Recovering History Through Fact and Fiction : Forgotten Lives [1 ed.] 9781527510777, 9781527503250

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Recovering History through Fact and Fiction

Recovering History through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives Edited by

Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien and Nike Sulway

Recovering History through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives Edited by Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien and Nike Sulway This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien, Nike Sulway and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0325-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0325-0

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Forgotten Lives: The Historical, the Speculative and the Biographical Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Recovering Forgotten Lives through Fact and Fiction Donna Lee Brien, Dallas John Baker & Nike Sulway Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 11 Australian Speculative Biography: Recovering Forgotten Lives Donna Lee Brien Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 27 Understanding Deadman’s Pocket: Peter Glynn and the Making of a Colonial Frontiersman Libby Connors Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 42 Forgetful Politicians: Biography and Politics in Australia Patrick Mullins Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 53 “A date with Barbara”: Paracosms of the Self in Biographies of Barbara Newhall Follett Nike Sulway Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 68 Memoir from Finnish Margins: Narrating Buried History Ira McGuire Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 78 Vladimír Ležák-Borin: Cold War Warrior Jayne Persian

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Writing and Performing Lives: Creative Interventions on Stage, Page and Screen Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 88 Gender Disruption in the Life and Times of Daphne Mayo Debra Beattie Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 99 Fiction as a Biographic Space for Exploring ‘Lost’ Lives James Vicars Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 110 Remembering Garland: Performing a Forgotten Biography Bernadette Meenach Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 123 Writing back to Tolkien: Gender, Sexuality and Race in High Fantasy Dallas John Baker Romantic and Renaissance Lives: Recovering the Past in the Digital and Fictional Present Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 146 Pictures of Lyly: Digital Corruptions and Biographical Truths Laurie Johnson Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 158 The Tudor Paintrix in Recent Fiction Catherine Padmore Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 171 Remembering Laura Cereta: Public and Private Lives of a Humanist Scholar Jess Carniel Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 183 Biography and Beyond: The Reanimation of Mary Shelley Alison Bedford Contributors ............................................................................................. 194 Index ........................................................................................................ 199

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors conceived this project in conjunction with the Forgotten Lives / Biographies symposium hosted by the School of Arts & Communication, University of Southern Queensland, in April 2016, convened by Dr. Dallas John Baker. The editors sincerely thank ReDTrain at the University of Southern Queensland for supporting that event, as well as funding an Eminent Visiting Scholar residency for one of the editors of this collection, Professor Donna Lee Brien, which enabled her to travel to Toowoomba to deliver her keynote address, and engage in the productive discussions that have resulted in this volume. A warm thank you also to Professor Barbara de la Harpe, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Business, Education, Law and Arts, who launched the symposium, and to Professor Rhod McNeill, Head of School of Arts & Communication, who supported the idea of the symposium from the beginning. This collection is the sum total of the work of the contributors, and we thank them for their commitment to this project. Sincere thanks, too, to the peer reviewers of the collection, whose astute and generous comments improved this volume. We would also like to gratefully acknowledge our schools and universities – the School of Arts & Communication at the University of Southern Queensland, and the School of Education and the Arts at Central Queensland University – for supporting both the research that has resulted in this book, and this collaboration. Special thanks go to the Centre for Regional Advancement in Learning, Equity, Access and Participation, a cross-disciplinary research centre at Central Queensland University, for their ongoing support of this research.

FORGOTTEN LIVES: THE HISTORICAL, THE SPECULATIVE AND THE BIOGRAPHICAL

CHAPTER ONE RECOVERING FORGOTTEN LIVES THROUGH FACT AND FICTION DONNA LEE BRIEN, DALLAS JOHN BAKER AND NIKE SULWAY Over the course of the twentieth century, biographical writing evolved into a rich academic field of research, with major studies published from midcentury onwards. More recently, the field has further developed into a diverse and inclusive area of scholarly endeavour. This has shown how, as both a description of genre and a form of practice, biographical writing has the potential to bring together a range of varied perspectives, including scholarship from creative writing and other cognate areas, such as history and literary studies. Starting from the premise that biographical (as autobiographical) writing is a significant component of both contemporary artistic practice and scholarship, it is timely to offer contemporary reevaluations of the components of the mode itself, its contemporary subgeneric incarnations, the range of subjects available to biographical investigation, and emerging or innovative methodological approaches. This is the purpose of Recovering History through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives, a new edited collection with an Australian focus on biography: traditional, speculative and hybrid. The aim of this edited collection is to encourage further research, innovation and collaboration in biographical writing by gathering together research that focuses on figures who have been largely neglected by history, or forgotten over time. The question of how to recover, reclaim or retell the histories and stories of those obscured by the passage of time, or neglected in historic and academic discourse, is one of growing public and scholarly interest. It certainly intrigues the contributors to this collection. Chapters on a diverse array of topics are included, such as: biography as a form of life writing (both historical and speculative); semi-biographical fiction; digital and visual biographies; autobiography; and semiautobiographical fiction and memoir (both factual and speculative). Together, the chapters included in this collection offer a snapshot of new

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research on biography and its many variations and hybrids. Forgotten Lives also showcases the creative interventions that some scholars have used to produce speculative biographies of subjects whose lives and works have been obscured by time or dominant discourses, or reframe the ways a public figure is most commonly understood, either through their life story or their published works. The desire to showcase contemporary academic scholarship in this field has been inspired by our current research, which examines shared interests in writing and publication, critical theory, and the multiple manifestations of biographical and autobiographical writing in various disciplinary and generic contexts. It is also strongly informed and inspired by our work with colleagues from the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) and leading contemporary journals in the field, including TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Programs, which has thrown into sharp focus a real and sustained interest in contemporary biographical and autobiographical writing. The AAWP and TEXT concentration on writing of all genres and approaches, bringing together scholars and researchers, writers, students, teachers and other professionals from across Australasia. These institutions’ focus on Australasian writing research and practice, but also foster interest and scholarship in specialist contemporary genres and sub-genres of writing. The interest in a collection on contemporary critical interrogations of biography and autobiography stems from the nature of numerous papers presented at AAWP conferences over time, and multiple conversations carried out between researchers, which identified biographical practice and research as an area of intense and enduring contemporary interest and a gap in current publication. As a result, a symposium was held at University of Southern Queensland in April 2016, bringing together scholars from around Australia, and from which the chapters of this collection are drawn. Recovering History through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives aims to provide a focus on contemporary biographical scholarship, bringing together a range of perspectives from different approaches and areas of study, including creative interventions into biographical discourse. The book offers a unique focus on research as well as speculative or imaginative biographical works focussing on persons whose lives have been obscured or forgotten. In particular, Recovering History through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives: x offers varied and multi-faceted readings of biographical and autobiographical writing, highlighting the importance and

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x x x

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impact of sub-generic differences and experimentation within the genre; includes innovative and fresh perspectives on biographical writing within established areas such as history, memoir and auto/biography; draws attention to the under-represented body of work that uses fiction and other creative processes to construct a life story, or intervene in a life story already widely disseminated; places a particular emphasis on contemporary issues within biographical scholarship, such as speculative biography and the ways that the lives of forgotten or obscured figures can be recovered or recuperated; has a unique Australian focus, which although a locus of sustained and prolific biographical writing and scholarship, research and practice, is under-represented in book-length works; and, signals a shift in biographical research to an interdisciplinary approach that embraces imagination and creativity, and focuses on figures obscured by time or marginalised by dominant discourse.

In spite of the interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transnational impact of biographical writing, most scholarly publications in the area have given a distinct priority to certain themes and areas of enquiry, including questions of truth, privacy and ethical production, and to prominent locations of production such as the USA and UK. While these are areas of important consideration, opening up the field to a broader range of critical themes and geographical or national literatures provides a more nuanced and diverse picture of the field, and of areas of investigation that are animating contemporary study and practice. There is a need, therefore, for this collection focused on contemporary biographical writing and its role in recovering important, but forgotten, lives, and focusing on scholarship arising out of Australasia. Likewise, this collection fills a need for examples of creative or speculative approaches to rendering those forgotten (or distorted) lives. Forgotten Lives is divided into three sections, organised both thematically and conceptually. Each of the three sections features essays developing the themes and content of that section in different and innovative, and sometimes even unusual, ways.

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Forgotten Lives: The historical, the speculative and the biographical The essays in the first section focus on forgotten or obscured lives, and on the historical and speculative methods used to discuss these lives. The first chapter in this section, ‘Australian Speculative Biography: A Means of Recovering Forgotten Lives’, by Donna Lee Brien, profiles the most contentious of biographical sub-genres – the ‘speculative biography’ – which proclaims the central role of authorial interpretation in biographical writing. Brien uses a case study approach to focus on a number of rarely discussed works, which illustrate varied aspects of the productive role of speculation in biographical writing. The chapter demonstrates the potential of using speculative writing strategies to produce biographies that are rich, appealing, thought-provoking, and historically-informed, narratives of real lives and experience. ‘Understanding Deadman’s Pocket: Peter Glynn and the Making of a Colonial Frontiersman’, by Libby Connors, explores an incident on the early Queensland frontier that was soon added to the pantheon of Australian colonial frontier stories. It investigates a racial attack through the biography of its survivor, Peter Glynn. Connors originally intended to peel away the racist context in order to understand its underlying causes but, in the process of her research, Glynn’s life revealed insights into acts of working class masculinity on the mid-nineteenth century Australian colonial frontier that add to existing gender critiques of and pioneering. In his chapter, Patrick Mullins argues that politicians are rarely forgotten. Thanks to the intersection of the Carlylean ‘Great Man of History’ theory, and the Rankean emphasis on nation states, studies of the past are commonly framed through the actions and words of those who are most conspicuous. Yet in Australia, those politicians who serve in the Senate are more easily overlooked than their Lower House colleagues; with the exception of notable crossbenchers, senators are generally unknown to the broader public. As Senator Bob Collins one said, “The Senate, of course, is the B-Grade” (Peacock 1996). The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate (BDAS) – commenced in part to rectify this – is nearing completion. Mullins’ chapter explores both the rationale for the BDAS and its preliminary outcomes. Comparing it with similar examples worldwide, Mullins critically analyses the limitations and opportunities of the BDAS as an example of biographical research and argues that – by its recovery of these overlooked lives – the Dictionary illuminates a dimension both inherent within, and outside, the mission of biography: institutions, places, events and contexts.

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Unlike politicians, children are seldom the subjects of biography. When they are, Nike Sulway suggests in her chapter, the relative lack of sources, the unresolved nature of their life stories, and the tendency of adults to overwrite children’s experiences with their own result in unusual, and often troubling, texts. In child biographies, objectivity is even more elusive than it is when dealing with adult subjects, particularly as these biographies are often written by grieving relatives. Sulway argues that the contemporary expectation that “biographers accept the impossibility of objectivity, deny their omnipotence and make their political, social, cultural and other motivations discernible in their texts” (Brien 2014) is further complicated by the particular nature of these biographies, and the unusual relationship of biographer and subject; parent/adult and child. ‘Memoir from the Margins: Narrating Buried History’, by Ira McGuire, reflects the idea that “all histories are a kind of fiction” (Nelson 2007, n.pag.). McGuire discusses her grandmother, Martta Vilenius, who had two novels published: her first in 1936 and the second in 1960. By the time Martta Vilenius moved from Finland to Australia in 1987, to join her family, she was a forgotten literary footnote. She lived out her final years in a Finnish nursing home in Brisbane, surrounded by the treasured objects collected in her youthful travels. McGuire reflects on the fact that her grandmother died before anyone thought to record her memories, to look at her as a subject, to give her context. From the fragments of recollections that McGuire holds, this chapter discusses and uses memory and photographs to narrate a buried history. The subject of Jayne Persian’s chapter is Vladimir Ležák Borin, a post-war enigma. Borin, a Czech migrant to Australia, was much more than he seemed. Arriving at the tail end of the post-war Displaced Persons (DP) Scheme, through which more than 170,000 Central and Eastern Europeans arrived in Australia as International Refugee Organisationsponsored refugees, Borin was described by contemporaries as a ‘fraud’ and of the ‘political underworld’ (Richards 1978, 11). Borin’s somewhat convoluted journeys, both political and geographical, tell us something of the life of the politically elite, and active, displaced person. Exploring the life story of an outlier of the DP Scheme in Australia, this chapter focuses on Borin’s life story as a type of micro-history, or even a foray into speculative biography.

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Writing and Performing Lives: Creative interventions on stage, page and screen Building on the methods of construction of biographical writing in section one, the second section focuses on how to represent or discuss lives using creative means such as film-making, fiction and performance. A number of these chapters focus on the famous or once famous, whose biographies have been forgotten or distorted by their celebrity status. Elaborating on concepts of the speculative nature of all biography evidenced in section one, and expressly discussed in Donna Lee Brien’s chapter, the works in this section demonstrate how researchers can creatively intervene in biographical discourse and/or resurrect interest in a forgotten figure through biographical narrative and imagining. Debra Beattie’s ‘Gender Disruption in the Life and Times of Daphne Mayo’ describes how the author, during extensive archival research for a bio-pic on this once well-known Australian sculptor, located previously unexplored information regarding a woman with a lifelong commitment to art and her career as a sculptor, and a determination to live her chosen life as a financially independent modern woman. Although quite introverted, Mayo is a feisty example of the emerging ‘new woman’. Beattie describes how she carved out a unique life devoted to art, her own arts practice, and her work for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In this, Beattie entwines her conclusions regarding Mayo’s personal life with these interventions into the public sphere. In ‘Fiction as a Biographic Space for Exploring “Lost” Lives’, James Vicars explores how the once closely-guarded, and argued, divide between fact and fiction is now being crossed by many kinds of writing, including the biographical. Reflecting upon his own writing of the biography of aviatrix Millicent Bryant, Vicars discusses how fictional forms are being used by writers in many parts of the world to recover forgotten or neglected lives, as well as those of better known historical figures. Ranging from the full biographical novel to hybrid true stories and fictional fragments, Vicars argues that these works create or inhabit a biographic space in which ‘lost’ lives can be rediscovered. Bernadette Meenach’s ‘Remembering Garland: Performing a Forgotten Biography’ begins with a discussion of how the evolution of biography has seen a transformation in the role of the biographer from the objective and invisible reporter of facts to a subjective perceiver situated firmly within a social context. In this chapter, Meenach discusses how, in her work in a practice-led doctorate, she aimed to recover the actress Judy Garland’s life story from the common descriptions of her life as a tragedy.

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By using two of her own original works of biographical theatre, Meenach reveals how she sought to reframe Garland’s life story. Meenach also highlights a series of principles that practitioners of biographical theatre, and other biographical writers, may find useful. In ‘Writing Back to Tolkien: Gender, Sexuality and Race in High Fantasy’, Dallas J. Baker argues that that there is more than one version of the much-loved fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien in public and scholarly discourse. He argues that it is important that the version that survives in public memory is not one that silences discussion about gender, sexuality and race. One potent way to work against this forgetting, Baker innovatively suggests, is to produce creative works that contribute to readers’ knowledge about race, gender and sexuality in Tolkienesque literature. Baker uses his own work, a series of Young Adult fantasy novels, as an example of how this can be accomplished.

Romantic and Renaissance Lives: Recovering the past in the digital and fictional present The third section of the collection looks further backwards in time to consider the biographical dilemma of how to write a life after the passage of centuries and the loss of much evidence. Each chapter in this section does this in its own unique way. The works in this section illuminate the lives of fascinating but largely unknown figures. Laurie Johnson’s chapter on John Lyly, playwright, poet, and ‘rather less than successful courtier’, discusses how, in the digital age, biographers invariably seek to furnish their scholarship with images of their subjects. Johnson notes that when dealing with subjects from eras preceding the photographic age, there is the blessing provided by portraiture, and poses the question: What is the fate of a biography where no portrait exists? Johnson’s chapter argues that although Lyly’s literary and dramatic influence on Shakespeare and others is without question, there has been no rush to produce Lyly biographies. Johnson suggests this may be partly due to the fact that no portrait was ever painted of Lyly. Johnson also discusses the pitfalls of using Google Images, or indeed any site of similar design and architecture, when seeking to compile visual support for a biography. In her chapter ‘The Tudor Paintrix in Recent Fiction’, Catherine Padmore considers the archival traces of two little-known female Tudor painters: Susannah Horenbout (1503-1554) and Levina Teerlinc (15151576). Padmore examines what has been made of these women’s lives by contemporary fiction writers, noting that little archival evidence of their

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lives remains and that, while the fragmented nature of the record has frustrated historians and art historians, it has been a boon for writers of historical fiction. Padmore argues that the absence of historical documents has allowed fiction writers to invent freely to ‘fill in the blanks’. Padmore uses a number of recent novels that feature these artists, or characters based on them, to frame her discussion, and argues that within these works of historical fiction the Tudor paintrix undergoes multiple metamorphoses, becoming detective, adventuress or protector. Jess Carniel’s chapter on fifteenth-century scholar Laura Cereta, a humanist of some renown in Quattrocento Brescia, a town in northern Italy, describes how many women who participated in this tradition of learning have been lost in its history, or have been disregarded as serious humanist thinkers, and the literary merit of their texts neglected. Carniel demonstrates how Cereta developed an array of techniques to deal with social and cultural mores regarding women and learning in the fifteenth century, also analysing the aspects of Cereta’s life experience that influenced the construction of her humanist literary persona. ‘Biography and Beyond: The Reanimation of Mary Shelley’, by Alison Bedford, acknowledges that the restorative power of biography in recognising ‘forgotten lives’ is well established. In the field of literary criticism, Bedford notes, this has led to the rediscovery of many writers and works now considered canonical. Bedford suggests that one of the most successful biographical recuperations is of that Mary Shelley, who was lifted from her husband’s shadow by the feminist biographers of the 1980s. However, this chapter argues that once biographical recuperation has re-established critical interest, it is possible to go beyond biographical approaches, which identify figures worthy of study, in order to reanimate these historical figures and make new offerings to the existing body of criticism and its theoretical approaches. Bedford outlines these approaches and explores how contextual studies of how place, time and personality shape authors enriches our understanding of the emergence of new cultural forms, such as science fiction, and also gives insight into the formation of discourses that reach beyond genre. Throughout the collection, these scholars, researchers and writers demonstrate various innovative and exciting approaches to the scholarship and practice of contemporary biography. Collectively, they argue for a practice that is inventive and creative, responding in diverse ways to the problem of the biographical subject whose life narrative has been obscured, distorted, hidden or erased. Each chapter demonstrates a unique approach to the practice of biography; together, they offer an exciting

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insight into the challenges and possibilities of biographical writing, while also urging us to recall and recreate the lives of those who have been forgotten. This collection will, we hope, not only provide a much-needed snapshot of biographical writing and enquiry in Australia today, but also encourage other such enquiries and collective responses.

Works cited Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP). 2017. http://www.aawp.org.au. Brien, Donna Lee. 2014. “‘Welcome Creative Subversions’: Experiment and Innovation in Recent Biographical Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Courses 18 (1). Accessed July 7, 2017. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april14/brien.htm. Nelson, Camilla. 2007. “Faking it: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal Of Writing And Writing Courses 11 (2). Accessed July 7, 2016. http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm. Peacock, Matt. 1996. “The Senate: What Goes Around Comes Around.” ABC Radio National. Background Briefing. 5 May. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/thesenate-what-goes-around-comes-around/3563852#transcript.Richards. Richards, Lyn. 1978. “Displaced Politics: Refugee Migrants in the Australian Political Context.” La Trobe Sociology Papers 45: 1-52.

CHAPTER TWO AUSTRALIAN SPECULATIVE BIOGRAPHY: RECOVERING FORGOTTEN LIVES DONNA LEE BRIEN

Introduction Profiling the most contentious of biographical sub-genres – the ‘speculative biography’, which proclaims the central role of authorial interpretation in biographical writing – this essay will use a case study approach (Merriam 2009) to focus on a number of rarely discussed Australian works that illustrate varied aspects of the productive role of speculation in biographical writing. This will suggest the potential of using speculative writing strategies to produce biographies that are rich, appealing and thought-provoking, historically-informed narratives of real lives and experience. By referring to the reviews of this volume, it also provides both some contextualisation of how these biographies have been received by critics and reviewers, as well as a working example of the value of such reviews in creative writing research.

Biography (and autobiography) Biography is popularly understood as a factual story of a life, which is not written by the subject (Hamilton 2009, 81). Technically, a biography covers the whole of a person’s life, whereas a biographical memoir focuses in on a certain aspect or period of that life. Although this ‘rule’ is often broken, biographies are also usually defined as being based on documentary evidence, while memoirs are based on memories of the person being written about (Brien 2004). The documentary evidence used in writing biographies traditionally includes such materials as: birth, death and marriage certificates; shipping, flight and other manifests; census records; diaries, letters and photographs; government, legal, business, financial and medical records; newspaper articles, books and other

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material written about or by the subject; interviews with the subject and people who knew that person; military service and war records; and other such materials (see, for example, Leckie 2004). Often other materials are also consulted to sketch in, or check facts about, the ‘times’ in which a biographical subject lived, and the ‘life and times biography’ is often referred to. This biographical evidence can be stored in the public domain, buried in archives or libraries, or held in private collections. Part of the biographer’s art is not only the ability to locate and then sift through relevant evidence, but also finally to order and describe it in a way that tells a compelling story about a person’s life. The biographer and scholar of biography Leon Edel has, for instance, stated that: The moment you start shaping a biography, it becomes more than a mere assemblage of facts … you are creating a work of art … This kind of writing requires patience, assiduity, also enthusiasm, feeling, and certainly a sense of the biographer’s participation. The biographer is a presence in life-writing, in charge of handling the material, establishing order, explaining and analyzing the ambiguities and anomalies (qtd. in McCullough 1985).

Libraries and bookshops hold shelves of such biographies, from ponderous tomes on political figures that may have taken decades to research and write to more quickly produced and frivolous – although albeit often enjoyable – volumes on figures from popular culture. This reliance on the published or archived public record brings with it, of course, certain problems. While some individuals attract considerable documentation of their lives, others attract little. There are many biographies, for instance, of powerful people, but far fewer of the people who work for them. Many more biographies have been written about the wealthy than the poor; many more biographies of men than women. Biographer Amia Leiblich has written, for instance, about how she, in the late 1980s “became aware of the scarcity or near-absence … of biographies about women, by women writers” (2004, 206). There are also many more biographies about those from rich Western countries than the developing world (Spivak 1999), and many more about heterosexual than queer subjects (Hughes-Hassell, Overberg and Harris 2013, 12). There are some vivid exceptions to this assertion, but these prove how many biographies of rich, powerful Western men there are. An unusual volume worth considering in these terms is the edited group biography Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe: Narratives of the Sick Poor, 1780-1938 (Gestrich, Hurren and King 2012). The editors of this volume note the paucity of “detailed biographies of the poor” (8), responding to Waller’s

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earlier observation that “not only arebiographies of the poor seldom written and even less often read, those which do reach the bookstands are invariably the memoirs of individuals who have risen from the lower ranks to achieve fame or notoriety” (2006, 13). But this task is not easy – in wanting to write about the inhabitants of slums in Victorian England, Shülting asks how such biographies can be researched or narrated (2016, 10). Feminist, queer, postcolonial and other scholarship cites the lack of biographical texts on subjects of interest in these areas, making similar cases for why such lives should be documented, remembered and re/inserted into the historical record (see, for instance, McIntosh 1988; Magarey, Guerin and Hamilton 1992; Moffat 2015). Some careers also seem to attract biographies – there are many more biographies of actors, pop stars and other celebrities than surgeons, farmers or academics, for instance. I have, to date, found only one published book-length biography of a homeless person, Alexander Masters’ award winning Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005), which won the Whitbread Award for Biography in 2005. Despite utilising a highly successful experimental narrative form, it was the author’s choice of subject that was most praised in reviews (Brien 2015). Morse, for instance, noted as the book’s “greatest triumph” that it presents “an intimate, poignant, if often disturbing view of one homeless man in England … in all of his complexities and contradictions, his strengths and weaknesses” (2007). Leading biographer Victoria Glendinning has recently complained about what Thorpe characterises as a “shrinking market for serious biography” (qtd. in Thorpe 2010), claiming that publishers are only interested in ‘safe’ subjects like the Brontë sisters and celebrity biographies (Thorpe 2010). Sometimes, however, this preponderance is due to the source materials available. In the case of the arts, there are many more biographies of writers, for instance, than painters, so many that the literary biography is a long-lived recognised sub-genre of biographical narrative. This concentration makes sense, as writers often leave a rich trail of documents that can be used in biography, including, most notably, their published and unpublished writing, which can be dissected for information about life events and their meaning. That all sounds rather straightforward, and reading posted reviews on bookselling sites such as Amazon.com reveals that that is how most readers understand biography. Since the 1990s, when all kinds of autobiographical narrative has made the bestselling lists, autobiography as a genre of writing has prompted much theoretical, methodological, ethical and other musing in the academy (see, for example, Bell and Yalom 1993; Anderson 1997;

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Backscheider 1999; Egan 1999; Douglas 2001; Smith and Watson 2001; Eakin 2004; O’Rourke 2006; Whitlock 2010). Although much serious work has also been completed on biography, it – as a genre of writing – has been less studied and theorised than the first person form of autobiography which, it can be posited, may be due at least in part to biography’s notional status as a straightforward, factual genre. Some writers and scholars have, however, long recognised that biography is of interest as a form of creative writing (see, for instance, Woolf 1927; Edel 1957; Nadel 1984; Novarr 1986). Biographers themselves have, indeed, reflected on the work involved in constructing coherent and interesting biographical narratives from the often seemingly dry and unpromising data which makes up the majority of biographical sources. In the Preface to his Eminent Victorians (1918), Lytton Strachey, for instance, reflects on how, “it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as it is to live one” (2012, 6). Edel notes that biographers require the qualities of “patience, assiduity, also enthusiasm, [and] feeling” (qtd. in McCullough 1985). In elaborating on this, he also posits that there is more to the journeyman craft of putting together a series of facts in writing biography, a focus on the interior life of the subject is essential: The moment you start shaping a biography, it becomes more than a mere assemblage of facts … you are creating a work of art … establishing order, explaining and analyzing the ambiguities and anomalies. Biography is dull if it’s just dates and facts … there must be a sense of the inwardness of human beings as well as outwardness: the ways in which we make dreams into realities (qtd. in McCullough 1985).

Later, he describes how the biographer is an artist who must both “explain and examine the evidence. The story is told brushstroke by brushstroke like a painter”. In this important interview, Edel also touches on speculation in biography, writing that, “What we hope for from most biographers is informed speculation”. In terms of his own practice as a biographer, he states that he “usually set[s] the facts in front of a reader and if necessary say[s] ‘we may speculate’ or ‘we may conjecture,’ if I think the facts add up to this or that conclusion. There are gratifying moments when you speculate and then find proof of accuracy; there are less gratifying moments when you find your conclusion was far-fetched” (qtd. in McCullough 1985). Many other biographers acknowledge that due to the interpretation involved in their creations, all biography is speculative to some degree and, in recognition of this, describe their narratives as one possible version of the life story they are telling, rather

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than the single definitive story of a subject’s life. This is clearly demonstrated in the now long established practice of biographers adding the subtitle “a life” to their titles as, for instance, in Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980), Claire Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life (1997), Meryle Secrest’s Stephen Sondheim: A Life (1998), Jonathan Steinberg’s Bismarck: A Life (2011), Peter Slevin’s Michelle Obama: A Life (2015), and myriad other examples.

Speculative biography As Edel maintains above, all biographical narratives include a measure of speculation on the part of their authors. Speculative biographers, however, openly include a level of conjecture and speculation that goes beyond this core authorial technique, yet are still able to maintain their works as nonfiction biographies, rather than biographically-based fiction (Brien 2014, 2015). Before investigating this in more detail, it is also worth clarifying upfront what the speculative biographer is not, as this has confused some commentators. Speculation in biography does not include biographers who exaggerate or lie about the data they collect, who claim they have conducted research they have not, or who have fraudulently invented their own background or qualifications. Such cases of exaggeration, lying, fraud and/or hoaxes are not examples of speculative biography. Speculative biography is also different again from what I refer to above as biographically-based fiction and which James Vicars elegantly describes as work which is “recognisably biographical … but is imaginatively written or entirely (or in part) presented as fiction” (2015, 17, italics in original). Instead, speculative biographers diligently work from the available evidence, but feel free to make what might be termed as “educated guesses” to fill biographical gaps. Speculative biographers, moreover, also make it patently clear when they are thus interpreting the available evidence and including their own conjecture in the text. Despite being somewhat controversial, such biographical speculation is not a recent innovation, nor is its recognition new. In 1927, Virginia Woolf discussed what she called “the biographer’s imagination”, which she believed particularly useful in investigating the subject beyond their public persona. Biographers, she stated, used “the novelist’s art of arrangement, suggestion, [and] dramatic effect to expound the private life” (1927, 155). Woolf, however, was also careful to stress that biographers must balance fact and speculation in their narratives or else risk their works not being classified as biography. Many biographers since have agreed. In 1973, for instance, Richard Ellmann, author of major literary

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biographies on Irish writers W. B. Yeats (1948), James Joyce (1959) and Oscar Wilde (1987) among many other volumes, confidently proclaimed that biographies would “continue to be archival, but the best ones will offer speculations, conjectures, hypotheses” (1973, 15). In 1996, acclaimed biographer Peter Ackroyd went further, proposing that, in his experience, the entire act of biographical composition is based on speculation, arguing “everything is available for recreation or manipulation” (qtd. in Onega, 214). While certainly not seeking to falsify the historical evidence (or record), the speculative biographer extends and supports the account generated from this evidence by using speculation as a means of inserting into the narrative those biographical elements without which the biographical subject’s life story is incomplete. These elements can include the emotional responses, thoughts and motivations that so interested Woolf, as well as other information which assists in creating a richer and more complete life story for the subject under investigation. To illustrate this, the rest of this essay will profile some Australian works that demonstrate varied aspects of the productive role of speculation in biographical writing.

