples in the Sciences, edited by Helena M.  Pycior, Nancy G Slack, and Pnina G.  Abir-Am, 207–19. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Stephan, Inge. “‘Ich glaube, daß eine Frau eine Karriere machen kann wie ein Mann …’ Das Leben der Mileva Marić-Einstein (1875–1948).” In Das Schicksal der begabten Frau: im Schatten berühmter Männer, 91–107. Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1989. Trbuhović-Gjurić, Desanka. Im Schatten Albert Einsteins: Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić. Bern: Paul Haupt, 1988. Troemel-Ploetz, Senta. “Mileva Einstein-Marić. The Woman Who Did Einstein’s Mathematics.” Women’s Studies International Forum 13, no. 5 (1990): 415–32. Walker, Evan H. “Mileva Marić’s Relativistic Role.” Physics Today 44, no. 2 (1991): 122–23.

PART V

Queering Biofiction

CHAPTER 13

Visceral Biofiction: Herculine Barbin, Intersex Embodiment, and the Biological Imaginary in Aaron Apps’s Dear Herculine Iseult Gillespie

But if the state and legal system has an interest in maintaining only two sexes, our collective biological bodies do not. —Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 31 This letter believes that all bodies are intersexed, yet dwells in the extreme of two bodies until the two burst and spread out into the floor. —Aaron Apps, Dear Herculine (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 2015), 8

In one of many visceral renditions of history in Dear Herculine (2015), Aaron Apps’s poetic response to the biography of the intersex person Herculine Barbin (1838–1868), the author imagines his subject’s own

I. Gillespie (*) University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_13

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relation to the past. Addressing Barbin directly, Apps writes: “when you were a child you would devour history texts, you’d take them and retreat into the chestnut grove filled with those little spheres of round nut meat. Little round things like gonads. Little tree foetuses ripe for the crunching.”1 These lines draw on a passage from Barbin’s own memoirs, rediscovered and published by Michel Foucault as Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (1980), in which Barbin describes retreating into chestnut groves to read as a child.2 Apps’s creative reworking of this scene explicitly links Barbin’s personal history to biology, as the pastoral moment of an intersex child reading in the woods sinks into foreboding imagery of ripening reproductive organs. More broadly, these lines suggest the intersection of Barbin’s biography with the medical history of gender. Born in southwestern France in 1838, Barbin was raised, and self-­ identified, as a woman.3 While writers have used a variety of pronouns, including they/them and s/he for Barbin, in this chapter I use she/her pronouns when referring to Barbin. Here I follow M. Morgan Holmes’s call to recognise and trust Barbin’s narrative of herself: “it is clear in Barbin’s own text that although she saw herself in many ways as an exceptional female, she did not perceive herself as necessarily beyond the boundaries of the female.”4 Barbin experienced chronic abdominal pain throughout her life, which motivated her, at the age of twenty-two, to seek out a doctor and precipitated the “discovery” that she had testes. After further medical, legal, and religious scrutiny, Barbin’s gender was legally assigned to male in 1860. Eight years later—forced to live as a man, isolated, and estranged from her former life—she died by suicide in her Paris apartment. Following her death, Barbin’s body was autopsied and circulated in the medical-scientific effort to determine the origin and meaning of sex. Barbin’s biography dovetails with a period of medical history that historian Alice Dreger terms the “Age of Gonads.” Aided by new methods for exploring the internal workings of gender, including improved microscopic technology and tissue sampling, medical men came to see gonads (ovarian and testicular tissue), rather than external sex characteristics, as the defining biological marker of sex.5 Apps references this gonadal logic, as well as Barbin’s subjection to the medical gaze, in his description of gonads “ripe for the crunching.” By placing this image of exposed internal organs in a scene from Barbin’s early life, Apps foreshadows Barbin’s

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vulnerability to the gonadal definition of sex, her ultimately fatal encounters with medical science, and the historic ramifications of her gender hybridity. Dear Herculine is, itself, a hybrid text that can be located at the intersection of poetry, auto/biography, and biofiction. The text functions as a collection of epistolatory prose poems addressed to Barbin, an autobiographical account of Apps’s own embodiment (Apps is intersex and uses he/him pronouns), a eulogy for a recently departed friend, and a visceral reimagining of Herculine Barbin’s life and afterlife. I use the term visceral to refer to Apps’s corporeally charged language and imagery, which he uses to invoke the internal organs or viscera of the intersex body. In addition, the term describes the profound, gut-wrenching connection that Apps continually performs with his biographical subject. By imagining his own body mingling with Barbin’s—their bodily fluids pooling together, their corpses oozing into each other—Apps collapses the boundary between self and other to stage a more intimate reckoning with the biographical subject. Each poem takes the form of an address, beginning “Dear Herculine …” These missives from author to subject tend to connect scenes from Barbin’s life to the author’s own lived experience, and to rewrite moments from Barbin’s memoirs, which were found alongside her body. In what follows, I contemplate Apps’s rewriting of Barbin’s life as a work of biofiction, in which details from Barbin’s daily life and her experience of medicalisation are used to illuminate and critique the medical history of gender as well as contemporary cultural and medical assumptions about intersex embodiment. Understanding biofiction as an expansive literary genre in which aspects of an historical figure’s life are reimagined and repurposed, I consider Dear Herculine as an experimental riff on the genre that amalgamates biography, poetry, memoir, and critique to re-tell Barbin’s story and make the intimate connections between author and biographical subject explicit. Throughout the collection, Apps blends first-, second-, and third-person address to evoke formally  the ways in which the borders between author and biographical subject mutate and shift, following the intimacy he proclaims with another intersex person who acts as both subject and muse. To illustrate Barbin’s connections to the medical history of gender and contemplate the wider phenomenon of the medicalisation of intersex bodies, Apps reworks different sources, including Barbin’s memoir and the medical documentation that proliferated around intersex bodies, such as clinical reports, genital diagrams, and microscopic samples of tissue. A full

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report on Barbin’s anatomy, accompanied by edited extracts of her memoirs, was first published by the doctor E. Goujon, who had obtained permission to perform Barbin’s autopsy lest science “lose the opportunity to make a study of it.”6 Responding to the dehumanising language that infuses medical-scientific accounts of Barbin’s body, Apps seeks new ways of representing Barbin as something other than fodder for medical science. He achieves this by repurposing and subverting the medical gaze, using biological language and imagery to propose a fuller, non-binary reckoning with Barbin’s story. Biological imagery is at the heart of Dear Herculine: castrated genitals, bloated gonads, flaking skin, putrefying corpses, and pooling bodily fluids are all recurring tropes. The abject quality of these bodily materials formally evokes the invasive history of the medicalisation of gender during the nineteenth century—including the internal exams, autopsies, and tissue sampling to which Barbin was subjected. Apps fictionalises aspects of Barbin’s life by foregrounding her somatic experience in scenes from her memoir, making the horror of her bodily discomfort and ultimate exposure to the medical gaze newly palpable to the contemporary reader. His depiction of Barbin’s medicalisation is not merely a historical project, however, as Apps’s own experience makes clear. As an intersex person, he writes that he is continually othered and misunderstood in medical contexts, in which invasive and oppressive practices continue to this day with regard to intersex bodies. In the absence of standards of medical care and comprehensive education on the spectrum of gender identities, infants who do not display dimorphic sex characteristics remain vulnerable to the subjective beliefs of doctors and fraught decisions by parents, which often result in medical “normalisation” surgeries shortly after birth. Those whose intersex traits do not “show up” at birth can later be subjected to “correction,” for instance, in the form of surgery or hormonal therapies.7 Dear Herculine continually references the historical background and contemporary ramifications of the medical construction of dimorphic sex. But Apps deploys biological language and imagery not only to echo, but to subvert the medical gaze. Throughout the text, Apps shows that the very biological matter that was absorbed into medical narratives about gender—gonads, genitals, tissue, chromosomes, and more—in fact defies categorisation as male or female. By staging a series of explosive encounters with the internal body, Dear Herculine refutes the logic that mapped maleness onto Barbin’s anomalous body and instead imbues the biographical subject with the capacity to defy a gendered read. Apps expands and

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dispels binary notions of gender that have long informed the circulation and reception of intersex stories. Through the language and imagery of biological profusion, Apps gives shape to the multiplicities of unorthodox embodiment and elicits a consideration of Herculine Barbin in all her corporeal complexity—a complexity that was disregarded in early accounts of her life. This chapter reads Dear Herculine as experimental biographical fiction that deploys a biological imaginary to represent Barbin’s life and afterlife. By biological imaginary, I mean the use of biology as a radical frame for representing the body of the biographical subject. Apps’s emphasis on Barbin’s somatic experience agitates a key convention of biofiction, what Catherine Belling calls a tendency to “psychologize material events, including persons produced as ‘figures’ rather than material bodies.”8 Rather than exploring the psychological interior of the biographical subject, Apps uses the biological imaginary to delve inside the body with the use of visceral language and imagery, deconstructing dominant medical-­ scientific discourses to forge alternative narratives of bodily alterity. I use the term “biological imaginary” to indicate the ways in which Dear Herculine uses images of biological multiplicity to dispel oppressive and deterministic notions of the biographical subject’s gender—and to suggest that biology functions as a source of formal and aesthetic innovation throughout Dear Herculine. I begin by laying out some historical and theoretical contexts. First I trace Barbin’s personal narrative as recorded in her autobiographical writings and consider the medical-scientific commentary that proliferated after her death. Following Foucault’s rediscovery and publication of Herculine Barbin in 1980, she became a prominent figure in theories of gender and sexuality. Secondly, I turn to Apps’s experimental / poetic biofiction in more detail, paying close attention to the ways in which the author deploys the biological imaginary to reframe what we know about Barbin’s life and to rework dominant medical narratives. I argue that Apps deploys a biological imaginary to pose alternative configurations of intersex embodiment, focusing on the use of gonadal imagery as a crucial aspect of that biological configuration. As an alternative history of Barbin and an experimental meditation on intersexuality, Dear Herculine shows us that the meanings of biology are never historically stable. Moreover, Apps suggests an urgent need to account for these alternative inscriptions of the body, at a time when intersex and other non-normative bodies remain vulnerable to pathologising logics and practices.

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Barbin in the Archives

What we know about Barbin’s early life today originates in her memoirs. Born to a poor family in 1838, Barbin grew up in the town of Saint-Jean-­ d’Angely in southwestern France. She gained a scholarship to the nearby Ursuline convent, where she excelled at her studies. In her autobiography, Barbin writes in melodramatic prose of her acute sense of bodily difference in the context of her all-female environments. For instance, she describes her pubescent embodiment as strikingly out of time: “My complexion with its sickly pallor denoted a condition of chronic ill health … my upper lip and a part of my cheeks were covered by a light down … this peculiarity often drew to me joking remarks that I tried to avoid by making frequent use of scissors in place of a razor.”9 At seventeen she moved to another convent school at Oléron, where she trained to become a teacher. As an assistant instructor in an unidentified girl’s school from 1857, Barbin fell in love with another teacher, Sara, and the two enjoyed a clandestine affair. While she documents ill health throughout her life, it was around this time that Barbin began to experience “intolerable” abdominal pain.10 Having reluctantly agreed to consult a doctor, she relays the encounter as a loss of control: “he wanted to examine me. As it is known, a doctor enjoys certain privileges with a sick person that nobody dreams of contesting.” After the examination, “the poor man was in a state of terrible shock!”11 While he did not inform Barbin at the time, the doctor had identified the source of her pain as underdeveloped testicular tissue. Another doctor, referred to as Doctor H, subjected her to further examination. It was during this meeting that Barbin apparently became aware of her intersexuality for the first time. That moment is somewhat glossed over in her text: “I shall excuse myself of entering into the minute details of this examination, after which science conceded that it was convinced. It now remained for [the doctor] to bring about the correction of an error … to do so, it was necessary to instigate a judgement that would rectify my civil status.”12 In June 1860, Barbin’s birth register was amended to male. From there, Barbin’s memoir progresses in a feverish register, moving through further medical exams, her gender reassignment under law and separation from her lover, her move to Paris in the hope of finding new employment, and the years leading up to her death. In Paris, Barbin laments, “can my isolation be more complete? Can my abandonment be more painful?”13 In February 1868, she asphyxiated herself using the charcoal stove in her apartment and was found dead by authorities. Suspecting

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death from syphilis, state medical officials examined Barbin’s genitals and granted Goujon permission to autopsy the body. Published in 1869, Goujon’s report documents Barbin’s anatomy in graphic detail, largely disregarding the written testimony that she left behind and instead seeking answers directly from her body.14 However, the tone of his report is not purely clinical. Rather, Goujon sets the scene of Barbin’s death with a narrative flourish: a mean bed, a small table, and a chair made up all the furniture in this place … a little earthenware stove, in which only ashes were left, stood in a corner with a rag containing charcoal. The corpse was lying on its back on the bed, partly dressed; the face was cyanosed, and there was a discharge of black and frothy blood coming out of the mouth.15