The biographer’s role in the biography A common feature of many speculative biographies involves the biographer openly acknowledging their research and writing processes, including any limitations or problems, as well as the various narrative strategies employed in order to construct their texts. This is exemplified in A. J. A. Symons’ innovative and influential The Quest for Corvo: An Experimental Biography (1934), a biography of the English author and eccentric Frederick Rolfe who called himself Baron Corvo, which has been cited as starting off “a whole new genre of biography” (Weintraub 2016, 244) due to its vivid inclusion of the biographer’s role. So much so, indeed, that Symons’ text was described as being a biographer’s autobiography (Cockshut 1989, 86). Australian Brian Matthews’ critically acclaimed Louisa (1987) similarly highlighted the biographer’s struggles, disappointments and methods while attempting to narrate the life of Louisa Lawson (author, publisher, feminist and mother of poet Henry Lawson). After describing a number of discarded ideas for inventing an “alternative [or parallel] text” (8) – by an invented editor or diarist – Matthews suggests that this alternative figure already existed by declaring: “It is the biographer” (12). He continues to write of himself, as biographer, in the third person throughout, and also creates an alter-ego for himself-asbiographer: Owen Stevens. Using these mechanisms, Matthews can

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ponder aspects of the biographical enterprise, including the frustrations involved in biographical speculation when writing can seem an “Impossible, maddening task! Never knowing, never being sure ... longing to understand what might – what must – have happened” (131, italics in original). He also writes of wishing to be able to visit the past in order to check on these speculations: “If only one could go back, live their days with them, breathe that air, hear the sounds and see the scenes that surrounded them” (132, italics in original). Matthews, as biographer, also unpacks, criticises and debates Stevens’ judgments and conclusions – revealing for the reader the kinds of interior deliberations the biographer often has with his or herself while researching, writing and redrafting a biographical text. Such passages provide the reader with a revealing insider’s account of writing biography, although some were critical of the amount of the text that was given over to the Matthews’ (and the invented Owens’) musings. This work was, however, truly ground-breaking, especially in the way the two key stories were wound together – that of Louisa Lawson, and of a biographer struggling to tell the story of her life due to the lack of sources and the unreliability of what could be located. This narrative device of author-as-character has continued to attract Australian speculative biographers, including Alan Close who drew on this device in The Australian Love Letters of Raymond Chandler (1995), which tracks the correspondence between a young Australian university student and the famous American crime writer in his later years. What Close can be said to have added to Australian speculative biography could be described in terms of his vivid sense of the biographer existing as an actual body in space, rather than a disembodied consciousness shaping the work in his or her mind’s eye. In this case, Close’s location in Australia – in his flat in Bondi and as he travels, tracing the letters and their Australian writer – plays a central and formative role in the biographical narrative. As the criticism of this kind of biography suggests, this acknowledgement of the biographer in the text can be seen by readers as a conceited and unnecessary distraction from the core purpose of the narrative – which is to tell the story of the subject’s life – and, therefore, is a narrative strategy that needs to be utilised with discretion (see, Brien 2002). If readers judge this approach as successful, it is usually when biographers employ two strategies. Firstly, they interrupt the biographical account only to clarify the nature of their research and/or how they are constructing those narratives. Secondly, these interruptions are usually kept to a minimum. This is certainly the case in Peter Ackroyd’s muchacclaimed Dickens (1990).

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The Two Frank Thrings (2012) Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Two Frank Thrings (2012) illuminates how far Australian biographers have come in the decades since Louisa (1987) and The Australian Love Letters of Raymond Chandler (1995). The Two Frank Thrings is an elegantly structured text that presents paired biographies of two prominent figures in Australian media who Fitzpatrick refers to as “Frank Thring the father” (1882–1936) and “Frank Thring the son” (1926– 1994). This compelling, beautifully written biography also provides considerable reflection on biography as a form of writing, in a wholly enjoyable form which is both humorous and deeply moving. This work was well-received by reviewers and critics (see, for instance, Britain 2012; Stephens 2012; Kelly 2013; Steger 2013). McFarlane, for instance, described the work as “a superbly constructed biography” and commended Fitzpatrick’s “impeccable research” (2012). The Two Frank Thrings was awarded the 2013 National Biography Award, not only a major Australian literary award but an interesting one, as it is for published works “aiming to promote public interest in these genres” (State Library of NSW 2016). The judges described two components of biographical endeavour – its content and how Fitzpatrick dealt with the lack of sources – as “a wellpaced and clearly written biography in which the author brings to life two very different and determined self-mythologisers, and gracefully deals with what can be known about them and what cannot” (qtd. in Steger 2013). This latter remark relates to a significant feature of this text: Fitzpatrick’s musings on his biographical sources. While the acknowledgements pages list a large number of interviews conducted over the seven years Fitzpatrick was writing this biography (vii–viii), his main text notes when these interviewees contradicted each other. His brief author’s note also acknowledges that not only did his two biographical subjects keep no diaries, they also “managed to ensure that no selfrevealing correspondence survived them at all” (ix). Throughout the biography, Fitzpatrick fascinatingly deconstructs a number of the kinds of historical documents that are usually understood to provide impeccable documentary evidence – birth, death and marriage certificates, and letters – to show how these were filled with untruths, as well as speculation on why they were. Fitzpatrick also clearly signposts his speculation on what might have happened with such words and phrases as “if”, “perhaps”, “presumably’, “might” “maybe”, “may have had”, “might have looked rather like”, “suggests at least” and so forth, clearly signposting what are his own hypothetical or other musings on the evidence and events in the public record. McFarlane comments that it is “admirable ... the ways in

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which this research is used without clogging the narrative, and the honesty that casts doubt on tempting but dubious sources, especially the words of the two protagonists” (2012). Fitzpatrick, however, goes further in terms of speculation, by including in this biography a series of openly fictional interludes between chapters, wherein he imagines a first person voice for each of his biographical subjects and creates a series of monologues – what he calls “exercises in impersonation” (ix). These, Fitzpatrick writes, “seek to create a distinctive voice for each of the Thrings, and a sense of how they might have talked to themselves” (ix). These passages are clearly set apart from the rest of the biographical narrative in terms of being set into discrete chapters and by the use of italics for these sections of the text. What is more, these chapters are always placed in the text at a time when the subject is travelling – on the move within Australia, or to and around England, Europe and America. These ‘impersonations’ are intriguing for, despite being so different from the rest of the biographical text, they do not disrupt it and, although being clearly invented, they do not hold the readers interest less than the historically-based narrative. This is likely due to a number of factors: their close reliance on the evidence (a footnote could be added to almost every sentence), how openly these are revealed as speculations, how elegantly they fit into the book’s structure and how well they support the meaning of the text overall.

The Convict’s Daughter (2016) In The Convict’s Daughter – a major release by Allen & Unwin in 2016 – history lecturer at the University of South Australia, Kiera Lindsey, pens an openly speculative biography of Mary Ann Gill who, in 1848, aged 15, secretly left her father’s Sydney hotel and took a coach to a local racecourse – there to meet and elope with the wayward son of the former Attorney-General. Her father, a convict made good, pursued them and, enraged, shot at the man, but did not kill him. The biography then details the most scandalous abduction trial of this era and the fate suffered by convicts ‘who got above themselves’. This is biography pushing the boundaries of speculation, but always pulling back before the volume becomes an historical novel. Lindsey does this through all the mechanisms suggested above. She is a voice in the biography and uses Fitzpatrick’s carefully chosen language of speculation – “perhaps”, “we might then see” and so forth – but, interestingly, only very lightly through her text. Instead, Lindsey supports a comparatively high level of speculation by using the accepted apparatus of history writing to clearly signal her

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speculations. Her brief Prologue, for example, during which we meet Mary Ann as she shimmies down the drainpipe to her clandestine meeting with her husband-to-be, includes much thought, feeling and observation that a reader might suspect falls outside the historical record. This is then followed with a more formally written Introduction in which Lindsey sketches in her framing historical argument – that 1848 was the year of revolutions and this case marks an example of the tensions brewing in colonial Australia in this decade: between British and Australian-born residents, and Regency and Victorian values, and women wanting agency over their own lives. In this, Lindsey directly tells readers that she is going to use Mary Ann’s story to attempt to show that “colonial Australia was much more diverse and dimensioned than the well-known narratives of discovery, convicts, gold, and bushrangers sometimes suggests” (xiv) and, hence, the necessity for what could be characterised as a ‘less familiar’ narrative. At the end of the book are an Afterword, Acknowledgements section, Chapter notes, Bibliography and Index. Each of these sections both make clear, and build a case for, the historical validity of the speculation that Lindsey employs to tell Mary Ann Gill’s story. In the Afterword, for example, Lindsey explains to readers why she has used this form “as exciting as fiction” (280) to describe why the people in this story “behaved as they did” and how they “thought and acted” (281), explaining that “I have striven to recreate the sounds and smells, textures and tastes of their time, believing that this exterior world would provide a pathway into the interior world of these ordinary colonial subjects” (281). In seeking to provide a foil to biography written “through historical documents and the eyes of the men who made them” (281), Lindsey provides a biographical text through which readers can see the world “from the perspective of a young woman who was preoccupied with the everyday” (281). Lindsey also explains that, despite the 40,000 words of newspaper stories published about the abduction, and ensuing legal trial, there is no surviving image of Mary Ann, no private diary or personal correspondence; and so she was faced with “the task of recreating a life that is only partially documented” (282). To do this, Lindsey, as biographer, has used all the existing evidence, but embellished this when there is none, although using historical research to do so. Alongside this, importantly, she also shares her rationale for doing so with the reader. She explains her rationale thus: “I don’t know, for example, the colour of the gloves and bonnet Mary Ann wore when she stepped into the witness box in 1848, but I do know the fashionable colours of that year and the importance of stagecraft in nineteenth-century courts, particularly when it came to romantic scandal” (284). This is not unlike the manner in which

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Andrew Motion used notes in his openly speculative Wainewright the Poisoner (2000). In Wainewright, Motion utilises the available historical evidence, together with his considerable knowledge of the Romantic period, to concoct a first person ‘Confession’ for his subject – an artist, con-man and poisoner who was transported to Australia – and then follows each chapter with notes that explain the evidence which sometimes supports, but at other times questions, ‘Wainewright’s’ version of events. In her Notes section, Lindsey provides descriptive detail “for readers who seek information about which parts of The Convict’s Daughter are factual and which are imagined” (296). Even her Acknowledgements pages (293– 5) add further information about the research behind Lindsey’s speculations. Lindsey also creatively uses the plates in the centre of the book in this manner. In one particularly indicative example, on a double page of illustrations in the middle of the book, she includes an archival illustration of the family hotel and an advertisement for it from The Sydney Morning Herald of 16 October 1846. These two images are presented alongside two photographs of contemporaries of Mary Ann’s parents and Mary Ann. In this case, the text accompanying the imagery explains that there are no surviving images of these individuals, but here, at least, are images of the time that fit with descriptions Lindsey could locate and that readers can use to assist their imagining of these people.

Conclusion In 1901, Henry James noted the importance of speculation in attempting to imagine past lives for literary characters, suggesting that a writer “may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints as much as you like” but noting that “the real thing is almost impossible to do ... the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals” (qtd. in Edel 1957: 202– 3). While James was writing about representing characters in fiction, these remarks are applicable to this discussion in terms of how to incorporate this sense of an individual’s consciousness and identity into the biographical text. Speculative biography, by suggesting possibility (an informed idea of what may well have happened) instead of asserting certainty (what must have happened) in some aspects of the biographical narrative not only does this, but also reveals the potential of investigating and revealing the subjectivity, creativity and fallibility of biographers in their task of narrative construction. Moreover, by basing their subjective conjecture, empathy and imaginings on the documented facts (and making clear when any conjecture is not thus grounded), biographers can speculate

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but still ensure their texts are classified as non-fiction biographies. In this way, speculation allows biographers to utilise and amalgamate into the resulting narrative evidence that is fragmentary, ambiguous and contradictory, and to relay how uncertain, contradictory and confusing real lives are. It also allows biographers to write reflectively on the nature of the biographical enterprise itself as a holistic mixture of historical archival enquiry and creative endeavour. Moreover, it can be posited that a recognition of such speculation can contribute to making a case for biography to be considered as a valid form of creative writing rather than merely a mechanistic presentation of historical facts. Such a reconsideration may lead to a more general recognition that there is both creativity and art as well as research and knowledge involved in writing a biography. That this is clearly how biographers see themselves is evidenced in how, in both the form and content of their writing, the biographers discussed above openly acknowledge that while they present only one of the many possible interpretations and re-imaginings of the available evidence, the life stories they present are the version that these biographers subscribe to. They are, indeed, the biographical versions of a life that these writers have crafted using all their skill in order to most coherently and completely explain the existing evidence about those lives.

Works cited Ackroyd, Peter. 1990. Dickens. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Anderson, Linda. 1997. Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures. London and New York: Prentice Hall and Harvester Wheatsheaf. Backscheider, Paula R. 1999. Reflections on Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, Susan Groag, and Marilyn Yalom, eds. 1993. Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography and Gender. Albany: State University of New York Press. Brien, Donna Lee. 2002. “Being Honest about Lying: Defining the Limits of Auto/biographical Lying.” TEXT: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 6 (1). Accessed June 13, 2016. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april02/brien.htm. —. 2004. “True Tales that Nurture: Defining Auto/Biographical Storytelling.” Australian Folklore 19: 84–95. —. 2014. “‘Welcome Creative Subversions’: Experiment and Innovation in Recent Biographical Writing.” TEXT: The Journal of Writers and Writing Courses 18 (1). Accessed June 13, 2016.

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http://www.textjournal.com.au/april14/brien.htm. —. 2015. “‘The Facts Formed a Line of Buoys in the Sea of My Own Imagination’: History, Fiction and Speculative Biography.” TEXT Special Issue 28 (April). Accessed June 13, 2016. http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue28/Brien.pdf. Britain, Ian. 2012. “An Expert Dual Biography.” Australian Book Review 345. Accessed June 13, 2016. https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/october-2012/1180-345features-britain. Close, Alan. 1995. The Australian Love Letters of Raymond Chandler. Ringwood: McPhee Gribble Penguin. Cockshut, A.O.J. 1989. “A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo.” In The Biographer’s Art: New Essays, edited by Jeffrey Meyers, 84-105. New York: New Amsterdam. Douglas, Kate. 2001. “‘Blurbing’ Biographical: Authorship and Autobiography.” Biography 24 (4): 806–26. Eakin, Paul John, ed. 2004. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Edel, Leon. 1957. Literary Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Egan, Susanna. 1999. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ellmann, Richard. 1948. Yeats: The Man and the Masks. New York: Macmillan. —. 1959. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 1973. Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 1987. Oscar Wilde. London: H. Hamilton. Fitzpatrick, Peter. 2012. The Two Frank Thrings. Clayton: Monash University Press. Gestrich, Andreas, Elizabeth Hurren, and Steven King, eds. 2012. Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe: Narratives of the Sick Poor, 17801938. London and New York: Continuum. Hamilton, Nigel. 2009. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Hughes-Hassell, Sandra, Elizabeth Overberg, and Shannon Harris. 2013. “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning (LGBTQ)themed Literature for Teens: Are School Libraries Providing Adequate Collections?” School Library Research 16: 1-18. http://www.ala.org/aasl/slr/volume16/hughes-hasell-overberg-harris.

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James, Henry. 1901. “Letter to Sarah Orne Jewett, Rye, 5 October.” In The Selected Letters of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel, 202-3. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. Kelly, Veronica. 2013. “Review of the Two Frank Thrings.” Theatre Research International 38 (1): 76-8. Klein, Joe. 1980. Woody Guthrie: A Life. New York: A.A. Knopf. Leckie, Shirley A. 2004. “Biography Matters: Why Historians Need Well Crafted Biographies More Than Ever.” In Writing Biography: Historians & Their Craft, edited by Lloyd E. Ambrosius, 1-26. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Leiblich, Amia. 2004. “Writing Biography as a Relationship.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender 7: 206-11. Lindsey, Kiera. 2016. The Convict’s Daughter. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Magarey, Susan, Caroline Guerin, and Paula Hamilton. 1992. Writing Lives: Feminist Biography and Autobiography. Adelaide: University of Adelaide. Masters, Alexander. 2005. Stuart: A Life Backwards. London: Fourth Estate. Matthews, Brian. 1987. Louisa. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble. McCullough, Jeanne. 1985. “Leon Edel, the Art of Biography No. 1.” The Paris Review 98 (Winter). Accessed July 15, 2016. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2844/the-art-of-biographyno-1-leon-edel. McFarlane, Brian. 2012. “Some Thrings are Different.” The Age, October 27. Accessed July 16, 2016. http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/some-thrings-aredifferent-20121026-28ark.html. McIntosh, Peggy. 1988. “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” In The Teacher in American Society: A Critical Anthology, edited by Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., 121-133. Los Angeles: Sage. Merriam, S.B. 2009. Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Moffat, Wendy. 2015. “The Narrative Case for Queer Biography.” In Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser, 210-226. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Morse, Gary. 2007. “Seeing the Homeless: The Biography of a Street Person.” PsycCRITIQUES 52 (33). Accessed May 1, 2016. http://psycnet.apa.org. Motion, Andrew. 2000. Wainewright the Poisoner. London: Faber and Faber.

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Nadel, Ira. 1984. Biography: Fact, Fiction and Form. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Novarr, David. 1986. The Lines of Life: Theories of Biography, 18801970. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Onega, Susana. 1996. “Interview with Peter Ackroyd.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 42 (2): 208-21. O’Rourke, James L. 2006. Sex, Lies, and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Secrest, Meryle. 1998. Stephen Sondheim: A Life. New York: Knopf. Shülting, Sabine. 2016. Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture: Writing Materiality. New York and London: Routledge. Slevin, Peter. 2015. Michelle Obama: A Life. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2001. “The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography: Extravagant Lives, Extravagant Questions.” Biography 24 (1): 1-24. Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. State Library of NSW. 2016. National Biography Award. Accessed March 1, 2016. http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/about-library-awards/national-biographyaward. Steger, Jason. 2013. “Frank Thring Double Bill Wins Biography Award.” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 5. Accessed July 16, 2016. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/frank-thring-double-billwins-biography-award-20130805-2r8ou.html. Steinberg, Jonathan. 2011. Bismarck: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stephens, Andrew. 2012. “In Search of the Real Thring.” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 18. Accessed July 16, 2016. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/in-search-of-the-realthring-20120817-24cz7.html. Strachey, Lytton. 2012. Eminent Victorians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Symons, A.J.A. 1934. The Quest for Corvo: An Experimental Biography. London: Cassell. Thorpe, Vanessa. 2010. “Biographers Fear That Publishers Have Lost Their Appetite For Serious Subjects.” The Observer, November 14. Accessed July 15, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/nov/14/victoriaglendinning-biographies-publishers.

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Tomalin, Claire. 1997. Jane Austen: A Life. New York: Viking, Penguin. Vicars, James. 2015. “Thresholds of Innovation: Conceptualising Imaginative Writing and Fiction Biography.” In Minding the Gap: Writing against Thresholds and Fault Lines, edited by Thom Conroy and Gail Pittaway, 17-26. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Waller, John. 2006. The Real Oliver Twist. Robert Blinco: A Life that Illuminates a Violent Age. Cambridge: Icon. Weintraub, Stanley. 2016. “The Precarious Survival of Baron Corvo.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 59 (2): 244-45. Whitlock, Gillian. 2010. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1927. “The New Biography.” Collected in Granite and Rainbow: Essays, 149-55. London: Hogarth, 1960.

CHAPTER THREE UNDERSTANDING DEADMAN’S POCKET: PETER GLYNN AND THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL FRONTIERSMAN LIBBY CONNORS

Australia’s pioneering mythology has been widely critiqued in the sixty years since Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958) was published. Irrespective of scholarly investigation of its gender and racial biases (Hirst 1978; Davison 1978; Lake 1986; Nile 2000; Davison 2012) pioneering has remained an icon of national identity, embodied in tourist attractions and popular culture (Hogg 2012, 180-181) and implicitly elevated by Prime Minister Howard as an ‘heroic achievement’ (Howard cited in McKenna 1998). This essay explores one incident on the early Queensland frontier that was soon added to the pantheon of the colonial frontier. It investigates this racial attack through the biography of its survivor, Peter Glynn. My original intent was to peel away the racist context in order to understand the underlying cause of this attack but in the process Glynn’s life reveals insights into acts of working class masculinity on the mid-nineteenth century colonial frontier that add to existing gender critiques of colonialism and pioneering. Today the story of an 1857 Aboriginal attack on a party of white men looking for valuable sources of timber just to the north of the township of Brisbane is not well known, but it was often recalled up to the 1920s. Two of the party became isolated from the other four and were assaulted by local Aboriginal men who left them to die; when one of them, Peter Glynn, managed to survive alone for three days by crawling 10 kilometers to a station, an archetypal frontier tale was born. It was first published for a British readership in 1876; in the colony it was included in Leopold Zillman’s account of the history of the Australian colonies in 1889 and also recalled by his brother John in the family’s papers (Zillmann 1889; Zillman Family). The Zillman family interest is not surprising since the attack took place on land owned by their father,

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Johann Zillman – one of the original ‘German’ missionaries who arrived in the colony in 1838 – although none of the family were present at the assault. Constance Campbell Petrie also talked about the event in her book based on her father’s memories first published in 1904. Her father’s account came not from the Aboriginal men involved, the source for many of his stories, but from the sole white survivor (Petrie 1975, 170-171). Edgar Foreman also drew upon its lurid details for his account of pioneering published in 1928 although events took place when he was only three years old and a decade before his family arrived in the Australian colonies (Foreman 1996). The elements of this assault were embellished by storytellers into a rugged pioneer tale. John Zillman was among the more measured for the events had constituted a terrifying backdrop to his family duties of delivering butter by packhorse from the Caboolture property to Nundah residents forty-five kilometres to the south on rough bush tracks: Now when you knew there had been several murders by blacks, two at Caboolture, one man killed crawling up to Gregorsford from Dead Mans Pocket, one at head of the Pine River, and also about Nundah, perhaps you can imagine how a boy of twelve felt … (Zillman Family; Lang Papers, 365)1

His older, more literary brother was more colourful in his assertion of the ‘savagery’ of the Aboriginal attackers and Peter Glynn’s bravery, despite his incorrect claim that Glynn and his mate were inexperienced bushmen: The origin of the name has to do with circumstances associated with my own history … timber-getters … inexperienced in the ways of the bush, allowed the blacks to follow them, and one of the parties, when least suspecting any mischief, was assailed by the savages … one was killed on the spot, the other felled to the ground, but, retaining hold of his gun, he managed to raise himself sufficiently and to turn around and fire at his assailants … (Zillmann 1889, 116117) 2

1

John was recalling events some 70 years later and actually seems to overstate his age; he was probably only 10 years old at the time of the Deadman’s Pocket conflict. Zillman Family Papers; Lang Papers, p. 365, ML. 2 Leopold uses the colonial name Deception River, which is now known as the Caboolture River.

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Intriguingly, given the source of the story was Glynn himself, Constance was much sparser and more measured in her introduction of her father’s account: There is a place on the Caboolture River known as the “Dead Man’s Pocket.” It got its name this way. Three natives … were responsible for the death at this place of one white man, and at the same time the attempted murder of another (Petrie 1975, 170).

Edgar Foreman’s account, on the other hand, came from his much older neighbour John Griffin, at Samsonvale, but the young Edgar was oblivious to Griffin’s aggrandisements and unapologetic violence: Captain Griffin had some very narrow squeaks … in those early days. On one occasion he was out on the run after cattle and had occasion to go into a small pocket on the river. Except for a narrow opening this pocket was surrounded by dense scrub. Judge of his surprise when returning to the open country to find the entrance to the pocket packed with wild blacks waiting to spear him. The Captain in telling me the story said he thought it was all up with him, but he meant to have a go for it, so he put the reins in his mouth and with a pistol in each hand charged the howling mob (Foreman 1996, 31).3

John Griffin was mainly associated with the stations of Samson Vale and Whiteside although he had purchased “Old Caboolture” prior to 1864 (Long, 1997, 198). Only the latter could fit the description of Dead Man’s Pocket on the Caboolture River but Foreman’s account contributed to the legend of pockets of rainforest thickets on southern Queensland rivers as locations of Aboriginal violence and white vulnerability. The actual assault of Peter Glynn took place in dense rainforest on a bend of the Caboolture River which today has been cleared and urbanised into residential acreage allotments, a few kilometres west of Morayfield train station (Brisbane Courier 24 February 1870, 4). The name ‘Deadman’s Pocket’ has fallen into disuse but was still recognisable in the 1920s (The Telegraph 6 August 1924, 20).4 One important aspect of the memorialising of the event was the omission of Peter Glynn’s past – only Constance Petrie referred to Glynn as “an old prisoner” (Petrie 1975, 3 John Griffin was never ‘Captain’ Griffin and Samson Vale was actually owned by Isabella Joyner, William Joyner’s widow, who married John Griffin in 1852. See Long 1997, p. 195. 4 Dead Man’s Pocket dairy farm was auctioned in 1870 and again in 1908; Brisbane Courier 8 February 1908, p. 8.

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170), a crucial piece of historical evidence to recover his personal story. For the contemporary newspapers, which indignantly reported this ‘treacherous’ Aboriginal attack, Glynn was a “vendor of stuffed parrots, snakes and animals of various kinds”; Glynn was implicitly ascribed with a veil of respectability and legitimacy, not only as a victim of “savages” but also by virtue of being “well known about Brisbane and its vicinity” and a seventeen-year veteran of the bush life (Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal 18 February 1857, 4; Fisher 2012, 9),5 valuable attributes for the gold rush era readership of new chums. The actual circumstances are much more byzantine than the free migrants of the 1850s wanted to hear. On Saturday 31 January 1857 six settlers set out to look for cedar in the northern parts of Moreton Bay. These factual details are all drawn from the Moreton Bay Courier’s detailed contemporary reports in February 1857 (7 February 1857, 2; 14 February 1857, 2).6 The party was made up of old work mates, Peter Glynn and David Peattie (at various times publican and master of the cutter Nelson), Glynn’s mate, Peter Grant, and three others identified only as Bishop, Moran and Williams. Glynn, Grant, Peattie and Williams were all long-term working men of Brisbane and recognised by the Aboriginal men whom they met on 1 and 2 February at the mouth of the Caboolture River. Without Aboriginal guides, the white men spent Saturday ineffectually searching the banks of Burpengary Creek; as they abandoned that waterway Glynn set fire to mangroves at its mouth. This wayward act of vandalism was not explained by any of the men – it seems it was a taken-for-granted part of their clearing of environments that they regarded as uncommercial or useless. It was an important signal to local Aboriginal people, however, that there were strangers on their land. On the Sunday afternoon Williams noted smoke and immediately alerted his mates to the probable presence of an Aboriginal campfire but Glynn dismissed it as the remains of his own fire from the previous day. He was wrong. Soon, two Aboriginal men cooeed from shore and the crew happily approached them, hoping for information about where to find cedar. The Aboriginal men explained that they were camped nearby with just three other Aboriginal men so the whites asked them to bring them some fresh water and to invite their mates back to have supper with them. That evening eight Aboriginal men camped on shore not far from the party of Europeans. From the mouth of the Caboolture River, the southern part 5 6

Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, 18 February 1857, p. 4. Moreton Bay Courier 7 February 1857, p.2; 14 February 1857, p.2.

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of Bribie Island – the island home of an Aboriginal community known to be hostile to Europeans – was visible but at this stage the Europeans claimed everyone was on friendly terms. Monday morning after breakfast, the leading Aboriginal man who had indicated that he recognised several of the Europeans, organised for four of his Aboriginal men to accompany the budding sawyers up the Caboolture River to a good stand of cedar. All day the boat traversed the windy narrow channel until, at 5pm, the Aborigines ordered the boat to moor and four of the Europeans to accompany them on shore through thick bush to the location, while Moran and Williams remained on board. The Europeans were relaxed about these arrangements despite the fact that it was late afternoon, the bush was thick and trackless, and that they were completely dependent on their Aboriginal guides. The white men were armed, had a box of caps in the event of any trouble, and badly wanted the valuable cedar. The party had proceeded less than 100 meters when the Aboriginal leader decided that the cedar would be too far from the boat; he insisted that Peattie and Bishop go back in order to move the vessel further upriver, at the same time also insisting that his youngest Aboriginal companion go with them. Glynn supported the Aboriginal leader in these decisions; he and Grant retained the weapons and caps and stipulated that the Aboriginal men march in front of them. They were surely unassailable. Peattie later reported that they had moved the boat less than 300 meters when they heard an Aboriginal cooee from the bush. Their young Aboriginal companion grabbed his dilly and jumped ashore. The whites were now suspicious. Peattie and Bishop tried to pursue the young man but within half a kilometre were stymied by the dense thicket. They returned to their companions, who were now painfully aware of their own vulnerability – Glynn had their only box of caps so their weapons were useless. Fearing their boat would be an Aboriginal target they hid in the scrub that night. Tuesday morning was spent searching on foot and yelling for Grant and Glynn to no avail so they made the decision to proceed upriver to Caboolture Station7 hoping for some support in a land search for Grant and Glynn. The rest of Tuesday and all of Wednesday men from the station on horseback and on foot joined Peattie and Williams in a fruitless search through the rainforest, while Moran and Bishop made it to Brisbane to report what had happened to the town police. 7

The men referred to it as Noble’s station but the Zillman sons referred to Noble as manager of the station.

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Miraculously, after spending three nights in the bush, wounded and bleeding, Glynn crawled into the station around 7.00am Thursday morning 5 February. His hands had been so badly beaten that he could not hold up his trousers, forcing him to crawl an estimated 10 kilometres (Petrie 1975, 171-172) – he said 6 miles over two days – from where he and Grant had been attacked. Grant had died in the attack and the next day a local Aboriginal man succeeded in locating Grant’s body. It was only at this point, a week after the party had first set out, that the town police belatedly arrived on the station to assist. On Saturday 7 February Glynn was carried south but made it no further than Cash’s Station – now the suburb of Cashmere. The creeks were flooded so he was still there on 8 February when the coroner and Dr Milford from Brisbane were also stranded there, unable to proceed north to the scene of the crime to recover Grant’s body and hold an inquest. Brisbane’s Saturday paper published the first reports of the ‘outrage’ and the fire of community indignation was lit. On Wednesday 11 February Glynn was finally admitted to Brisbane Hospital (Brisbane General Hospital: Register of Cases and Treatment 8 January 1853-14 June 1858) where he was interviewed by the police. Concerned that he might not survive, Captain Wickham, formerly the town’s police magistrate, now the Government Resident and leading official in the northern districts, took his deposition on the Thursday. By Saturday 14 February the Moreton Bay Courier was able to provide a much fuller account of what had transpired and the leading Aboriginal man was named as Ballow. He had been known around Brisbane since at least 1851 when he was described as a young follower of Dundalli from Bribie Island (Connors 2015, 151).8 Glynn admitted he had wounded Ballow but blamed him for triggering the incident when Ballow had seized the barrel of his gun as he urged Glynn to shoot a wallaby. The report of Glynn’s musket brought many more Aboriginal men with waddies and nullah nullahs to the scene where both men were beaten senseless. When Glynn came to many hours later, he believed Grant was dead. The police later found the stock of Grant’s gun broken off at the barrel and left alongside his body (Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser 14 February1857, 2). Both men had been ferociously beaten about the head and neck but Glynn, who boasted that he refused to let go of his musket, also had his hands badly mangled (Moreton Bay Courier 21 March 1857, p.2; Petrie 1975, 171). 8

Whites originally gave him the name ‘Billy Barlow’; according to Gubbi Gubbi historian Alex Bond, Billy Barlow and Ballow were the same man, which is consistent with the account given in Queen of the Colonies, 1876, p. 56.