Goujon’s incorporation of dramatic details—the pitiful setting, smouldering ashes, and gurgling corpse—serves to portray Barbin as a grotesque subject. More broadly, the doctor’s morbid fascination with Barbin’s cyanosed face and effusive corpse, her genitals and internal organs, reveals the reliance of medical science on tropes of the monstrous and the mythical in accounts of anomalous embodiment.16 Compounded by the cultural fascination with non-conforming bodies, the indeterminate nature of sex and gender, the tragedy of Barbin’s story, and the grim circumstances of her death, Goujon’s report exceeded the ostensibly clinical domain and established a biographical tradition around Barbin that has long rendered fact and fiction inextricable. In the wake of her death, Barbin’s body rapidly assumed the symbolic force of what Jenell Johnson terms a “medical marvel.” For Johnson, medical marvels are products of the “intense symbolism” that has been applied to extraordinary bodies and unusual medical events since antiquity. A marvel “might be characterized by the density of cultural networks that enfold it in layers of meaning … yet a more crucial aspect of the marvel’s circulation is its translation between various discourses and cultural fields, and particularly the bidirectional translation between fact and fiction.”17 We see an example of this bidirectional translation in the accounts of Barbin that circulate through varied cultural fields. After her death she was marvelled at in the press, debated in medical-scientific and legal fields, and re-figured in fiction like Oskar Panizza’s 1893 story “A Scandal at the Convent” (and, much later, Jeffrey Eugenides’s 2002 novel Middlesex). Following Foucault’s rediscovery of her memoirs, Barbin’s a­uto/

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biography was resurrected and analysed by a range of critical theorists, including Judith Butler, Ladelle McWhorter, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.18 These texts and more make up an expansive array of biographical discourse on Barbin, testifying to the enmeshment of medical science, human biology, representation, and identity that her complex biography entails. For instance, post-mortem examinations of Barbin’s body elided her self-­ identification as female, overwriting her sense of her own embodiment to establish a pseudo-scientific account of her life as a “male pseudo-­ hermaphrodite.” As Dreger writes, intersex people “necessarily challenged what it meant to be female or male … In so doing they forced observers to admit presuppositions and to make decisions about the category of male or female—and they forced medical and scientific men to tighten up the borders” (emphasis mine).19 Through the story of Barbin’s non-consensual gender reassignment, which was reiterated/repeated in the medical literature that proliferated after her death, we witness the ways in which medical science chose to fix identity to the body and to fortify sexual categories rather than admit the expansive biological realities of sex and gender that intersex bodies materialise. While medical-scientific accounts of Barbin sought to stabilise the meanings of gender, the queer reparative tradition that begins with the work of Foucault reflects the inherent instability of these meanings. Foucault rediscovered Barbin’s memoirs while researching for The History of Sexuality at the French Department of Public Hygiene, publishing them in full in 1980 alongside his own brief biographical-theoretical introduction, historic timelines, medical and legal paraphernalia, and Panizza’s fictionalisation of Barbin’s life. In many ways, Barbin’s story appears to offer a microcosm of Foucault’s central scholarly concerns. Her life directly demonstrates the workings of medicine, surveillance, religion, and other disciplinary structures on the individual. In addition, her story exemplifies the workings of what Foucault called scientia sexualis, or the process by which (pseudo-)scientific claims are deployed for exclusionary political aims.20 And yet, Foucault’s account of Barbin’s life takes little interest in her implication in and production of power. Instead, he imbues her with the potential to slip outside power structures. According to Foucault, the institutional, all-female contexts in which Barbin lived—the convent, the school, the dormitory—were “monosexual” all-female environments, which fostered “sexual non-identity” and allowed Barbin to inhabit “a happy limbo of non-identity.”21 Foucault

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(who refers to Barbin using her family name of Alexina) thus frames Barbin’s early life as a time that was gloriously unregulated by sexual and gender norms: It seems that nobody in Alexina’s feminine milieu consented to play that difficult game of truth which the doctors later imposed on his indeterminate anatomy … One has the impression at least if one gives credence to Alexina’s story, that everything took place in a world of feelings … where the identity of the partners and above all the enigmatic character around whom everything centered [Barbin], had no importance. It was a world in which grins hung about without the cat.22

Foucault’s location of Barbin in this utopian space, in which sex and desire floated freely from the body and her bodily difference attracted no attention, reframes her story: from a life plagued by social limitations and gender designations to the tale of a gender-bending fugitive who only met restrictions later in life. The passage above also glosses over Barbin’s self-­ presentation (“if one gives credence to Alexina’s story”) as a chronically ill, melancholy, and nervous young person who appears to have been acutely aware of her difference, particularly during her sexual awakenings. Bearing in mind the importance of reparative modes of reading the past, I nevertheless remain wary of the romanticising strand that runs through Foucault’s theoretical-biographical account of Barbin and its simplification of Barbin’s own account of her life.23 For one, Foucault’s willingness to perceive Barbin as an embodied example of sex and gender “before” they come under the law indicates a tendency to celebrate her life to the point of discounting her formative material experiences. As previously noted, Barbin expresses a constant and often literally painful awareness of her bodily and sexual alterity throughout her memoir. While she writes frankly of her sexual encounters with women, she is also acutely aware of their taboo nature. My point here is not to disregard her capacity for self-­ determination, nor to discount the defiant nature of her sexuality. Rather, it is to sound a note of caution against accepting these relationships as evidence of a “non-identity” in which desire, gender, and sexual identity are untethered from the material body. Judith Butler also rejects Foucault’s “emancipatory ideal” of Barbin, arguing that his introduction to her memoirs denies her life important context. But in her chapter on Barbin in Gender Trouble, Butler focusses less on Barbin’s gendered body and more on the legal regulations that

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surround it: “Herculine is not an identity, but the sexual impossibility of an identity. Although male and female anatomical elements are jointly distributed in and on this body, that is not the true source of scandal. The linguistic conventions that produce intelligible gendered selves [i.e. the law] find their limit in Herculine.”24 This argument, that Barbin’s anatomy is not “the true source of scandal,” offers the social construction of gender as a key political claim—repeating Foucault’s elision of Barbin’s embodiment in all its fleshly complexity. More recently, intersex scholars have addressed this elision of corporeality in scholarly discussions of Barbin, departing from diagnostic views while keeping the material body in play.25 A crucial aspect of this reckoning entails affirming the corporeal mixing that Barbin herself claimed, while holding past and present medical-scientific practices to account.26 For instance, the work of scholars like Hil Malatino, Morgan Holmes, and Gilbert Herdt shows that disavowing intersex medicalisation need not come at the expense of exploring the biological body. Instead, intersex bodies in fact materialise the multiple meanings of biology beyond medical frameworks, pointing to the insufficiency of a purely medical or purely social account of embodiment. Across a variety of media and genres, intersex artists and activists have echoed this view of embodiment by looking inside the body—not to echo, but to refute the methods and logic of medical science. For instance, the body humour of intersex comics Amazon Jackson and Seven Graham, visual art of Dela Grace Volcano and Ins Kromminga, and the experimental filmmaking of River Gallo, all offer alternative logics of gender that articulate the rich spectrum of biological variation beyond the binary. In what follows, I explore the ways in which Apps’s Dear Herculine gives formal shape to the political claim of intersex scholars, artists, and activists: that biology retains multiple meanings beyond the binary, and that equity and care must be pursued with this variability in mind. Apps historicises, or filters, these claims through the story of Herculine Barbin, positing her as a figure with the capacity to resist without discounting her material, often traumatic, experience. By deploying a biological imaginary to concoct a visceral, experimental work of biofiction, Apps shows that the historical intersex body can withstand imposed, gendered meaning.27

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 Dear Herculine and the Auto/Biographical Body Dear Herculine troubles the formal conventions of biographical fiction by blending prose poetry, medical-scientific fragments, and autobiography, and by refracting the subject’s and author’s visceral experiences of intersex embodiment through each other. The relationship between authorial self and biographical subject has been much discussed as an epistemological problem in biographical narratives, with writers variously affirming or negating the possibility of reaching the “truth” of their subject.28 Dear Herculine is fundamentally concerned with the charged dynamic between self and other: both in terms of the performative encounter that biographical forms entail and the fraught relationship between the intersex body and the external world that Apps experiences first-hand. We see these related concerns unfolding in the opening prose poem, which maps an uneven relationship between public and private, self and other, internal and external worlds. Titled “A Letter Concerning the Layering of Shame onto Shame,” Apps writes of his teenaged efforts to separate his body from the outside world in order to mask his gender. He writes, “layers are preferable. I layer the space between others and myself as I proceed through my days, making sure that the façade of my gender is never broken.”29 Swaddled in loose clothing, avoiding the same bathroom twice, and agonised at the thought of anyone getting too close, Apps cultivates clear divides between himself and others: The confusion tightens below my skin like a vise, so I keep that confusion hidden below layer upon layer of clothing and shame. Clothing, shame, and all the borders I draw between myself and others using the objects and words that shape rooms. Clay against clay … and the bad blood bubbling its black black between the borders.30

These lines introduce two modes of embodiment that coexist, in tension, throughout the collection. Firstly, Apps writes of a body constricted by confusion and shame: internalised sensations made tangible through layers of clothing and the fortification of boundaries. These boundaries assume the bent of architectural containment, as seen in the image of rooms taking shape while Apps hides himself away. Secondly, the poem’s initial depiction of bodily compression gives way to a more recalcitrant mode of embodiment in its final lines. Between layers of clay upon clay, a frothing biological image emerges: “bad blood bubbling its black black between

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the borders.” While the bubbling liquid under consideration here is blood, Apps’s repeated emphasis on its blackness also readily evokes black bile and the unseen internal activities of our bodies that often remain shrouded in darkness. Black bile gushes through the entire text: staining tongues, charring skin, and oozing out of corpses. In humoral theory, an excess of black bile secreted from the spleen was thought to be symptomatic of a range of illnesses, most famously melancholy but also physical conditions like cancer. These humoral theories resonate with the ways in which bodily substances frequently assume an agency of their own in Apps’s visceral writing. In the passage above, for instance, black blood takes on an invasive proclivity, spurting through cracks and defying boundaries. In other words, biological matter is seen to pressurise, and possibly exceed, the conditions that constrict the subject. Images of biological profusion range throughout the collection, suggesting the strange agencies of biology that exceed disciplinary logics. Dear Herculine squeezes these two configurations of the body together—one compressed and confined, one uncontainable and perverse—to dramatise overlooked moments in Barbin’s memoir, and to link these moments to Apps’s own experiences. Take, for instance, the sequence of prose poems titled “A Letter Concerning the Formation of Shame Within Rooms,” which leads us through the rooms or disciplinary spaces referenced in Apps’s first poem. The Room poems transpose biographical details into dreamlike scenarios, progressing through eerie spaces where the body is classified or surveilled, including clinics, social encounters, changing rooms, and schools. Titled simply “First Room,” the first poem in the sequence depicts a doctor inspecting Apps’s genitals. “Second Room” recreates a scene from Barbin’s memoir in which she expresses her fear of undressing in front of others. “Third Room” brings us back to Apps’s own school days, squirming under the two-way mirror his coach erected in the changing room. In “Fourth Room” we move again to a scene in Barbin’s memoir in which she recalls her shame at becoming aroused by a nun. Finally, in “Fifth Room,” we witness Apps swimming with a friend, pulsing with fear at the thought of having to take his shirt off. The scene mirrors a moment in Barbin’s own memoir in which she expresses reluctance to expose her body at the seaside. Flitting between past and present, self and other, the Room poems angle Apps and Barbin towards each other, fictionalising certain scenes from Barbin’s memoir and explicitly connecting them to the author’s own life. In these ways, Apps

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experiments with the formal conventions of biofiction to further defy temporal and spatial boundaries. In presenting scenes from his own life—doctor’s office, school, social settings—Apps echoes and concretises the institutional settings of Barbin’s memoir. Barbin spent her life in religious and educational institutions, a fact that leads Marc LaFranc to read her life “unfolding across a series of cells—that is, of geo-physical boundaries and institutionally-imposed frontiers.”31 The setting and style of the Room poems reproduce these cellular configurations; each poem leading into an enclosed space with its own disciplinary logic (for Apps, even “the sea is its own room”).32 In this sense, the Room poems appear to echo in their structure the linear version of Barbin’s biography, which reproduces “the logic enacted by the disciplinary agents … whose diagnoses and pronouncements forcibly shaped and constrained Herculine’s life.”33 This logic informs the ways in which Barbin’s life has been presented to public audiences: from the first publication of her memoirs in Goujon’s report, to Foucault’s editorial choice to pair Barbin’s republished memoirs with a dossier of historic timelines and media and medical paraphernalia. Though starkly different in their approaches to Barbin, both examples testify to the ways in which her biography was packaged into digestible formats, presented in linear terms, and annotated from above. On a surface level, the Room poems appear to reproduce this linear approach. Formally, they emulate the ways in which Barbin’s life was forged in institutional cells, leading us from school to convent to uncomfortable medical and social encounters. Yet the content of the poems subverts this structure by allowing alternative, counter-disciplinary configurations of her body to seep through. Like the bubbling black blood of the opening piece, biology churns within each room: “blood boils red,” “muscle fibres twitch,” eyes “vibrate” out of skulls, organisms “teem.” With this slew of inexplicable bodily activity, Apps amplifies the mutability of biology and ultimately declines to produce a cohesive, gendered biographical subject. We see this refusal of cohesion unfolding in “Second Room,” which rewrites a seemingly innocuous scene from Barbin’s autobiography. Recalling a school trip to the seaside, Barbin describes her reluctance to strip off using agitated yet elliptical language: The sea was climbing rapidly. The indiscreet waves often reached to a height that one might have wished to save from immersion! What wild hilarity