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There was enough evidence here for newspapers as far away as Victoria to decry the “treacherous and untameable tribe of blacks who inhabit … the vicinity of Caboolture and the Deception Rivers” (Portland Guardian and Normanby General Advertiser 13 March 1857, 2-3). A new professionalism in colonial journalism in the 1850s led to increased local reporting (Cryle 1989, 39) and the Moreton Bay Free Press’ story was closely reproduced in the Empire, Argus, Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, the Portland Guardian and Normanby General Advertiser and the Maitland Mercury and Hunter River Advertiser. The gold fields were a ready audience for these tales of thrilling settler-survivors up against “treacherous savages”. On 18 March 1857 the Melbourne Age reproduced the Empire’s report on the wounded Ballow recovering on Bribie Island, and called for a native police attack on this Aboriginal community to “strike terror into their minds” (5). Ballow’s and the Bribie Islanders’ connection to the much-feared Dundalli was well known in Brisbane and the link between this attack and Dundalli’s attack on Gregor’s station eleven years earlier was noted in the first Brisbane newspaper report (Moreton Bay Courier (7 February 1857, 2) heightening community fears despite the fact that Dundalli had been publicly executed in Queen Street some two years earlier (Connors 2015, 182-184). Yet the version that Glynn voluntarily gave Tom Petrie raises a number of questions. Glynn knew that Petrie was friends with many local Aboriginal men but it still seems strange that he assigned blame for the whole incident to his mate Grant. Grant, he said, was so nervous that his whining caused Glynn to turn around in anger to confront him. It was as Glynn turned to tell him to go back to the boat that he accidentally discharged his weapon and shot Ballow. This was the trigger for Ballow to attempt to wrest the gun from him; Grant was paralysed, immobilised with fear, and stood there as the Aboriginal men turned on them both (Petrie 1975, 170-171). Although Ballow had indicated that he knew Peattie, Williams, Glynn and Grant, the Aboriginal leader had contrived the situation so that it was Grant and Glynn who were left alone with his men. Grant’s extreme anxiety indicated that he had feared and dreaded this very situation. Grant’s extreme nervousness resonates with another frontier shooting incident near Brisbane some eleven years earlier. On this occasion it had been Peattie captaining his cutter on the Brisbane River who panicked. He had been moored near Norman Creek when he claimed that he was approached by an unnamed Aboriginal and also heard Aboriginal war cries nearby. Peattie hurriedly worked to get a load of timber on board but as he did so his sleeve caught in the trigger of his

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musket; the firearm “exploded” killing his crewman (Moreton Bay Courier 7 November 1846, 3). Peattie’s contract to collect timber at the Norman indicates that he was perhaps unintentionally caught up in the conspiracy by a group of sawyers to murder Millbong Jemmy.9 The death of Millbong Jemmy was reported in the same issue of the paper but there are more layers still to these events. Peattie was armed, with another white man, and had no active part in the entrapment of Yilbung, so his extreme nervousness cannot be explained only by these events. There was more at stake. The key to understanding Peattie’s and Grant’s nervousness was divulged at a sitting of the magistrate’s court in Brisbane way back on 15 January 1847. The courtroom heard shocking evidence of a night time altercation between the pastoralist David McConnel and Peter Glynn that had taken place some weeks previously in the summer of 1846. David McConnel and his brother John, also a pastoralist, had hired David Peattie and his cutter Nelson and Peter Glynn to take them on a natural history field trip to collect scientific curios. They had stopped at Stradbroke Island, where the brothers employed Aboriginal people, including children, to assist with collecting; among them was a young girl of about 10 or 11 years who they agreed to take to Kangaroo Point to join her mother on their return journey. This entailed an overnight stop so Peattie moored at St Helena Island where Peter Glynn said he would spend the night while Peattie, David and John McConnel stayed on board the vessel. In the middle of the night David McConnel was woken by the cries of the girl on shore. Peattie rowed over and brought the crying girl aboard – her only explanation: “Peter drunk”. The child was settled aboard but a few hours later McConnel was again woken by a noise on deck where he found Peter Glynn in the act of taking the young girl back to his island camp. When McConnel objected, Glynn “made use of insulting and disgusting expressions, which confirmed Mr Maconnel’s [sic] suspicions that he had been abusing her person.” David and his brother then rowed over to the island to try to extricate the child but Glynn refused to surrender her; instead he “put himself in a menacing attitude, and dared them to take her away from him.” The next morning David arranged for another vessel to take the girl back to Dunwich while his party returned to Brisbane (Moreton Bay Courier 16 January 1846, 2-3).

9

Millbong Jemmy’s real name was Yilbung and he was accused of participating in the Dundalli-organised attack on Gregor’s station in October 1846. The machinations of the sawyers in claiming the reward for Yilbung’s “capture” are outlined in Connors 2015, pp. 115-116, 119, 137.

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Some weeks later David McConnel of Cressbrook Station made the decision to prosecute Glynn, not for sexual assault, but for misconduct while in his service. There were possibly pragmatic legal reasons for this lesser charge – to prove sexual assault would have required the presence of the girl, an un-christened Aboriginal child whose inability to give sworn testimony would have carried little weight in the courtroom. A disobedient servant seemed a much easier charge to prosecute given the evidence of two gentlemen pastoralists and the respectable master of the Nelson. Yet the newspaper reported that the proceedings took “several hours”. Unfortunately, the official court records from this year have not survived so we have only the report in the Moreton Bay Courier to understand all the dynamics of this hearing. Glynn had no intention of accepting the charge. At no stage did he deny his abuse of the girl – quite the opposite – he defied the right of the McConnel’s to govern his sexual conduct. In the words of the paper his response to David McConnel’s disgust over his behaviour was “open derision”. Why such an unabashed public performance over his abuse of the child? Glynn apparently had male friends and supporters in the courtroom. He showed no remorse over his sexual exploitation of the girl but rather enjoyed the opportunity to scorn the young gentleman opposing him. This defiance contributed nothing to his defence, which rested on the technical question of who his legal employer was at the time. Glynn produced a witness, Robert Hulland, the licensee of the Sawyers Arms hotel at North Brisbane, who was part of a coterie of working Brisbane men that included Peattie and Glynn (Moreton Bay Courier 13 March 1847, 1).10 Hulland swore that Glynn was in his hired service at the time and that, while he had given him permission to participate in this trip, he regarded Glynn as still in his employ even while away. The Bench found in Glynn’s favour. The newspaper was disgusted. It concluded that Glynn had showed “an amount of brutality, and depth of ignorance, only accountable for in mere youth, or the existence of thorough demoralisation.” Peattie knew of Glynn’s sexual misconduct in November 1846 and, given his extreme nervousness, so too did Peter Grant. These men had been in the district long enough to have a good grasp of the local Aboriginal laws of payback. The unnamed Quandamooka girl, referred to only as a “gin” in the court, was someone’s sister and niece, and probably someone’s betrothed. Under Aboriginal law brothers and maternal uncles had an obligation to avenge offences against 10 Peattie took over this licence in September 1847; see Moreton Bay Courier 11 September 1847, p.3.

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their kin (Elkin 1994; Keen 2003).11 Peattie and Grant certainly seemed to have intuited that Glynn was a marked man in Aboriginal eyes and feared that their association with Glynn might also make them targets for violent reprisal. So who was Peter Glynn? Could his conduct in 1846 be excused on the grounds of youthful misadventure? And why does his biography matter? Unlike the image of the respectable settler that the press of 1857 had provided, Glynn had arrived in the colony as a convict. The transportation records and associated bureaucracy enable the basic outline of his life to be tracked. On 24 October 1825, he had been found guilty of robbing a shop and sentenced to seven years transportation (Chronological Register of Convicts 1824-1839, 62). He was approximately eighteen years old – the original Lancashire trial records have not so far been identified so establishing his age has proved difficult. Glynn gave different ages to the medical staff at the Moreton Bay Convict, later General, Hospital each time he was admitted. On admission for flu symptoms in 1838, he stated his age was 30, but in February 1857 he gave it as 51 (Moreton Bay Convict Hospital 4 September 1838; Brisbane General Hospital 11 February 1857), suggesting he was born between 1806 and 1808. By 1830 he was serving his time at Port Stephens where he burgled one of the residences of the Australian Agricultural Company. The judge at the Maitland trial in April 1830 entered a sentence of “Death recorded” meaning that he was entitled to order execution but intended to commute the sentence (Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser 6 May 1830, 3). Glynn’s life was saved but he was sentenced to a further 14 years re-transportation to Moreton Bay Penal Settlement. Arriving in Brisbane on 30 June 1830 at the approximate age of 23; Glynn absconded for a period in 1832 but eventually was assigned as personal servant to William Whyte, the convict settlement’s chief constable and postmaster. This assignment saved him from gang labour and also put him in a privileged position as the convict station was wound down in 1839 (Queenslander 24 July 1869, 2). He was allowed to stay behind in Brisbane as Whyte’s servant and, in 1840, successfully applied for remission of the remaining four years of his colonial sentence (Chronological Register of Convicts). As the district was opened to free settlement he was in his mid-30s with useful local experience that was invaluable to the incoming working class. 11

For instances of the application of payback law in southeast Queensland see Connors 2015, pp. 12-17. ‘Gin’ sometimes spelt as ‘jin’ was colonial slang for an Aboriginal woman but the denial of the girl’s childhood inherent in its use here is still startling.

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When accused of assaulting the Quandamooka girl12 Glynn was around 40 years old so the reference to youthfulness is a distraction. What makes his life important is the powerful insight it provides into the process of class and gender formation in the 1840s and 1850s in this outpost of empire. His court victory against two of the gentlemen squatters of the district was a public statement of his independence as a free working man, freed from the constraints of his convict bondage. The tussle with the McConnels was not just about class, however, but a contest between differing understandings of masculinity in a time of rapid social change, just four years after the last convict transport reached New South Wales. As Robert Hogg has noted of British frontiers, they were “frightening, liminal, exciting and transformative. Men encountered challenges to their preconceived ideas of manhood” (Hogg 2012, 3). What was an unacceptable definition of manly sexuality to the McConnels and to Arthur Lyon, the editor and owner of the Moreton Bay Courier, in these years (Cryle 1989, 7-8) – extreme sexual exploitation of Aboriginal girls – was being covertly developed by the ex-convict working class with the tacit of approval of local officials. Only a week after McConnel’s failed prosecution of Glynn, Brisbane hosted a local inquiry into the mistreatment of Aboriginal people in the district which lifts this veil on colonial masculinity a little further. Instituted by Governor FitzRoy after complaints had reached Sydney, the inquiry was resisted by Captain Wickham, the police magistrate, who did his best to slant the evidence in favour of the town police. Another local official, William Duncan, however, was determined that evidence regarding the level of racial violence as well as the sexual abuse of Aboriginal women must be presented. He appeared before the inquiry to report conversations he had with Canary, a Quandamooka man, who had complained to him of Stradbroke Island women being abducted by sawyers and by the convict crew of the harbour pilot (Inquiry into Affray with Aborigines; Sydney Morning Herald 23 February 1847, 3), and other reports that had reached him of convict staff in the surveying department also kidnapping Aboriginal women. Duncan had only moved to Brisbane a few months earlier and his abhorrence of the level of violence he had witnessed placed him on the other side of the racial divide from pastoralists such as the McConnels and local journalist Arthur Lyon who, despite their opposition to the sexual assault of an Aboriginal child, had actively endorsed frontier aggression (Connors 2015, 69-70; 110-111). 12 Quandamooka people comprise the Goenpul, Ngugi and Nunukul traditional owners of Moreton Bay.

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Duncan’s evidence, however, produced public statements from officials who not only turned a blind eye to male-on-male violence but also denied the sexual aggression of their charges. They might be convicts but J. C. Burnett the surveyor was determined to show masculine solidarity with his staff. Despite class differences Burnett’s racial and sexual identity was with his men whom he indignantly defended in a long letter presented to the Inquiry. His explanation was a gender and imperial cliché (Wilson 2004, 44): there was no need to use force to abduct Aboriginal women because “a black gin can be got at any time with the full consent of all her relations for a pannikin full of flour or a fig of tobacco” (Burnett 15 February 1847). Yet only a week earlier the fit young David McConnel had testified in a court of law that he and his brother John had been unable to extricate a small Aboriginal girl from a drunken servant. The local ruling class of pastoralists and officials who could be defined as gentlemen were dividing over the sexual brutality that was being openly witnessed yet officially denied. Peter Glynn’s court room behaviour and the botched Inquiry in the town just nine days later has enabled us to see a little of how colonial masculinity was being constructed in the 1840s and its internal contestation. In early Queensland men divided over the level of violence that could be unleashed. For some elite males sexual aggression towards children was beyond the pale. The colonial state in calling the Brisbane Inquiry, undoubtedly agreed but in the end Sydney officials concluded that the lack of eyewitnesses prevented them from taking any meaningful action. The Brisbane magistrates similarly refused responsibility for a workingman’s sexual exploitation of a female child. There would be no unified opposition to the action of men such as Peter Glynn. A legal framework was being established for the sexual seizure that feminist scholars argue is a corollary of war and genocide (Schott 2011, 5-21). It leaves a sense of foreboding for the gender and racial history of colonial Queensland yet to unfold. Of course there was a third strand of masculinity being performed in these colonial conflicts – Ballow performed a masculine role that had been founded in antiquity. His sense of identity was grounded in millennia of masculine practice and was endorsed by a code that was both legal and spiritual. Ballow’s story intersects painfully with the working men of Glynn’s biography but the sense of Aboriginal manliness and law being played out in these encounters must be probed beyond Glynn’s story. Theodore Koditschek provides a wonderful summary of the work of historians on gender who followed in the wake of EP Thompson’s landmark opus on the making of the English working class. He reminds us

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that to understand the changes in class and gender identity taking place in the mid-nineteenth century we must be alert not just to class formation but also to masculinist class formation (Koditschek 1997, 343); historians of colonial frontiers must insist on a trilogy, including racist as the third factor to be untangled as these intersections shaped local, national and imperial identities in the nineteenth century. Glynn’s standing among the working men of Brisbane was enhanced by the thrilling story of his encounter and survival. Only a few weeks after his discharge from the Brisbane General Hospital he had organised another boating party to head off in search of lucrative timber. On 5 May at 11 o’clock at night while waiting at Richardson’s Wharf for the party to gather, the intoxicated Peter Glynn fell into the Brisbane River and could not be recovered (Moreton Bay Courier 9 May 1857, 2). His sexual exploits clashed with the ancient Aboriginal laws of southeast Queensland – a fact of which the working men who were his friends and co-workers were only too well aware. His behaviour had indirectly caused the death of Peattie’s crewman in November 1846 and of Peter Grant on the Caboolture River eleven years later. Like the girl from Stradbroke Island whose name we do not know, they were just some of the collateral damage from Glynn’s performance of his own sense of race, class and gender.

Works cited Brisbane General Hospital: Register of Cases and Treatment. 8 January 1853-14 June 1858. HOS1/25, Z1625-1626. Queensland State Archives, Brisbane. Burnett, J.C. to J.C. Wickham, 15 February 1847. Archival Estrays, Add. 82. Dixon Library, University of New England, Armidale. Chronological Register of Convicts 1824-1839, Part 1, 62, Item Id 1719352. Queensland State Archives, Brisbane. Connors, Libby. 2015. Warrior: A Legendary Leader’s Dramatic Life and Violent Death on the Colonial Frontier. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Cryle, Denis. 1989. The Press in Colonial Queensland: A Social and Political History 1845-1875. St Lucia, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Davison, G. 1978. “Sydney and the Bush: An Urban Context for the Australian Legend.” Historical Studies 18 (71): 191-209. —. 2012, “Rethinking the Australian Legend.” Historical Studies 43 (3): 429-451.

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Eight years’ resident. 1876. The Queen of the Colonies or Queensland, As I Knew it. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington. Elkin, A.P. 1994. Aboriginal men of high degree: initiation and sorcery in the world's oldest tradition, Rochester, NY: Vermont Inner Traditions. Foreman, Edgar. (1928) 1996. From Wiltshire to Queensland: Being a New Edition of The Adventures of a Queensland Pioneer, edited by Elizabeth Rodger and Neville Cusack. Lewes, UK: EMR. Hirst, John. 1978. “The Pioneer Legend.” Historical Studies 18 (71): 316337. Hogg, Robert. 2012. Men and Manliness on the Frontier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Inquiry into Affrays with Aborigines at York’s Hollow. Sworn Statement, February 12, 1847. CSIL/10 Dixon Library, University of New England, Armidale. Keen, Ian. 2003. Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Koditschek, Theodore. 1997. “The Gendering of the British Working Class.” Gender & History 9 (2): 333-363. Lake, Marilyn. 1986. “The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context.” Historical Studies 22 (86): 116-131. Lang, Rev John Dunmore. List re Members of the Mission. Mission Papers in “Lang Papers”. A2240, vol.20, CY579, Mitchell Library, Sydney. Long, Erica 1997. “Early White Settlement on the Pine River.” Royal Historical Society of Queensland Journal 16 (5): 189-209. McKenna, Mark. 1997-98. “Different Perspectives on Black Armband History.” Research Paper 5, Parliament of Australia, Parliamentary Library, Canberra. . Moreton Bay Convict Hospital: Register of Cases and Treatment. 12 October 1836 - 22 July 1839. Item Id 2865, Z1623, Queensland State Archives, Brisbane. Nile, Richard (ed.). 2000. The Australian Legend and its Discontents. St Lucia, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Petrie, Constance Campbell. 1975. Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland. Facsimile of 1904 edition. Hawthorn, Melbourne: Lloyd O’Neil. Schott, Robin May. 2011. “War Rape, Natality and Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 13 (1-2): 5-21.

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Ward, Russel, 1958. The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. —. 1965. The Australian Legend. 2nd edition. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Kathleen. 2004. “Empire, Gender, and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century.” In Gender and Empire, edited by Philippa Levine. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 14-45. Zillmann, J. H. L. 1889. Past and Present Australian Life: Being for the most part Personal Reminiscences with Stories of the First Explorers, Convicts, Blacks and Bush-Rangers of Australia, and a Short Historical Sketch of the Colonies, their Progress and Present Condition. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington. Zillman, John Williams. ca 1922-1926. Notes in Zillman Family Papers, OM74-28 Box 8889 JOL.

CHAPTER FOUR FORGETFUL POLITICIANS: BIOGRAPHY AND POLITICS IN AUSTRALIA PATRICK MULLINS

Introduction Politicians are rarely forgotten. Thanks to the intersection of the Carlylean ‘Great Man of History’ theory, and the Rankean emphasis on nation states, studies of the past are commonly framed through the actions and words of those who are most conspicuous. Yet in Australia, those politicians who serve in the Senate are more easily overlooked than their Lower House colleagues. With the exception of notable crossbenchers, senators are generally unknown to the broader public. As Senator Bob Collins once said, “The Senate, of course, is the B-Grade” (Peacock 1996). The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate (BDAS) – commenced in part to rectify this – is near completion after nineteen years of development. The fourth and potentially final volume, which encompasses Australian senators whose terms ended between 1983 and 2002, has been published in hardcopy and online (2017). Whether to produce more volumes – that cover senators serving after 2002 – is likely to be considered in the next few years, as sufficient time elapses for the establishment of a quota of former senators that would merit another volume. It is, therefore, both an appropriate and opportune time to consider the Dictionary – its rationale and outcomes, its example of biographical research, its limitations and its strengths – and how it speaks to an understanding of Australian history.

Rationale The idea for the Dictionary came in 1997. Anne Millar, an employee in the Department of the Senate, visited the United States Congress, where a parliamentary official suggested that a biographical dictionary which

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provided succinct and illuminative detail on the lives of selected personalities, much like that of the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress 1774-1996 (Teese 1997), would be a fitting project for the Department of the Senate to undertake. Millar agreed, and was able to convince the Department of the Senate to establish the initiative. An influential factor in the decision was the pending centenary of Australia’s Federation and the funds that the Federal Government had allocated for commemorative projects. The Dictionary was explicitly framed in this light: as a project of commemoration that would recover and document Australian history. This was the rationale that sustained successive volumes, as Millar noted in the second volume: The purpose of the dictionary remains as at the time of its establishment in 1997, that is, to further the appreciation of Australian political history through the examination of the lives and careers of senators, as a unique group of Australian politicians (Millar 2004, vii)

The distinction Millar makes between senators and other politicians is apt. For in spite of the considerable similarities between the House of Representatives and the Senate in powers and methods of composition (Miragliotta, Errington & Barry 2013, 82-83), senators in Australia are distinct from their Lower House colleagues. A long tradition in the major parties of using the Senate as a sinecure for loyalists and faithful, and the regular presence of third, minor, and micro-party senators, means that membership has been more varied in temperament, ideology and demographics than that of the House of Representatives. This difference has been reinforced by the distinct operating procedures, or Standing Orders, that the Senate has developed (Bennett 2004). The use of party ‘tickets’ and the statewide constituency that elects a senator – as opposed to the electorate-based constituency that elects an MP – allows senators to be used as ‘shock troops’ in marginal and opposition-held seats during campaigns (Miragliotta, Errington & Barry 2013, 83). Moreover, the statebased election of senators has sustained a longtime conception of the Senate as a ‘state’s house’, a conception that finds regular invocation at each election, even as evidence for its practice has been found wanting (Evans 2010). In sum, there is a difference. To a large extent, however, this difference is often expressed in terms of a disregard and derision that stem from the paradox of a bicameral system of government, where, as political scientist Abbe Sieyes put it, “If a second chamber dissents from the first, it is mischievous; and if it agrees it is superfluous” (qtd. in Bailey 1954, 17). Labor senator Bob

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Collins spoke plainly when he said that the Senate “is the B Grade […] the place for the slow grind” (qtd. in Peacock 1996); his colleague Paul Keating put it plainer still when he argued that the Senate was comprised of “unrepresentative swill” (qtd. in Peacock 1996). The Senate sits in the shadow of the House of Representatives, where governments are formed and may fall, and from where most ministers will come. All of these reasons gird Millar’s rationale that the senators studied in the BDAS are unique and, as much as politicians can be, are often overlooked or forgotten. For the twenty years that followed Millar’s trip to the United States, the BDAS has been given substantial resources to ensure its fruition. The Biographical Dictionary Unit, housed within the Procedure Office of the Department of the Senate, was established with Millar as its director, and employed a small team of researchers, editors, verifiers and assistants. An advisory board that comprised several prominent scholars and historians – including Geoffrey Bolton, Don Aitkin and Joan Rydon, among others – was assembled to provide support, contacts and editorial direction. Contributions on specific senators were sought from an array of scholars, journalists, parliamentarians and staffers. The first volume, which covered the lives and careers of the hundred senators who served between 1901 and 1929, was published in 2000; the second, covering senators who served between 1929 and 1962, was published in 2004; the third, covering senators who served from 1962 until 1982, was published in 2010. As noted, the fourth volume, covering senators who served between 1982 and 2002, was published in 2017. Compiled, verified and edited in the Department of the Senate under the aegis of the Clerk of the Senate; published in hardcopy in partnership with Melbourne University Press (the text is copyrighted by the Commonwealth of Australia; the design and typography is copyrighted by Melbourne University Press), the Dictionary is also published online, with entries searchable via the biography.senate.gov.au website.

Form The compilation of multiple lives in a single volume or work has long been a tradition within biography. Plutarch’s Selected Lives (1982) and Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars (1989) are among the earliest such compilation biographies; until publication of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1953) in the seventeenth century this compilation was the norm. As the scholar Reed Whittemore has noted, compilations of the sort authored by Plutarch, Suetonius, John Aubrey (1982 [1693]), and Samuel Johnson, in

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his Lives of the English Poets (1963 [1779]), “had in mind nobles, saints, kings, painters, and poets first, individuals second, and their emphasis was that of their times” (Whittemore 1988, 2). The convention of biographical work was “putting together groups of lives, the groupings determined by social rank and function, or by profession”, Whittemore argues. The centre of any biographical endeavour was not the individual illumination of character but the “character and standards of each group” (Whittemore 1988, 131). Biographical dictionaries echo this approach, and progenitors of parliamentary or national biographical dictionaries – such as Leslie Stephen’s and Sidney Lee’s work on the Dictionary of National Biography, or Lewis Namier’s and John Brooke’s History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754-1790 (1986) – are no different. They are all anchored by a particular focus, generally an institution or class, catalysed by what Lee called the “commemorative instinct” (qtd. in Stephen 1898, 2), and will have the breadth of only a minority of names. As one would expect, The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate is no different to this. With the exception of the Clerks of the Senate, on whom entries are supplied at the end of each volume, inclusion is warranted only if a person has been elected or appointed to the Senate. They do not, however, need necessarily to have served, as the entry on John Maurice Power – who was elected to a casual vacancy in the Senate in 1924 but died two months later without taking his seat – demonstrates (Hawker 2000, 70-71). The tight scope of the BDAS affords some opportunities and makes for some limitations. With considerable overlap with the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), the BDAS may be said to suffer from comparisons. Duplication of work on various identities and persons is frequent, though the institution-skewed focus of the BDAS does lend a different perspective to that of the all-encompassing and national focus of the ADB. However, the BDAS has the strength, by that strict rule of inclusion and exclusion, of being comprehensive, and as such may revive and recover the lives of some figures not studied in the ADB. For example, Benjamin Benny – an admittedly minor South Australian senator who served from 1920-26 – has no entry in the ADB (his widow, however, does). Yet Suzanne Edgar and Alison Pilger’s entry in the first volume of the BDAS (2000, 196–98) recovers and explores Benny’s life in some detail. Moreover, the entry offers a way of understanding Australia’s stillcohering Federation by detailing Benny’s role securing uniform bankruptcy legislation across the Australian states. The entry testifies both

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to the irony of Benny’s role and the effect of the legislation when it discusses his subsequent insolvency and imprisonment for embezzling. A limitation and opportunity of the BDAS, proscribed by that strict rule of inclusion, is the prominence and length of entries for its subjects. Most entries run to three to four pages in length, and although some are longer – for example, Lionel Murphy’s, which runs for nine pages in volume three (Browne 2010, 415-24) – the limitations imposed can serve to distort the role and prominence of some senators. Lynette Aungiers’ entry on William Robinson (2004, 85-87) – a West Australian senator who served for nine months in the Senate in 1952-53, speaking only twice on legislation – is roughly the same length as Joan Rydon’s on John Leckie (2003, 130-133), whose twelve year career in the Senate in the 1930s and 1940s included stints as a minister with multiple portfolios in the Menzies and Fadden Governments. Is there a problem of distortion here? Potentially. However, the BDAS has some opportunities of that strict rule of inclusion and exclusion: where the ADB must distil the lives it includes in order to attain the sweep it requires, the BDAS may allow for larger, longer studies. By way of comparison, the ADB entry authored by B.J. Costar on Vincent Gair – whose role in the DLP and resignation from the Senate in 1974 indirectly led to the dismissal of the Whitlam Government – runs to barely three pages. In the BDAS, Brian Stevenson’s nine-page encomia (2010, 323-31) offers a more detailed and expansive understanding of both Gair’s career and character. It is an opportunity that has been utilised. Another limitation – most acute in recent volumes – has been that of time and distance. As Evans noted in the third volume, the “closer we are to a time in the past, the more difficult it is to make a lasting assessment of its real contribution to the present” (2010). Writing through individuals about issues and policies that are still unsolved or reverberating years later is fraught. As Mao Tse-tung suggested of the French Revolution, is it too early to judge? In another vein, writing about subjects who are still living poses other problems. Although researchers and writers of the BDAS have often gained the cooperation of its subjects and been given access to private papers and oral histories, they have also, as a general rule, avoided interaction with those subjects so as to minimise the prospect or charge of interference. The potential for this is pronounced, but so too are the opportunities that are foregone. “We are in the realm of contemporary history”, wrote Evans in the third volume; plainly, the uncertainty, problems and opportunities that this realm throws up must be considered.

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One of the greatest limitations, however, of the BDAS – and, indeed, biographical dictionaries in general – is the innate conservatism of entries. Solicited from a large number and variety of contributors, entries must be roughly uniform across a completed volume, a condition which may negate radical biographical techniques or overtly stylistic approaches to a subject. A reading of the four published volumes of the BDAS shows, for example, that chronology is often straightforward and linear, with the effect that entries that are read in succession may seem repetitive. The desire to produce a ‘historical document’ within the auspices of the public service also has the potential to blunt the sharp judgment of a biographical subject’s right and wrongdoing. Caution is unspoken but shadows each entry. Psycho-biography, for example, is eschewed almost entirely in the BDAS; entries that draw upon Freudian or Jungian techniques are nowhere to be found. The problem, as the parliamentary historian R.L. Cope has observed, is that while “agreement will be readily found for the necessity of accuracy and completeness in core factual information (e.g. correct names, dates, family relationships, career details)”, the interpretation of behaviour, character or motives “is much more contentious since such things cannot generally be objectively validated” (1999). Nor can assumptions or even speculative judgments be included. Obviously, as Leslie Stephen has written, “No biographical dictionary can be in the full sense exhaustive” (1898, 18); yet it is clear that the confines of the biographical essay assembled for inclusion in a dictionary impose harsh conditions on a biographer. The complexity and subtleties afforded by greater length and independence must generally be eschewed.

As a reference tool These limitations of length, style and technique, however, are not the final word. “Nobody will expect the poor dictionary-maker to be a substitute for Boswell or Lockhart”, Leslie Stephen wrote (1898, 21); within the bounds of this limitation biographical dictionaries offer opportunities for further study, providing a guide for future biographers, historians and scholars. Entries on particular subjects can suggest what is important and what is not; what is useful and what is not. The opportunity to use a biographical dictionary as a reference tool has been a long acknowledged benefit of such projects; as Leslie Stephen pointed out: The most important and valuable part of a good dictionary is often that dry list of authorities which frequently costs an amount of skilled labour not apparent on the surface, and not always, it is to be

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In this vein, as reviews of successive volumes have shown (Bennett 2001, 32; Gilbert 2011, 63; King 2011, 105-06; Sprod 2011, 115), this material is an invaluable characteristic of the BDAS, and one that promises to be of great use. But is it being used? Much as the Senate itself labours in the shadow of the House of Representatives, the BDAS could arguably be said to labour in the shadow of the longer-established and more sprawling ADB. Although online publication of entries from the BDAS will afford greater dissemination of the material it has produced, evaluating its penetration and use over its twenty years is difficult without access to sales records or website logs. Along with citations and uses in other source material, these resources would be key to evaluating and understanding the use of the BDAS and its future direction.

The Understanding That commercial and disseminative caveat made, however, the BDAS succeeds best of all in the way it uses the assemblage of that ‘unique group’ to further an understanding of the institution in which that group was constituted: the Senate itself. As noted above, by the compilation of multiple lives within one volume, biographical dictionaries augment the typical focus of biography by adding to the knowledge of the individual life the contextual links that connect the multiple individuals together. In the BDAS, these links are frequently invoked and discussed. As Harry Evans writes in this vein: Biography may or may not be the key to history, but the biographies of those who served in institutions of government can throw great light on the workings of those institutions. These biographies of Australia’s senators are offered not only because they deal with interesting people, but because they form an assessment of the Senate as an institution. They also provide insights into the history and identity of Australia (Evans 2010).

The bounds of each volume, Evans notes, correspond with notable shifts, consolidations and changes in the Senate’s history. As he writes of the first volume, “The period selected (1901-29) includes the formative years of the Senate, with the addition of a period of its operation as a going concern” (2010). What becomes easier to understand, by the force of the

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multiple lives included in that first volume, is the initial work of the Senate as a legislative chamber, Evans argues, “setting the Senate’s rules and its method of operation and thereby setting the course of the Australian parliamentary system” (2010). This includes, but is not limited to, the formation of a unique set of Standing Orders – derived from Senator Richard Baker’s belief that the chamber should “develop its own practice and procedure, rather than just follow Westminster practice” (Bennett 2004) – an assertion of the powers of the Senate commiserate with its status in a bicameral parliamentary system, and the absence of state-based parochial voting patterns (Brenton 2014, 271-72; Evans 2000). Subsequent volumes chart, in their study of multiple lives, the growth of a rigid party discipline (Brenton 2014, 271-73; Evans 2000), the formation, consolidation and expansion of the Senate committee system (Evans 2010), and the emergence of the Senate as a ‘house of review’ (Brenton 2014, 270-80; Evans 2000, 2010). Moreover, outside of the Senate as an institution, the Biographical Dictionary also offers the opportunity to study the character of the country from which senators were drawn. The absence of female senators in initial volumes is evidence of the absolute male domination of the political system for the forty-two years following Federation. The considerable number of senators who had been born overseas speaks to the important role that immigration has played throughout Australia’s history. The similar backgrounds of senators in the second and third volumes of the Dictionary speak to the effect of two World Wars and the Great Depression upon Australia, and the impetus those circumstances offered, for parliamentary service. What is evinced by such a study is an understanding of biographical subjects collectively as much as individually. The BDAS is able to use the inherent indeterminacy of the biographical endeavour – the problems of divorcing individual influence from the social, political and cultural forces of a period – to reach for larger questions that can offer insight on “leadership, decision-making, the acquisition and exercise of power, the dynamics of policy-making, and the constraints generated by institutions” (Walter 2014, 125). The lives included in the BDAS can be of “great use”, as Stephen wrote – because “they come into the narratives of other lives or supply data for broader histories” (1898, 27).

Conclusion What the scholar Sir Herbert Butterfield noted about Namier’s and Brooke’s History of Parliament applies equally to the BDAS: it constitutes

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“one of the most magnificent works of reference ever provided for a student of history” (qtd. in Namier 1986, endmatter) – Australian political history, that is. Reviews of the Dictionary have uniformly commended its scope, the standard of its work, and the contribution it makes to knowledge of Australian history. When read as a whole, the Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate not only suffices Leslie Stephen’s description of “the most important and valuable part of a good dictionary” (2012, 19) – the dry list of authorities of birth, death, career and descendants – but it also sweeps the Senate in whole, providing a window into its formation and consolidation, its membership and its work. Will the Senate produce further volumes? It can only be hoped that it will. A note in the fourth volume of the BDAS by the just-departed Clerk of the Senate, Dr Rosemary Laing, is ambiguous: “We leave Australia’s senators for now. The Centenary of Federation project is complete and it will be up to a future generation of parliamentary officers, much assisted by the availability of digital records, to contemplate further collations and interpretations of the careers of individual senators as a contribution to the institutional history of the Senate and Australian political history in general” (2017, 9).

Works cited Aubrey, John. 1982. Brief Lives. London: Penguin. Aungiers, Lynette. 2004. “Robinson, William Charles (1907-1981).” Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Volume Two, 19291962. Carlton: Melbourne University Press: 85-87. Bailey, Sydney. 1954. The Future of the House of Lords. London: Hansard Society. Bennett, Scott. 2004. “The Australian Senate.” Research Paper (6). Canberra: Politics and Administration Group, Australian Parliamentary Library Boswell, John. 1953. Life of Johnson. London: Oxford University Press. Brenton, Scott. 2014. “State-based Representation and National Policymaking: The Evolution of the Australian Senate and the Federation.” Journal of Legislative Studies 21 (2): 270-280. Browne, Geoffrey. 2010. “Murphy, Lionel Keith (1922-1986).” Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Volume Three, 1962-1983. Carlton: Melbourne University Press: 415-424. Cope, Russell Leslie. 1999. “Biographical Dictionaries of Parliamentarians: Considerations and Examples.” Papers on Parliament. May 1999.

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http://www.aph.gov.au/~/~/link.aspx?_id=0D211A6C71404302A3203 FEB070382B4&_z=z. Costar, Brian. 1996. “Gair, Vincent Clare (Vince) (1901-1980).” Australian Dictionary of Biography 14. Carlton: Melbourne University Press with the National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/gair-vincent-clare-vince-10267. Edgars, Suzanne, and Alison Pilger. 2000. “Benny, Benjamin (18691935).” Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Volume One, 1901-1929. Carlton: Melbourne University Press: 196-198. Evans, Harry 2010. “Introduction.” In Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Volume One, 1901-1929, edited by Harry Evans and Ann Millar. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Online Edition, n.pag. —. 2010. “Introduction.” Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Volume Three, 1962-1983. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Online Edition, n.pag. Gilbert, Catherine. 2011. “The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, Volume 3: 1962-1983.” Review in Australian Academic and Research Libraries 42 (1): 63. http:dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048623.2011.10722208. Hawker, Geoffrey. 2000. “Power, John Maurice (1883-1925).” Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Volume One, 1901-1929. Carlton: Melbourne University Press: 70-71. Johnson, Samuel. 1963. Lives of the English Poets. London: Collins. King, Tom. 2011. “Book Reviews.” In Australian Journal of Public Administration 70 (1): 105-6. Laing, Rosemary. 2017. “Introduction.” Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Volume Four, 1983-2002. Canberra: Department of the Senate. Millar, Anne. 2004. “Preface.” Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Volume Two, 1929-1962. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Miragliotta, Narelle, Wayne Errington, and Nicholas Barry. 2013. The Australian Political System in Action. Sydney: Oxford University Press. Namier, Lewis, and John Brooke. 1986. The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1754-1790. London: Secker & Warburg. Peacock, Matt. 1996. “The Senate: What Goes Around Comes Around.” ABC Radio National. Background Briefing. 5 May. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/thesenate-what-goes-around-comes-around/3563852#transcript.

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Plutarch. 1982. Selected Lives, From the Parallel Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Translated by John Dryden. Pennsylvania: Franklin Library. Rydon, Joan. 2004. “Leckie, John William (1872-1947).” Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Volume Two, 1929-1962. Carlton: Melbourne University Press: 130-133. Sprod, Dan. 2011. “Book Reviews.” Papers and Proceedings: Tasmanian Historical Research Association 58 (1): 115. Stephen, Leslie. 2012 (1898). Studies of a Biographer. London: Duckworth and Co. Stevenson, Brian. 2010. “Gair, Vincent Clare (1901-1980).” Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Volume Three, 1962-1983. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Suetonius. 1989. The Twelve Caesars. Translated by R Graves, Introduction by Rev. M. Grant. Sydney: Penguin. Treese, Joel, ed. 1997. Biographical Directory of the United States Congress 1774-1996. Washington: Government Printing Office. Walter, James. 2014. “It is Not a Biography…It is Executive Practice.” In The Craft of Governing: The Contribution of Patrick Weller to Australian Political Science, edited by Glyn Davis and R.A.W. Rhodes. Sydney: Allen & Unwin: 123-143. Whittemore, Reed. 1988. Pure Lives: The Early Biographers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

CHAPTER FIVE “A DATE WITH BARBARA”: PARACOSMS OF THE SELF IN BIOGRAPHIES OF BARBARA NEWHALL FOLLETT NIKE SULWAY

Introduction Children are rarely the subjects of biography and, when they are, the relative lack of sources, the unresolved nature of their life stories, and the tendency of adults to overwrite children’s experiences with their own result in unusual, and often troubling, texts. In child biographies, objectivity is even more elusive than it is when dealing with adult subjects, particularly as these biographies are often written by grieving relatives1. The contemporary expectation that, “biographers accept the impossibility of objectivity, deny their omnipotence and make their political, social, cultural and other motivations discernible in their texts” (Brien 2014) is further complicated by the particular nature of these biographies, and the unusual relationship of biographer and subject; parent/adult and child. In this essay, I use case studies of three biographies2 of Barbara Newhall Follett3 to show how biographies of young people can also be 1 See, for example, Benjamin Heath Malkin’s A Father’s memoirs of his child (1808) (discussed later in this essay), or more contemporary works such as Pamela Richardson’s A Kidnapped Mind: A Mother’s Heartbreaking Memoir of Parental Alienation (2006), or Anne Deveson’s Tell Me I’m Here: One Family’s Experience of Schizophrenia (1991) 2 This chapter examines three biographies by four writers: Wilson Follett, Harold Grier McCurdy, Helen Thomas Follett, and Astral Aviary. There are at least four other biographical texts concerning Barbara that are beyond the scope of this essay, and which I hope to address at a later date. Helen Follett’s Magic Portholes (1932) and its sequel, Stars to Steer By (1934); Stefan Cooke’s 2015 Barbara Newhall Follett: A life in letters; and Laura Elaine Smith’s The art of vanishing, which is due out from Viking in March, 2017.

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read as biographies of their authors: complex texts in which biographers grapple to express some essential ‘truth’ about their subjects, but also about themselves, and their relationships to their subjects. I argue that each of Barbara’s biographers has created a paracosm – a parallel reality – that collapses her reality and identity with their own.

Historical Note (by another hand) Barbara’s first biographer was her father, the writer and editor Wilson Follett (1887-1963), perhaps best known as the author of Follett’s Modern American Usage (1966). Follett was, at the time that Barbara’s first novel was published, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf. His is not a comprehensive biography, but a short essay that appears as an appendix to Barbara’s first published novel, The House Without Windows and Eepersip’s life there (1927). Barbara had only just turned thirteen when her book was published; her publishing success can be partly linked to the 1920s fashion for publishing child-authored works4, beginning with the publication of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters in 1919. As Sadler writes, “by the end

3

Barbara was born in New Hampshire on 4 March 1914. The first child of Roy Wilson Follett (1887-1963) and Helen Thomas Follett (1883-1970). In 1927, she published her first novel, The house without windows. This was followed by The voyage of the Norman D (1928), published the year that her father left her mother. She wrote at least two more unpublished manuscripts (Lost island and Travels without a donkey). In 1933, she married William Nickerson Rogers. Six years later, at the age of 25, ‘[o]n Thursday, December 7, 1939, in the early evening, Barbara walked out of her Brookline apartment. She had thirty dollars with her and the shorthand notes she had taken during the day. She was never seen again’ (McCurdy 1966, 144-145). 4 See, for example, nine-year-old Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters: or, Mr Salteena’s plan (1919), eleven-year-old Horace Atkisson Wade’s In the Shadow of Great Peril (1920), seven-year-old Opal Whitely’s ‘The Story of Opal: The journal of an understanding heart’ (1920), nine-year-old Grace Conkling’s Poems of a young child (1920), twelve-year-old Helen Douglas Adams’ The elfin pedlar, and tales told by Pixy Pool (1924), the works of Nathalia Crane, who published her first book, The janitor’s boy and other poems (1924), when she was twelve, and twelve-year-old David Binney Putnam’s David goes voyaging (1925). Many of these child authors were related to, or supported by, either publishers or wellknown authors/celebrities. David Putnam, for example, was the son of the publisher George Palmer Putnam (1887-1950) and his wife, aviator and author, Amelia Earhart (1897-c.1937).

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of the 1920s at least eighteen books by eleven young authors – most of them American – had been published” (1992, 24). Many of these publications attracted sceptical responses from critics convinced that the works were not the works of their child authors. In March 1920, The Atlantic Monthly began publishing extracts from the diary of Opal Whitely, written when she was six and seven years old. Opal claimed to be the illegitimate child of Henri, Prince of Orléans, brought to Oregon in 1904 and adopted by a lumberman. Opal was accused of creating her falsified childhood diary shortly before its publication, when she was twenty years old. Steve McQuiddy writes that, “within months, praise turned to disdain, and the remarkable young woman … faced in turn rejection, obscurity and finally death in a London insane asylum” (1997, n.p.) There were also precedents for adult paratexts to accompany child-authored publications5, many of which share similar themes with Wilson’s: Helen Douglas Adams’ The elfin pedlar and tales by Pixy Pool (1924) includes a preface in which her great uncle writes: “there is nothing of the prodigy encouraged in her young mind” but that “[f]rom her earliest days her mind found beauty and a deeper meaning in ordinary, everyday things” (1924, n.p.). Wilson, however, writes that his historical note was “the youthful author’s idea, not mine” and that he “do[es] not know how, when, or exactly why she formulated such a requirement” (1927, 55). Wilson claims that his daughter’s novel, at least in its first incarnation, had been completed on “the 5th of October, 1923 … Twentyfour hours later we left it in a burning building from which nothing got out but the lucky human occupants” (1927, 54)6. The “fair copy” she finished

5

Despite the introduction defending the young author’s ‘unaided effort in fiction’ (vii) by the renowned British author J M Barrie, and the fact that the text included many quaint errors in spelling and grammar, many critics questioned the authenticity of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters. Similar accusations of fraud were directed at Nathalia Crane, with Edwin Markham writing in the Brooklyn Eagle that he was ‘fully convinced a child did not write them. The sophisticated view-point of sex and on life, the special knowledge of history and archeology found on these pages, place them beyond the reach of any juvenile mind’ (cited in Sadler 1992, 27). 6 This assertion that Barbara had first completed a draft of her novel in 1923 is partially confirmed in a letter written by Barbara to Edward Porter St. John (18661953). The letter is dated 4 February 1923: in it she writes, ‘Did you know that I have been writing a story, started long, long ago? I will tell you about it. It is about a little girl named Eepersip who lived on top of a mountain, Mount Vacrobis, and was so lonely that she went away to live wild. She talked to animals, and led a

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in March 1926 was, he claimed, a “second draft” (54). Wilson gives a detailed account of the text’s resurrection, concluding that, “what the reader is given here is an articulate eight- and nine-year-old child’s outpouring of her own dreams and longings in a fanciful tale, superficially revised by the hand of a twelve-year-old girl” (1927, 55). In a later passage, Wilson carefully elucidates the degree of editorial intervention he, and his wife, had on the second manuscript, insisting that: Barbara has been given by her parents, in the final preparation of this manuscript, exactly what help she has asked for. That is not nearly so much help as many an adult author often has from us, for there is not one idea or structural change of ours in the entire story (1927, 56).

Wilson’s ‘note’ is typical in the way it gently slides from a description of the child-author’s ‘natural’ character, to a description of the ways in which she is being raised. He writes that: She is not precocious … She is not excessively gregarious and has not been regimented in schools and groups: therefore nothing has yet standardized her, or ironed out her spontaneity, or made her particularly ashamed of it. She has been given plenty of time to know herself (1927, 56).

This is both an argument for Barbara’s specialness and a defence of the way Barbara was raised, particularly her free-range home schooling. It introduces a theme that is continued in the biography Helen Follett collaborated on with Harold McCurdy: the biography of a child as a study of parenting.

An unconscious autobiography In 1966, more than 25 years after Barbara’s disappearance, Harold Grier McCurdy, “in collaboration with Helen Follett” (McCurdy 1966, n.p.) published what he subtitled “the unconscious autobiography of a child genius”. In the foreword, McCurdy argues that: [T]he unity of a life, if it exists, is a matter of an individual myth. To know it we have to start far back in the individual history and know those things which children know and do not as a rule articulate very fully, and we have to be in at the death (1966, v). sweet lovely life with them—just the kind of life that I should like to lead.’ (Cooke 2015, 44)

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McCurdy goes on to articulate his and Helen’s methodological approach to writing the “individual myth” or “unconscious autobiography” of Helen’s daughter (McCurdy 1966, v). He writes that: … on both sides, but particularly on mine, was the aim to tell a life story from the inside, from the point of view of the one living it – which, with Barbara, meant telling it through stories and poems of hers even more than through her letters. We had no desire to gossip, much less to wound anyone. By keeping very close to Barbara’s own words and by emphasizing the imaginative writing, and by centring our attention on her personality and the meaning of events rather than on details of history (especially other people’s history), we hoped to convey the essentials of a vivid life with discretion (McCurdy 1966, ix).

Here, McCurdy makes clear several intriguing aspects of his and Helen’s approach to Barbara’s ‘autobiography’: their focus on her imaginative rather than ‘real’ life; on her fictional writings, rather than her voluminous and highly diaristic letters; and on the peculiar idea of telling the life of a now missing, presumed dead, person ‘from the inside’. The idea of writing a biography of Barbara’s unconscious emerges from the scholarly interests and personal motivations of its two authors. McCurdy had completed his doctorate in psychology at Duke University in 1938, and had subsequently published a series of textbooks on personality. His specialty was the close analysis of literary works as evidence of their author’s personalities7. In an article on “Literature and Personality”, McCurdy argued, “that literary productions (and dreams as well) often possess a character of coherence and wholeness which invites analysis without reference to anything external to themselves” (1939, 307). His scholarly interest, established over several decades prior to first meeting Helen Follett, was in the excavation of personality through an examination of a writer’s creative works.

7

See, for example, his 1953 publication, The personality of Shakespeare: A venture in psychological method, Yale University Press, London; He also published articles modelling this methodology, including ‘A study of the novels of Charlotte and Emily Bronte as an expression of their personalities’, Journal of Personality, vol. 16, 109-152; ‘Literature and personality: Analysis of the novels of D. H. Lawrence, Part 1’, Character and Personality, vol. 8, 181-203; and ‘Literature and personality: Analysis of the novels of D. H. Lawrence, Part 1’, Character and Personality, vol. 8, 311-322.

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Helen Follett’s motivations are less clear and perhaps arise from her strong ambiguity about writing the story of Barbara’s life. Helen first contacted McCurdy in March, 1960, after reading an article, “The Childhood Pattern of Genius”, which he had published in The Times. The article argued that “genius was in some cases a costly gift” (McCurdy 1966, vi). In her letter, Helen describes the archive of Barbara’s writings in her possession, including prose, poetry, and a “hundred or more personal letters” (McCurdy 1966, vi)8. She writes that the author of these papers was described as a ‘child genius’ by critics, but “whether this childauthor would have come under your classification ‘genius’ I don’t know. A costly gift, if so, as you pointed out” (qtd. in McCurdy 1966, vii). She then presents her own initial idea for a publication: I am wondering if a selection of these documents, accompanied by an editorial comment from a competent person in this field of education, would be of any help to parents, teachers, and psychologists, would even serve, perhaps, as a warning (qtd. in McCurdy 1966, vii).

McCurdy’s reply was dated five days later (19 March). In it, he offers a sympathetic response to Helen’s self-deprecating remarks about ‘the child’: It seems that the documents you described might indeed enrich us. Perhaps, with the annotations you suggest, they would serve more as a revelation than a warning – a revelation of the extraordinary possibilities, both dark and bright, in a single little girl. For you hint at tragedy, the costliness of the gift. Yet it is difficult for me to believe that the tragedy was not shot through with a very lovely brilliance, or you could not remember her as you do. (McCurdy 1966, viii)

What followed was a five-year collaboration on a text that gradually evolved from “a study of the literary development of a child author into a full-length, though still strictly limited, biography” (McCurdy 1966, viii-ix). A project that McCurdy seems to have taken the lead on, writing, as he does, that “My own daughter had died two years before, and grief made me bold” (1966, viii). Here, I think, is an interesting portrait of the biographer(s): two grieving parents, both interested in discovering and tracing the source and 8

Curiously, in this letter, Helen refers to Barbara as ‘the child’ or ‘a child’, avoiding explicitly referring to the child in question as her own daughter.

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expression of a child’s genius, not through the outward events of her life, but primarily through an examination of her imaginative work: her novels and poems, as well as her paracosmic creation Farksolia and its language, Farksolia. What follows is a curiously coy biography deeply infused with a mother’s regrets and grief, as well as her instinct for discretion. This ‘unconscious autobiography’ deals very lightly with any of the more troubling events of Barbara’s life, focusing for the most part on her happy early childhood, the content of her juvenilia and her publishing successes. The biography also makes the assertion that Barbara’s juvenilia, and most particularly her novels, The House Without Windows and Lost Island, were not only autobiographical, but prescient or prophetic. Towards the end of Barbara, the author(s) discuss the mystery of Barbara’s disappearance. Rather than speculate on or explore the evidence around her disappearance, the author(s) cite two passages from Barbara’s fictional works. The first is a passage from Lost Island9, which Helen selected, saying that she “was struck by the significance of the following passage” (McCurdy 1966, 144): This running away into the woods had always been her favorite escape, from other people or from herself, beginning with her childhood in Maine (qtd. in McCurdy 1966, 145).

The author(s) follow this quotation from Barbara’s unpublished novel by writing: How consistent it would have been if Barbara, on that December evening, had carried her loneliness northward to her friendly woods and mountains! Here we strike into a deep theme. Is The House Without Windows to be read prophetically? … Can we be far wrong in substituting Barbara’s name for Eepersip’s in the closing scenes of that book? (McCurdy 1966, 145-146).

Next comes a quotation from the ending of The House Without Windows: a scene in which Eepersip stands on the peak of ‘her’ mountain and the child author describes, with rapturous detail, a sunset. This is followed by a summary of the rest of the final scene, in which Eepersip vanishes into 9

Lost Island: A romance was not published during Barbara’s lifetime. According to the evidence of her letters, she wrote the first draft between 1930 and 1932, and made revisions in 1934. The manuscript held in the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library has a small typewritten label affixed to its cover, which gives the date of the fair copy as 1934.

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the air amid a cloud of butterflies, becoming a “spirit of Nature” (Follett 1927, 52). McCurdy and Follett write: And it was prophesied: ‘She would be invisible for ever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see’ (McCurdy 1966, 146).

Here lies, I think, the most extraordinary aspect of the McCurdy/Follett ‘autobiography’; its conclusion, in which their analysis of Barbara’s personality, as evidenced by her creative works, culminates in a magical, and magically reassuring, account of Barbara’s fate. In McCurdy/Follett’s analysis of Barbara’s novel as a prophecy of her death, there is no body, no return, no explanation for her disappearance; instead, the authors propose that Barbara foresaw her own end, and that it was something she longed for. Barbara’s end is reimagined here, not as a tragedy, or the ‘warning’ Helen had first suggested her daughter’s story might provide, but as a magical transformation not unlike those of the butterflies Barbara so loved: an evolution into her ideal form as a spirit of Nature.

An unending sadness of being Between April 2007 and May 2008 a blogger known as Astral Aviary published 25 blog posts10, in two series, which he named “An unending sadness of being: the tragedy of Barbara Newhall Follett” and “A haunting spirit: further reflections on the tragedy of Barbara Newhall Follett”. The author asserts: There are in a sense two ‘Barbaras.’ One is the tragic and all too human being who vanished in the early evening of Thursday, December 7th, 1939 – three months shy of her 26th birthday, the beginning of mature adulthood. Then there is Barbara the enigma, whose life as chronicled by McCurdy shows her as a character in her

10

The original series of ten posts (An unending sadness of being) are: ‘untitled’ (22 April 2007), ‘untitled’ (29 April 2007), ‘Introduction’ (29 April 2007), ‘Into the central fire’ (6 May 2007), ‘Never in this world’ (13 May 2007), ‘untitled [interlude]’ (20 May 2007), ‘untitled [Lost]’ (28 May 2007), ‘Oblivion’ (10 June 2007), ‘Every liberation is not a deliverance’ (18 June 2007), ‘untitled [immortality]’ (24 June 2007). The second series (A haunting spirit) are untitled, and dated 18 March 2008, 23 March 2008, 1 April 2008, 8 April 2008 and 4 May 2008.

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own legend and who stunning disappearance is almost too perfect an end (24 April 2007).11

Here Aviary reveals some of the themes that will haunt his eccentric biography (and indeed haunts each of the others): the notion that Barbara never quite achieved adulthood, and that she remains an enigma. He also notes, in his discussion of McCurdy’s biography (his “sacred book”) that “the legend was allowed to completely overshadow Barbara the human being and writer. I believe it is time that changed” (22 April 2007). Aviary makes particular note of his deeply-felt personal connection to Barbara’s story, noting that despite never having met her, and having no personal relationship to her12, he had considered “her story to be a secret part of myself … this sad tale of a lost child-genius”13. He further reveals that, “I did weep for her once … It took me a long time to understand why”. In a later, reflective post, he describes the series as “my sprawling, experimental, and not altogether focused series” and writes that, “the intent of the series was both to work out my thoughts regarding her life … and how it had affected my life [and] to find kindred spirits” (18 March 2008). Here, in contrast to the biographies (co)written by her parents, is a biographer who confesses that he is not, and is making no attempt to be, dispassionate or objective. It is less surprising, then, that this biography –

11

The source for Astral Aviary’s blog biography is a single webpage in which the works have been collated. I have added the dates on which the original blog posts were added as reference points throughout my discussion of this work. The blog posts are, like many blog posts, not always well edited. I have preserved the errors as they appear in the original. 12 Almost all of Barbara’s other biographers, to date, have been deeply connected to her. As already noted, they include her father and her mother; more recent biographers include Stefan Cooke, the grandson of Wilson’s second wife, (Barbara’s nephew) who both maintains a comprehensive website dedicated to Barbara’s life and work, and edited and self-published Barbara Newhall Follett: A life in letters (2015). 13 I have not, in this essay, addressed the way in which her various biographers defend Barbara’s status as a genius, or child genius, but each biographer has, in their own way and usually implicitly rather than explicitly, connected the ‘tragedy’ of her early disappearance, and her status as a genius. As if each relies on the other: as if, that is to say, her disappearance would not have been such a tragedy if she were not a genius; and as if, had she not been a genius, she would not have disappeared/had such an enigmatic end.

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informal, personal, self-published, unedited and ultimately abandoned14 – is as much a memoir of the author’s own emotional life as it is a biography of his subject. Throughout the posts, Aviary refers, directly and indirectly, to his own experiences. Though he writes self-deprecatingly about his writing15 (“as a writer, I am a complete flop” (22 April 2007)), it quickly becomes apparent that his examination of Barbara’s life is also an examination of his own life: his battles with creativity, loneliness, unhappy relationships, and uneven literary success, and – finally – his impending “date with Barbara”. At times, this examination of the self by the biographer is subtle, as when he slips into the collective first person: “we have to accept or forever stifle creativity … While every writer put’s a great deal of themselves into their first book, few follow it to the literal end” (6 May 2007). At other times he is more explicit, as when he writes that: “I doubt neither William nor anyone in his family had any interest in her writings or any other aspect of her artistic longings. Such happens, as I well know …” (ellipsis in original, 28 May 2007). One of the most heartbreaking moments in which Aviary connects his own experiences with Barbara’s is in his 8 April 2008 post. Here, we find Aviary describing the function of paracosms (parallel worlds, as he describes them) in his and Barbara’s emotional and creative lives: No fantasy is more prevalent and powerful than the fantasy of a parallel world, one hidden from our senses, yet believed to be as real in its own strange way as our own. The fantasy states we live beside this invisible existence throughout our lives, most never knowing it nor having idea it is even there. But, the fantasy hints, some of us can wonder, suspect, and imagine this hidden world. And a gifted few, artistically or spiritually, are granted the magical means/powers to 14

Astral Aviary deleted his blog, some time after his last post, dated 4 May 2008. The material was retrieved from archive.org by its current webhost ‘Bluejay Young’, who has added a series of notes. 15 Under the pseudonym J. Kel, Astral Aviary has written at least one fantasy series (the Shedding Grace series), whose titles are A prophet on the water, A nomad in the wind, A hero in the fire, and An artist of the earth. According to the synopsis on Amazon.com, ‘Shedding grace tells the tragicomic tale of Dr. Damon Maxwell, site-manager for the multi-billion dollar INDIANA project. Against the backdrop of 21st century America—a fragmented nation suffering its own spiritual crisis— and haunted by the memories of his two great loves, Ana and Penelope, Damon is a man on a quest for his soul.’

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perceive this alternate reality and can enter it to either escape the endless boredom of this one or flee its unrelenting terror. Thus the fantasy serves as both a refuge and a solace to our day-to-day existence and like its metaphysical equivalents, time travel and heaven, it is very old. Psychologically, it began with the dread of death and blossomed from there. The fantasy speaks to a need very deep in the human psyche and can either spark our creativity or our anguish, or both, but the longing is ever present from the first love loss in life – perhaps a pet, a friend, a relative, or a spouse – to the finality of our own demise.

Here, again, Aviary uses the collective first person (our), and connects his own experiences as a writer of fantasy and science fiction, with Barbara’s experiences as a writer, and as the creator of Farksolia. Aviary suggests that a parallel world (paracosm) is only accessible to a gifted few (those few, he implies, include himself and Barbara), that it is both ‘refuge and solace’: a site of longing until “the finality of our own demise”. In the next paragraph, Aviary’s writing about paracosms takes a darker turn. Here he argues that Barbara grasped at an early age that “to cross over to it … the only mechanism was through one’s own death” and that her “longingdread for the night doomed her” (8 April 2008). Aviary’s conclusions about the links between Barbara’s imaginative work and her disappearance or death do not entirely align with McCurdy’s implied conclusion that Barbara had, like Eepersip, or Jane Carey of Lost Island, escaped into the woods or been transformed into a spirit of Nature. Aviary does, however, argue that The house without windows “can be read, in retrospect, as a life-script” (6 May 2007). In these passages, in particular, we see the ways in which Aviary’s biography becomes, increasingly, what I have called a paracosm of the self. That is, an imagined alternative world in which the self and subject commingle or overlap, or in which the biographer enters into, and alters, the subject’s imagined world. This process of entering into, and altering, the subject’s paracosm extends to a similar commingling of self and subject in Aviary’s writing about Barbara’s relationships: in these sections he ranges freely away from the documentary evidence into musings informed by his own experiences and emotional reactions to her lovers. In describing her romance with the mysterious ‘A’, a sailor and amateur scholar, Aviary writes that “the effects of this relationship remained with her to the end and during the very difficult time of the ever deepening depression from which both were struggling to survive, it sustained her” and that “I think it would have been much better for her if this relationship had worked out” (28 May 2007). In

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contrast, his treatment of Barbara’s husband, William Nickerson Rogers, is far less sympathetic. Aviary notes that, “he is the one person in this unhappy tale I do not like. With everyone else I can at least feel if not sympathy, then empathy, but try as I may the man leaves me cold and the more I think about him, the colder I become” (28 May 2007). Here, Aviary writes in a way that strongly commingles his own feelings about Roger with Barbara’s, blurring the distance, and differences, between them. In a later passage, he writes that an argument between Barbara and her husband, “must have been a beaut. Having been on the receiving end of such a thing myself … I can attest that while such psychological conflagrations leave no physical damage (usually), they deeply scar one’s soul” (8 April 2008). Given Aviary’s strong negative response to Rogers, it is perhaps no surprise that his tentative conclusion regarding Barbara’s disappearance is that she died of an accidental self-administered drug overdose and that Rogers covered up her death, disposing of her body in order to avoid a scandal. Aviary writes, “I no longer believe she walked out of the apartment that night … the haunting image of her locking the door behind her as she walks slowly out into the cold night of a world going mad is touching but wrong” (8 April 2007). In his next-to-last entry, having summed up his conclusions about the possible circumstances of Barbara’s death, the author returns to himself, and to his emotional relationship to Barbara’s life story. He writes that “my deepest sorrow is for Barbara. What a sad, empty end to such a magnificently promising beginning. It shouldn’t have been that way, but ‘should’ and ‘fair’ are merely invented concepts” (8 April 2007). This summary of her ending is echoed in Aviary’s concluding post, posted on 4 May 2008. Here, Aviary writes: not too many years hence I will be going on a ‘date with Barbara’. Which is about as coy a euphemism as I can come up with regarding the end result. Nevertheless, I’m not terribly concerned at the moment … I mean I am coming up to the end of the line anyway of what has turned out to be pretty much a wasted, useless life.