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there was then! I was the only one present at this bathing party who was a spectator. What stopped me from taking part in it? I would not have been able to say at the time. A feeling of modesty, which I obeyed almost in spite of myself, compelled me to abstain, as if I were afraid that by joining in this sport I would offend the eyes of those who called me their friend, their sister!34

Barbin’s account implicitly suggests panic, punctuated by exclamation marks and a sense of the physical environment as threat. In rewriting the scene, Apps takes the latent dangers of Barbin’s version, including the rising waves that threaten to submerge and stir the genital area, her awareness of her outsider status and bodily difference, and her fear of exposure’, and renders these disturbances in order to render these disturbances on a more visceral level: You worry about what their bodies’ image will think of your image, screen on screen, so you stand behind the screen high on the beach with the dune grass. At a distance. In your eyes, blood pools … your nervous eyes thick bowls of black borscht egregiously salted with sea broth, teeming with infectious organisms in the massive slurp spit.35

Taking his poetic cue from her memoir, Apps further illustrates Barbin’s feelings of otherness but casts the scene as one of intense bodily disturbance. He imagines Barbin’s fears on the level of turbulent bodily activity, translating her implicit panic into the visceral responses of sobbing, shaking, and physically overflowing with agitation. Visceral responses are overpowering, intuitive, and embodied reactions that, in this case, elevate and intensify Barbin’s every-day experience. By focusing on his subject’s capacity for visceral experience, Apps confounds the medico-historical attempt to fix Barbin as an anaesthetised specimen and emphasises an alternative register of embodiment that evades the traditional archive. Throughout Dear Herculine Apps portrays Barbin as painfully aware of her alterity, terrified but also thrilled by her body, and continually agitated by the stifling rules of her surroundings. In this depiction, Barbin encapsulates the impossibility of reconciling one’s own unruly body to the conditions that seek to define it. For instance, Apps’s depiction of Barbin’s discomfort as overwhelming, infectious, and distorted—her eyes thick bowls of salted sludge “teeming with infectious organisms”—suggests that the interaction of intersex individuals with their social surroundings produces an array of non-normative effects including a sense of

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extraordinary embodiment, instability, and toxicity.36 In these ways, Dear Herculine reworks moments in Barbin’s memoir to shape and spectacularise the affective contours of the subject’s alienation. Apps reinforces this experience of intersex alienation by documenting his own intense sense of otherness in the world. Eschewing authorial distance from the subject, Apps frequently represents his and Barbin’s emotional experience as coterminous: “my body breathes fluid out into your body, Herculine. My body breathes your breath through your memoirs. We who are intersex leak-breathe through our animal pores such articulating slime. We consume and are consumed.”37 Such suggestions of mutual consumption are formally reproduced in the slippage between first, second, and third person throughout Dear Herculine. While Apps’s authorial voice is most frequently conveyed through “I” and Barbin is typically addressed as “you,” Apps’s occasional use of the third person troubles the fixity of these identifications and testifies to the ever-shifting positions of subject and object in his experimental biographical project. These images and pronouns also suggest an experience of abjection, or an encounter with external bodies and substances that “expose[s] the border between self and other as constituted and fragile, and threaten[s] to dissolve the subject by dissolving the border,” to use Iris Young’s phrase.38 Apps evokes this dissolution through his central image of the corpse, a figure that materialises porous boundaries not only between life and death, but between self and other. According to Julia Kristeva, “corpses show me (it) whatever I thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit at what life withstands … on the brink of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.”39 Dear Herculine lingers on that border between life and death from the beginning, with the first prose poem declaring “this book is written from death. And what if we are already biological? What if we are already compost?” (emphasis mine).40 Here the language of dissolution echoes the life cycle of the physical text itself: paper already mulching into compost, the living already turning towards oblivion. The lines also capture the deterioration of the human body—a shifting, organic process that informs Dear Herculine’s re-imagining of an affronted historical figure. In contrast to the clinical fetishisation of Barbin’s corpse, Apps clarifies his interest in the corpse as an active presence that continues to disturb the present: “I don’t mean to fetishize your death, I mean to say we are both corpses in a way. I mean to say we always already were animals dying in the soil.”41 Apps reinforces this deathly identification with the subject by continually referring to

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himself and Barbin as corpses or corpse-like: “we are bloody meat, disgorged tubesteaks,” “we are related to all that is dying and dead,” “[we are] thick corpse substances drooping forth.”42 In “A letter concerning our bodies as corpses,” Apps writes: These letters are the memory of two bodies coupled until amalgamated by putrefaction. Two hermaphroditic bodies tied to each other’s corpses mouth-to-mouth, limb-to-limb, with an obsessive exactitude in terms of how the parts correspond. A dull black-blooded chamber music that runs through all the chambers.43

Among these amalgamated bodies, various biological forms are discernible: mouths, limbs, bubbles of blood. On one level, these corresponding parts exemplify Apps’s detachment of parts from wholes throughout the collection, reinforcing his poetic tendency to untether biological matter from stable human figures in order to undermine any attempts to “fix” biology. But the author also admits an “obsessive exactitude” in how these parts might fit together in unorthodox ways. The language and imagery of imperfect coupling recurs throughout the text: broken two-way mirrors, choked channels of communication, and glued-together orifices that sputter but do not necessarily speak, all suggest that the encounter between author and biographical subject is an abject, viscerally charged event. In another poetic moment that also reads like an authorial manifesto, Apps writes: “this text appropriates and refigures a hermaphrodite so that I might describe, poorly, myself. In the process I learn that the hermaphrodite also appropriates me. Such strange acts of cannibalism in the act of seeking out another body like one’s own.”44 Here, he draws our attention to the ways in which his biographical project cannot be one-directional: in imaginatively figuring the life of another, the author of biofiction re-­ encounters and refigures themselves. In these ways, Dear Herculine challenges the bodily, temporal, and spatial boundaries that have traditionally structured biological forms. As we see from the unruly configurations of embodiment that range across the text, Apps places biology at the centre of this formally innovative project. In the following sections, I explore a key biological trope that clarifies the possibilities of this biological imaginary for representing intersex embodiment and enhancing our understanding of Herculine Barbin: the gonads.

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Gonadal Logic and the Reimagining of Gendered Subjects “When I do think about myself,” Apps writes, “I think about a history of bodies. I think about the small histories of my own body, the histories inside each organ, each gonad.”45 Here the poet takes a microscopic view of the past, zooming in on histories nestled within human biological matter itself. By deploying this microscopic view, Apps references and subverts scientific methods that were used to peer inside Barbin and other intersex bodies: namely the gonadal understanding of sex, and the technology that facilitated that understanding. In the mid-nineteenth century, improved microscopic technology and more precise methods of preparing human tissue for inspection facilitated close examination of gonadal tissue.46 This popularised the gonadal definition of sex, which departed from the earlier focus on genitalia and secondary sex characteristics to emphasise ovarian and testicular tissue as definitive markers of sex and gender. Gonadal logic stemmed from the evolutionary notion that the sexes were defined by reproductive roles, as well as the gonads’ physiological role in the development of characteristics like hormones and body shape.47 This decisive turn inwards—away from external features and towards internal worlds—went hand in hand with the dehumanisation of intersex bodies as fungible, inanimate specimens. As Dreger explains, the adjustment of the medical gaze from external to internal characteristics depended on the death and exploitation of the subject-specimen: By the end of the nineteenth century, the gonadal definition of true sex meant that “truth” was determined by the nature of the gonads, even if that “truth” were invisible and unsuspected in a living patient. Furthermore, the only true hermaphroditism would exist on a microscope slide after the death or castration of the person from whom the sample came.48

Apps references these overlapping historical contexts—the gonadal definitions of sex, the visual and scientific role of the microscope, and the sampling of dead bodies that became routine in the nineteenth century—in a poem titled “A Letter Within a Letter Concerning the Chestnut-Like Gonads.” The piece opens with a visual image of the internal body, a “PHOTOGRAPH OF HISTOLOGIC (MICROSCOPIC) SECTIONS OF A GONAD FROM THE TURN OF THE 20TH CENTURY PROVIDED BY SCIENTISTS AS EVIDENCE OF THEIR ALLEGED

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CASE OF ‘TRUE’ HERMAPHRODITISM” (capitalisation in original).49 Visually presenting itself as a label on a diagram, this image-text pairing might at first appear to originate from a medical science archive. However, on the false label, Apps displaces clinical language with a blazing critique: “ACCORDING TO THIS METHOD (THIS LOGIC) THE ONLY POSSIBLE ‘TRUE HERMAPHRODITE’ BEING A DEAD OR CASTRATED ONE AFFIXED TO THE SURFACE OF A MICROSCOPIC SLIDE.”50 The image of human tissue effectively distils the history of dissection and microscopic investigation that were deployed in the medicalisation of sex, while Apps’s accompanying text makes explicit the violence inherent in that pursuit. By drawing our attention to the fact that these investigations of gender were predicated on the death, dissection, and distribution of the intersex body, Apps underscores the ways in which intersex bodies were denied recognition in life and rendered fungible under the medical gaze. While its human and historic origins are unclear, Apps’s image of human tissue nevertheless encapsulates the paradoxical position of writing and reading about Herculine Barbin in the present. “Affixed to the surface of a slide,” the gonadal image is both visceral and abstract: a literal slice of human flesh, but also a non-figurative entity detached from any recognisably human source. The medical-scientific approach to Barbin contributes to the image’s paradoxical position as a simultaneously visceral and abstract object. While the medical men who examined Barbin were fundamentally concerned with the visceral, with the very entrails of the subject, their reports are structured by a desire to abstract Barbin into scientific object and specimen. Dear Herculine echoes and subverts this history by entangling the visceral and the abstract.51 Phrases like “flooding corpulence,” “cream contortion,” “gonad flux,” “vomit-flood,” and “rotting blood cocoon” evoke the disintegrating experience of abjection through a deluge of biological stuff while refusing a concrete, figurative, biographical subject. But with this use of biological language and imagery, Apps also elicits a visceral response that makes the formerly abstracted body newly present to us. These stark biological images do not easily map onto traditional understandings of the human form. Rather, they work to produce new configurations of the gendered body that defy medicalised, binary definitions of sex and their attendant logic of gender fixity. Take “A Letter Within a Letter Concerning the Chestnut-Like Gonads,” in which microscopic

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imagery of gonadal tissue retains a mark of deep ambivalence. The tissue fails to register visual traits of the masculine, feminine, or indeed the human, and instead might be more readily likened to the cross section of a chestnut or other non-human objects (it is steak-like, map-like, bacteria-­ like). The subsequent lines of the poem continue to detach gonads from gendered meaning: Small lovable cells that spread thick, slime butter. A nut lard that vibrates, a dark fruit. Kill the thing, cut open the dead, get at its essence. Cut and biopsy the autopsy, declare the gender. Essence as if sex could be defined by a few cells in a profuse space.52

The comparison of gonads to ripening fruit echoes the scene in which Apps re-writes Barbin’s recollections of reading among the chestnut trees. While the bruised fruit protecting a dark kernel implies the vulnerability of Barbin’s body to invasive gazes and procedures, its capacity to “spread” and “vibrate” gives shape to Apps’s poetic vision of Barbin’s body as active biological refuse rather than specimen; as matter imbued with the capacity to emit strange and affecting messages. Dear Herculine can be read as an attempt to translate these messages into literary form, re-animating accounts of Barbin with a flurry of organic activity. In the passage above, the body is constellated through competing images of essence and profusion. Under the view of the microscope, individual cells are typically examined for essential truth. Yet Apps imagines that they become spreadable like butter on a slide, their form thick, mutable, and leaving slick fatty imprints. With this distended microscopic imagery, Apps deploys a central conceit of the biological imaginary by subverting medical-scientific methods to stage an alternative encounter with the affronted body. Rather than utilising the microscopic perspective to determine the nature of Barbin’s gender, the poem suggests that cutting, biopsy, and autopsy all fail to account for the complexity of gendered identity. Ultimately, attempts to determine the essence of gender result in the proliferation of biological meaning: with images of spreading cells and trembling gonads, Apps suggests possibilities not of gender rigidity but multiplicity and instability. Apps’s subversion of the medical gaze, from determinism to unruliness, fixity to profusion, in turn gives formal shape to the ironic outcomes of scientific inquiries into sex and gender across time. As Ellen Samuels

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demonstrates, the pursuit of bodily classification that accelerated in the nineteenth century resulted neither in certainty nor in concrete terms of identification, but in confusion, proliferation, and even dissent. Ironically, nineteenth-century attempts to fix the biological definition of sex only resulted in an “expanded field of ambiguous bodies [which] created new categories of confusion and contested meaning.”53 In other words, the more medical science investigates the sexed body, the more biological variations of sex emerge. A consideration of gonadal imagery throughout Dear Herculine testifies to these shifting, fugitive meanings of biology under scrutiny. In one poem, gonads are placed in a literally fluid setting: “each gonad a fruit at the bottom of the river that is never the same river twice.” The setting of the gonads within an ever-changing river brings Heraclitan notions of flux as a constant condition of existence to bear on Apps’s understanding of gender. To destabilise the nineteenth-century logic that declared the gonads to be essentially male or female and framed them as the fixed “source” of gender, Apps sets biological matter in motion. In addition to referencing Barbin’s memoirs, Foucauldian biopolitics, and nineteenth-century documents, Apps’s capacious citational field incorporates classical references as another historical and mythological frame for understanding Barbin’s story. For instance, his descriptions of gonads as “‘perfect,’ round bodies that replicate the ‘divine’” (redactions in original) and as “tiny spreading spheres”54 recall Plato’s account of  Aristophanes’ myth of the three primordial genders. Each gender corresponded to a celestial sphere (with the male born of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the androgyne born of the moon), and each were born with two faces and two sets of genitals and limbs. When Zeus spliced them in two, the separated androgyne became heterosexual couplings while the separated male and female spheres became homosexual couplings. According to Michael Groneberg, the story of three sexes provides an origin myth not only for inherent desire but for binary gender, which was taken up and transformed by nineteenth-century sexologists’ theories of third sexes. While sexologists like Magnus Hirschfeld used “third sexes” as an umbrella term for homosexuals, intersex people, and transvestites (rather than using the separated third sex as an explanation for heterosexual desire, as in Aristophanes’s myth), Groneberg argues that nineteenth-­century medical men used these early gender epistemologies to “actualize” the myth of binary gender as well as inherent gender and desire.55 By striking out the description of the primordial spheres as “perfect” and “divine,” Apps formally evokes the futility of attempting to determine an origin point for

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gender, despite the persistence of this attempt in cultural and medical narratives alike. By transforming the gendered orbs into “spreading” spheres, Dear Herculine replaces deterministic definitions of sex and gender with wayward gonadal imagery that defies gendered interpretations. The capacity of Apps’s biological imaginary to signal gender multiplicity has significant ramifications not only for historical understandings of gender, but for contemporary understandings of Herculine Barbin as a figure who has been reduced to medical logics, misgendered, and deprived of her complex identity by those who branded her a “male pseudohermaphrodite.” Through poetic meditations on gonads, human tissue, and other internal bodily materials, Apps references the oppressive history of the Age of Gonads, suggests the ways in which gonadal logic shaped post-­mortem investigations into Barbin’s body, and emphasises the unstable historical meanings of biology. These imaginative depictions of intersex embodiment have implications for the ways we view gender and intersexuality today, particularly the ways in which gender identity is still mapped onto internal bodily matter in both medical and lay contexts. While gonadal definitions of sex have receded, modern medical ideas about gender remain reliant on deterministic conceptions of the internal body. Ellen Samuels argues that with the discovery of sex-linked chromosomes in the twentieth century, both medical-scientific and popular understandings of gender became further determined by dimorphic logic.56 But chromosomal definitions of sex are far from absolute. Despite the cultural solidification of the simplified scientific notion that females have XX chromosomes and males have XY chromosomes, thousands of human bodies— such as people born with one sex chromosome (sex monosomies) or three or more sex chromosomes (sex polysomies)—reveal the untenability of this claim. Nevertheless, the fantasy of genetically determined dimorphic sex pervades contemporary medical-scientific practices, ranging from athletes’ sex testing to the subjection of infants with ambiguous sex characteristics to non-consensual normalising surgery. In one of the few investigations into medical “normalisation” of intersex infants, the Human Rights Commission of San Francisco deemed medical interventions as human rights abuses that violated the child’s right to autonomy and integrity: “Normalizing interventions deprive intersex people of the opportunity to express their own identity and to experience their own intact physiology.”57 Organisations such as interACT and the Intersex Campaign for Equality continue to work against this non-consensual medicalisation, as well as

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social stigmatisation and the erasure of intersexuality from public life. Based on research by Fausto-Sterling, interACT estimates that 1.7% of people are born intersex—far higher than a chance of being born an identical twin (0.3%) or with red hair (0.5%).58 In light of  this, the lack of research on intersex experiences is striking. To date, the largest study of intersex adults in the US focused on 179 people. Within this small sample size, the researchers found that 43% of participants rated their physical health as fair/poor and 53% reported their mental health as fair/poor. The participants were found to have significantly higher than typical diagnosis of depression, anxiety, arthritis, and hypertension, and over a half reported “serious difficulty” with cognitive tasks.59 These disparities may be attributed to poor access to healthcare as a result of medical stigmatisation and lack of knowledge about intersex bodies and care.60 In these ways and more, the cultural and medical focus on dimorphic sex continues to erase the rich spectrum of intersex biology and experience, and to contribute to a system in which intersex health is obstructed and self-determination is suppressed.61 Intersex and queer activism hinges on a rejection of these binary structures by affirming the biological realities of sexual and gendered variance. It is to  this variance that  Dear Herculine also attends, drawing together the past and present treatment of intersex bodies in a poetic refusal of determinism. Apps’s creative engagement with biofiction as a way of re-imagining Barbin’s life and afterlife involves affirming and giving shape to biological variance through experimental forms. The resultant text refutes cultural logics that seek to prescribe and determine the meanings of biology.

Coda I have argued that Dear Herculine challenges the formal conventions of biography and contributes to our understanding of gender diversity by deploying a distinctly biological imaginary. Through the use of scrambled temporal and bodily boundaries, polyvocality, capacious and interdisciplinary citation, blended generic conventions, and varied registers of address, Apps demonstrates the impossibility of locating stable biographical truths and the value of authorial imagination, particularly when it comes to affronted bodies that have been archived in service to normative agendas. Dear Herculine declines to present either a cohesive biographical subject or a linear narrative of Barbin’s life, instead reimagining scenes from Barbin’s memoir and her position in history by deploying a

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biological imaginary. By drawing on the oppressive logics of medicalisation, such as microscopic technology and the medical gaze, Apps formally echoes the ways in which Barbin’s body was distorted by powerful fantasies of gender fixity. And yet, Apps does not wholly disavow the medical gaze. Rather than bypassing a consideration of biology to frame Barbin as a gender fugitive or to emphasise the socially constructed nature of embodiment, Apps takes an active interest in the capacity of biology to exceed deterministic frameworks. At the centre of his experimental biofictional project, Apps places alternative bodily morphologies  which transgress the boundaries of male/ female and ultimately scramble a traditional gendered read. The text exemplifies transgression on a formal level by straddling the conventions of poetry, memoir, auto/biofiction, and critique. This blurring of boundaries formally evokes the transgressions that intersex bodies materialise. The association of intersex bodies with boundary crossing is integral to the arguments and practices of many intersex artists, activists, and theorists, who seek to destigmatise bodies that defy gender dimorphism and to celebrate their transgressive potential. As the visual artist and “gender abolitionist” Dela Grace Volcano proclaims, “I … amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body … I believe in crossing the [gender] line as many times as it takes.”62 Such aesthetic practices give shape to arguments that intersex scholars and activists have identified as fundamental to the fight for intersex rights: the recognition of the biological fact that there are multiple genders, the defiance of scientifically imposed definitions of male/female, and the pursuit of equity. In his experimental biofictional account of Barbin’s life, Apps contributes to these arguments by deploying a distinctly biological imaginary, one which deconstructs the scientific logics imposed on Barbin’s body while testifying to the most visceral aspects of her complex corporeality and finding kinship in abjection. Ultimately, Dear Herculine offers a frame for contemplating biology beyond imposed, dimorphic understandings of sex. In this space, the transformative and imaginative potential of life writing might not always be thought of as arching towards resolution or full knowledge of the gendered subject. Rather, in its visceral moments of disturbance, it enacts the refusal of traditional systems of and expectations for representation.

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Notes 1. Aaron Apps, Dear Herculine (Boise: Ahsahta Press, 2015), 27. 2. Barbin describes reading as a refuge from the melancholy that infused her early life. Growing up in rural France in the 1840s, she writes that history “distract[ed] me from the vague sadness that then dominated me completely. How many times did I excuse myself … to walk alone with a book in hand, on the magnificent paths of our beautiful garden, at the end of which there was a little wood planted with dark, dense chestnut trees!” See Herculine Barbin, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage, 1980), 8–9. 3. M.  Morgan Holmes, “Locating Third Sexes,” Transformation: Online Journal of Region, Culture and Societies, no. 8 (2004): n. pag. 4. Ibid. 5. See Alice Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 139–167. 6. See E. Goujon, “A Case Study of Incomplete Hermaphroditism as a Man,” Journal de l’anatomie et de la physiologie de l’homme, 1869, 609–39. Translated by Foucault and republished in Barbin, Herculine Barbin, 129. 7. Intersex scholars and activists have continually drawn attention to the ways in which intersex babies are considered outside the category of the fully human, only admitted with the widespread but unregulated acts of medical intervention into infant DSD (disorders of sex development). As Holmes writes, “intersexed infants and children face a prevailing perception that they are so seriously damaged it is impossible even to conceive of admitting them to the category of personhood without performing extensive and immediate medical and surgical intervention on them. The birth of an intersexed child has until very recently been described with near unanimity in the medical literature as a crisis, with these alarmist tones calming only very recently in favour of other, more subtle means of promoting immediate surgical intervention. See Holmes, “Locating Third Sexes,” n. pag. 8. Catherine Belling, “The President’s Glands: Somatic Interiority and the Referents of Biographical Fiction in American Adulterer,” a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 60. 9. Barbin, Herculine Barbin, 26–27. 10. Ibid., 51. 11. Ibid., 68–69. 12. Ibid., 78. 13. Ibid., 103. 14. As Rosemary Garland Thomson points out, the disabled or deviant body has historically been regarded as the harbinger of biological secrets in

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­ edical contexts. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Thomson m writes that doctors voided the agency of an individual’s testimony and instead “sought direct communication with the body regarding its condition.” See Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York, Columbia University Press, 2017), 50. 15. Goujon in Barbin, Herculine Barbin, 133. 16. For more on the ways in which the medical and lay gaze ascribe mythical/ monstrous qualities to anomalous bodies, see Benjamin Singer, “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re) Viewing Non-­ normative Body Images,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (Philadelphia: Routledge, 2013), 617–636. 17. Jenell Johnson, American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 14. 18. For a brief intellectual history of Barbin’s resonance with an array of critical theorists, see Hil Malatino, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 39–40. 19. Dreger, Medical Invention of Sex, 28. 20. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 51–75. 21. Foucault in Barbin, Herculine Barbin, xi–xiv. 22. Ibid., xii–xiii. 23. Hil Malatino reads Foucault’s account of Barbin as a “reparative impulse,” one which reveals the ways in which Barbin disidentified from the systems within which she lived. See Malatino, Queer Embodiment, 42. 24. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 31. 25. In this scholarly tradition, Barbin functions as a parable for intersex experience, an object of study, and a historic figure who continues to resonate in our ongoing reckonings with gender diversity. In these contexts, the collective memory of Barbin subscribes to what Ann Cvetkovich calls an archive of feeling: a repository of emotion that engenders discussion and community around the experiences of intersexuality beyond either a purely medical or a purely symbolic context. See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 26. In close reading Barbin’s memoir, for instance, Malatino seeks “a way of thinking about the resistance of intersex subjects in the context of intense administration regulation [in the present] by examining an early instance of [intersex] resistance in a moment shaped by an intense consolidation of medical authority in diagnosing and treating ostensible abnormalities of sex.” See Malatino, Queer Embodiment, 64.

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27. According to David Getsy, “A capacity is both an ‘active power or force’ and an ‘ability to receive or maintain; holding power’ (OED). A capacity manifests its power as potentiality, incipience, and imminence. Only when exercised do capacities become fully apparent, and they may lie in wait to be activated.” David Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 2. 28. Julia Novak, “Introduction,” in Experiments in Life-writing: Intersections of Auto/biography and Fiction, ed. Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 3. 29. Apps, Dear Herculine, 3. 30. Ibid., 5. 31. Marc LaFranc, “The Struggle for True Sex: Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B and the Work of Michel Foucault,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 32, no. 2 (2005): 167. 32. Apps, Dear Herculine, 11. 33. Malatino, Queer Embodiment, 41. 34. Barbin, Herculine Barbin, 39. 35. Apps, Dear Herculine, 11–12. 36. Mel Chen writes that queer and non-normative subjects have long been framed as toxic subjects, in addition to being more vulnerable to toxicity themselves. In their consideration of queer and sick intoxication, Chen reconceives impurity not as a purely negative position, but as positing critical orientation to toxic worlds: “an uptake, rather than a denial of, toxicity seems to have the power to turn a lens on the anxieties that produce it and allow for a queer knowledge production that gives some means for structural remedy while not abandoning a claim to being just a little bit ‘off.’” See Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 220. 37. Apps, Dear Herculine, 31. 38. Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 144. 39. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia and Princeton: University Presses of California, 1982), 3. 40. Apps, Dear Herculine, 6. 41. Ibid., 54. 42. Ibid., 74. 43. Ibid., 58. 44. Ibid., 36. 45. Ibid., 58. 46. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 38. 47. Ibid.