Conclusion One of the earliest biographies of a child was Benjamin Heath Malkin’s A Father’s memoirs of his child (1808). Though written over a century before Barbara was born, it shares many of the features of her biographies: it includes a parent’s defence of their parenting, an insistence that their child was a natural prodigy, and an account of a child who invented their

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own paracosm, Alleston. As in the biographies of Barbara discussed here, in the face of a lack of material about the subject’s adult life, there is a strong focus on the imaginary life of the subject, overwritten and interpreted by the biographer. These are narratives in which biographers enter into the paracosms of their subjects, cloak themselves in the magical logic that pertains there, and thus discover, for themselves if not for their subjects or even their readers, solace. Although Barbara left behind a voluminous correspondence, she is understood by the biographers examined here as an enigma, a mystery (as well as a genius and a tragedy). Perhaps this is inevitable with child subjects who have not, and may never, reach McCurdy’s Act Five of Life, which he describes as necessary in order to clarify and confirm the vague “foreshadowings” of Act One (1966, v). These foreshadowings, in Barbara’s case, are largely embodied in her published and unpublished creative works: her paracosmic creations. In researching and writing about them each of the biographers examined here rewrites, or at least adapts, the parameters of her world. Driven by grief, or strong empathy and selfidentification, seeking meaning in her life, and in its ending, they create their own paracosms: worlds that resemble our own, and build on those created by Barbara, but in and through which Barbara’s life gains meaning and resolution, as do their own relationships to her. This is not to say that these paracosms are always comforts to their authors. Aviary, in particular, constructs a paracosm in which his ‘visit with Barbara’ will be a meeting of two tragic and misunderstood figures. And Helen Follett’s paracosm does not, perhaps, offer the consolation, reassurance or closure that she had been seeking for more than 25 years. Wilson’s is an early work: written while Barbara was still alive, still very young, not yet the estranged daughter or ‘missing person’ she would become. In his paracosm, she remains the ideal child that each of her biographers celebrates. The natural genius whose dreams of another world, though described explicitly by her as places of solitude and escape, were parallel worlds in which they participated: these paracosms of the self are, for these writers, both biographies and autobiographies, both “a refuge and a solace” (Aviary 8 April 2008).

Works cited Adams, Helen Douglas. 1923. The Elfin Pedlar and Tales told by Pixy Pool. London, New York, Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton. Aviary, Astral. 2008. “An Unending Sadness of Being: the Tragedy of Barbara Newhall Follett.” Accessed 5 April, 2016.

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http://www.dreamshore.net/bluejay/barbara.html. “Barbara Newhall Follett, Disappearing Child Genius.” 2010. NPR (National Public Radio) interview with Paul Collins, Washington D.C., 18 December. Brien, Donna Lee. 2014. “ ‘Welcome Creative Subversions’: Experiment and Innovation in Recent Biographical Writing.” TEXT: The Journal of Writers and Writing Courses. 18 (1). Accessed 5 April 2016. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april14/brien.htm. Collins, Paul. 2011. “Vanishing Act.” Lapham’s Quarterly IV (1) Accessed 18 February 2016. http://laphamsquarterly.org/celebrity/vanishing-act. Cooke, Stefan, ed. 2015. Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life in Letters. Massachusetts: Farksolia Follett, Barbara Newhall. 1934. Lost Island: A Romance. Series III: Unpublished materials, Barbara Newhall Follett Papers 1919-1966. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. —. 2013. “In Defense of Butterflies.” The Horn Book Magazine, 4 February. Accessed 12 August 2016. http://www.hbook.com/2013/02/choosing-books/horn-bookmagazine/in-defense-of-butterflies/. —. 1927. The House Without Windows and Eepersip’s Life There. New York and London: Alfred A. Knopf. —. 2011. Lost Island: A Romance. New York: N Underground Publisher Ltd. Follett, Helen. 1932. Magic Portholes. New York: Macmillan. McCurdy, Harold Grier. 1939. “Literature and Personality.” Character and Personality 7: 300-308. —. 1966. Barbara: The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. McQuiddy, Steve. 1997. The Fantastic Tale of Opal Whitely. Willamette, Oregon: Intangible Publications. Myers, Mitzi. 1995. “Of Mimicry and (Wo)man: Infans or Forked Tongue?” Children’s Literature 23: 66-70. Rosenberg, S. 1989. “A Study of Personality in Literary Autobiography: An Analysis of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56 (3): 416-430. Sadler, David. 1992. “Innocent Hearts: The Child Authors of the 1920s.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 17 (4): 24-30. Smith, Laura. 2015. “The Last Word.” The Paris Review. 16 July. Accessed 18 February, 2016. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/16/the-last-word-2/.

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“Tragedy in a Hothouse.” 1966. Time 87 (22): 3 June. Accessed 18 February, 2016. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.usq.edu.au/ehost/detail/detail?vid= 4&sid=597a1b07-d62a-425e-85497c2fab612bea%40sessionmgr4010&hid=4204&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZW hvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=a9h&AN=54714766. Whitely, Opal. 1920. The Diary of Opal Whitely. March 1920. Intersect Digital Library. Accessed 12 August, 2016. http://intersect.uoregon.edu/opal/default.html. Wood, Naomi J. 1995. “Who Writes and Who is Written?: Barbara Newhall Follett and Typing the Natural Child.” Children’s Literature 23: 45-65.

CHAPTER SIX MEMOIR FROM FINNISH MARGINS: NARRATING BURIED HISTORY IRA MCGUIRE

‘… all histories are a kind of fiction’ (Nelson 2007).

My grandmother, Martta Vilenius, published two romance novels, the first, Hyvin Kävi Minullekin (1936) when she was just 26. Grandmother had promising talent: when my mother handed me an old family photo album, a folded newspaper clipping fell out from between its pages. I unfolded the page and a found a short article introducing Martta as the new Hilja Valtonen (1897-1988), a successful and prolific feminist novelist who introduced modern and progressive heroines into Finnish fiction. Martta’s writing style, in the clipping, is described as ‘feisty’ and ‘needling’ (Martta Viitaniemi, n.d.) Both words were also fitting descriptions of how I recalled her personality. The second novel, Tuulessa ja Auringossa, was published in 1960 with little fanfare. The long gap between her first and second novel was due to World War II and the death of her first husband. He was brought home from the front gravely ill with tuberculosis and died a few weeks later, at home, from a haemorrhage. For the duration of the war and until she remarried years later, Martta was left to look after the family business: a vegetable stall at a large indoor market in Tampere, 160 kilometres north of Helsinki. Martta worked to keep herself and her five-year-old daughter, my mum’s halfsister, alive. Air sirens sounded frequently and Martta often had to abandon her stall and run to a bomb shelter. She followed hundreds of others, grabbing only handbags kept nearby with money and identity papers. My mother tells me that, in later years, Martta spoke of masses of panicked people running. All windows were blackened with blankets and sheets, and after dark, only limited use of light was allowed. There was rationing and food shortages. Martta’s daughter was sent to relatives in the country

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with the hope that she would have enough nourishment, and would be better protected. There was a third manuscript, written another ten or so years later. Apparently, on being asked by her editor to restructure some parts of the narrative, Martta burnt the only copy in a fit of hot temper. She didn’t formally write again. Martta had a long history of burning things – especially bridges with family and friends. Grandmother was forty years old by the time my mother was born, her second husband was much younger and an artist: an alcoholic, a rascal, a womaniser, depending on who does the telling. I never met my grandfather. He committed suicide in the garage of the white, American-style house the family lived in, gassing himself in his car by running a hose from the exhaust into his window. The house was built by an American architect sometime after World War II and was unlike anything else in their municipality. Hämeenkyro was a small but culturally significant town: it was the home of the first Finnish Nobel laureate, Frans Emil Sillanpaa (1888-1964) and later, our family home was bought by Panu Rajala, a noted writer and academic. The house was grand, the whole point for Grandfather. The story I heard repeatedly growing up was that Grandfather purchased the house and adjoining lakeside land, with a disused three-storey office building, during one of his blackout drinking binges. He was roaring drunk at an auction, smoking and laughing, and made the winning bid as a joke. When he sobered up and realised he had signed legal documents, was now the proud owner of a country estate, he called Martta to confess. He argued that the house was to be kept because it suited his style, his artistic bent, and gave him the space the marriage needed. He probably argued out of sheer embarrassment. The house was representative of their marriage: a battle of wills and temperaments until his death. Martta’s most enduring conflict was with my father, someone she scolded frequently, hoping to drive a wedge in my parents’ marriage. My father was from an inferior family, according to Martta, who had hoped my mother would marry a previous boyfriend from a wealthy and respected family. That same album that contains the newspaper clipping has dozens of pages of black and white photographs glued in seemingly random order, names and places scrawled in childish cursive. I deduct the writing to be my mother’s, since many photographs I recognise as Martta are simply described as ‘Mother’. Without pulling the photographs from their pages to

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check for further notations, I trust the person who has scrawled locations and named Mother in several – a stylish looking woman, usually smiling at the photographer. The photographs of Mother – dressed in a neat, twopiece skirt suit – are staged in various places: Stockholm, Paris, Capri, Switzerland, London. The settings are bland, rarely with a distinguishing feature, with Mother standing in front of brick walls, fences and gardens. The monochromatic pictures are enigmatic, and certainly offer up no straight explanation of who she was in those pictures, or at what stage of her life they may have been taken. In many, she looks to be quite unlike the woman I was to know, and is precisely an example of a ‘memorialized’ (Sontag 1977, 9) family member. As Sontag explains, ‘Those ghostly traces, photographs, [supplying] the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family – and, often, is all that remains of it’ (1977, 9). Assembling a life, and narrating buried history from scant evidence, brings into focus the compromise of the writer, of remaining honest while employing fictional strategies, to ‘construct stories from the data they collect, forcing the disordered and vast complexity of an actual life into a neat literary form and, importantly, that the life thus presented only appears authentic and life-like to readers because they accept, and endorse, this literary convention’ (Brien 2014). My approach to writing memoir, imbuing a sense of authenticity, has been to describe details I have access to through photographs, objects and places, gathering a catalogue that is more tangible than my memories. My parents have four small, framed photographs of a very youthful Martta hung on a wall in their kitchen. I often look at the photos, since they face the table where I sit drinking coffee when I visit. My favourite is one where she is wearing a white shirt and men’s wide-legged pants held up with a thick belt, a silk scarf tied around her head, and stands straddling her first husband’s motorbike. Grandmother was head gardener for Wintterin Väritehdas, managing the surrounding gardens. The motorbike in the picture is parked in a gravel driveway, the background darkened by the shadow of a building, roses in bloom. She smiles broadly at the lens, at the person behind the camera. She is quite like a female Steve McQueen before the famous motorbike scene in The Great Escape (1960). There is no date to the photograph, but it may have been around 1937, a few months after her first daughter was born, just a couple of years before World War II ravaged Europe, before women became invaluable, stepping into the slipstream of the fighting men. Each time I look at these

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photographs, I project myself into the frames, imagining what might have occurred beyond the borders: Martta is thin, talks animatedly, uses her hands to emphasise points, adjusts the silk scarf on her head. Her husband helps her from his motorbike, holds her hand as she swings her leg over. The camera is forgotten, pointing down, leather strap touching gravel. He has just bought the motorcycle on a whim, has come across town to show off, waving an arm in the air as the sputtering engine comes up the gravel driveway of Wintterin Väritehdas. Martta stands next to half-pruned rose bushes, secateurs in hand, watches him stall then kick a stand out. Martta removes her soiled gloves, shades her eyes, laughs at her husband. This interpretation of the photograph – Grandmother happy, the whole world aligning at that point, directing her towards, perhaps, what may have seemed like an idyllic future, finally standing above the dark current that she was born into – are the intimacies out of reach. As a writer, I can’t enter Martta’s life except through an imagined narrative, much like that Kristina Olsson employed in her memoir Boy, Lost (2013). Narrating a memoir from the margins demands an assemblage of narrative from scant details, the reliance on photographs, picking through the mythologised stories of other family members. This is especially true when writing and researching the lives of women from history: their voices and representations are often marginalised, missing, an ‘occluded feminine experience’ (Modjeska 2015). Olsson had to rely on fiction to represent what might have happened to her mother: I began with surviving family members, and the memories of my aunts, my father and my sister. But even they couldn’t access the deep trauma and grief my mother had suffered and that she carried with her, always. That kind of suffering cannot be documented, there is nowhere to go for a record, so I had to move beyond biographical or journalistic questioning and try to re-imagine parts of her life, based on the stories I was told and my own experience not just as my mother’s daughter but as a woman and a mother myself. (Olsson 2013, 8)

The key to Olsson’s success was tapping into a shared reality, drawing on her own experiences as a woman to reflect on those of her mother, thereby assuming a narrative identity that may have closely resembled her mother’s. To me, the use of emotion to influence the writing is a key factor, even if it might seem to rest heavily in the realm of fictive embellishment: it lends an authenticity, and gives access to an otherwise

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unobtainable interior life. Adopting fictional strategies to cope with gaps in the record is the suturing together of several modes, ‘the imagined and the informed, the fictive and the researched’ (Modjeska 2015). It is the ‘personal involvement’ (Gutkind 2012, 13) that allows the occupation of a space left behind, a way to further illustrate a life lived. Piecing together a narrative from remembered objects around my grandmother’s home, a place I last visited some thirty-five years ago, further blurs the truth/fictive paradox: these things exist mostly in my imagination. And much remains unwritten, thousands of hours left without any documentation. Writing memoir, for me, has been an exercise in elimination – what to leave out. Rightly or wrongly, this process of deflection is usually a matter of my opinion, perception and judgement – creative choices I make about which memories to include and how they might be portrayed. The things I do know, from when I spent time with her: Grandmother was an avid collector of objects from her travels – a large, hand-woven rug in duck-egg blue dragged across Europe on one trip is still in our family now. She loved the gothic and claw-footed Chippendale furniture she shipped home from England. A collection of fine china trinkets from Germany took up space on her shelves. Hand-drawn images of Parisian prostitutes, bought on the edges of the Seine, hung on a wall. She kept a selection of lingerie and nightgowns from the mid-century, all carefully hung on coat hangers – bolero-style coats in see-through materials, ribbons cascading from long nightgowns, the type of costuming I later saw in old Hollywood productions. In Finland, when I was a child, she allowed me to layer nighties and bed-jackets, the outfits topped by roping black crystal beads and pearls around my neck. I swanned around her apartment, clickclacking in feathered mules. Martta indulged and fed my imagination, often lying down on her bed for me to poke her arms with knitting needles when I decided I wanted to play at being a nurse. She read dozens of books to me, borrowed from the Hämeenkyro Library, told me stories, took me with her to the mobile library once a month. She allowed the things Mum didn’t, like drinking milky and sugary coffee from her best china. I often slept over at her house, sharing her large bed, enjoying the feeling of being spoilt. Before moving to Australia permanently, my grandmother came to visit us once in Eltham, Melbourne, after we had lived in the country for a year or so. Our brown brick and tile home, a new construction in a fresh estate, was not like anything Martta was used to. She continued to speak Finnish

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to the neighbourhood kids, a woolly-haired bunch of my friends, who constantly cycled up and down the streets, or skipped rope in a dead-end street that was waiting for council approval for more housing. Our grass was just coming in next to a dirt driveway, and she stood out the front, on the small porch, with the purpose of guarding the grass from marauding kids. In a stern voice and wagging a finger she called out to my friends: ‘Keep away!’ I felt embarrassed by her noisy remonstrations, my friends poking out their tongues and saluting her with two fingers. My parents drove us to remote beaches, took us up mountain roads to show Martta the rainforests and bush. She was fascinated by the size of gum trees, the way palm fronds seemed Jurassic. We walked through Fitzroy Gardens and she let my father take a picture of her, standing outside Captain Cook’s Cottage. Her permanent move came after she claimed she was too frail to keep going without family assistance in Finland. Grandmother was calling weekly, describing in lengthy and teary detail how she wasn’t well; complaining that her retirement home was treating her badly, that there was no heat; that Auntie, my mother’s half-sister, had abandoned her, never visiting. Grandmother knew how to push buttons. She had everyone imagining a cold and desolate home with Nurse Ratchett, the heartless antagonist from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in charge. My mother started floating the idea that Grandmother should move to Australia and live with us. Her argument was that Grandmother wouldn’t live for much longer and she should be well cared for in the time she had left. My father tried to steer the conversations back out to sea and drown them: he and Grandmother had always enjoyed a difficult relationship. In Finland, she had lived in an apartment block she owned, the top-level apartments converted into one large home. She had always believed in ghosts, would relay stories of audible footsteps coming up the stairs, pausing on the landing of her bedroom. At the height of her ghost paranoia, Grandmother would appear at my parents’ house at dinner time and sit on a chair in the formal dining room, nursing her handbag, until my father finished eating at the kitchen table and left to go back to work. Only then, after my father had gone, would Grandmother enter the kitchen. Mum held firm to her ideas. In 1988, Grandmother flew over from Finland, aged 81. She landed at Brisbane International Airport, happy, with not a care in the world apart from her arthritic knees making walking slow and painful. Both my parents felt duped. Her stories of failing and ill health were obvious nonsense. Her deceptions almost ended my parents’ marriage.

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Martta couldn’t comprehend the Gold Coast and its neck-craning tallness, its shiny exteriors that only mirrored itself. She complained constantly about where we lived, how my father didn’t provide well enough for the family, nit-picking everything mum did. Consequently, moving in with us turned out to be the beginning of a perfect storm. When I think about my grandmother, I mostly recall her from this time – she was short and thin and always immaculately dressed. She was a pearls and perfume type, emerging from her room like the matriarch of a grand manor. She always sat at the end of our kitchen table, hair set, lips red, sometimes wearing sunglasses at night, peering at everyone through them with the look of a stern owl. She seemed innocent, like some of the gentle grandmothers in the fairy tales she had read to me when I was a child, but she was an acerbic wolf in disguise. The grandmother I had known as a child had gone, replaced by this cynical and critical woman. The soon to be volatile home situation was brought to a critical point with Grandmother dragging her Chippendale furniture to Australia with her, the furniture a representation of what she had achieved in life, how far she had come. Grandmother failed to inform Aunty about taking the whole setting. Aunty was furious at the loss of a large part of her (imagined) owed inheritance. Grandmother’s response to the terse phone calls threatening an international lawsuit was a nonchalant quip: ‘I left her the bloody grand piano, didn’t I?’ Neither Aunty, nor any of her four children, were musical or appreciative of the instrument. The hulking piano just took up space, was deemed worthless. I guess, without anyone to play it, it really was. Aunty had got her comeuppance for not taking heed of Grandmother’s complaints about not being looked after. Martta played mind games, forcing recognition from both daughters by pitting one against the other, and the sisters broke contact for years, not reconciling until well after Grandmother’s death, when Aunty was diagnosed with terminal cancer. My father finally issued an ultimatum – him or Martta. And so Martta lived her final years in a nursing home staffed by Finnish ex-patriots on the outskirts of Brisbane, in a small room with a kitchenette. The room was furnished with a single bed, her bedside table one of her precious Chippendale coffee tables, a round, claw-footed piece adding an odd but stately presence to the clinical atmosphere of the room. Grandmother had tried to bring her sophistication with her, dotting the space with her decorative porcelain knick-knacks and silver-framed photographs, that duck-egg blue rug still under her feet.

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I didn’t visit the nursing home often, something that makes me feel guilty even now. The times I did visit, she complained that the nursing staff were using a wet cloth to wipe her table, causing damage to the dark timber panelling, the intricate joinery a buckled mess. Grandmother was brought up in a Pastorage. Here was a fact that she kept hidden from us until just before her death – she was the accidental result of a dalliance between a wealthy landowner and a servant girl. As soon as the servant girl announced she was pregnant, the father-to-be was shipped off to America and, when Grandmother was born, she was given to relatives to be raised. Her mother was abjectly poor and couldn’t support Grandmother on her servants’ salary. My great-grandmother saved her money and with her family’s assistance, managed to scrape together the funds required to send Grandmother to gardening school, the first planned-out step to lift Grandmother towards a more esteemed life, where she should have been in the first place. Grandmother eventually became a gardener, working for a wealthy household. According to my mother, Grandmother decided to repeat history and fell in love with the wealthy owner. At the time Grandmother won a manuscript competition with her first novel, a romance about a young student who falls in love with a wealthy man – not exactly a stretch of the imagination to deduce where she found her inspiration. Perhaps this is where my Grandmother’s obsession with the finer things began. She often seemed to regard herself as above everyone else, and perhaps it was a trick of her genetic inheritance: I don’t know if she was ever told the name of her father, but I imagine if she was, it would go a long way towards explaining why she felt she deserved better in life, why she surrounded herself with aspirational objects denoting wealth. I frequently find myself reflecting on why Grandmother looked at my father as a great failure: he was hardworking, a busy and successful self-starter. He was kind and supportive, a fit man who only drank on social occasions, unlike the men Grandmother had experienced. My father wasn’t violent or bad tempered. Perhaps in trying to distance herself from her own illegitimate and poor beginnings, she drew some kind of comparison between her own mother and my father’s mother: women who, through a perceived moral failing, had a difficult life. Perhaps she feared that my mother would be left to carry similar burdens to her own. Martta died when she was eighty-four. I was nearly four thousand kilometres away in Kalgoorlie when the call came from the Gold Coast. The ringing of the phone woke my fiancée in the early hours. He was

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working for the Royal Flying Doctor Service at the time, and so answered expecting a nurse with patient details on the other end. ‘Yes?’ he said, listened for a few moments, and then passed the phone to me. ‘It’s your mum. She’s crying.’ I took the phone. The last time she had called in tears was when her dog had died. She had been inconsolable, describing in detail the dog’s fitting and vomiting an arc of bright blood, apparently an aneurism, bursting and causing a scene like a massacre. My mother was prone to being dramatic in all situations, sometimes calling and crying about news stories she had seen. Her visceral reactions were blamed on her ‘theatrical’ personality and her increasing drinking habits. Her crying on the phone wasn’t all that alarming, and so I wasn’t prepared. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked, and after a series of sobs and noises from her end, she finally said, ‘Grandmother has died.’ Martta wasn’t religious but was frightened of finding out there was a God after all, and so she had prayed each night, just in case. She had a crucified porcelain Jesus hanging above her bed, and on my frequent sleepovers as a child, I had stared at His sad eyes and punctured limbs before going to sleep. Martta died when I was too young to appreciate all she had done. I didn’t think to speak to her more and no one thought to write down her experiences – herself included. But in me, she lives on. Her ghost follows me but I don’t mind it so much. She was, after all, someone with a buried history worth unearthing.

Works cited Brien, Donna Lee. 2013. “Non-Fiction Writing Research.” In Research Methods in Creative Writing, edited by Jeri Kroll and Graeme Harper, 34-55. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —. 2014. “ ‘Welcome Creative Subversions’: Experiment and Innovation in Recent Biographical Writing.” TEXT 18 (1). Accessed December 8, 2016. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april14/brien.htm. Case, Jo. 2013. “The Shadow of Lost Children: An Interview with Kristina Olsson.” The Wheeler Centre. Accessed April 14, 2016. http://www.wheelercentre.com/notes/4b62676bff1f. Gutkind, Lee. 2012. You Can’t Make This Stuff Up. Boston: DaCapo Press. Green, Stephanie. 2012. “The Deflected Subjects: Ethics, Objects and Writing.” Axon: Creative Explorations 1 (2). Accessed March 15,

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2016. http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-2/deflected-subject-ethicsobjects-and-writing. Kesey, Ken 1962. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Accessed May 12, 2017. http://www.somersetacademy.com/ourpages/auto/2015/9/29/56608819 /cuckoos%20nest.pdf Modjeska, Drusilla. 2015. “The Informed Imagination.” Meanjin Quarterly 74 (2). Accessed December 7, 2016. http://meanjin.com.au/memoir/the-informed-imagination/. Nelson, Camilla. 2007. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT 11 (2). Accessed December 6, 2016. http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm. Olsson, Kristina. 2013. Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Picador. Vilenius, Martta. 1960. Tuulessa ja Auringossa. Helsinki: WSOY. Viitaniemi, Martta. 1936. Hyvin Kävi Minullekin. Hämeenlinna: Karisto. Webb, Jen. 2009. “Inbetween Writing: Philosophy and Catachresis.” TEXT Archive. Accessed October 9, 2015. http://www.textjournal.com.au/archive/webb1.htm.

CHAPTER SEVEN VLADIMÍR LEŽÁK-BORIN: COLD WAR WARRIOR JAYNE PERSIAN

Vladimir Ležák Borin was a post-war enigma, a Czech migrant to Australia who was much more than he seemed. Arriving at the tail end of the post-war Displaced Persons (DP) Scheme, through which more than 170,000 Central and Eastern Europeans arrived in Australia as International Refugee Organisation-sponsored refugees, Borin was described by contemporaries as a “fraud” and of the “political underworld” (Richards 1978, 11). Borin’s somewhat convoluted journeys, both political and geographical, tells us something of the life of the politically elite, and active, displaced person. Exploring the life story of an outlier of the DP Scheme in Australia, this essay will focus on Borin’s life story as a type of micro-history, or even a foray into speculative biography, in order to tease out broader themes. Borin’s life also points to the ambiguities inherent in disrupting grand narratives: in this case, that the displaced persons were politically unproblematic ‘New Australians’. Borin left the Communist Party after a disappointing visit to Moscow in 1934, subsequent to which he was possibly a Nazi agent in Paris and indeed, continued in London to provide information to Czech communist agents. Denied British citizenship, he arrived in Australia in 1952 where he wrote the first DP novel and advocated for displaced persons on various issues with federal politicians. He also continued his political activity, associating with Eric Butler’s farright organisation, the Australian League of Rights, and working with the Democratic Labour Party. Borin left Australia in the mid-1960s. His journey back to the Soviet Union, and sudden death in either 1968 or 1970, are matters of conjecture. Was he invited to return to Prague by the Czech leader Dubcek in 1967 during the ‘Czech Spring’, and then killed during the Soviet invasion of 1968? Or did he die, of natural causes, in Czechoslovakia in

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1970? Was this ‘world traveler’ and ‘complete cosmopolite’ a political ‘adventurer’, or a sleeper agent for the communists? Borin, who claimed descent from the royal Hapsburg family of Austria, was ostensibly a pre-war Czech journalist, novelist and playwright. Born in 1902 as Vladimir Ležák, he later claimed to have served in the Czech partisan army in 1918 against the Germans and in 1920 against the Hungarian Communist Army, then with the Ukrainian Army against the Russian Bolsheviks; and, in 1921, in the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. He joined the Communist Party, apparently then adding the Russian name Borin, and wrote for the communist press, occasionally under the pseudonym Otto Rikin, until a visit to the Soviet Union in 1934. After this visit, he stated that he was “shocked” and deeply disillusioned by witnessing “starving children begging for pennies” in this purported communist utopia (Holt 2001, 10). Another story, spread by his detractors, was that he was “one of the most violent communist agitators” in Czechoslovakia, charged with converting peasant agrarians, but was in fact “bought with hard cash” over to the side of the Agrarian Party, for which he was expelled from the Communist Party (NA:UK, KV 2/2482). In any case, he became an outspoken opponent of the USSR, and of the Edvard Beneš government in Czechoslovakia (1933-1938), allying himself with Milan Hodža, former leader of the Agrarian Party, ex-Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia (1935-1938), and a rival of Beneš. After the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, Borin fled to London in 1940, via Paris (and Hodža), leaving his wife Marie and daughter Vera in Czechoslovakia. He later said that his 17-year-old son was killed by the Germans. He claimed to be on the run from the Nazis after a spot of proCzech espionage activity, and to have worked for the French Police Political Department in Paris against members of the Czech Communist Party. However, the British government soon received intelligence that he had been an active collaborator in Czechoslovakia and even perhaps a Nazi agent in Paris. There were allegations from the Czech National Committee in London that Borin had edited a National Socialist newspaper and organised a Czech Fascist Group. They also charged him with causing the arrest of a woman in Prague who refused to cooperate with him and work for the Nazis. Borin, in turn, accused committee members of being active in secret communist organisations. One British intelligence agent reported that Borin “gave a convincing picture of himself as an opponent and victim of the Beneš group, who was at the same time a fervent believer in the Czech liberation and supporter of the allied cause”. Another found he was “unreliable, being everything by starts and nothing long”. A final report observed:

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At best, it was thought that Borin was an “unreliable person” and that “it was safer to keep him out of possible trouble”. Borin and other prominent Hodža supporters were interned on the Isle of Wight in 1940. During this internment he described himself as an “unknown foreigner” and a “broken statesman”. After release from internment in 1942, he continued dissident activities against the Czech Government-in-Exile led by Beneš in London. A British intelligence officer reported that “he is the intellectually unimportant type, but stormy at mass meetings” (NA:UK, KV 2/2483). Borin’s post-war activities with the Czech National Committee in Britain put him in contact with leading British fascists, and he successfully evaded an extradition attempt by the Czech government on a war criminal charge. He also, however, apparently admitted passing “unimportant information” to Czech communist agents, and receiving “a large sum of money” in payment for this information (NA:UK, KV 2/2486). Other allegations included acting as a Russian “agent-provocateur” in Polish government circles; he was declared “subtle and clever”. A British intelligence officer observed that at public events Borin “spoke badly and at length on the menace of Soviet Russia” (NA:UK, KV 2/2484). Even though much of the intelligence against him was propagated by the Czech Government-in-Exile, which was in permanent conflict with the Czech National Committee to which Borin belonged, there was a strong suspicion in London that he was “playing a double game”, and was in fact a Soviet spy (NA:UK, KV 2/2486). Borin was denied British citizenship after he condemned the Anglo-American response to the Soviet takeover of Central and Eastern Europe, and spent time in Germany and Switzerland. In 1950 the CIA echoed London’s confusion about the “adventurer” Borin. They had received intelligence from the former Czech Minister of Industry that Borin “had been a Communist since 1945 and is considered to be a dangerous person”. Noting that he had recently written an anti-Soviet article in the émigré press, the CIA questioned “whether such is intended

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as chameleon writing to cover other motives or actual activities” (Koson 1950). They concluded that they could not answer this question. In 1952, Borin was back in London and had contacts with the Australian DP community. The 170,000 displaced persons who arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952 included about 9,000 Czechs. A compatriot had set up a timber harvesting concern in Tasmania at the end of his two-year contract, and asked Borin if he knew anyone interested in working with him. Borin suggested the son of his close friend, Dr Locher, a conservative Czech leader in London. Jan Locher migrated to Australia that same year and so did Borin, apparently for the sake of his health (in 1948 he was diagnosed with cardiac degeneration, chronic bronchitis and emphysema). His daughter, Vera, who had apparently spent the war years interned in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, joined him. Borin worked as a migrant organiser for the Australian Railways Union, the Ironworkers’ Union and the Liberal Party, and then for Santamaria’s Movement and the nascent Democratic Labor Party (DLP). During this time, Borin wrote for and edited various Czech émigré newspapers. In one article he claimed that there was a “communist conspiracy in the Australian unions” and that migrants should “actively combat their moral enemy communism in the trade union movement” (Gilson and Zubrzycki 1967, 89). He also described Santamaria’s Movement as “the only people in the Anglo-Saxon world who realise clearly that Communism must be fought in the factories”. According to organisers, though, Borin’s work with the DLP was just a job; at the end of the campaign, he disappeared. One Australian organiser described Borin as standing “out like a big building, with the others just trams underneath”. At the same time, fellow Czechs labelled him “a fraud” and “of the political underworld”; a Polish displaced person described him as “a sponge in politics, he soaked everything up” (Richards 1978, 11). In 1954, Borin came to prominence in the Australian press when a Czech Lutheran leader, Dr Josef Hromádka, visited Australia. Hromádka, a socialist and founding member of the World Council of Churches, spoke at a world peace forum in Melbourne. Peace organisations in this period were often encouraged by the Soviet Union to differentiate it from a perceived American attitude of war-mongering; they were communist-influenced, and thus attracted anti-communist protest in western countries. In this case, Borin was not only representing the small group of Free Czechs in protest at Hromádka’s appearing as an apologist for the communist Czech government; Borin claimed to have known Hromádka personally since 1914. Hostile DP demonstrators chanted “Let Borin speak!” The press reported that “New Australians hissed and booed

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and distributed pamphlets” against Hromádka. Borin may well have published in association with the Australian League of Rights. The Anglican, appalled that an “eminent Christian visitor be howled down”, asked: “Were the mob new or old Australians?” (LeRoy 2015, 72-73, 76). Borin applied for naturalisation as an Australian citizen in 1957. The Department of Immigration noted that he was “not highly regarded by Czech nationals and is of definite interest to Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)” (NAA, J25). He was, however, cleared by both ASIO and the Commonwealth Investigation Service and naturalised in April 1958. Borin was an outspoken advocate for displaced persons, and secretary of the (migrant-led) Settlers’ Association in Tasmania. He corresponded with government departments and ministers, and wrote press articles about the lack of marriageable women for single male displaced persons, as well as about the absence of New Australians in responsible government positions. To a family friend, these efforts were characterised as part of a “successful career as a ministerial advisor in the federal Liberal Governments of the 1960s” (Shearing). However, Minister for Immigration Harold Holt did not seriously consider Borin’s letters and complaints. Privately, he labelled Borin “one of the more articulate of our European settlers” in a patronising exchange with Alexander Downer Snr, who agreed with Holt that “Mr Borin has quite a lot to say about a variety of subjects”. As one of Borin’s associates noted: “They are mocking at us” (NAA, M2606).

Cover art by Charles Keeping. V. L. Borin, The Uprooted Survive: A Tale of Two Continents (London: Heinemann, 1959).

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Borin’s 1959 autobiographical novel, The Uprooted Survive: A Tale of Two Continents, follows a group of male Czech DPs in Europe and Australia. The Czech protagonist, Blaha, scathingly characterises the Communist Party as “Government by the People – for the People – damn the People!” (Borin 1959, 92). The anti-communist DP in Europe who had managed to escape the communists was, however: “nobody and nothing; just a human rag”; DPs were “puppets of destiny” (Borin 1959, 100). Blaha migrates to Australia as a DP on behalf of the Czech National Committee in London, in order to shadow a communist agent and to continue the “fight for freedom” in Australia (Borin 1959, 173). In the novel, Borin criticises Australia, outlining the problems that male Czech DPs faced, including prejudice from Australians, a lack of single women, alcoholism and mental illness, unemployment, homesickness and language difficulties. He also presents Australia as a “Never Never Land” where people can break free from their European histories (Borin 1959, 264). Nosal, the communist spy, wishes to escape from Moscow’s control. Upon his naturalisation he mutters: “I wish I could really become an Australian” (Borin 1959, 248). He ends up a boundary-rider in outback Queensland: “clean-shaven, sun-browned, grey-haired, dressed in horseman’s garb with a big hat”, denying his Czech heritage with an Australian drawl (Borin 1959, 265). Borin’s autobiographical novel was the first by a displaced person or New Australian, and was almost unique in the assimilation era. While recently described by the National Library of Australia’s Stephen Holt as “no literary masterpiece”, a contemporary critic noted that the novel was a “parable of more than ordinary interest” (Holt 2001). A reviewer in Quadrant noted the “shrewd observation” in this, “the first novel of the ‘new Australians’” (Holt 2001). Rather than being a New Australian of displaced person origin, however, Borin was really a world traveler, a self-described “complete cosmopolite” and “citizen of the world” whose decade in Australia was just one part of a transnational, politically active life (‘World Citizen’, Times (Canberra), 8 June 1962, 14). In the early 1960s Borin became interested in the anti-communist plight of Southeast Asia. The USA Council against Communist Aggression and the Alex de Tocqueville Society sponsored him to carry out research at the National Library of Australia. Borin then changed his name by deed poll and obtained a passport in the name of Ian Debor. At some point during the 1960s he journeyed back to the United Kingdom, expecting to be away for twelve months. He was apparently invited by Czech leader Alexander Dubþek to return to Prague in 1967, during the

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Prague Spring. His friends in Australia heard that he was killed during the 1968 Soviet invasion. Other sources say he died of natural causes, in Czechoslovakia in 1970, after living in Scotland and Austria.

Australian passport photograph of Ian Debor, 1959. NAA: J25, 1957/10070

Archival research can only take one so far in this journey to uncover a plausible life story for Vladimir Ležák Borin. His migration trajectory from Czechoslovakia through France to Britain, and then onwards to Australia, could be adequately explained by Borin’s involvement in dissident Czech politics. Indeed, his voluminous political publications and private correspondence are entirely in keeping with this explanation. The allegations of Nazi collaboration and spying for the Soviet Union could be just what Borin said they were: empty denunciations from political opponents supporting Beneš. Similarly, Borin’s reputation in Australia as someone with access to the halls of power in both Australia and Czechoslovakia could be attributed to some

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egotistical storytelling on Borin’s part. But why did Borin change his name to Ian Debor just before travelling back to Europe? A fragment of doubt about Borin’s biographical veracity leads to further conjecture about his communist and fascist affiliations. What was fictional history and what was a historical fiction? If he modelled one of his protagonists after his own life story, was it Blaha, the political operative on the side of Czech nationalism, or Nosal, the communist spy in fear of his Moscow masters? Historical writing can be described as an attempt to pin down evidence, working within a framework of primary and secondary sources, footnotes and bibliography. Immersed in historical material on Borin, I have found the questions perhaps more illuminating than the (few) answers I have been able to find. The complexities and ambiguities in his life story, as well as the contribution of allegation and denunciation to his migration trajectory, lend themselves to a sort of speculative history. Borin is something of an outlier, not an example of an average or typical displaced person. Because of this he not only adds depth to our understanding of this heterogenous group of post-war migrants, but suggests a stronger than usual role for historical imagination.

Works cited Primary sources Borin, V. L. 1959. The Uprooted Survive: A Tale of Two Continents. London: Heinemann. Debor, Ian (formerly Lezak, Vladimir), also known as Borin. 1957/10070, J25, National Archives of Australia (NAA). Koson, Andre D. 1950. Memorandum. 66th CIC Detachment, Region V, Regensburg, 6 January 1950. http://www.fioa.cia.gov. Náhlík, Petr. 2015. “Když se Slim Howard stane evergreenem.” Music Open. Accessed June 20, 2017. http://www.musicopen.cz/index.php/osobnosti/3608-kdyz-se-slimhoward-stane-evergreenem. Personal Papers of Prime Minister Holt, Miscellaneous Correspondence, 47, Correspondence Files, M2606, NAA. Shearing, Rod. 2012. “A Czech in the Woods.” Accessed June 20, 2017. https://rodshearing.wordpress.com/a-czech-in-the-woods/. —. Czech. 1940-1941. KV2/2482, National Archives, UK (NA:UK). —. Czech. 1941-1943. KV2/2483, National Archives, UK (NA:UK). —. Czech. 1944-1945. KV2/2484, National Archives, UK (NA:UK).

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—. Czech, 1947-1950. KV2/2486, National Archives, UK (NA:UK).

Secondary Sources Gilson, Miriam, and Jerzy Zurbrzycki. 1967. The Foreign-Language Press in Australia, 1848-1964. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Holt, Stephen. 2001. “Nothing if not a Survivor: Vladimir Lezak Borin.” NLA (National Library of Australia) News XI: 10. Accessed June 20, 2017. http://www.nla.gov.au/pub/nlanews/2001/jul01/survivor.html. LeRoy, Doris. 2015. “Worker for Peace from Behind the Iron Curtain.” In Proceedings of the 14th Biennial Labour History Conference, edited by Phillip Deery and Julie Kimber. Melbourne: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History: 70-82. Macklin, Graham. 2007. Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism after 1945. London: I. B. Tauris. Richards, Lyn. 1978. “Displaced Politics: Refugee Migrants in the Australian Political Context.” La Trobe Sociology Papers 45: 1-52. Bundoora: La Trobe University.

WRITING AND PERFORMING LIVES: CREATIVE INTERVENTIONS ON STAGE, PAGE AND SCREEN

CHAPTER EIGHT GENDER DISRUPTION IN THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DAPHNE MAYO DEBRA BEATTIE

Introduction The beginning of the twentieth century was an exciting time for women interested in breaking out of the strict confines of the gender roles to which they had been assigned, and in experimenting with what some described as the gender disruption evidenced in the phenomenon of the New Woman. Australia had its fair share of such ‘new women’, and even had its own conception of the Australian Girl who was “a colonial representation of the greater freedom possible in a younger country” (Jalland 1998). During many months at the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland researching the Daphne Mayo archives for a bio-pic on this once very famous Australian sculptor, I was looking specifically for visible evidence of the ‘gender disruption’ inherent in the emergence of this particular new woman of the twentieth century. Her archives, held at the university since her death in 1982, include 94 boxes of correspondence and newspaper clippings, concert programs and short stories. During this research on Mayo, who was referred to in The ABC Weekly, 12 April, 1941 as ‘Miss Michelangelo’ (Fryer Library, Collection notes), I found a woman with not only a lifelong commitment to art and her career as a sculptor, but also to living her chosen life as a financially independent modern woman, although she was exceedingly reserved and quite introverted in nature. The Dawn: A Journal for Australian Women was an early feminist journal edited, printed and published monthly by women in Sydney keen to spread ideas and the possibilities of what a ‘new woman’ might be in the Australian context. Louisa Lawson (Henry Lawson’s mother) was the instigator of The Dawn from its inception in 1888, and behind its publication, until its final issue in 1905. An article in The

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Morning Bulletin in Rockhampton, Queensland, on 27 October 1896 speaks eloquently of Louisa Lawson, described as “The Poet’s Mother”, and how she “suffered all her life from that craving for knowledge and culture which one sees in so many bush girls – often suppressed” (6) It is quite possible that Mrs. Mayo sat in the garden of her home in Balmain on the foreshore of the Sydney Harbour reading The Dawn in 1896 as she watched her year-old daughter, Daphne, who is the subject of this essay, and the protagonist of the narrative of the bio-pic I am researching. Circumstances moved forward quickly for the Mayo family because, by 1900, only five years after Daphne’s birth, William Mayo was offered a position in the growing settlement of Brisbane. He was to become a superintendent at the insurance company, Mutual Life Consolidated; and so Mr. and Mrs. Mayo and their two children, Dick and Daphne, moved to a home close to the centre of the growing town, in the suburb of Highgate Hill overlooking the Brisbane River. The biopic will focus on these early and formative years of Daphne in Brisbane as her mother, Lillian Mayo, becomes a role model and example of a ‘new woman’ by becoming the first woman to be certified as a member of the Queensland Naturalists’ Club. Lillian writes regular articles for the Moreton Bay Courier about the many adventures that she and her young family enjoy sailing their boat up and down the Brisbane River. Daphne, or ‘Doodles’, the nickname given to her by her family due to her constant drawing and sketching, is enrolled to study at St Margaret’s School for Girls in Albion, recently built on the other side of the river. ‘Doodles’, however, suffers from chronic and frequent asthma attacks, so much so that her mother decides to remove her from the school in 1910. From 1911 to 1913 Daphne is enrolled in a diploma in art craftsmanship at the Brisbane Central Technical College studying under the tutelage of R. Godfrey Rivers and encouraged to specialize in casting models under the guidance of L. J. Harvey. It is here that her prodigious skill as a sculptress is recognized, especially with her work The Winged Victory inspired by the ancient Greek statue of Thrace. In 1914 she is awarded Queensland’s first publically funded travelling art scholarship, sponsored by the local Wattle Day League, a patriotic society dedicated to celebrating the emerging Australian identity as one integrated with a pursuit of the arts. Later that same year, the First World War is declared, and Daphne Mayo’s travels are put on hold. It is not until 1919 that she arrives in London to briefly attend the Royal College of Art. After much persistence and determination, she is finally accepted as the first woman to be admitted to the Sculpture School of the Royal Academy of the Arts in

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December 1920. On her graduation three years later, she is awarded the school’s Gold Medal for Sculpture, much to the chagrin of the male cohort. In correspondence with her mother, she debates as to whether she should enter the Prix de Rome, to which her mother replies with her fervent enthusiasm for expanding the gender roles, and for elevating the tenor of colonial life, “Do it, Daphne. Do it for Queensland and for Woman!” (Mayo papers, Box 12, UQFL119.3) Daphne had also won a Travelling Scholarship to Europe and decides against going into competition against her fellow classmates for the Prix de Rome, writing back to her mother that “I am a woman doing a man’s job; I can’t afford to stick my neck out” (Mayo Papers. UQFL119, Box 18). In writing the bio-pic, it will be important to illustrate these moments when we see just how difficult is the path Daphne chose to pursue with a career in sculpture, requiring as it did winning a lifetime of public commissions for often quite large public works. This kind of work required a strength and stamina challenging for a woman of such small stature. No doubt she would have looked to, and been inspired by, the work of the French sculptor Camille Claudel and the American Malvina Hoffman, among others. The work of these great sculptresses of the early twentieth century would have been known to Mayo from newspapers and art catalogues sent from overseas and, even in sleepy Brisbane, Home magazine provided extraordinary images of Hoffman having her car unloaded onto the wharf from the steamship on which she had travelled from America to research physiognomy in Africa. In London, in 1921, as part of the emergence of the advanced woman for whom matters of sex were no longer to be hidden, a Marie Stopes Clinic was opened. There, books were sold on ‘sex knowledge’ to be shared between educated women contemplating marriage. When the news of Daphne’s engagement to fellow art student Lloyd Rees is announced in 1923, Daphne’s dear friend Phyllis (surname yet to be determined) sends the bride-to-be one of these modern books, Stopes’ Married Love (1918) (Mayo Papers, Box 18, UQFL119). Rees and Mayo met as students in Brisbane, both growing up on the Southside of this emerging city, he in Yeronga and she in Highgate Hill, and connect as aspiring artists at the Brisbane Central Technical College. Rees is a sickly lad and when the First World War begins, he is declared unfit for military service due to his regular bouts of nephritis. Once the war is over, and Mayo has fulfilled her first ambition of studying at the Royal Academy in London, Rees joins her as her fiancée. After she graduates, they travel together in Italy, where she says, “her life began” (Mayo Papers, UQFL119, Box 52). Rees sketches the hills and valleys of

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the Italian countryside from Florence to Milan, producing images that were to inspire him his whole life long. After Rees returns to his work in Australia, Mayo stays in London, where she reconnects with Vida Lahey. Lahey has spent the war years in dutiful commitment to nursing and nurturing her brothers and cousins on their many returns to the London home-base that she provided on their various periods of leave from the theatre of war in Europe. The Lahey family all agree she is to be rewarded by providing her with the financial support to travel to Paris and Vienna. In between these trips, she spends time with Mayo. In an interview with his son, Rees describes the bond that Mayo and Lahey forged in London. From then on, he says, the two women are seen as a ‘pair’. Sue Lovell describes how “Lloyd Rees, another Brisbane artist, once engaged to marry Daphne Mayo, knew and respected Vida who, he said, ‘belonged to a group we [younger artists] looked up to’. Rees says that Daphne and Vida ‘made a link in London [...] and from then on those two were very close friends ... When Daphne lived for years and years in Brisbane they were a ‘pair’” (2008, 206). Rees’ representation of Lahey as one of a ‘pair’ is a fairly standard response to the relationship from perusal of the correspondence at the Fryer where most of the letters to Mayo from various friends across Australia and overseas, always conclude with a sentiment like “… love to you and Vi” or “love to you both”. Sadly, Dick Mayo, Mayo’s older brother, dies in 1924 after a long illness due to the effects of the so-called ‘mustard gas’ he was exposed to in the war. After six years abroad, Daphne returns to Brisbane to be with her aging parents. On her return journey back to Australia in 1925, Mayo breaks off the engagement to Rees, although he remains an important part of Mayo’s life and they maintain their friendship into old age. The writing of the bio-pic will need to collapse many of these years, as those of the lifelong relationship with Lahey. As Bettina McAuley writes of Lahey, “Throughout her adult life, her friend, sculptress Daphne Mayo, shared her passion for art and was also instrumental in initiating and consolidating institutional change” (1989, 23-24). From careful reading of the correspondence between the two women, they also shared a passion for each other, sharing many intimacies and ending most letters with “lots of love darling” (Mayo Papers. Box 10, UQFL1197). Lahey provides a delightful foil to Mayo’s more serious nature. Lahey lives her life in dedication to friends, family, and to art, and reveals an altruism shaped by early Victorian sensibilities. Mayo wrote of Lahey in an unpublished biography that she “was born in, and belonged, and had received all her ideas, in the nineteenth century [...] in which you accepted

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the status quo – not questioned it” (Mayo Papers. UQFL119. Box 1). Mayo also remarks that Lahey had “great personal determination and a sense of duty to all fellow beings [and that her] very quiet and modest personality covered an iron determination” (Mayo Papers. UQFL119. Box 1). In 1925, Daphne is 30 and Vida is 43. They are both intensely committed to their activities in the Queensland Art Society and to working towards the establishment of a Queensland Art Gallery. In 1929, the two women founded the Queensland Art Fund. Many, many letters from Lahey to Mayo during this period begin with the words “My dear little one”. Mayo produces some beautiful sculptural work during this period, one being the panel of racing horses in a bas-relief along the main wall at the Tattersall’s Club in 1926. This was quickly followed in 1928 by the commission for the Mt Thomas crematorium of full-length figures to grace the entrance, one called Grief and the other Hope. In 1929, Mayo is awarded the most prestigious commission ever seen in the Colony – the design and sculpting of the tympanum over the entrance of the newly constructed City Hall. It is this period that will be written into the bio-pic in most detail as the protagonist is figuratively, and literally, at a pinnacle.

Fig. 1. The City Hall, Brisbane. John Oxley Collection, State Library of Queensland

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The impressive sum of 5,750 pounds (the highest figure ever received by an Australian woman artist to that point) is paid to her by the newly established city administration for this important work of civic pride. She uses this money to buy herself some land at the absolute crest of Highgate Hill, not far from her family home; and it was to here, at the highest point of Gladstone Road, overlooking the city to one side and the hills of Mt Cootha to the other, that she moved her studio from City Hall and built a small cottage. Thus began her life as an independent woman, an ‘advanced woman’, financially independent as a result of her own labor, and beholden to no-one, a self-confessed ‘wild bird’ who would not be pinned down. Kay Ferres discusses in detail the social lives of the ‘advanced woman’ in Brisbane in these years and the importance of the Lyceum Club in her life. The club, established in 1919 by a group of women wanting to “share and develop their interests in art, literature, music, science, education, journalism and current affairs” (Ferres 2014, .62) elected as their inaugural President, Margaret Ogg, journalist and key leader in the suffrage campaign in Queensland. The ‘modern woman’ of the early twentieth century was also sometimes called the ‘advanced’ woman’; and, in May 1929, the voters of Bulimba also elected ‘advanced woman’ Irene Longman, as the first female member of the newly established State government. Ferres recalls Mayo, as the ‘girl sculptress’ as she was then known, was a frequenter at the club, and quite likely the unnamed companion referred to in the Brisbane Courier, on 8 March 1916 by Winifred Moore describing a happy time on annual holiday in Mt Buffalo in Victoria as “…the happiest of all in my companion, sharer of many holiday jaunts” (Moore, qtd, in Ferres 2014, 67). In living her life, Daphne Mayo exemplified the ideals and aspirations of ‘the new woman’ all over the world, when she chose to live freely, as she wanted, and not according to society’s dictates. It is important in this retelling of the forgotten life of Daphne Mayo to address the controversy that erupted when the tympanum was unveiled. The public discourse that surrounded her inclusion of the ‘natives’ being driven out of the city by the ‘Progress of Civilisation’ as the tympanum design was titled, was a site of intense dispute at the time. The newspapers of the day included many arguments, often by church leaders, that there was no need to include that part of the story of the settling of the city. There was a prevailing view that the ‘dispersal’ of the natives was not an aspect of the settlement that needed to be addressed at all, and that it was best not to include any reference to such ‘unpleasant’ events in celebrating the founding of the new City Hall.

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As E .H. Carr alerts us in his seminal text, What is History? (1964), all history is contemporary history. The past is always seen through the eyes of the present and so it is always open to interpretation, and to re-interpretation, as the new understandings emerge. It is ironic, and a little sad, that in 2016 there is an opposing view of the inclusion by Mayo of the pioneers driving the Indigenous people to the edge of the frame in this pageant of colonial conquest, and almost literally ‘out of the picture’. Many today argue that this is evidence of Mayo’s evocation of an imperialist triumphalism and, indeed, it has been said in some quarters, of her racism. The evidence in the correspondence, to the contrary, is that Mayo had a lifelong concern and commitment to portraying the dignity of the Indigenous population, and including them in the design of the tympanum was part of her desire to be authentic in representing what had happened. This is one of the many features of the character of the woman that I am seeking to re-interpret in the writing of the bio-pic. Her next large public commission is to provide the sculpted relief for two doors at the entrance of the new State Library in Sydney, New South Wales; and Mayo chooses the Eora as her subject. She researches again using photographs in works of anthropology to achieve authenticity in her renditions of this tribe of native people who had once lived so plentifully on the banks of the Sydney Harbour, hunting and gathering. Later in her life, her correspondence archived at the Fryer also reveals a letter to ‘Nugget’ Coombes when, in 1968, he became chairman of the Australian Council for Aboriginal Affairs. In this letter, she seeks advice on how she might financially contribute to indigenous health or education with a six-figure sum she had just received from another commission. These are hardly the acts of a woman with racist tendencies. One of the other features of the forgotten life of Daphne Mayo that I am seeking to redress in the bio-pic’s narrative is the issue of her sexuality. My concerns in this regard are shared by my colleague Lovell who writes in another article on Lahey that, “Even in these very preliminary stages, this issue of sexual gossip is relevant because it stands as a point of entry into an analysis of the ethics of power, agency and representation in biographical writing” (2005, 69). Just as the British feminist and sociologist Mary Evans suggests that much life writing can be considered the “literary equivalent of gossip”, Evans also claims that the difference is “that we tend to view gossip as in some sense partial, while auto/biography is generally assumed at least to aspire to some version of the absolute and inclusive truth” (quoted by Lovell 2005, 69) Lovell is also mindful that until “the liberating of selves that emerged in the sixties, sexual identity was considered ‘private’. To include any

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reference to it, even in auto/biography that aspired to ‘absolute’ truth, was deemed improper” (2008, 32). Evans too, says Lovell, acknowledges this important post-sixties shift in reader expectations: auto/biography is now allowed (indeed expected) to reveal everything about an individual. While it was once the case that biographers were expected to draw veils of secrecy over particular matters (largely sexual ones), it is now the case that no matter in individual life cannot, indeed, should not, be revealed (2008, 32).

I take heart also, regarding my own determination to engage in biographical revelation, in the words of Ross Gibson who argues that the historian must recall the entirety, without denials or erasures. “To deny the entirety of a story is usually to refuse difficulty, to wish away differences or contradiction. From such refusal, melancholy looms” (2002, 180). Thus, my story of the lives of these two women, Vida Lahey and Daphne Mayo, will be depicted on the screen as so much more than the current melancholy rendition of two spinsters, when it is retold as the tale of a lifelong friendship that is passionate and sexual. For a large part of the 1930s, Mayo spends much of her time at her studio in George Street near the wharf at Circular Quay in Sydney. Lahey has opted to remain in Brisbane as the dutiful daughter and sister, and their letters to each other are clearly open to interpretation as love letters, for example, as one writes as she is settling down to a meal wondering what the other might be thinking, doing, eating at the same time. Vida during this time is working on one of the most famous of her oil paintings, and it is a depiction of the warmth and glowing contentment of a room looking out to a Queensland verandah in the sunshine, Sunlit Interior (1932), a metaphor perhaps for the inner peace she felt at having found her soulmate. Another important sequence of scenes for the bio-pic include the 1938 award to Daphne Mayo of the prestigious Society of Artists’ medal for her vigorous campaigning for the arts in Queensland. Not long after this, she leaves for Milan in Italy to oversee a large commissioned work to be bronzed at a foundry there. The Second World War is declared, and she must return to Australia, while her bronze was melted down to make weapons for Mussolini’s soldiers. Daphne continues throughout these war years to make brave, exciting and controversial purchases to add to the nascent Queensland Art Gallery collection, most notably in 1943, William Dobell’s The Cypriot. After the end of the Second World War, Daphne returns to life in Sydney. Known as an important figure in the arts world, she becomes a highly respected member of the Artists’ Society, with regular invitations to

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glittering events and cocktail parties. The archives include Margaret Preston’s invitation beseeching the reclusive Mayo, who has a reputation for not tolerating “small talk”, to please attend, as the other invitees are “all very intelligent people” (Mayo Papers, UQFL119, Box 40). Margaret Preston’s Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is later to become another controversial purchase, bought by Daphne in her time on the board of trustees for the Queensland Art Society. This painting of an indigenous Adam and Eve is the one used for the cover of Oodgeroo Noonucal’s Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972). In 1961, after the deaths of both her parents, Daphne returns to Brisbane as her principal place of residence, although still maintaining her studio in Sydney. She is now aged 66 and the correspondence in the archives includes all her tax returns. I noted that finally, in 1964, the descriptor of her occupation changes from ‘Sculptress’ to ‘Sculptor’. Over the next five years, now in her seventies, Daphne works on ‘the big man’, the statue of Sir William Glasgow, a much-respected Queenslander and one of the most distinguished soldiers of the First World War. It is an interesting choice for Daphne to tender for this commission, as Glasgow was often fondly remembered for his refusal to demur to the British order to cross the enemy’s frontlines while it was still light. “Even if God Himself had given the order”, he is reputed to have said, “we would not cross there in daylight” (Harry, ADB, 1983). So yet again, in what would be her final commission, Mayo is working on a project that acts as another form of subtle subversion, in that it hints at her respect for the larrikin nature of an independent thinker. In an interview with ABC journalist Hazel de Berg in 1963, Mayo describes the ferry ride to the Sydney wharf where she makes the decision on who to model the face for this posthumous statue of a proud general of the Australian Army. In a later scene of the bio-pic, I will need to depict the moment at which she chooses the strong, honest face of a working class man, earning his living by the sweat of his brow, a ‘wharfie’. I will seek, therefore, in writing the bio-pic, to nuance a harking back to a shared ethos such as that depicted in the iconic work of Lahey’s Monday Morning (1912) in which Lahey described her effort to give dignity back to those engaging in manual labour. Lovell notes that, “In a characteristically subtle way, Lahey subverts the norm” (2008, 204). At this time, Mayo continues with her work on the board of Trustees for the Queensland Art Gallery until there is a heated dispute with one of the most philistine of the State Ministers appointed in charge of the arts portfolio, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen. The dispute is over the appointment of the head of the Queensland Art Gallery. Mayo is deeply

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concerned at the ethics of some of the government representatives on the QAG Board of Trustees. She resigns in 1967, and her anger in this instance is described by Lahey in one of her letters as “voluble, righteous and eloquent” – which will provide a challenge for me as a scenario writer. Not long after the dispute, eleven Queensland Police and Customs officers knock loudly at the door of the home of Daphne Mayo, at 10 o’clock at night. They allege that they are looking for pornography. This incident is a disturbing attempt at intimidation of the artist. Nineteen Sixty-Eight was a time when artists were very much engaged with the inter-twining of the aesthetic and the ethical in their pursuit of ‘the new’; and this was seen as threatening by a government that was avowedly antimodernity. This scene will be the crucial transitional scene between the end of act two and the beginning of act three of the narrative arc. In 1968, Vida Lahey dies at the age of 86. At the funeral on 29 August, Mayo’s lifelong companion is described as having maintained her status as “a woman of late Victorian sensibilities” with no hint of gossip attached to her. In 1975, the inaugural International Women’s Year, Mayo’s eightieth year, she and Lahey are included in a special Queensland Art Gallery catalogue as one of Five Women Australian Artists, along with Bessie Gibson, Margaret Olley and Anne Allison-Greene. That year Daphne also writes an impassioned letter of support to The Courier Mail urging the re-election of Prime Minister E. G. Whitlam in May 1975 for what he had done, for education, and for ‘Aborigines’ (When Mayo dies in 1982 aged 87, she is feted as one of Queensland’s most “formidable’ women” (Mayo Papers, UQFL119, Box 52). The Queensland Film Centre is commissioned to make a short documentary on ‘the pair’ simply called 2 Artists (Carroll, 1984). In living her life, Mayo exemplified the ideals and aspirations of ‘the new woman’ in the early years of the twentieth century, known nationally as the ‘girl sculptress’. Mayo wrote on many occasions that it was as a result of her travelling through Italy as a young artist, and seeing the great Classical works integrating art and architecture, that she had the experiences that changed her life, and seeded her determination to live her life seeking beauty and truth in the public art commissions she was awarded. Her commitment to that life as an artist occurred at the same moment in history that the constructs of gender were being disrupted across the globe. Knowing this, I conducted my research in her archives, for the purposes of writing a bio-pic, with a focus on an exploration of the gender disruption evident in her life and, more widely, across Australia in the twentieth century.

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Daphne Mayo was a gutsy example of the emerging ‘new woman’. She carved out a unique life devoted to art, her own arts-practice and acquiring contentious acquisitions for the catalogue of what would become a world-class State-run art gallery. She advocated with passion for the importance of art in the life of a civil society and she committed herself to a life-long affair with a woman who shared that commitment to art, and to her, and to living their lives, always, as a ‘pair’.

Works cited Carr, E.H. 1961. What is History? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, C. 1984. 2 Artists. Documentary. Production Services Branch, Queensland Education Department. Evans, M. 1999. Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/biography. London and New York: Routledge. Ferres, K. 2014. “The Lyceum Club and the Making of the Modern Woman.” Queensland Review, 21 (1): 62-71. Fryer Library, University of Queensland. “The Daphne Mayo Collection.” Online. Gibson, R. 2002. Seven Versions of An Australian Badland. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Harry, Ralph. 1983. Glasgow, Sir Thomas (1876-1955). Australian Dictionary of Biography 9. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. Jalland, 1998. “Victorian Spinsters: Dutiful Daughters, Desperate Rebels and the Transition to the New Woman.” in Exploring Women’s Past, edited by Patricia Crawford, 129-170. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Lovell, S. 2008. “Wanted, a Strong Girl, Able to Milk and Make Herself Agreeable.” Australian Feminist Studies 23 (56): 195-211. —. 2005. “Seductive Whisperings: Memory and Desire and Agency in Auto/Biography.” Thirdspace, 4 (2): 32-44. MacAulay, B. 1989. Songs of Colour: the Art of Vida Lahey. Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery. Mayo papers. Box 12. UQFL119 Box 18, UQFL119 Box 10, UQFL119, Box 52, Box 40, and UQFL119 Box 1, Folder titled “Notes for Daphne Mayo’s Biography of Vida Lahey, Society of Women Writers Biography Competition 1969.” Fryer Library, University of Queensland. Noonucal, O. 1972. Stradbroke Dreamtime. Pymble NSW: Angus and Robertson. Stopes, M. 1918. Married Love or Love in Marriage. New York: The Critic and Guide Company.