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48. Dreger, Medical Invention of Sex, 150. 49. Apps, Dear Herculine, 58. 50. Ibid., 58. 51. This entanglement of visceral and abstract may seem like a contradiction in terms. As Sianne Ngai writes, “the visceral encompasses everything the abstract is not … [abstraction is] associated with the noncorporeal and unparticularized.” But Ngai clarifies that abstraction can, in fact, elicit the most visceral responses: it is our capacity to experience visceral responses to confounding materials that makes the abstract available to our understanding. See Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 173–76. 52. Apps, Dear Herculine, 59. 53. Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 192. 54. Apps, Dear Herculine, 21, 49. 55. Michael Groneberg, “Myth and Science around Gender and Sexuality: Eros and the Three Sexes in Plato’s Symposium,” Diogenes 52, no. 4 (2005): 39–49. 56. See Samuels, Fantasies of Identification, 192–95. 57. Marcus de María Arana et  al., “A Human Rights Investigation into the Medical ‘Normalization’ of Intersex People—a Report of a Hearing of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission,” Intersex Human Rights Australia, April 28, 2015, https://ihra.org.au/wp-­content/ uploads/2009/03/sfhrc_intersex_report.pdf. 58. “FAQ: What is Intersex?” interACT, last modified January 26, 2021, https://interactadvocates.org/faq/. 59. Amy Rosenwohl-Mack et  al., “A National Study on the Physical and Mental Health of Intersex Adults in the US,” PloS one 15, no. 10 (2020): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar ticle?id=10.1371/journal. pone.0240088. 60. As scholars working across the field of disability, intersexuality, and other forms of queer embodiment have suggested, there is a need to engage the alignment between the fight for intersex recognition and care with that of disability access and equity. See, for instance, M. Morgan Holmes, “Mind the Gaps: Intersex and (Re-productive) Spaces in Disability Studies and Bioethics,” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 5, no. 2–3 (2008): 169–81; Sumi Colligan, “Why the Intersex Shouldn’t Be Fixed: Insights from Queer Theory and Disability Studies” in Gendering Disability, ed. Bonnie G.  Smith, Beth Hutchison (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004); and Celeste Orr, “Exploring Intersex and Cripping Compulsory Ableism,” (PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2018), https://ruor.uottawa. ca/bitstream/10393/37597/3/Orr_Celeste_E_2018_thesis.pdf.

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61. This erasure resides within medical language itself—as Fausto-Sterling demonstrates, doctors’ use of “specific medical terminology—such as ‘sex chromosome anomalies,’ ‘gonadal abnormalities,’ and ‘external organ abnormalities’—indicate that intersex children are just unusual in some aspect of their physiology, not that they constitute a category other than male or female.” See Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 51. 62. Quoted in Sarah M.  Creighton et  al., “Intersex Practice, Theory, and Activism: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 2 (2009): 258.

References Apps, Aaron. Dear Herculine. Boise: Ahsahta Press. 2015. Arana, Marcus de María et al. “A Human Rights Investigation into the Medical ‘Normalization’ of Intersex People—a Report of a Hearing of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission.” Intersex Human Rights Australia, April 28, 2015. https://ihra.org.au/wp-­content/uploads/2009/03/sfhrc_intersex_ report.pdf. Barbin, Herculine. Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite. Translated by Michel Foucault. New York: Vintage, 1980. Belling, Catherine. “The President’s Glands: Somatic Interiority and the Referents of Biographical Fiction in American Adulterer.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 31, no. 1 (2016): 59–82. Boldrini, Lucia, and Julia Novak, eds. Experiments in Life-writing: Intersections of Auto/biography and Fiction. New York: Springer, 2017. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Chen, Mel. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Creighton, Sarah M., Julia A. Greenberg, Katrina Roen, and Del LaGrace Volcano. “Intersex Practice, Theory, and Activism: A Roundtable Discussion.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15, no. 2 (2009): 249–60. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Dreger, Alice. Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1975. ———. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1976. Getsy, David. Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

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Groneberg, Michael. “Myth and Science around Gender and Sexuality: Eros and the Three Sexes in Plato’s Symposium.” Diogenes 52, no. 4 (2005): 39–49. Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Öives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Herdt, Gilbert, ed. Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Holmes, M. Morgan. “Locating Third Sexes.” Transformation: Online Journal of Region, Culture and Societies, no. 8 (2004). ———. “Mind the Gaps: Intersex and (Re-Productive) Spaces in Disability Studies and Bioethics.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 5, no. 2–3 (2008): 169–81. Johnson, Jenell. American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014 Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia and Princeton: University Presses of California, 1982 LaFranc, Marc. “The Struggle for True Sex: Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B and the Work of Michel Foucault.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 32, no. 2 (2005): 161–82. Malatino, Hil. Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Ngai, Sianne. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. Orr, Celeste. “Exploring Intersex and Cripping Compulsory Ableism.” PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2018. https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/ 37597/3/Orr_Celeste_E_2018_thesis.pdf. Rosenwohl-Mack, Amy, Suegee Tamar-Mattis, Arlene B.  Baratz, Katharine B.  Dalke, Alesdair Ittelson, Kimberly Zieselman, and Jason D.  Flatt. “A National Study on the Physical and Mental Health of Intersex Adults in the US.” PloS One 15, no. 10 (2020): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0240088. Samuels, Ellen. Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. New  York: New York University Press, 2014. Singer, T. Benjamin. “From the Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)Viewing Non-normative Body Images.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, 617–36. Philadelphia: Routledge, 2013. Smith, Bonnie, and Beth Hutchison, eds. Gendering Disability. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Thomson, Rosemary Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

CHAPTER 14

“A Way Out of the Prison of Gender”: Interview with Novelist Patricia Duncker Caitríona Ní Dhúill and Julia Novak

Patricia Duncker’s second novel, James Miranda Barry (1999), has become a classic among biofictions of gender. The novel imagines the life and career of a distinguished Irish-born military surgeon of the nineteenth century, whose sex was reportedly revealed after his death to be female. Resurrected as an icon of gender resistance in the twentieth and twenty-­ first centuries, Barry has been claimed as both a transgressive feminist heroine—a woman who dared enter the masculine public sphere in disguise and thereby demonstrated the instability and arbitrariness of conventional gendered divisions—and a transgender man who succeeded in living his true identity. Recently, historians have also advanced the theory that Barry may have been intersex.1 Subtly refusing to take sides in this ongoing debate, Duncker’s James Miranda Barry reworks the C. Ní Dhúill Department of German, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] J. Novak (*) Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_14

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biographical data into a compelling portrait of a taciturn, determined protagonist whose identity remains elusive. The novel has been lauded for its critical focus on “the frustrated desire to know the self and the past in terms of gender binaries and static sexual identity categories,” and for demonstrating “how the past can resist the desire to understand others and ourselves in terms of limiting gender norms.”2 Duncker’s more recent historical novel Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (2015) is no less concerned with questions of gender. A “clever comedy of Victorian manners”,3 it hinges on the discrepancy between eminent novelist George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans’s) own personal life, which was lived well outside the norms of her time, and the conventional plots and fates that she metes out to her female characters. Duncker’s original treatment of the neo-Victorian “work versus life” topos,4 beloved of biographers, pits the figure of the historical author against that of a young (fictional) heroine and ardent Eliot reader, Sophie. Through their confrontation, Duncker investigates the life choices open to Victorian women. She has described the resulting narrative as an “echo chamber of nineteenth-­century writing and discourses.”5 In this interview, begun at the “Herstory Re-Imagined” conference at the Centre for Life Writing Research,  King’s College London on 16 December 2019, Duncker reflects on her choice of subjects, on her strategies for representing gender in biofiction, and on the pleasures and risks of writing about historical characters from a twentieth-  and twenty-first-­ century standpoint. *** Julia Novak (JN): Tell us how your work with biofiction started. How did you come to write a novel about James Miranda Barry? Patricia Duncker (PD): I first encountered James Miranda Barry in a 1983 Onlywomen Press lesbian diary, which I still have. And in that tiny volume Barry was claimed as a transgressive lesbian heroine and an honourable, courageous fore-sister. We were a bit pushed for finding lesbians in history at this stage of our feminist revolution—and so to have a lesbian-history diary was a bit of a facer: my God, we’ve got to have twelve of them, where are they to be found? In any case, you need to use your imagination if you want to recognise and discover love between women in history. If anything’s hidden from history, that ­certainly is. I thought: well,

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we can’t have Sappho, because all our information is speculation and too uncertain, and what are we going to say about her? We’ve got about 650 lines of her poetry, one complete poem, and her colossal reputation for genius. James Miranda Barry was our “cover girl” for July in 1983. Now, one of the problems with James Miranda Barry is that we have no idea whether she/he/they was or were a man or a woman, or both, or indeed what kind of man. We just don’t know. There is only one way that we could find out, which is to dig him up in Kensal Green cemetery and analyse the DNA—then we would be able to find out a lot more about him with the help of the forensic experts. So, I encountered James Miranda Barry back in the early 1980s. The first thing I tried to write about him was in 1989: a short story called “James Miranda Barry”; it’s a very brief imagistic piece, but it contains the skeletal structure of the novel. I started writing the novel in 1991. I began a new academic job that year and put the book aside for a while. I returned to the novel in 1993, full of enthusiasm, wrote one hundred pages and then got stuck. I remember that awful summer. I rang my mother and said: “I can’t go any further.” I felt like a failure as a writer and was quite convinced that nothing I wrote was ever going to work again. I don’t usually get stuck, so I threatened, not very seriously, to blow my brains out. My mother said: “Why don’t you go on holiday? Drive down to the Midi, that always gives you a bit of a lift.” I went down to Nice, and there I started writing Hallucinating Foucault. In that book, which was my first published novel, I found the solution to James Miranda Barry. My problem with James Miranda Barry, and indeed with Hallucinating Foucault—because both books are gender-benders—was that I was extremely discontented with the obligation to go on being a woman. This partly comes from my age, because if you were young in the 50s and 60s, you were being told by men, rows of women who are tools of the patriarchy, and a great many books that your destiny is to be a wife and mother and to do the housework. I don’t know how you feel about any of these three things, but I feel venomous. My problem was how to find another way to exist in the world without being a woman. James Miranda Barry seemed to have cracked it. So, it was a search for a way out of the prison of gender, as far as I was concerned. Now, back in the 1990s, you would find that it’s much easier for a commercial publisher to publish a novel about a woman who passed as a man. That’s a narrative they could handle. But somebody who was neither man nor woman? Well, the publishing

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world found that a bit more complicated. What sex was Barry? That’s what everybody who writes about Barry actually wants to get at, as if the sexed body answers all the questions. But of course it doesn’t. Nevertheless, that question—was he a woman or a man?—raises even more interesting questions for me as a writer—questions about the body in history, the body in the text, the body of the text. It was one of the problems that I addressed straight on, in the first encounter between James Miranda Barry and Alice Jones. Alice Jones is my own fictional invention. She was part of the impulse which comes up in biographical fiction, and which I entirely support, of writing the stories of completely unknown working-class people. Alice, for me, was the working-class girl who makes good, by somewhat Thatcherite methods. She meets Barry in an English country house—they are both children at this point—and that first encounter is one of those meetings where the deal is: “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” It leaves Barry confused. What did he have to show? Alice notices that he isn’t a girl or a boy in the sense that she understands, but she doesn’t give a damn. She likes him. That’ll do. Alice simply ignores the gender agenda if it doesn’t suit her, and she makes a very successful career out of playing the “breeches part” on the nineteenth-century stage. She specialises in sexual ambiguity. She and Barry are made for each other. Caitríona Ní Dhúill (CND): Arguably, your readers may be left confused as regards Barry’s gender—or indeed, their sex. Pronouns fluctuate in the novel, we are not given a clear view either of the character’s anatomy or their sense of gender identity. Is this perhaps the point? PD: The text is written in first person and third person—as “I” and “he.” Barry never was “she,” and I respected that, as it seems to me that he chose or assumed, or indeed had masculinity and a masculine identity imposed upon him, for very particular reasons. I suspect he’d be nonbinary if he were living now. I was very influenced in my later thinking about Barry by Rachel Holmes’s queer biography of James Miranda Barry, which was called Scanty Particulars. We were writing our books at the same time. Rachel argues, very convincingly, that Barry was in fact, like Herculine Barbin, a hermaphrodite, that she/he/they was/were both woman and man—and therefore neither. And I chose the maze as my metaphor for representing this: the idea of the maze, and thinking about gender as a maze. How do you negotiate the maze? And how do you get through a gendered life safely if the maze leads to a lot of dead ends as well

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as blank squares? The maze turns up in this novel twice. Once in the scene where Barry is given his identity by his rich male patrons and sent forth into the world as a man. For of course it matters whether you are born a man or a woman in that period, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, because he wanted to go to medical school in Edinburgh and study to become a doctor, and women couldn’t. You’ve got no choice but deception and disguise if you are born into the material world as a woman. But I liked the metaphor of the maze, so it appears again at the end of the book when the goddess Diana, who once stood at the centre of the maze, has vanished and Barry just finds a blank, black stone square—he’s got no more guidance from the maze. JN: Your novel on Barry treats a personal history that is very much about passing, which involves having a good portion of one’s past disappear. This obviously makes the life of one’s future biographer very difficult— but what about the biofiction writer? How did your writing of the Barry book compare to tackling a figure whose life is as well documented as that of George Eliot? To what extent is historical ­visibility an impediment, as well as a prerequisite, to biofiction? PD: There are—surprisingly enough—very many books, biographical, fictional, critical, even dramatic texts about James Miranda Barry. Ann Heilmann has uncovered a wealth of material and includes detailed commentary on my novel in Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre. Barry had a very public persona, but a very private, hidden, personal identity. The mystery of who he was has fascinated many kinds of writer. And there’s been a fair amount of feminist axe-grinding. Women writers who want to celebrate Barry as their nineteenth-century daredevil heroine will insist that he was a woman disguised as a man. Writers like myself, who are resolutely opposed to the social, political, and economic consequences of sexual difference, savour the mystery. Maybe there’s a third way of being human and occupying a bit more space in the world—outside the binary of sexual difference. For me, Barry was a gender-transgressor—to use Kate Bornstein’s term in all its glory.6 I refused to unveil the mystery. For it is a mystery not only of the body, but of the nature of the performance. If he was indeed intersex, Barry made a damned good fist of being a bloke. He courted disaster, fought duels, chatted up the ladies, and quarrelled with everyone who crossed him. I tried to reflect that in my novel.