CHAPTER NINE FICTION AS A BIOGRAPHIC SPACE FOR EXPLORING ‘LOST’ LIVES JAMES VICARS

Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley wrote in The Guardian late in 2015 (Dyer et al. 2015) that ‘[t]he history of literature shows that listeners and readers want to know not only what happened, but also how it looked, sounded, smelled, felt, and also what it meant then and what it means now’. Smiley was contributing to a discussion among a number of respected writers about the divide between fact and fiction, with fellow writer Geoff Dyer observing that what was formerly a well-maintained border, was now a frontier crossed from both sides by many kinds of writing (Dyer et al. 2015). These comments reflect a much more normalised sense of such crossings than was apparent sixteen years ago when Peter Robb, after jointly winning the Australian National Biography Award for M, a biography of European painter Caravaggio, effacingly described his work as ‘an identikit picture of the man rather than a scholarly biography’ (Wyndham 2000, 12). This comment may well have reflected the fulminations of some critics in the UK, which generated, according to Stephen Moss, several ‘of the most venomous reviews you are ever likely to encounter’ as well as strong praise from others (Moss 2000). On one hand, the book was written in the third person and based on extensive research; on the other, it brought Caravaggio to life, as one reviewer noted, through Robb’s ability to create ‘the everyday atmosphere of palazzos and tennis courts; their air of indolence and danger; the street corner subcultures of a world in which beauty and brutality, the grotesque and the exquisite, rubbed cheek to cheek’ (Culturecrammer 2009). Biographically painting around Caravaggio (as it were), Robb merged his representations of a partly-known historical world with a series of mostly unrecorded and thus explicitly imagined day-to-day actions and feelings of his subject.

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Winning the National Biography Award offered a recognition that the use of fictional modes or tools could produce works judged to be not only biographies, but also works of biographical quality. Indeed, fiction has featured in notable literary forms by writers of lives in many parts of the world. Better known historical figures may be the more usual subjects, from Roman emperors (Robert Graves’ I, Claudius in 1934 and Marguerite Yourcenar’s remarkable Memoirs of Hadrian in the 1950s) to American President Ronald Reagan in Edmund Morris’ Dutch (1999). Literary figures from Shakespeare in Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004) to Sylvia Plath (Emma Tennant’s Sylvia and Ted in 2001 and Kate Moses’ Wintering in 2003) also abound. However, forgotten, neglected or obscured lives have also emerged as vibrant subjects in such works and range from Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter (1999), about radical abolitionist John Brown, a book that was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, to Andrew Motion’s acclaimed Wainewright the Poisoner (2000), about a Romantic painter and poet who was transported as a convict to Australia, and Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009), about early paleontologist Mary Anning. Ranging from full biographical novels to hybrid true stories and fictional fragments, it can be argued that these works create or inhabit a biographic space in which ‘lost’ lives can be recovered and rediscovered. How might such a fictional space be described, or utilized, as biographic? How might it function in illuminating forgotten lives? Its dimensions might be configured in a number of ways, with the potential apparent even in the roots and early use of the term ‘biography’. This is given in the Oxford English Dictionary (Murray et al. 1933, 870) as bíos and graphia (ȕަȠȢ + ȖȡĮijȓĮ) – simply, ‘life’ and ‘writing’. The primary definition, moreover, is given as ‘[t]he history of the lives of individual men, as a branch of literature’ (Murray et al. 1933, 870). Notwithstanding the gender distinctions of the time, the final phrase identifies biography within the wider scope of literary rather than strictly historical projects. In this sense, the telling and understanding of lives are shaped or explored in a literary space. This reflects a sensibility dating as far back as the second century CE when Plutarch, in setting the classical benchmark for biography as a form with his Parallel Lives comparing great Greek and Roman figures, emphasised, according to Barbara Caine, the differences between biography and history and ‘demanded freedoms for the biographer from the rigour so central to the writing of history’ (Caine 2010, 8). This was because, for Plutarch, it was not deeds that mattered so much as character: ‘I am writing biography, not history, and the truth is

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that the most brilliant exploits often tell us nothing of the virtues or vices of the men who performed them’ (8). This is no less the case for those whose ‘brilliant exploits’ are not well-known or well-documented: it may even be that vices, virtues and other stories are what help to reveal exploits that were hitherto forgotten or obscure. This a reminder that human qualities and character are central to the enduring appeal of life writing. Few people, arguably, are likely to be interested in historical events and achievements without human stories. Conversely, human stories and impacts are required to make sense of achievements, good and bad. In this respect, as Plutarch asserted, there is a need for biography to accommodate more than just exploits and even for the historical record to be conceived, at times, as a tool for understanding rather than a set of constraints. This sense of a biographic space is about room to move beyond the ‘known’, and, in particular, the known as a certain form of presentation. While much biography in the 20th century sought to encompass detachment and a historiographic approach, the creative interruption of the ‘New Biography’ that began with the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians in 1918 and emerged in the writings of Harold Nicholson, Virginia Woolf and others amounted to a revolt against the ossified and formal recording of lives. Woolf, in her renowned 1927 essay ‘The New Biography’ castigates Sydney Lee’s biographies of Shakespeare and Edward the Seventh on the grounds that ‘by supposing that though both are stuffed with truth, he failed to choose those truths which transmit personality’ (Woolf 1994, 473). This understanding has had a lasting impact and may be part of the reason contemporary biographic subjects and styles extend well beyond the lives of the ‘great’, what might be told about them and how. The historical, non-fiction biography is no longer seen as one size that fits all, and I have argued recently (see, Vicars 2016) that the term biography can no longer simply be considered a synonym for non-fiction biography but should be acknowledged to include other kinds of biographical life writing, including modes employing fiction. This is quite apart from the broadly postmodern perspective that points to the constructed nature of all non-fiction, including all forms of biography. Maureen Ramsden, for example, writes that reality is constructed as a text because our representation of the world in any way is always different from our direct ‘knowing’ of it (2011, 341). Narrative is therefore an essential means of making sense of the real world, and factual as well as fictional works have, as Ramsden puts it, ‘a basic element of fiction at the level of their imaginative conception and construction’ (345). This would apply to the most stridently factual biography, which cannot

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avoid selecting material on a subjective as well as objective basis and is the product of authorial attitudes and positions. At the same time, while it is important, liberating even, to work with an understanding of these factors, this is not an argument that the writing of the life of a real person should disengage from its sources. Rather, it is to point out that writing a life has more to do with how sources are interpreted and what is made of them through the forming processes most appropriate to the chosen mode of discourse. In my own practice, the forming processes have corresponded with the mode of fiction narrative. Serious and systematic academic attention to the potential of this mode was provided by Ina Schabert in her landmark study, In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as biography (1990). In surveying the reasoning and methods of a number of writers as well as closely analysing case studies, Schabert established the term ‘fictional biography’, a mode in which fiction aims to serve the purposes of biography; it is not, therefore, an arbitrary or purely creative fiction but one that, while constrained by – and aligned with – the known facts of the life, still has as its goal a fuller, more vivid and intimate sense of the subject person than the facts can relate. This is especially relevant to facilitating the writing of forgotten, neglected, obscure or otherwise ‘lost’ lives, and the thinking of the influential German-American philosopher, Hannah Arendt, adds weight to this possibility. Arendt writes in The Human Condition that ‘the essence of who somebody is – can come into being only when life departs, leaving behind nothing but a story’ (1989, 193). The significance of a life, its meaning in relation to others, requires the act of remembrance and then narration – she writes that even the hero ‘remains dependent upon the storyteller, poet or historian’ (194). The contribution of a person to the life of the polis, their community and political world, is thus dependent on being remembered and then narrated – and Arendt’s recognition that the narration can take a variety of forms is borne out by the wide range of published works about lives that exist in the early 21st century. It perhaps follows that this variety is important and necessary because it creates spaces for remembrance and narration – individual spaces to allow for individual narrators and individual subjects who might otherwise remain unknown or forgotten. In this respect, Arendt’s thinking pointed me along the path I took to tell the story of Millicent Bryant, a forgotten life that may well have been ‘lost’ if she had not been my own great-grandmother. As a writing project it began, indeed, with remembrance, and this took place when my

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mother, Millicent Jones (née Bryant), addressed a gathering of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Australian Division during International Women’s Year in 1975. She presented her talk about her grandmother Millicent Bryant as part of a theme of ‘Women in Aviation’ in the Australian Academy of Science Building in Canberra – a structure that, with its flying saucer shape, seems to look as confidently forward to exploring the cosmic realm as the early aviators were of conquering the skies. My mother’s short composition for the talk, largely collected from remembered fragments and anecdotes, was a first step in Arendt’s terms: it was perhaps the first time since 1927 that her namesake’s life had really been sketched out as a whole, rather than just in relation to the particular achievement that made her famous in her time. It was this that provided the foundation and impetus for my own broader project more than thirty years later and for my use of fiction in the writing of it. My reasons for doing so are explained in detail elsewhere (Vicars 2014) but, in brief, after exploring the intersections of history, biography and fiction, I came to realize that my aim of portraying Millicent Bryant’s broader life and developing personality would be best satisfied by Schabert’s notion of ‘fictional biography’. This is because, although my aims were biographical, Bryant’s story seemed too constrained by nonfiction biography; at the same time, I was not writing a novel for its own sake. Examining the distinctions implied by these forms was an important process and one that could assist other writers in clarifying their intentions and in establishing a sense of direction and narrative voice. For the reader in this case, however, the form of fictional biography may appear to differ only subtly (if at all) from forms such as the biographical novel, and there is a near equivalence in the two terms. With its unhindered imaginative freedom, the latter – the biographical novel – may offer even more potential to approach the meaning of the life through ‘the truth of fiction’ – ‘a deeper, less literal kind of truth’ as Aminatta Forna describes it (Dyer et al. 2015). That said, Michael Lackey points out that the fact that the biographical novel is more fictional than biographical ‘does not minimize the role of the biographical’ in such works (2016, 54). It just means, he writes, ‘that we, as scholars, have a lot of work ahead of us in order to clarify the nature, role, and function of the biographical within the biographical novel’ (Lackey 2016, 54). This is where distinguishing fictional biography as a mode may offer clarification. Although seeking the same ‘truth’, albeit perhaps more narrowly and working in alignment with the ‘truth of correspondence’, fictional biography may be inclined to draw in more detail and retain its focus on the subject more faithfully than

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other forms of fiction. If there is a fundamental measure that Schabert would suggest for recognising a work as fictional biography, it might be that the shape of its narrative follows the unique, idiosyncratic movement of the subject’s life rather than a trajectory determined by fiction per se. This may require readers to judge whether a particular fictional biography is genuinely and primarily concerned with knowing the subject person and being faithful to them. In this respect, questions such as the following can be offered as additional yardsticks: Is fiction the form or is it the objective of the work? Does the work realise biographical truth in terms of both fact and the person? I suggest that these questions describe the dimensions of another possible biographic space. It might thus be construed that the dimensions of the biographical novel are broader, shaped more by the creative considerations and requirements of fiction, than the fictional biogrpahy. However, the overlap between the two forms can still allow one to pass into the other, as it were, and the work that established the biographical novel as a literary phenomenon in the United States, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), is one of the case studies Schabert provides for fictional biography. This celebrated, much commented-on work is also an example of the exploration of an all-but forgotten life, that of a young black man who led one of the few uprisings against slavery in Virginia in the early decades of the nineteenth century. It was also controversial, with Styron, a white writer, seeking to adopt and explore the persona of a black slave removed from him in time and alien in almost every way apart from being a man – a bold as well as deep act of empathy of which Styron was well aware and had meditated on over a long period (Schabert 1990, 149). While such an empathetic act is a key feature of much fiction as well as of fictional biography, Schabert draws particular attention to Styron’s view that the imagination of the author writing a fictional biography is a ‘responsible imagination’, an imagination which ‘as a rule respects the known facts, yet is free to interpret them, enlarge upon them and supplement them according to the certainties of the empathic act’ (147). Along with the notion that fictional biography follows the unique, idiosyncratic movement of the subject’s life rather than a trajectory determined solely by fiction, Styron’s statement reflects an ethos well aligned with writing about forgotten lives. In these terms it has resonances with Australian author Kate Grenville who sought to recover a sense of the tragedies visited on Aboriginal people in the Australian settler past in her novel, The Secret River (2005). ‘While the historians are doing their thing’, Grenville said in a radio interview, ‘let me as a novelist come to it

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in a different way, which is the way of empathising and imaginative understanding of those difficult events’ (2006). Although Grenville soon found herself at the centre of disputes with historians Inga Clendinnen and Mark Mckenna for such proclamations, her method reflects an essential element of much writing in the biographical space of fiction, what might be called an empathetic ‘presentness’ that not only assists writers in accessing their subjects as fellow humans but inhabiting them on the page, especially when the time distance is significant. To borrow from Jane Smiley, if readers are immersed in how things looked, sounded, smelled and felt, that is itself likely to help them know ‘what it meant then and what it means now’. This is especially true of forgotten lives where the source material is minimal, as was so often the case with, for example, the wives of well-known male figures who have become interesting biographical subjects in their own right: Marele Day’s story of the Captain’s wife, Mrs Cook (2002), is a prime example. Another is Robert Graves’ writing of the poet John Milton’s first wife, Marie Powell, in his Wife of Mr. Milton (1943), an accomplished attempt to provide a kind of belated restitution to Marie (who Graves clearly felt must have suffered in being married to Milton). Carol Baxter recently recovered the life of the Australian bushranger Captain Thunderbolt’s ‘lady’, Mary Ann Bugg, and in so doing has redrawn some dimensions of our understanding of the historical figure of the bushranger himself (Baxter 2011). Other works, however, take a recognisably postmodern approach in their use of fiction as a biographic space to explore less well-known or forgotten lives and are usually written self-referentially in a metafictional mode. One work in which this praxis is particularly visible and powerful is Anna Banti’s Artemisia (2004), based on the little-known life of the Italian Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. Banti’s novel offers a fictional dialogue, which opens with the painter consoling the author about the loss of a 100 page fictional manuscript about Gentilischi before retelling her story to the author. This device ‘emphasises the role of writing and fiction in (re)creating historical memory’, according to Susanna Scarparo, adding that ‘[t]he effort to remember that which is lost – be that Artemisia’s real history, Artemisia’s fictional history, or women’s history at large – becomes part of the narrative’ (2005, 11, 13). Banti’s approach also exposes processes that I have argued elsewhere (Vicars 2014) especially characterise fictional biography, including the relation of ‘other’ to ‘self’, subjective as well as objective knowing, and the invention of the life in its narration. As Banti writes, ‘we are playing a chasing game, Artemisia and I’ (2004, 121).

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The same might be said about Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, a kind of ‘meta’ fictional biography that slyly asserts its own total inability to get anywhere with the attempt to write about the 19th century French novelist, Gustave Flaubert. Working creatively in what Schabert (1990, 206) calls an ‘ambivalently negative mode’, Barnes brings together fragments, like a collage, multiple perspectives which, in enacting a kind of dialectical movement of their own, seem to be trying to show the impossibility of grasping a person in the past and, yet, offering myriad glimpses that, as it were, animate Flaubert in the quasi-fictional awareness of his narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite. Barnes’ achievement is both mosaic as well as aloof from the project of existentially knowing the other, yet writing lives in such a mode also makes it possible to inhabit selfcontradictions, liminal spaces, ‘absences’ and alternatives in the biographic space. Here, fiction may self-reflexively be aware of its every move (as in Flaubert’s Parrot) but language’s exploratory power can also be used to tell of lives which cannot be (or simply are not) told in an ordinary sense. Natalie Kon-yu notes that while past shame and social approbation make it perhaps impossible to tell some lives, their absence, as if still present in their effects, sometimes cannot be ignored, and can result ‘in the emergence of other stories, differently positioned’; in her case, the reader is confronted with the frustration arising from her refusal to ‘excavate’ a history which has been ‘buried’ but is, on the other hand, connected with the loss, uncertainty and confusion this represents (Kon-yu 2012). Some writers even insist that real lives cannot be portrayed in a mainstream discourse without emerging as ‘other than they are’, that is, subverted. Anna Kuhn argues that writers such as Bettina von Arnim and Christa Wolf have highlighted biography’s ‘failure’ in this generic sense through their personal, speculative and open-ended accounts (Kuhn 1990, 15) that seek to explode notions of even the frontier that Geoff Dyer proposed. Kuhn writes that: in their endeavours to articulate their experiences [in Die Günderode and The Quest for Christa T respectively], they [von Arnim and Wolf] devise writing techniques that enable them to subvert some of the limitations of conventional (male) literary structures. By transcending traditional norms of canonical genres, von Arnim and Wolf create new literary forms that substitute a dialogic structure for phallocentric discourse: a conversation between two women replaces the single authoritative (and authoritarian) narrative voice (15).

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Works like these ask questions that readers of biographical works may be little accustomed to hearing but, if these authors are exploring the further edges of the discourse, their writing shows that the terms I have been arguing for – recognising the use of fiction as a biographic space to explore the lives of real people – are still clearly linked to the norms, and limitations, of the mainstream. This space is what enables Brian Matthew’s Louisa (1987), for example, about the mother of Henry Lawson, with its use of multiple (including fictional) narrative lenses, to approach from the historical biography side of the frontier; it is also a space in which Drusilla Modjeska’s semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional Poppy (1990) can fully expand. The challenges and understandings exemplified in these works reflect part of the basis for a more flexible contemporary practice and contributed an important sense of scope to my own writing of the life of Millicent Bryant. While not passing over my debt to sources and evidence, using fiction to begin writing her life allowed me not only to build an understanding of her from limited and unbalanced factual and documentary resources, but also provided a space to explore the ‘possible’ in her life which lay beyond these: it removed barriers to drawing in, as it were, the ‘not-known’, the kinds of non-factual, unverifiable or personal ‘knowledge’ that could help create a story of her life that was as rich, plausible and ‘true’ as I could make it. This personal experience strongly supports the notion that imagination and empathetic understanding create or inhabit a certain space in which they react alchemically with accepted evidence in order to recover, rediscover and even recreate ‘lost’ stories, subjects and marginalised histories. Women’s lives, especially, have fallen into that category and, being more frequently unrecorded, Susanna Scarparo writes that ‘their stories – if they are to be told – have to be invented. The stories of the invisible … can only exist through fiction’ (2005, 90). This has certainly been the case for Millicent Bryant. Although she might have been more visible in her lifetime than many, and especially for a short time, she was invisible for much of her life. And she could well have remained so without the use of fiction as a biographic space in which her story could be told.

Works cited Arendt, H. (1958) 1989. The Human Condition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Banks, R. 1999. Cloudsplitter. London: Vintage.

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Banti, A. 2004. Artemisia. Translated by Shirley D'Ardia Caracciolo. London: Serpent's Tail. Barnes, J. 1992. Flaubert's Parrot. London: Bloomsbury. Baxter, C. 2011. Captain Thunderbolt and his Lady: The True Story of Bushrangers Frederick Ward and Mary Ann Bugg. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Caine, B. 2010. Biography and History. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chevalier, T. 2009. Remarkable Creatures. London: HarperCollins. Culturecrammer. 2009. “Peter Robb – ‘M’ ”. Viewed 27 August 2011. http://culturecrammer.com/2009/09/08/peter-robb-%E2%80%93-mbloomsbury-2000. Day, M. 2002. Mrs Cook: The Real and Imagined Life of the Captain's Wife. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Dyer, G. et al. 2015. “‘Based on a True Story’: the Fine Line Between Fact and Fiction.” The Guardian, Books section, 6 December 2015. Viewed 26 August 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/06/based-on-a-truestory--geoff-dyer-fine-line-between-fact-and-fiction-nonfiction. Graves, R. (1934) 1989. I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54. New York: Vintage International. —. 1943. Wife to Mr. Milton: The Story of Marie Powell. London: Cassell. Greenblatt, S. 2004. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Grenville, K. 2005. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text Publishing. —. 2006. Interview with Ramona Koval on “Books and Writing.” ABC Radio National, 8 January 2006. Accessed 26 August 2016. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandwriting/kategrenville/3629894. Kon-yu, N. 2012. “ ‘The Recounting of a Life is a Cheat’: Unreliable Narration and Fragmentary Memory in Historical Fiction.” TEXT Journal 16 (1). Kuhn, A. 1990. “The ‘Failure’ of Biography and the Triumph of Women’s Writing: Bettina von Arnim’s Die Günderode and Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T.” In Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography and Gender, edited by Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom. SUNY Series in Feminist Criticism and Theory. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lackey, M. 2016. “The Rise of the Biographical Novel and the Fall of the Historical Novel.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Special Issue: Essay Cluster: Biofictions 31 (1): 33-58.

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Matthews, B. 1987. Louisa. Melbourne: McPhee Gribble. Modjeska, D. 1990. Poppy. Ringwood: McPhee Gribble. Morris, E. 1999. Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. New York: Random House. Moses, K. 2003. Wintering. London: Sceptre. Moss, S. 2000. “ ‘M’ by Peter Robb.” The Guardian, 9 February 2000. Viewed 19 May 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/feb/09/1. Motion, A. 2000. Wainewright the Poisoner. London: Faber and Faber. Murray, J.A.H., H. Bradley, W.A. Craigie, and C.T. Onions. 1933. The Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ramsden, M.A. 2011. “Fictional Frontiers: The Interrelation of Fact and Fiction between the World and the Text.” Neophilologus 95: 341. Robb, Peter. 1998. ‘M’, A Biography of European Painter Caravaggio. Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove. Scarparo, S. 2005. Elusive Subjects: Biography as Gendered Metafiction. Edited by George Ferzocco. Leicester: Troubadour Publishing. Schabert, I. 1990. In Quest of the Other Person: Fiction as Biography. Tübingen: Francke Verlag. Styron, W. (1967) 1968. The Confessions of Nat Turner. London: Jonathon Cape. Tennant, E. 2001. Sylvia and Ted. Sydney: Flamingo, HarperCollins,. Vicars, J. 2014. Flights of Imagination: Fictional Biography and Writing the Life of Australia’s First Woman Pilot, Millicent Bryant.”PhD diss., University of New England, Armidale. . —. 2016. “ ‘Life’ Choices: Deciding to Use Fiction in Biographical Writing.” Writing in Practice: The Journal of Creative Writing Research 2 (March). Woolf, V. 1994. The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Volume IV (1925-1928), edited by A. McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press. Wyndham, S. 2000. “Book Judges Discover New Life Forms.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 22 March 2000: 12. Yourcenar, M. 1955. Memoirs of Hadrian., translated by G. Frick. London: Secker and Warburg.

CHAPTER TEN REMEMBERING GARLAND: PERFORMING A FORGOTTEN BIOGRAPHY BERNADETTE MEENACH

Introduction Entertainer Judy Garland (1922–1969) could hardly be described as a historical figure forgotten by the passage of time. She endures through the character Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz (Langley 1939), which is annually featured on television (Clark 2000, 104). Her signature song Over the Rainbow (Arlen and Harburg 1938) is one of the most recognised songs of the twentieth century. Kamakawiwo’ole’s (1993) ukulele version has even been used by The Liberators International for an event on a Perth train with over two million views on YouTube to date. Garland fanadministered social media sites abound, Garland tribute acts thrive, and ‘tell-all’ biographies continue to be published (Luft 2017; Phillips 2015; Meyer 1983). These ‘traces’ of Garland permeate contemporary culture almost fifty years after her death. However, when I was preparing to perform the role of Garland in Nick Enright’s jukebox musical The Boy From Oz (1998), my archival research revealed a problematic trend – that biographical playwrights have obscured a version of Garland’s life story worth telling. White (1978, 86) argues that historians emplot a complex of events to adhere to particular kinds of stories. The reader then comes to understand historical events through familiar plotting patterns. Davis (1992) suggests biographers also shape their subject’s lives to fit particular narratives. In the case of Annie Oakley, Davis (1992, 300) posits the romance narrative, traditionally used to encode her life, results in the omission of significant biographical details. A contextual review of plays featuring Garland (Enright 1998; Mellor 2013; Quilter 2005; StewartJones 2010; Van Zandt 2007) reveals that biographical details are omitted to serve the dramatic arc of these theatrical works. I deem such details as

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significant to understanding Garland’s personality, actions and motivations, yet, to perform Enright’s version of Garland in The Boy From Oz, I had to dismiss these details. Thus, I performed Garland according to how her life has repeatedly been encoded in plays: through a tragedy narrative. Shakespeare’s history plays illustrate how commonplace it is for playwrights to distort the lives of historical figures to create great drama. Two of the most villainous characters in the theatrical cannon, Macbeth and Richard III, were not, for instance, murderous tyrants in life. LyallWatson (2013) argues audiences acknowledge that playwrights use poetic licence and thereby expect biographical theatre to be fictionalised retellings of life stories. Nevertheless, I felt conflicted when my performance of Garland resulted in audience members approaching me to express their pity for the actress, commonly using expressions such as ‘poor Judy’ and ‘what a terrible life’. It seemed they believed Enright’s version of Garland to portray ‘the (entire) truth’ about her life, and were praising me for believably portraying her tragic life. As a result, I worried I had colluded in concealing biographical details that distorted the life of Garland. Dortins (2010, 70), who has actively deconstructed biographies of the Aboriginal historical figure Bennelong, argues: ‘Tragedy is not a life, or history, but a dramatic or literary genre with its own logic and genealogy. If Bennelong’s life is “tragic”, then it is the storytellers who have made it so’. As a theatrical storyteller, I questioned whether I could shift audience perception of Garland’s life as ‘tragic’ through the creation and performance of new biographical theatre works. My question was derived from my practice, so a practice-led approach was selected for my research into biographical theatre. Haseman (2007, 151) posits this approach ‘not only affirms the primacy of practice in the research process, but it proclaims that the techniques and tools used by the practitioner can stand as research methods in their own right’. Thus, my pre-existing arts practice informed the manner in which I planned to tackle re-presenting Garland in the theatre. However, within weeks of commencing the project, I discovered the results of reception studies that Canton (2011) conducted with theatre audiences viewing biographical performances in the UK. Canton (2011, 174) contends that the theatre is a site where the audience’s understanding of the world could be contested and negotiated. Yet, it is this very understanding of the world, which can prevent such negotiation. Hence, biographical theatre may be able to ‘fill gaps’ in an audience’s knowledge of a historical figure but it cannot shift perceptions of the figure if the play directly counters their previous ideas (Canton 2011, 166). My quest to recover, reclaim and retell Garland’s life

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story through the medium of theatre seemed doomed: Garland was to remain trapped in the tragedy narrative. Canton’s study provides insight into the modernist and postmodernist techniques used in biographical theatre, but as a practitioner grounded in the Stanislavski System of acting, I wondered whether something was amiss in her findings. Stanislavski (1936, 256) argues that it is the actors’ duty to carry out the playwright’s super-objective, or his or her main idea. Thus, the actors must communicate to an audience the playwright’s driving purpose for writing the play. Canton provides no evidence to suggest the plays used in her reception studies were expressly written for the purpose of shifting perception of historical figures. I contend that to reliably test whether biographical theatre can shift audience perception of a historical figure the playwright’s super-objective must be clearly related to this purpose. Consequently, I questioned whether this oversight in Canton’s study could be readdressed by making biographical theatre with the super-objective of shifting audience perception of the historical figure portrayed. In doing so, I was hoping that biographical theatre could become a place for the re-negotiation of the construction of Garland that has been so encoded through the tragedy narrative. Rather than dismissing Canton (2011), I determined to build upon her research into the impact of modernist and postmodernist thought on biographical theatre by creating and performing two new Garland biographical theatre works. The first would use modernist techniques as described by Canton, and the second, the postmodernist techniques Canton identifies. Both works would maintain the super-objective of shifting perception of Garland as a tragic figure. In this way, it would be possible to test whether an audience’s perception of the historical figure is best shifted through one approach or the other. The modernist Ms Garland at Twilight (Meenach 2013) and the postmodernist Judy Strikes Back (Meenach 2015) emerged as very different theatrical works but both attempt to reposition Garland by moving the focus from tragedy to the polyphonic nature of her biography. In dual roles as the biographical playwright and the biographical performer in both plays, the strategies employed to create and perform the new biographical theatre works were always informed by my pre-existing arts practice. Thus, using what Stock (2007, 1) describes as my ‘embodied practice’, I attempted to retell Garland’s life anew.

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Constructing a new biographical play To ‘build a character’ (Stanislavski 1950) I engage in dramaturgical research, character research, and skills preparation. These three areas of investigation are essential to my practice as an actor. They construct my understanding of the play, the character, and guide me in how I will embody this understanding in performance. Dramaturgical research involves gathering and analysing historical sources that may be useful in developing an understanding of the time in which the play is set: the events, the people, their actions and their motivations. Character research draws on this historical information, specifically focusing on the character I am to play: how they dressed, what they sounded like, the way they walked and their personality, as well as how they were perceived. Skills preparation is the logical extension of the dramaturgical and character research. Equipped with a self-awareness of my performance skills I determine what skills need to be developed in order to embody the character in performance. For example, an accent may need to be acquired. My investigations for The Boy From Oz had uncovered biographies, documentaries, interviews, letters, movies, television shows and music by, or about, Garland: a wealth of data to draw on to write a new biographical play. My physical embodiment (performance) of the research provided me with a unique insight into Garland, especially as I had already experienced ‘becoming’ Garland in The Boy From Oz. This subjective perspective was key to uncovering what Smith (1994, 291) deems the biographical ‘figure under the carpet’. The biographical figure I had uncovered was the ambitious, tenacious, work-driven artist. It was this figure I wanted to present in Ms Garland at Twilight and thereby shift the story of her life from one of tragedy to artistry using an approach influenced by modernist thought. Modernist biographical theatre uses poetic license but presents historical figures through the lens of objectivity: the biographical playwright becomes the invisible reporter of facts. The playwright emulates the modernist life writers who seek to tell the stories of the ‘great men’ (Margadant 2000, 3), providing insight into an individual’s achievements, creative genius, or gift, in a manner perceived to be objective (Parke 2002, 135). I decided then that Ms Garland at Twilight would tell the story of the ‘great woman’, focusing on Garland’s achievements in a manner that appeared objective. In this way, I could redirect attention away from the commonly-used tragedy-laden Garland biographical material – such as her troubled relationship with her mother, failed marriages and drug abuse – toward biographical material relating to

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her training as a performer, her mentors, her artistic collaborators and advice she may have had for those working in the entertainment industry today. To reinforce the cloak of objectivity, I resolved that the play would take the style of a live concert whereby Garland would sing, dance and speak directly to the audience. As an actor, this meant singing, dancing and telling stories ‘as if’ I truly was Garland. In effect, my identity would be erased and replaced with her identity. My role as biographer could be completely hidden: the audience would hopefully experience an hour-long event with Garland, listening to her own words, as if she was still alive. In the guise of Garland in performance, I could achieve the modernist goal of being the invisible reporter of facts. Ms Garland at Twilight, therefore, contains predominantly verbatim Garland material, however as a biographer, I selected and arranged her words to re-present Garland as the heroine of her own life. Like other biographical playwrights, I used poetic licence to tell my version of the Garland story in a dramatically compelling manner. For example, the final monologue in Ms Garland at Twilight is sourced from a letter she wrote to a magazine in which she complains about being perceived as a tragic figure and asserts her identity as an actress in control of her own choices. At the end of the monologue, Garland then sings Once in a Lifetime (Bricusse and Newley 1961), the lyrics of which close with the empowering line ‘I’m gonna do great things!’ Garland wrote the letter relatively early in her career and did not sing the song until later, however my embodied practice told me that presenting this material in this way would create a theatrically satisfying finale to the play. This finale also reinforced my attempts to reclaim Garland from the tragedy narrative. In its creation and performance Ms Garland at Twilight sought to recover Garland’s life in a seemingly objective manner, yet my subjective ‘fingerprints’ could be detected all over the content.