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But the crunch question is this. How do you construct a life when you know nothing about that person’s childhood? Many modern biographers rely on the story of childhood to provide the key to their subjects. This is of course a contemporary Freudian fixation, although there are classical precedents. If we think of the Gospels as biographies, then the birth of the God and the telling childhood events that are recorded, particularly by St Luke, foreshadow later events. I invented that kind of childhood for Barry. That’s the liberty you have as a novelist. Obviously, I couldn’t invent a childhood for Marian Evans Lewes. And much of her later life was indeed determined by her early years, especially her love for the grim, religious brother Isaac, who repudiated her when he discovered that she wasn’t really Mrs Lewes. I approached the alleged Mrs Lewes and her so-called husband—at the end of her life and the height of her fame, when she had nothing to prove and was welcomed (almost) everywhere with her (not quite) husband. My story of Sophie and the Sibyl was about a celebrity novelist and the vexed expectations of her readers. Describing a character who is historically visible—which might well be advisable if you want to explore and exploit the personality and achievements of someone who lived and breathed, and influenced all our lives— can have interesting consequences. When James Miranda Barry was published in America, the publisher rang me up and said they wanted to change the title. Barry wasn’t known in America. The name had no meaning. I resisted the change on the grounds that the Great American Public had no problem with Huckleberry Finn or Roderick Hudson as titles. She hadn’t heard of Roderick Hudson. I said, well, what about Moby Dick? There was an astonished gasp at the other end of the phone. Then she said: “But Moby Dick’s a whale!” So what? That’s his name and it’s his story. But I didn’t say that. And they did change the title. What goes on inside a human soul? Nobody knows. A biographer can speculate. A novelist can imagine. And in my opinion a novelist should be able to take every freedom in doing so. The imagination is our most powerful tool. And you can use it both to penetrate the evidence and to create an entirely fresh dimension to a known history. That said, Rachel Holmes told me—very sweetly: “It’s very difficult to write a biography of someone who has no childhood, and Barry doesn’t, but you had invented one so I used yours.” She used the imaginary childhood I had invented when she was thinking about her queer biography of Barry and imagining in her turn who Barry was. I was delighted. Biographers, novelists, and historians have to use their imaginations in similar ways.

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CND: Which suggests how biography and fiction can live off each other. To move on to your more recent biofiction: how did Sophie and the Sibyl come about—a novel that also deals with questions of gender on several levels? PD: When you are looking at why writers choose to create these novels, and what people they choose to resurrect, I think it’s absolutely right to emphasise the fact that it’s commercial fiction. A lot of what you are reading is precisely that. And commercial fiction is a publishing term, which implies a certain kind of writing, a certain kind of structure, a certain kind of register and a certain kind of plot. Keep an eye on what sells well. Writers have always done that. But as far as I’m concerned, writers often have quite personal reasons for taking up the subjects they do and for arguing for the agendas they investigate. And mine were very personal in both these cases. One was the discontent at being shovelled into the role of being a woman. I know it’s supposedly illegal now in Britain, but the fact remains: when you’re sitting there at a job interview, very often the men who are also sitting there looking at you are thinking: are you married? Or when are you going to get married? And if not, why not? When are you going to have children? Are we going to have to go on paying for you if you do have children? I feel that my professional life has been a long saga of deflecting and confronting insults for an awfully long time. And I just hope things are better, but sometimes I think they are not. Not really. And refusing gender altogether, while I think it’s a smart political move, can land you in deep trouble without solving your problems. Anyway: Sophie and the Sibyl was also very personal, because I absolutely adore George Eliot. I am her ideal reader. And yet I have a huge quarrel with George Eliot. And… when you have both a great love for a writer as well as a huge argument with them, you’ve got an explosive piece of material in your hands. I have to say, that happens with an awful lot of writers. I will not go into my relationship with the Great Male Tradition, but the male writers that I most admire are among the very worst misogynists: Milton, Tolstoy, Flaubert. George Eliot is very interesting, because she worked out how not to be a woman, and then how to be a woman and become very famous while still pretending to be a man. Very clever. And I’m struck by the fact that none of us talk about Charlotte Brontë as Currer Bell, do we? But we all still talk about George Eliot, we don’t talk about Mary Ann Evans Lewes as the author of the novels. George Eliot said, quite explicitly, that she didn’t want to be known by her real name, but by

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the name that wrote the books—so that what has remained of George Eliot is the writing identity, the textual identity. And I think that’s brilliant. Now, the climax of the book happens the first time that Sophie and the Sibyl meet. There’s been a very chequered history that is being negotiated both through her texts and through the fact that Sophie is her most ardent reader. Sophie is a young German aristocrat, and the difference between them is tied up with the generations into which they were born. George Eliot was born in 1819, Sophie is born in 1854. There’s a huge gulf between the expectations a young woman could have from the first period to the second period. George Eliot disappoints her, and so Sophie is furious. Sophie marches into Eliot’s household, uninvited and enraged, to confront George Eliot the powerful, compelling writer, and the elderly invalid, Mrs Lewes. The immediate cause of Sophie’s fury is the over-­ affectionate letter Mrs Lewes wrote to Sophie’s husband Max. Max has fallen wildly in love with George Eliot, and there’s nothing strange about that, because absolutely everyone who met her did, women and men. Max is Max Duncker of Duncker & Duncker publishing—which still exists!7 I based Max Duncker on a real person. The parting shot in Sophie’s speech is this accusation: “I would not have lived one life and believed in another!” Those words are taken verbatim from George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs Warren’s Profession—from Vivie Warren’s last speech to her mother before she gives the elderly lady of pleasure the push. That was written in 1892, and not performed until 1903 because the entire play—and that scene— was so scandalous. Sometimes it seems to me that half of my book appears to revisit my nineteenth-century sources. That’s my Victorian echo-­ chamber of voices! JN: Mary Ann Evans not only flouted Victorian conventions by living with a married man, but also by marrying a man, later in life, who was twenty years her junior. In your novel, we meet her again at a critical point in her life, when her husband John Cross attempts suicide during their honeymoon in Venice. This event gave rise to much speculation as to Mary Ann’s exhausting sexuality—which you mention—and I am sure there are novelists who would have considered this a prime opportunity to step in and imagine what may have happened. Yet you refrained from doing that. Why? PD: I am not that sort of novelist. I found John Cross’s gigantic leap into the canal far more fascinating than the horror of the honeymoon bed-

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room. If there’s one woman I would never want to go to bed with, it would be George Eliot. Which doesn’t mean that I’m not infatuated with her—her mind, her writing, her intelligence, her scholarship, her ambition, her genius. I am. Where we part company in our views of the world is in the matter of her reliance on men for support, for approval, for recognition. Many women were in love with her. I would have had to join the queue. But she valued masculine judgements and opinions. She often wrote as a man. And she punished her heroines. Relentlessly. She made them look naïve, stupid, uneducated, vain, silly, frail, dependent—remember, she educated herself, more thoroughly than many men of her class— she was a colossal intellectual. No woman in her novels who has the slightest opportunity to better herself and doesn’t do so ever gets off the hook. If Eliot’s heroines are victims, then it’s their fault. No point blaming Mrs Lemon’s academy in Middlemarch, where you learned how to get in and out of a carriage. Charlotte Brontë doesn’t do this. She champions the women who fight back and stand up for themselves—and she goes for the men. I wouldn’t want to be the hero in a Brontë novel: she blinds them, maims them, drowns them. George Eliot had a dark side. She felt she had the right to interfere in other people’s lives. I was more interested in her arrogance on this point than I was in her sex life. What went wrong with her honeymoon in Venice? We’ll never know. JN: By contrast, Max Duncker also has an interesting clandestine adventure in Venice. While, up to this point, he has been a picture of heteronormativity in all his views and actions, he has an unexpected encounter with a male prostitute dressed as a woman, which he enjoys. For a novelist, is this intrusion into the man’s intimate secrets less ethically problematic because the character has been fictionalised to a greater extent than that of Eliot? PD: If Byron’s letters and journals are to be believed, Venice was the very place for a walk on the sexual wild side. Max’s discovery of the Venetian pleasure grounds happens quite by accident. But he doesn’t say no. Remember, the Black prostitute is both man and woman. She is dressed as a woman, but has a man’s genitals. Many men who would never think of themselves as anything other than heterosexual simply accept homosexual adventures when they are offered. It’s also easier to write about male sexu-

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ality because there are fewer consequences. Men are not policed in the same way that women are. They have many more opportunities for sexual encounters of every kind, and they are, quite literally, not so exposed— either to moral censure or pregnancy. There is a homosexual literature that surrounds Venice and slides over into opera and film. I slipped in a reference to another writer I adore and admire: Thomas Mann. The prostitute says: “The signor will pay,” just like the gondolier who rows Gustav von Aschenbach to the Lido in Death in Venice. On the issue of ethics: I don’t hold with hard and fast rules, and I don’t think any novelist should. The material of your book should determine how you handle any particular issue or situation. And you must make a careful literary judgement concerning what is at stake. A literary judgement, mind, not a self-righteous, sanctimonious moral one based on our own contemporary customs and mores. Max is my character, the one to whom I was closest throughout the book. I didn’t draw on the real Max Duncker at all. I don’t judge my fictional character from a lofty position on the moral high ground, and I don’t think the reader should either. He can do nothing that I don’t imagine him doing. He exists entirely in the book. Marian Evans Lewes had an existence in the material world. And I was careful not to include anything that she didn’t write or say outside the entirely imaginary incidents and situations in which I placed her. There I had a freer hand. If you are re-creating a character who once lived and breathed and has many fans in the real world, you have to be cautious to be credible. But I certainly didn’t entertain any ethical scruples that would constrain what I imagined and what I wrote. It’s important to be persuasive, convincing, and it’s not likely that you will be if you are always camped out on the moral high ground. You cannot give the reader a richly imagined, complex, nuanced world. Where I was very careful to be absolutely true to the historical record is in one section of James Miranda Barry: my description of the Jamaican Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. This was a famous slave uprising. I remained very close to the historical account given by Mary Turner in her book, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society 1787–1834. Few European readers would know the story of this particular slave revolt. Many people died defending their right to freedom. And they should be honoured with nothing but the truth. I was born and raised in

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Jamaica. My family is Jamaican. This history matters to me as much as it does to all other Jamaicans wherever they live in the world. CND: Both novels face similar challenges in that they are set in a period— the Victorian era—which is in one sense so present to us and so familiar from popular culture. And it’s also the subject of a vast research literature, but it’s beyond the reach of living memory and, as you suggest, its literature is also receding from the grasp of popular reading habits. So what is “neo” about the neo-Victorian? PD: You have to worry about “neo,” because “neo” of course always suggests you know that it is different from the Victorian period, but you are asserting an intimate connection with all things Victorian. I’ve been teaching the Victorian period for about forty years, and I used to teach different books, poetry, fiction, political thought, more or less every year. I’m passionate about the Victorians and we’re surrounded by them. When I went to work in Manchester and I was surrounded by all the buildings in Manchester, especially the civic ones, libraries, theatres, factories, railways stations, hotels, which were built when the Victorians were in their pride and glory, the Victorian period didn’t feel very far away. Also, the infrastructure is still there. I mean the canals, the sewers—those are also Victorian. The Victorians are both all around us and in our heads, but they are also vanished, absent. On the question of researching historical fiction, you can never know enough! However much research you do, however much reading, however many research trips, you still don’t know enough. Sometimes you feel you know nothing. You have no access to these people’s minds. You can read everything they’ve written, but if you are honest, that connection with your own mind is still blank. There is no way back to the Victorians. And, oddly enough, that’s really wonderful, because it gives you a space to re-imagine them. Your literary imagination is the door to that world. I do a massive amount of reading and research. I think I’m like George Eliot in that way, and this is one of the reasons I love her so much: she was a research-based writer. She worked as I do, and I learned how to do it from her. She travelled to places about which she intended to write, walked around everywhere, counted steps, and raided the local bookshops. She learned the languages. And when she couldn’t get into Savonarola’s monastery in Florence while she was doing the field research for Romola,

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simply because women weren’t allowed inside, she sent Lewes in and got him to walk around Savonarola’s cell to count out the steps and to get the size exactly right. I’m like that. I absolutely love doing it. Researching a novel is one of the great joys of my life, because I go to the strangest places, and the most peculiar things often happen. I haven’t actually been shot, taken hostage, or kidnapped. But very odd things have sometimes happened which have transformed the way I write. And yet despite everything you do, you’ll never know enough, and there are things that will just knock you backwards with the surprise, when you find them out. JN: Patricia, you have already addressed the peculiarity of writing about a writer. Such author fictions—biofictions about authors—clearly have a special place within the genre. In the Afterword to Sophie and the Sibyl, you talk about your relation to George Eliot and mention that the “grain of resentment one writer always feels for another whom she hails as ‘Master’ … would not dissolve.”8 This seems to echo Harold Bloom’s famous notion of the “anxiety of influence”—a quasi-Oedipal model of literary history that has been criticised for the linearity it establishes, and of course for its androcentrism. Do women authors succumb to the anxiety of influence, perhaps so as to establish a female line of tradition, or how else can we understand this urge to “write back” to Eliot? PD: One of my students once said, “When I’m writing, I don’t read at all, and I’m very nervous of reading anything that has to do with what I’m writing, because I’m so frightened of being influenced.” Well, I would say to every young writer, read as much as you can! Get down on your knees every night and pray to be influenced, because that’s the only bloody thing that’s going to save you. So be as deeply influenced as you possibly can be. Read every word your subject ever wrote. Read what other people said about them. Interview their great-great-­grandchildren. Go to séances, get the ghost of James Joyce to inhabit you before you start trying to write about Joyce. Do whatever you need to do to get close to the writer that you are studying and thinking about. And to write your own work, you need all of the tradition before you. Language and literary traditions are shared. They are a resource, a wealth we can all grasp, possess, and treasure as our own.

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I don’t suffer from an “anxiety of influence.” I want to be influenced. But I will choose the writers who will teach me and be “the master-­mistress of my passion”—both my mistress and my master. CND: The heroine Sophie in Sophie and the Sibyl is appalled at the thought that George Eliot has turned her into Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda and meted her punishment of that character out to her. “Mrs Lewes cannot bear it that another woman should have beauty, youth, wealth and still be loved,”9 Sophie speculates, and the narrator of Sophie and the Sibyl does not entirely discount this quite negative interpretation of the famous author’s motives. So here we have a quite unsympathetic George Eliot. What are the possibilities, but also the ethical limits, of the licence to speculate in biofiction? If biofiction can demythologise cultural idols by imagining them in an unsympathetic or unflattering light, does this have broader implications for other types of biographical discourse? PD: George Eliot had a dark, unforgiving, vindictive side. I believe that’s visible in her letters and in her fiction. I would never condemn her for that. But I would never pretend that it’s not there, not part of who she was. She wasn’t a saint. None of us are. In some cases, when you are dead, you pass into fiction, legend, myth. You become someone who is spoken about, not someone who speaks for herself. And that is the gift of resurrection that a novelist can give to a character: fresh adventures, a chance to enter the world again, as a living, breathing body, and a voice. The problem is that when someone feels that they have been misrepresented in a fiction, they may experience that as a form of identity theft. They may feel that who they are, what their motives were, have been taken away from them. That’s what Sophie feels when she imagines that she has been recycled and traduced in George Eliot’s fiction. And there’s another reason, a reason which goes deeper. Every one of us is starring in our very own life stories. So when you are included in somebody else’s novel, in their fiction or in their autobiography, you are suddenly—often—becoming a minor character in someone else’s story. Well, there is nothing more enraging—is there?—than becoming a walk­on bit part in another’s narrative, especially if you feel that you deserve more, and better. So, using real people in fiction is a project that is absolutely fraught, especially in autobiographical fiction.

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But I’m not big on pious ethics—I care less and less as I get older. When publishers or editors pick up on the fact that an author is doing a whitewash, they pounce upon it. That’s when you’re softening the edges, making someone kinder, making a character more romantic, understanding their motives, forgiving them. I stand here alongside Leopold von Ranke, one of the greatest nineteenth-century historians, who said: “Our task is not to judge the past, but to understand it.” I completely agree. I’m a warts-and-all writer. And George Eliot was both a genius—I think one of our greatest English writers—and she was also a monster. Well, that is, she could be a monster. She buggered up other people’s lives, convinced of her own rectitude, and hardly knew she was doing it. But she wasn’t the first person to do that, she won’t be the last, and I don’t judge her for it. She read Ranke, and she considered the role of the novelist to be akin to that of the historian. Now, when you hide something, or soften and excuse certain kinds of behaviour, it’s always in someone’s interest. You have to look carefully at whose interest is being served. So, this is my one ethical concern: I’m very interested in creativity as an abstract phenomenon, and as a gift. But I’m also very interested in who takes the rap. Who suffered for this great writer’s amazing achievements? Who is lying there, collapsed, or very ill with Alzheimer’s, like Dorothy Wordsworth? She was the handmaiden of the Great Poet all her life; she dedicated her best years to him. She allowed him to use her writing in his poetry. But she ended up decrepit and housebound, shitting, farting, and swearing. She let her anger out at last. There’s always someone who gets it in the face and in the teeth, because of someone else’s dedication to their own genius and creativity. And it’s important to look to see who it is, and defend them. Because usually they’ll be women. JN: Your novel Sophie and the Sibyl features a contemporary, opinionated narrator, who is overtly distinct from its author. And this narrator acknowledges John Fowles as a predecessor but criticises Fowles’s tendency to “assault the 19th century with the sensibility of the twentieth.”10 If we read this critique of the presentism in Fowles’s work as a warning that it is naïve to believe we will ever be able fully to understand historical characters from our present point of view, where does that leave the writer—and reader—of biofiction? PD: I think presentism in historical fiction is inevitable, because you are actually going to choose the figures that you want to write about. That

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choice will reflect your own concerns, and your concerns will always be the arguments and agendas of the present, and visible in your work. And to use the tools of analysis that you’ve developed in your own present time to access the past, to think about the past, to understand the past, well, that seems to me to be a legitimate thing to do. With presentism, I think, I go back to the ethical question, too, and to Ranke’s comment: Don’t judge the past, understand it, work to understand it. I do think he’s right. So that when Sophie judges the Sibyl in the scene that I mentioned, that’s not a twenty-first-century argument, it’s a nineteenth-century one, and it’s even a nineteenth-century woman talking: I gave her Vivie Warren’s exact words. I’m very fond of George Bernard Shaw; a lot of people don’t seem to read him anymore. And his plays are not produced quite so often as they were. I’m very glad to have proudly resurrected him there. Neither George Eliot nor George Bernard Shaw feel very far away from me and from my life. I’m the child of a much older father. My father was born in 1904. George Eliot had only been dead twenty-four years when he was born. It’s not actually that far back. And also, to argue with Ranke, for I am sure I would have argued with him, I do see things in the past that make me enraged, and which have never been eradicated: male violence against women, sexual abuse, rape as a weapon in war, slavery, child brides, ransacking the natural world for gain, killing animals for sport. The list is endless. It’s good to interrogate that rage; just because something was accepted in the past doesn’t mean that it’s not accepted now in some other form—and certainly doesn’t make it right. Funding  This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), grant number V543-G23.

Notes 1. For the view of Barry’s life as a feminist “masquerade,” see Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield, Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time (London: Oneworld, 2016). The controversy around EJ Levy’s biofiction The Cape Doctor (New York: Little, Brown, 2021) points to Barry’s significance as a transgender icon—see Alison Flood, “New Novel about Dr. James Barry Sparks Row over Victorian’s Gender Identity,” The Guardian, February 18, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/ feb/18/new-­n ovel-­a bout-­d r-­j ames-­b arry-­s parks-­r ow-­o ver-­v ictorians-­

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gender-­identity. For Barry as an intersex person, see Rachel Holmes, Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Dr. James Barry, Queen Victoria’s Preeminent Military Doctor (London: Viking, 2002). 2. Jana Funke, “Obscurity and Gender Resistance in Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry,” European Journal of English Studies 16, no. 3 (2012): 216, https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2012.735410. 3. Stephanie Merritt, “Sophie and the Sibyl Review—George Eliot’s Later Life Reimagined,” The Guardian, May 17, 2015, https://www.theguardian. com/books/2015/may/17/sophie-­and-­the-­sybil-­r eview-­george-­eliots-­ later-­life-­reimagined. 4. For other examples of this trend in neo-Victorian biofiction, see Julia Novak and Sandra Mayer, “Disparate Images: Literary Heroism and the ‘Work vs. Life’ Topos in Contemporary Biofictions about Victorian Authors,” Neo-­ Victorian Studies 7, no. 1 (2014): 25–51, http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/. 5. Patricia Duncker, interview by Jane Garvey, Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, April 13, 2015, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qfj17. 6. Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (London: Vintage, 1995). 7. The publishing house Duncker & Humblot has been in existence since 1809. 8. Patricia Duncker, Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 288. 9. Ibid., 213. 10. Ibid., 56.

References Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us. London: Vintage, 1995. Duncker, Patricia. Hallucinating Foucault. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1996. ———. Interview by Jane Garvey. Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, April 13, 2015. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qfj17. ———. James Miranda Barry. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999. ———. Sophie and the Sibyl: A Victorian Romance. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. du Preez, Michael, and Jeremy Dronfield. Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time. London: Oneworld, 2016. Flood, Alison. “New Novel about Dr James Barry Sparks Row over Victorian’s Gender Identity.” The Guardian, February 18, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/18/new-­novel-­about-­dr-­james-­barry-­sparks-­row-­ over-­victorians-­gender-­identity. Funke, Jana. “Obscurity and Gender Resistance in Patricia Duncker’s James Miranda Barry.” European Journal of English Studies 16, no. 3 (2012): 215–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2012.735410.

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———. Heilmann, Ann. Neo-/Victorian Biographilia and James Miranda Barry: A Study in Transgender and Transgenre. London: Palgrave, 2018. Holmes, Rachel. Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of Dr. James Barry, Queen Victoria’s Preeminent Military Doctor. London: Viking, 2002. Levy, EJ. The Cape Doctor. New York: Little, Brown, 2021. Merritt, Stephanie. “Sophie and the Sibyl Review—George Eliot’s Later Life Reimagined.” The Guardian, May 17, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2015/may/17/sophie-­a nd-­t he-­s ybil-­r eview-­g eorge-­e liots-­l ater-­ life-­reimagined. Novak, Julia, and Sandra Mayer. “Disparate Images: Literary Heroism and the ‘Work vs. Life’ Topos in Contemporary Biofictions about Victorian Authors.” Neo-Victorian Studies 7, no. 1 (2014): 25–51. http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/. Turner, Mary. Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Correction to: Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction: Introduction Julia Novak and Caitríona Ní Dhúill

Correction to: Chapter 1 in: J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_1 The book was inadvertently published with an error: 1. The original version of this chapter was revised: this chapter was previously published non-open access. It has been changed to Open Access.

The updated version of the book can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­031-­09019-­6_1 © The Author(s) 2023 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_15

C1

C2 Open Access  This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Index1

A Agency, 8–15, 21, 23, 30n10, 88, 148, 158, 180, 181, 187, 191, 251, 273, 279, 282, 309, 350, 363n14 Age of Gonads, 340, 359 Alpern, Sara, 8 Anguissola, Sofonisba, 26, 27, 297–310, 313n49 Anne Boleyn, 24, 135, 138–140, 144, 147–149, 161, 167, 183, 186–189, 192, 194, 195 Anxiety of influence, 66, 380, 381 Appignanesi, Lisa, 83, 91 Askew, Anne, 163, 164 Atwood, Margaret, 185, 250 Australian history, 197 Author fictions, 25, 252, 380

B Bair, Deirdre, 77 Baker, Dallas, 19 Banti, Anna, 8, 22, 23, 35n83, 287n12, 290n62 Barbin, Herculine, 27, 339–361, 362n2, 363n18, 363n23, 363n25, 372 Barry, James Miranda, 18–21, 23, 27, 37n104, 38n114, 369–374, 383n1 Barry, Kevin, 7 Beckett, Samuel, 77, 79, 83, 85–88, 91, 98 Bell, Quentin, 61 Belling, Catherine, 343 Bennett, Andrew, 53, 251

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Novak, C. Ní Dhúill (eds.), Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6

387

388 

INDEX

Bergmann, Ina, 10, 26, 30n10, 182, 187, 322 Beveridge Report, 159, 162, 163 Biofictions of gender, 369 Biographical turn, 216, 247 Biological imaginary, 339–361 Bird, Stephanie, 9, 323 Blackadder, Jesse, 25, 182, 188, 190, 191, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201 Bloom, Harold, 66, 380 Boccardi, Mariadele, 191 Boldrini, Lucia, 8, 22, 32n35, 92, 104n151, 112, 192, 236, 275, 287n12, 290n62 Boone, Joseph Allen, 233 Bordo, Susan, 140, 194 Bowden, Peta, 15 Boyle, T. C., 249 Britishness, 198 Brontë, Charlotte, 375, 377 Brosch, Renate, 229 Brown, Richard, 62, 233 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 10, 51, 60, 276 Butler, Judith, 2, 17, 346, 347 Byatt, A.S., 63 C Canton, Ursula, 275, 277 Carlyle, Thomas, 52 Caro, Jane, 25, 183, 185, 188–190, 192, 193, 198–201 Casey, Bella, 12 Catherine of Aragon, 167, 169 Celibacy, 26, 213, 214, 216–237 Celibate modernism, 213–237 Chase-Riboud, Barbara, 12–15, 28n5 Cheney, Mamah, 249 Colonisation, 197 Cooke, Jennifer, 16 Crane, Julie, 188, 194

Cullen, Lynn, 251–260 Cult of domesticity, 159, 172 Cultural memory, 6, 10, 20, 37n104, 200, 250–251, 259 Cunningham, Michael, 50, 51, 54, 62, 63 D Dalley, Hamish, 198 Damsel in distress, 144, 259 De Gouges, Olympe, 283, 284 De Groot, Jerome, 3, 4, 25, 161, 179, 186, 188 De Obaldia, Blaise, 272, 283, 284, 290n57 De Obaldia, Krystyna, 272, 283, 284, 290n57 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 53 Diener, Michelle, 25, 183, 184, 188, 190, 196, 198, 199, 201 DiGiuseppe, Donna, 298, 301, 305–308, 313n49 Dimock, Wai Chee, 222 Donoghue, Emma, 4, 7, 17 Double historical biofiction, 10, 26, 259 Double othering, 25, 179, 180, 200 Dreger, Alice, 340, 346, 355 Duncker, Patricia, 18, 19, 22, 23, 27, 28, 196, 201, 369–383 Dunn, Wendy J., 25, 179, 180, 183–185, 187, 189, 191–193, 195, 198, 199, 201 E Eades, Quinn, 16 Ebershoff, David, 7, 15, 17–19, 21, 67n9 Edel, Leon, 216, 217, 219, 220, 227, 228, 230

 INDEX 

389

Eide, Marian, 81 Elbe, Lili, 7, 15, 17–19, 21 Eliot, George, 28, 370, 373, 375–377, 379–383 Elizabeth I, 157, 169, 183, 185, 189 Ellmann, Richard, 76–78, 80, 82, 85, 99n7, 103n115, 104n138, 217, 220, 231 Escapism, 86, 91, 92, 258 Ethical biofiction, 285–286 Ethics, 20–23, 38n114, 82, 213, 235, 271–286, 330, 378, 382 Ethics of biofiction, 38n114, 235, 271–286 Ethics of biographical fiction, 20–23 Exemplarity, 16–20

220, 223, 235–237, 247–250, 252, 258, 283, 290n61, 310, 311n4, 323, 341, 348, 380 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 8, 16, 32n35, 35n83, 297, 298 Gerould, Daniel, 281 Gibson, Lady Violet, 90, 91, 97 Gilmore, Leigh, 277, 285 Gold, Alison Leslie, 84–88, 90, 91 Gordon, Lyndall, 218–220, 227, 232 Gregory, Philippa, 24, 25, 51, 136, 138, 139, 143–145, 147–149, 157–173, 184 Groneberg, Michael, 358 Grossman, Lev, 247 Gwyn, Nell, 4–6, 32n29

F Fallen woman, 255 Feldman, Ellen, 249 Fleishman, Avrom, 53, 54 Fordham, Finn, 81 Foucault, Michel, 27, 55, 221, 225, 340, 343, 345–348, 351, 363n23 Fowles, John, 382 Fraser, Antonia, 139 Futurity, 84–93

H Haeger, Diane, 4, 5 Haralson, Eric, 214, 223, 224, 235 Harvey, John, 226 Hastings, Michael, 85, 86 Hayman, Ronald, 22 Heilmann, Ann, 18, 23, 37n104, 38n114, 137, 373 Hemings, Sally, 13–15 Henry VIII, 1, 10, 24, 25, 136, 137, 142, 143, 152n22, 157, 158, 160, 161, 166, 170, 171, 173, 184, 185, 194 Herstorical biofiction, 9, 187, 247–253, 259, 318, 319, 322, 323, 333n30 Herstory, 9, 249–251, 253, 320 Heterobiography, 22, 92, 104n151, 112, 236, 275 Historical biofictions, 50, 52–56, 61, 62, 182, 184, 186, 188, 191, 194, 197, 199–201, 248, 250, 251, 254, 258, 259 Historical romance novel, 4, 5, 161

G Garvey, Joyce, 90, 91 Gee, Maggie, 62, 64–66 Gems, Pam, 272, 279–282, 287n12, 289n40 Gender performativity, 2 Gender-transgressor, 373 Generic turn, 248 Genre(s), 1–8, 10, 11, 18, 20, 22, 27, 28n5, 51–53, 56, 59, 62, 66n2, 84, 90, 92, 111–114, 150n5, 172, 173n4, 180, 183, 197, 214,

390 

INDEX

Historiographic metafiction, 30n10, 111, 113, 123, 124, 126n22 Holmes, Rachel, 372, 374 Horan, Nancy, 249 Horenbout, Susanna, 183, 184, 190, 196 Hutcheon, Linda, 24, 110, 113, 126n21, 126n22 I Incest, 89, 94, 104n138, 137, 138, 141–143, 150, 151n9, 152n18, 282 Intersex, 16, 18, 19, 27, 339–361, 362n7, 363n25, 363n26, 365n60, 366n61, 369, 373 J Jacobs, Fredrika, 300, 301 Jiang Qing, 24, 109–124, 125n4, 125n5, 125n7, 127n29, 127n34, 127n38, 128n39, 128n48, 129n83, 130n91 Johnson, Jenell, 345 Joyce, James, 75–82, 91, 96, 99n2, 233, 380 Joyce, Lucia, 24, 75–99, 102n93 K Kahan, Benjamin, 213, 214, 221–225, 235, 240n52 Kaplan, Cora, 237 Katherine of Aragon, 24, 135–150, 170, 186 Keener, John F., 6, 113, 126n22, 248 Kent, Hannah, 191, 275 King, Jeannette, 250, 251 Kohlke, Marie-Luise, 20, 21, 28n5, 29n6, 33n58, 69n66, 322

Kosicka, Jadwiga, 281 Kovács, Ágnes Zsófia, 227–229 Kristeva, Julia, 353 L Lackey, Michael, 2, 7, 11–14, 28n5, 30n10, 50–52, 56, 60, 62, 67n15, 89, 92, 166, 180–182, 191, 220, 248, 274, 328 LaFranc, Marc, 351 Lan Ping, 109, 116, 119, 120, 123, 129n70 Latham, Monica, 23, 25, 37n104, 56, 61, 62, 65, 66, 69n63 Layne, Bethany, 63, 180, 216, 226, 227, 229 Lee, Hermione, 6, 7, 53, 61, 84, 273 Lefebvre, Henri, 55 Levy, E.J., 18, 20 Light, Alison, 50, 186, 188, 198, 201 Llewellyn, Mark, 137 Lodge, David, 3, 7, 25, 51, 213–237 Lukács, György, 30n10, 50–55, 59, 60, 180, 181 M Maddox, Brenda, 77–79, 82, 84, 85, 96, 100n22, 104n138 Mann, Thomas, 378 Mantel, Hilary, 51, 153n41, 283 Mao Zedong, 10, 109, 110, 115–117, 120–122, 124n1, 127n29, 128n46, 129n71 Mary, Queen of Scots, 50, 182, 183, 188, 190, 191, 195, 196 Masculinity, 10, 20, 121, 213, 223, 224, 234, 372 Matilda Effect, 317, 326–330, 331n2 May, John, 252–260 McIver, Katherine, 299, 300

 INDEX 

Medical gaze, 340, 342, 355–357, 361 Medicalisation of gender, 342 Medical marvel, 345 Meinig, Sigrun, 254 Mental health, 22, 83, 84, 92, 360 Mercer, Lucy, 249 Metabiography, 19, 58, 66n2, 69n70, 111, 114, 124 Middeke, Martin, 113, 251 Min, Anchee, 24, 109–124, 125n3, 125n4, 125n7, 125n10, 129n83, 130n91 Moffat, Wendy, 17 Montani, Chiara, 298, 305, 306, 308–310, 313n43 Morales-Ladrón, Marisol, 13 Moretti, Franco, 56, 58 Morrison, Toni, 250 Morrissy, Mary, 12, 13, 15, 35n74 Moses, Kate, 22, 275 Mulrooney, Deirdre, 96–99 Mummery, Jane, 15 N Neo-Victorian, 27, 370, 379 Neumeier, Beate, 10 New biography, 54 New Feminism, 159, 172 New woman, 255 Nicolson, Harold, 56, 57 Ní Dhúill, Caitríona, 8, 19, 111, 114, 229, 259, 323, 372, 375, 379, 381 Novak, Julia, 69n70, 248, 276, 330, 370, 373, 376, 377, 380, 382 Novick, Sheldon, 218, 220, 227, 228 Nunez, Sigrid, 63 Nünning, Ansgar, 30n10, 38n121, 248

391

O O’Farrell, Maggie, 9, 11 O’Sullivan, Michael, 224 P Padmore, Catherine, 25, 306 Parini, Jay, 7 Parr, Katherine, 25, 157–173 Perkin, J. Russell, 215, 225, 235 Pheby, Alex, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96–98 Plaidy, Jean, 25, 50, 51, 157–173, 173n4, 174n39 Plath, Sylvia, 22, 273, 275 Plato, 226, 358 Postcolonial reading, 199 Presentism, 193, 224, 237, 382, 383 Prosser, Jay, 16 Przybyszewski, Stanisław, 271, 281, 283 Q Queer, 4, 17, 19, 23, 57, 181, 190, 191, 214, 215, 218, 219, 221, 224, 227, 229, 236, 346, 360, 364n36, 365n60, 372, 374 Queer life-writing, 19 R Regard, Frédéric, 274 Relational biofiction(s), 10, 259 Relational biography, 26, 259, 323 Renaissance, 58, 247, 297–310, 313n43 Renaissance virtuosa, 297–310 Revisionist fictional biographies, 248, 258 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 7, 249 Rossiter, Margaret W., 317, 318, 327 Rousselot, Elodie, 30n10, 179

392 

INDEX

S Sackville-West, Vita, 49, 59, 60, 65, 69n63, 69n64 Saint-Amour, Paul, 222 Samuels, Ellen, 357, 359 Sartor, Genevieve, 98 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 90 Saunders, Helen, 98 Saunders, Max, 21, 52, 54, 57, 58, 69n63, 69n69, 126n17 Savu, Laura E., 228 Schabert, Ina, 33n48, 84, 85 Schiller, Anna, 272, 278, 279 Scientia sexualis, 346 Second-wave feminism, 165 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 225 Sensationalism, 22, 254, 258, 272 Shaw, George Bernard, 234, 376, 383 Shields, David, 247 Shloss, Carol Loeb, 76, 77, 79, 81–84, 86, 89, 90, 95, 97, 102n93, 103n115, 104n138 Short, Emma, 145, 188, 191, 192, 273, 286 Soja, Edward W., 23, 55, 56 Soprani, Raffaele, 298, 302–310 Spoo, Robert, 233 Stapleton, Áine, 93–95, 97–99 Strachey, Lytton, 54, 56, 57, 60 Sutherland, Emily, 188 T Talbot, Mary, 86, 92, 98 Third-wave feminism, 165 Tóibín, Colm, 25, 51, 213–237

Transgender, 15, 17–19, 21, 369, 383n1 True woman, 255 Tudors, 1, 24, 25, 135, 136, 139, 142, 145–148, 158, 159, 165, 166, 170, 174, 179–201 V Vasari, Giorgio, 298–304, 306, 308, 312n11 Vaught, Anna, 90–92, 96–98 Victimisation, 25, 172, 271–286 von Ranke, Leopold, 382 W Wagner-Martin, Linda, 16, 35n82 Wallace, Diana, 23, 24, 149, 162, 165, 182, 186, 199, 250 Weak theory, 222 White, Hayden, 55, 126n21, 187 Wilde, Oscar, 217, 230–232 Williams, Erin, 234 Wood, Olivia, 275 Woolf, Virginia, 11, 23–25, 49–66, 83, 84, 249, 273, 275 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 214, 215, 217–219, 232–235 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 382 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 249 Y Young, Iris, 353