Practice meets theory Biographical theatre influenced by postmodernist thought rejects the notion of objective impartiality in favour of subjectivity: the biographer’s relationship with the historical figure becomes central to understanding what life story can be told. Canton (2011, 37) contends the shift in focus from the biographical subject to that of the perceiving subject has given rise to the use of meta-biographical devices in biographical theatre: narratives that interrogate the process of representing past lives through the presence of biographer figures or structural devices that

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direct the audience’s attention to the way in which the past is evoked (Canton 2011, 10).

Unfortunately, as a practitioner, I had no experience of working with meta-biographical devices. The aim of all my work up until that time had involved attempting to immerse an audience in a narrative in a way that redirected their attention away from any theatrical structural devices. It was clear that the biographical creation and performance of Judy Strikes Back was going to force my arts practice into previously unexplored terrain. However, that super-objective to shift audience perception of Garland as a tragic figure still anchored the process. To make a start, I analysed audience reception data collected from the performance of Ms Garland at Twilight. Comments from the surveys provided initial ideas regarding how to weave theatrical devices into the existing play to direct audience attention toward how the past was being evoked in performance. How I responded to this data clarified my personal relationship to Garland as a biographical subject. Thereby, the surveys served as a springboard for creating and performing a biographical theatre work that would reveal to an audience my subjective desire to reclaim Garland from the tragedy narrative. During this creative development cycle I persisted with the dramaturgical, character and skills investigations. I read more plays from the biographical theatre cannon, and attended more performances of biographical theatre, cabaret and jukebox musicals. Also, I continued to collaborate with the same creative team who facilitated the creation and performance of Ms Garland at Twilight. We met regularly to discuss concepts or to improvise in the rehearsal studio. The key difference that emerged between the creation of the first biographical theatre work and the second was the manner in which the notion of tragedy was addressed. To attempt to free Garland from the tragedy narrative in Ms Garland at Twilight I purposefully omitted biographical details widely perceived as tragic. It became clear to me, however, that Garland’s relationship with the tragedy narrative had to be embedded and deconstructed through each scene in Judy Strikes Back. For inspiration, I read and attended productions of Attic tragedy. I rewrote selected monologues from these plays from the point of view of Garland, her associates, or her fans. This task led to an engagement with literature regarding theories of tragedy. None of the monologues I composed feature in Judy Strikes Back but the theories of Aristotle and Nietzsche found their way into a number of original songs composed for this performance: But Everybody Does Judy (Chalmers and Meenach 2015) and Shit Happens to Us All (Chalmers and Meenach 2015). Their work also informs a scene

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between my version of Garland and the other actor who features in the play, who performs a drag version of Garland. The songs and the scene attempt to direct audience attention toward the manner in which Garland’s life story has traditionally been emplotted. In this way, Judy Strikes Back grew into a theatrical experience whereby a forgotten version of Garland could be remembered. .

Giving voice to the audience Audience reception surveys were distributed to audience members directly after seeing the performance of Ms Garland at Twilight on September 4 2013 at the USQ Arts Theatre (in Toowoomba, Queensland). An audience of 257 people attended the production, and seventy-seven audience members responded to the survey. Surveys were also distributed to audience members directly after seeing Judy Strikes Back on 6 August 2015 at the Empire Theatre (also in Toowoomba), and 13, 14 and 15 August 2015 at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts (in Brisbane, Queensland). An audience of 432 people attended these productions and 80 responded to the survey. An analysis of the audience reception survey data confirms Canton’s (2011) claim that biographical theatre is able to ‘fill gaps’ in an audience’s knowledge of a historical figure. However, the findings from an analysis of both the Ms Garland at Twilight and the Judy Strikes Back surveys contradict Canton’s assertion that audience perception of a historical figure cannot be shifted if the play directly counters their previous ideas. Eighty-two percent of those surveyed after viewing Ms Garland at Twilight stated they had knowledge of Garland prior to attending the play. After viewing the production, 75 percent of those surveyed believed their perception of Garland had shifted. In keeping with a practice-led research approach, whereby the methods for collecting, analysing and reporting on phenomena emerge from practice (Haseman 2007, 148) this shift in perception is reported using a tool of my embodied practice: playwriting. Below, in dramatic monologue form, is the audience’s explanation of this shift. The material that forms the monologue is verbatim audience data representing the responses of all age and gender groupings and confirms that biographical theatre influenced by modernist thought can shift at least some audience members’ perceptions of a biographical subject: I have watched a number of bios that focus on her troubled later years, this was refreshing – we could see her vast connection to a Hollywood that has now disappeared – her place in a history at a

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particular time. It was great to focus on her work ethic and how much she enjoyed her work. It explained how talented she really was – a brilliant Artist and a person. A more holistic view of her. It highlighted her enormous talent, which the present generation may not be aware of because her death seems to have overshadowed her life. I had always assumed she was unhappy and had a tragic life. However she obviously had a very fulfilling life…she wasn’t just a tragic child star or tragic figure. I was ‘hung up’ on the tragedy of her life but I feel so differently as a result of this production. It made her appear a happy rather than a tragic person interested in and loving life…she wasn’t as passive to her situation as is sometimes conveyed. She chose her own destiny. A lady totally accomplished with all the fragility of life and its challenges. Not just an alcoholic. As was portrayed in a recent performance early this year at QPAC. Want to go home now and listen to her, rediscover her (Audience Reception Surveys, 4 September 2013).

Seventy-two percent of those surveyed after experiencing Judy Strikes Back admitted to having previous knowledge of Garland. After viewing the production, 87 percent of those surveyed also believed their perception of Garland had shifted. Affirming the primacy of my embodied practice in the reporting of the research, I give voice to the audience by means of the dramatic dialogue form. This dialogue articulates their shift and thereby serves to confirm that biographical theatre influenced by postmodernist thought can shift perception of a biographical subject: A: I respect her more now. She came across as a stronger person – one who seemed to have more control. She appeared a stronger player – with a stronger role in the industry. It gave me more respect for her as an artist. I had no idea how talented and diverse a performer she was. B: I saw Judy as so much more than just a lost little girl, and obviously so much more than what everybody else thought of her. You could see that she wasn’t just the tragic drug addict that everyone saw her as. She didn’t just have a terrible awful tragic life. My sense of her as a tragic figure has diminished. I’m upset that I knew she was a drug addict and that was most prevalent. C: I saw how a woman’s image is so easily defined by the ‘mistakes’ she makes rather than the amazing things she has done. In a different time her tragedy may have been seen as a victory.

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Biographical theatre-making principles It can be argued then that biographical theatre can indeed challenge an audience’s life-world knowledge, and thereby recover a historical figure from an entrenched and enduring plotting pattern. The Garland project used specific strategies to retell the life story of Garland and thereby liberate her biography from the tragedy narrative. I recognised that the strategies used to create and perform both plays were informed by my individual embodied practice and cannot be repeated by other biographical theatre-makers. However, I contend that biographical theatre-making principles that emerged from the project can be used by those who wish to reclaim, recover and retell the biographies of forgotten or neglected historical figures. I provide this in second person prose to directly address such biographers. Principle 1: commit to your super-objective To make biographical theatre that reclaims a historical figure from a narrative you believe misrepresents the subject, commit to your superobjective. Thus, anchor all creative development in your overall goal. As you build the theatrical work, consider how you can disrupt the narrative in each unit of action. Whether you create monologues, scenes, songs, movement sequences or digital imagery, they must all serve your goal. Continue to ask ‘how does this dramatic moment shift audience perception?’ When the material you explore distracts from your superobjective, dismiss it and allow your pre-existing arts practice to lead you in alternative directions. To maintain control and remain true to your super-objective, I recommend using the Critical Response Process (Lerman and Borstel 2003) for collecting feedback. CRP aims to help practitioners absorb the views of others in a way that encourages innovative creative development. The four core steps involved in the process provide a rigorous structure for reflective journaling, work-in-progress showings, forums, audience reception surveys and interviews. Both quantitative and qualitative data can be collected for analysis using CRP so as to ascertain how best to use

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the biographical theatre form to shift perception of a historical figure, and to determine whether the resulting work is successful in shifting audience perception. Principle 2: include other people’s thinking Cameron (2012, 54) encourages practitioners to ‘get what they need’ by developing a ‘“magpie bibliography” using shiny bits of other people’s thinking for direction and instruction’. Thus, seek diverse literature from myriad discourses to enable the creation and performance of your biographical theatre works. Moreover, accept the ‘slippery’ nature of authorship when theatre-making. As the biographical playwright, it is your duty to shape the data collected but the theatre work will only emerge in collaboration with your creative team. Each member will bring their own unique set of talents and ideas to the studio floor so be prepared for growing your vision with them. The one other person crucial to the creation and performance of your theatrical work is the historical figure you wish to reclaim. I contend that, through close examination of your biographical archive, you will note patterns in how your subject “wants to be perceived”. By exploring these patterns in the studio you can allow the subject to write the biographical play for you. Principle 3: embrace ‘liveness’ as the key Rokem (2000, 202) suggests it is difficult to understand why an individual spectator reacts in a specific way to a performance. Nevertheless, by transcending traditional word-bound knowledge, biographical theatre can recover historical figures and shift audience perception. Borrowing from Tait (2000, 4) who believes that ‘live is the starting point for all bodily knowledges’, the live medium of theatre allows for the communication of ideas about the representation of an historical figure that an audience can embody, feel and thereby know (Tait 2000, 5). In effect, biographical theatre provides an audience with a three dimensional interactive experience whereby they live the biography with the performers. It is through this lived experience that they can come to know a neglected, forgotten or misrepresented individual. Therefore, embrace this ‘liveness’ of the biographical experience as key to your work.

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Conclusion This project illustrates how biographical theatre can rediscover and reframe a historical figure. Whether a modernist or postmodernist approach is used in the creation and performance of the work, an audience may accept the version of history presented if the biographical theatre-maker/s have considered three emergent principles: committing to a super-objective; including other people’s thinking; and embracing ‘liveness’ as the key. Biographical theatre will not shift the perception of every audience member, but the manner in which plays are created and performed can facilitate that shift in perception for many.

Works cited Arlen, H., and E.Y. Harburg. 1938. Over the Rainbow. New York: MetroGoldwyn-Mayer. Bricusse, L., and A. Newley. 1961. “Once In A Lifetime”. In Stop the World – I Want to Get Off. By arrangement with Tams-Witmark Music Library, New York. Canton, U. 2011. Biographical Theatre: Re-presenting Real People? Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Cameron, M. 2012. “A Quest(ion) of It: Methodology is Whatever Generates Possibilities and Delays Closure.” In Live Research: Methods of Practice-led Inquiry in Performance, edited by Leah Mercer, Julie Robson and David Fenton, 49–67. Nerang: Ladyfinger. Chalmers, M., and B. Meenach. 2015. “But Everybody Does Judy.” In Judy Strikes Back. Unpublished. Chalmers, M., and B. Meenach. 2015. “Shit Happens to Us All”. In Judy Strikes Back. Unpublished. Clark, G. 2000. Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland. New York: Random House. Davis, T.C. 1992. “Annie Oakley and Her Ideal Husband of No Importance.” In Critical Theory and Performance., edited by JG Reinelt and JR Roach, 299-312. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Dortins, E. 2010. “The Many Truths of Bennelong’s Tragedy.” Aboriginal History, 33: 53-75. Enright, N. 1998. The Boy From Oz. By arrangement with David Spicer Productions. . Haseman, B. 2007. “Rupture and Recognition: Identifying the Performative research paradigm.” In Practice As Research: Approaches to Creative

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Arts Enquiry, edited by Estelle Barret and Barbara Bolt. London: I B Tauris. Kamakawiwo’ole, I. 1993. Somewhere Over the Rainbow / What a Wonderful World. Honolulu: Mountain Apple Company. Langley, N. 1939. The Wizard of Oz. Los Angeles: Metro-GoldwynMayer. Lerman, L., and J. Borstel. 2003. Critical Response Process: A Method for Getting Useful Feedback on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert. Takoma Park, MD: Dance Exchange. Luft, S. 2017. Judy and I; My Life with Judy Garland. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Lyall-Watson. K. 2013. “Biographical Theatre: Flying Separate of Everything.” PhD diss., University of Queensland. Margadant, J.B. 2000. The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Meenach, B. 2013. Ms Garland at Twilight. Unpublished. —. 2015. Judy Strikes Back. Unpublished. Meller, M. 2013. Wizard of Oz. Unpublished. Meyer, J. 1983. Heartbreaker: A Memoir of Judy Garland. New York: Double Day. Parke, C.N. 2002. Biography: Writing Lives. New York: Routledge. Phillips, S. 2015. Judy and Liza and Robert and Freddie and David and Sue and Me…: A Memoir. New York: St Martin’s Press. Quilter, 2005. End of the Rainbow. London: Methuen Drama. Rokem, F. 2000. Performing History: Theatrical Rrepresentations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa. Smith, L.M. 1994. “Biographical Method.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by K. Denzin and Y. Lincoln, 286-305. California: Sage Publishing Thousand Oaks. Stanislavski, C. 1936. An Actor Prepares. New York: Theatre Arts. —. 1950, Building a Character. Great Britain: Max Reinhart. Stewart-Jones, D. 2010. The Judy Monologues. Darren Stewart-Jones. Kindle edition. Stock, C. F. 2007. Accented Body and Beyond: A Model for Practice-led Research with Multiple Theory/Practice Outcomes. Accessed May 17, 2012. . Tait, 2000. “Introduction: A/live Performance.” In Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance, edited by P Tait, 1-11. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Van Zandt, B. 2007. The Property Known As Garland. New York: Samuel French.

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White, H. 1978. Tropic of Discourse. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.

Internet Sources

< https://judygarlandnews.com>,



CHAPTER ELEVEN WRITING BACK TO TOLKIEN: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND RACE IN HIGH FANTASY DALLAS JOHN BAKER

They came to the top of the hill and looked down onto a small village. A group of thatched cottages hugged the banks of a shallow river, their chimneys all working overtime sending white smoke up to mingle with a few clouds scudding westward … Most of the cottages already had light in their windows. The distinct smell of home cooking wafted up from the town, carried on a lazy breeze. As the breeze reached them, bringing with it a bouquet of mouthwatering fragrances, Harriett gasped with joy. The sight and smell of the quaint little village was like something from one of the books she loved so much. “Do you think Frodo’s home?” she asked in all seriousness. (McPhee 2016a, 45)

Introduction Without naming him, the excerpt above invokes Tolkien, not the person J. R. R. Tolkien but the works written by him, what could be called his textual or discursive trace. The excerpt is also an explicit example of, and intertextual jape referring to, the near ubiquitous influence of Tolkien on certain types of fantasy fiction. The excerpt is from Waycaller, the first book of The Faeden Chronicles, a Young Adult epic fantasy trilogy that also includes Keysong (McPhee 2016b) and Oracle (McPhee 2017). The Faeden Chronicles are the product of a “writing back” to Tolkien, which will be described in detail later in this essay. Fantasy novelist John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) is the opposite of forgotten. He is internationally renowned, remembered by

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legions of readers, by a global scholarly community focused on his work1 and by fans of the highly-successful film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002 & 2003) and The Hobbit (2012, 2013 & 2014). Tolkien Studies is an established academic discipline, with informal beginnings in 1969, with at least two dedicated peer-reviewed journals, The Journal of Tolkien Research and Tolkien Studies, published since 2014 and 2004 respectively.2 It is also now possible to study for a degree in Tolkien Studies at Signum University in the United States.3 Tolkien’s work has, indeed, inspired an entire genre of fiction, referred to interchangeably as epic fantasy, High Fantasy or sword and sorcery (Fultz 2013). Those few fantasy authors not inspired directly by Tolkien follow his lead indirectly by contributing to a tradition of epic fantasy supported by intricate world-building that includes invented languages (Stockwell 2006; Beckton 2015), diverse cultures and a detailed fictional topography (often presented in map form). The races Tolkien imagined for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are drawn from European folklore, though adapted and refined by him so that they are distinct. The characteristics these races display are now features of those races as they appear in the fantasy fiction of numerous other authors. The clearest example of this is Tolkien’s rendering of the race of Elves, who are now depicted in dozens of fantasy narratives just as Tolkien imagined them – as tall, virtuous, beautiful, immortal and light-skinned.4 The fantasy fiction of Raymond E. Feist (The Riftwar Saga, 1982-1986), Markus Heitz (The Dwarves series, 20092018), Terry Brooks (Shannara sequence, 1977-2017) and R. A. Salvatore (Forgotten Realms, 1988-2004) all include depictions of fantasy races that owe a debt to Tolkien. Tolkien’s creation of an elaborate and racially diverse fictional world is a model that many fantasy authors following after him have used when populating their own imagined worlds. Take as examples Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series (1968-2001), David Eddings’ Belgariad (1982-1984), Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (1983-2015) 1

See The Tolkien Society, established 1969. Accessed 20th April 2017, https://www.tolkiensociety.org/ 2 See Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, Accessed 20th April 2017, http://wvupressonline.com/journals/Tolkien_studies and Journal of Tolkien Research, Accessed 27th April 2017, http://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/ 3 See ‘Tolkien Studies’, Signum University, Accessed 20th April 2017, https://signumuniversity.org/departments/language-literature/tolkien-studies/ 4 See ‘Elven Characteristics’, Tolkien Gateway, Accessed 20th April 2017, http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Elven_Characteristics

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and the Game of Thrones series (1996-2011) by George R. R. Martin. (Even Martin’s middle initials invoke the ghost of Tolkien, whether intentionally or not.) Given that Tolkien is internationally renowned and profoundly influential, why then is he a subject for a chapter in a book on forgotten lives? This is because there is now more than one Tolkien. At the very least there are four J. R. R. Tolkiens. There is the Tolkien of history, the actual person who lived and wrote and died. Then there is the subject of the numerous biographies based on that actual person.5 There is the Tolkien as imagined by the, perhaps millions, of people who have enjoyed his novels or the film adaptations. This Tolkien is perceived as akin to Gandalf, a kind of wizard genius who created a world that many of his fans feel more at home in than the real world.6 Finally, there is the Tolkien as constructed in the scholarly research about his writing. It is this last Tolkien, perhaps the least broadly known, that I address here. This Tolkien emerges from discussions and analysis of his many literary works, but mostly those set in the fictional world of MiddleEarth. This Tolkien is a contested figure, precisely because he is a discursive figure, a figure that emerges from text. The meanings of text or discourse are dependent on the subjective position of the reader (van Dijk 1997; Kress, Leite-Garcia & van Leeuwen 1997; Klages 2006). Text is open to interpretation and changeable and often, if not always, ambiguous (van Dijk 1997; Klages 2006). In other words, texts are always multimodal (Kress, Leite-Garcia & van Leeuwen 1997). The Tolkien who emerges from this textual haze is paradoxical – simultaneously sexist (Roberts 2014) and an advocate for women’s power (Brennan-Croft & Donovan 2015), Christian (Agoy 2011) and pagan (Hutton 2011) at the same time, and both conservative (Coulombe 2008)7 and radical (Shippey 2002). The textual Tolkien is also overtly racist (Ibata 2003; Fimi 2009; Brackmann 2010; Sinex 2010) and not racist (Chance 2001; Straubhaar 2003; Evans 2003; Rogers 2013). Who, then, is the real Tolkien? This is a question that is impossible to answer of the discursive Tolkien. The real Tolkien’s attitudes to gender and race appear to be complicated, ambiguous, dependent on environment 5

See ‘Books about Tolkien’, The Tolkien Society, Accessed 20th April 2017, https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/books-about-tolkien/ 6 See LOTR/Hobbit Cosplay, Accessed 20th April 2017, http://one-cosplay-to-rulethem-all.tumblr.com/ and Middle-Earth Cosplay, Accessed 20th April 2017, http://middle-earth-cosplay.deviantart.com/ 7 This work is also online: http://www.tumblarhouse.com/lounge/column/romanticconservatives-the-inklings-in-their-political-context

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and place and are also likely to have changed over his lifetime. The discursive Tolkien, the Tolkien that can be gleaned from his written works, is even more ambiguous and contradictory. For me, the inability to define a real (textual) Tolkien is a good thing. A contested Tolkien provokes discussion and debate, and keeps questions of gender and race in fantasy fiction on the agenda. Unfortunately, this contested Tolkien is obscured by the huge success of his books and the film adaptations (Isaacs 1976; Rearick 2004). Some decades ago Neil Isaacs (1976, 1) had already noted that ‘The Lord of the Rings and the domain of Middle-earth are eminently suitable for faddism and fannism, cultism and clubbism’ and that the popularity and cultish appeal of Tolkien’s works ‘acts as a deterrent to critical activity’ (Isaacs 1976, 1). There is a danger that the Tolkien who survives in the public memory will be the Tolkien as wizard genius, an uncomplicated and unproblematic figure whose Gandalf-like status makes it difficult to get any popular attention for questions like: How are race, gender and sexuality represented in Tolkien’s writing? Do Tolkien’s books privilege racist, sexist or homophobic interpretations? What happens when the contested, problematic and ambiguous Tolkien is forgotten, or obscured by the celebrity of the Tolkien imagined by fans? What can be done to address or intervene in any problematic representations of race, gender or sexuality in Tolkien’s work? How might those interventions be disseminated beyond scholarly circles, to the broader public? These are the questions I will engage with below.

Race, gender and sexuality in Tolkien Debates about gender and race in Tolkien began almost as soon as the first book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was released (Isaacs & Zimbardo 1976; Rearick 2004). Academics have noted race-based and arguably racist elements in his work, and The Lord of the Rings in particular (Ibata 2003; Rearick 2004; Fimi 2009; Brackmann 2010; Sinex 2010; Vink 2013). Some of these critics argue that Tolkien’s writing is influenced by racist theories such as eugenics (Fimi 2009) and others that Tolkien uses stereotypes and symbols to create racial embodiments of good and evil (Brackmann 2010). C.S. Lewis, a friend and colleague of Tolkien, suggested that readers were interpreting Tolkien’s clear demarcation of good and evil as ‘a rigid demarcation between black and white people’ (qtd. in Abate & Weldy 2012, 163). Christine Chism (2007) argues that accusations of racism in the pages of The Lord of the Rings fall into three categories: accusations of intentional racism, of unconscious Eurocentric bias, and arguments that posit that Tolkien’s writing shows an evolution

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from latent racism in the early works to a conscious rejection of racist tendencies in the later ones. Alternatively, a number of critics have argued that Tolkien’s works are to be lauded because they depict a diversity of peoples, cultures and social practices (Chance 2001; Evans 2003; Rogers 2013). Some have gone so far as to claim that Tolkien’s works are examples of multiculturalism (Chance 2001), while others suggest that it displays ambiguous racialism rather than racism (Rearick 2004; Cramer 2006; Vink 2013), that is, the belief that separate races with distinct physical and behavioural characteristics exist rather than the belief that one race (Caucasians) is superior to other races. These competing arguments about race and the discursive Tolkien are well-represented by the following quotes: … returning the Ring to its origin means refusal of power as domination by the One – by sameness, homogeneity – and therefore acceptance of respect for difference and diversity” (Chance 2001, 33). It is undeniable that darkness and the colour black are continually associated throughout Tolkien’s universe with unredeemable evil, specifically Orcs and the Dark Lord Sauron. So unredeemable is this evil, in fact, that, especially in encounters with the Orcs during the war’s action, it is dealt with by extermination. Contrariwise, the Orcs’ mirror-selves, the Elves, are called “the noblest of the children of Eru” … and continuously described as extremely fair. (Rearick 2004, 861)

A number of critics of Tolkien have suggested that his works are also sexist, specifically because women are scarce in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and those female characters that are present reinforce female gender norms and passivity (Roberts 2014, 476). Alternatively, some feminist critics have argued that Tolkien’s writing depicts a number of powerful women who are not subject to men (Enright 2015; Rawls 2015). As Laura Michel (2006, 56) writes about this debate: For years, Tolkien has been criticized, attacked, explained, forgiven, and mainly misunderstood when it comes to the matter of women. Criticism on this topic has ranged from mild attempts to excuse Tolkien’s point of view to truly violent accusations of misogyny and chauvinism.

With each passing year, the pendulum swings one way or the other, either adding more fuel to the argument that Tolkien’s works are racist and/or

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sexist or to the counter idea that Tolkien’s works are not sexist or racist at all. All of this discussion is about the textual or discursive Tolkien rather than the actual person named J. R. R. Tolkien. This perpetual debate evidences the heart of my argument – that the discursive Tolkien who emerges from discussion of the books is shaped mostly by the reader. This means that the questions about race and gender in Tolkien’s writing are not likely to ever be settled. Certain readings of Tolkien’s works are, however, privileged over others. The privileged readings of a text are the ones that are easier to make, that require less cognitive acrobatics on the part of the reader for them to work, and to make meaning out of that text. A privileged reading is one that can be made by non-scholarly readers without use of a critical framework to interpret or build meaning. They are easy and seem “natural”. They are also the readings, or meanings, supported and reinforced by the dominant groups and institutions in societies (Kress, Leite-Garcia & van Leeuwen 1997), which are almost universally patriarchal and heteronormative. As Kress, Leite-Garcia & van Leeuwen (1997, 270) argue: The meanings of the dominant will remain dominant for me, and it is they who shape, more than I can, the representational resources of my community and thereby the means of my making of meaning. Cognitively, psychically and affectively, I am in the position of making meanings through means of making meaning developed by others – precisely those who dominate my world. (emphasis original)

The privileged reading of Tolkien is arguably one that places white skin as superior to black skin, men as superior to women. I would add that the privileged reading of Tolkien constructs heterosexuality as presumed norm and homosexuality or bisexuality as non-existent. This privileged reading makes it difficult to interpret any of the beings of Middle-Earth as nonheterosexual or non-gender normative. The dominance of this privileged reading of Tolkien is evidenced by the fact that Tolkien’s books are required reading for a number of racist and fascist organisations, such as the youth wing of the British National Party.8 As David Ibata (2003) of the Chicago Tribune has noted: ‘For years, Tolkien scholars have waged a fight on two fronts: against an academic establishment that for the most part refused to take the author's work seriously, and against white supremacists who have tried to claim the professor as one of their own’ 8 See ‘Tolkien: Master of Middle Earth’, Our Race is our Nation, Accessed 20th April 2017, http://library.flawlesslogic.com/tolkien.htm

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(n.p.). The connection between Tolkien’s writing and extreme right wing politics is made explicit by the following facts: the Heathen Front (a British organisation of right wing “volkists”) admired him as “racialist”; at least one far right movement ran paramilitary youth groups called “camp Hobbits”, and; there are strong links between the spiritual fathers of modern Italian fascism and Tolkien’s writing.9 Tolkien’s writing would not be used by these groups unless a racist interpretation of the works was relatively easy. As one white nationalist, also anonymous, notes: There is much with which nationalists can identify in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings: the nobility of ancient and self-reliant peoples; the neighbourliness, comradeship and community spirit of The Shire, with its clean air and green landscape; the heroic life or death struggle for a great cause, between the forces of light, freedom and racial survival, against the conspiracy of corruption and tyranny. 10 (emphasis added)

None of this means that the actual Tolkien was racist and/or sexist. That may never be known for sure. It is possible that the privileged racist and sexist readings of The Lord of the Rings and the other Tolkien works do not reflect the author’s intended meaning. The most likely explanation about the real Tolkien, the actual person, is that he unwittingly created a racist discourse in his earlier works and attempted to address and atone for that in his later ones. For me, the ongoing debate about gender and race that the discursive Tolkien inspires shows that the works are complex and nuanced. This does not diminish the fact that the discursive Tolkien evidently privileges some unsavoury readings. Instead, it places the onus on Tolkien’s readers to actively intervene in, and work against, these kinds of interpretations, in whatever way they can. As the textual Tolkien emerges from subjective readings of text, from an engagement with, and reflection on, his writing, it is worthwhile to outline my own history of reading and thinking about The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. My reading of these works highlights (some of) the specific ways that the texts privilege normative masculinist and heteronormative discourse and how that triggered my intention to work against that discourse by “writing back” to Tolkien. 9

See, ‘The use of Tolkien to defend fascism’, Compromise and Conceit, Accessed 20th April 2017, https://faustusnotes.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/the-use-of-tolkiento-defend-fascism/ 10 See ‘Tolkien: Master of Middle Earth’, Our Race is our Nation, Accessed 20th April 2017, http://library.flawlesslogic.com/tolkien.htm

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Acts of reading: A brief auto-ethnography Some books are like portals that drag us (willingly) into other worlds. We are more susceptible to this when we are young. The excerpt below, also from my Young Adult novel Waycaller (McPhee 2016a, 24), refers to this experience of being transported to another (fantastical) place: A wave of overwhelming pleasure rolled up his arm and spread through his entire body. Glittering silver light surrounded them, blocking all view of the cemetery and enfolding them in utter silence. The pleasure mounted as the glittering light increased. Jack closed his eyes to enjoy it and felt himself being forcefully pulled away, hurtling through the silver light to another place.

This section of text is a subtle encouragement for readers to keep the notion of crossing (from page to mind, from text to imagining) in mind, so that what they are about to read might communicate with what they have already read (in this genre). It is a flag that their intertextual knowledge will enrich their experience, and that their knowledge of the genre will deepen and change as they read. The first book portal I crossed was J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), which transported me at the age of eight to Middle Earth, right into the parlour of Bilbo Baggins. Once there, I didn’t want to come home – mostly because the idea of second-breakfast appealed to me greatly, but also because I found that world so rich and engaging. The world of my everyday existence was pale and uninteresting compared to Bilbo’s world, though inarguably safer. After The Hobbit, I read The Lord of the Rings (1954), and then my own world seemed exceedingly bland. It had no Gandalf or Lady Galadriel, only soapie stars and dull politicians. On the upside, my everyday world had no Orcs or mountain trolls to threaten me in the dark hours of the night. Still, I would have willingly forgone the safety of my run-of-the-mill existence for a little danger if it meant I could tramp in the Misty Mountains or visit the enchanted woods of Lothlórien. My love for the world that Tolkien created was an unquestioning one. That changed one autumn morning in 1986, when I was eighteen. I remember it vividly. It was the kind of morning perfect for reading in a patch of sunlight by a window, cool yet sunny with a clear sky. A Hobbity kind of day. I’d settled myself by just such a window to finish re-reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I hadn’t picked up those books for many years and had thrown myself into the re-reading with some excitement. When I finished The Return of the King (1955) later that day I was left with an uneasy feeling.

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By that point I had noticed the overt environmental messages of Tolkien’s work (Curry 1998; Dickerson & Evans 2006; Campbell 2011). The ecological interpretations of Tolkien are, perhaps, the least contested. As Kristine Larsen (2012, 84) argues: At this late date there can be no serious Tolkien scholar who denies the environmental themes in Tolkien’s legendarium. After countless essays and conference presentations on the topic, and an entire conference devoted to it at the University of Vermont in 2011, saying that Tolkien was concerned about the environment is like saying that The Lord of the Rings contained rings.

As a committed environmentalist myself I found the ecological elements of the books gratifying. But now, on this re-reading, I could not help but notice other things that unsettled me. Unlike my earlier (childhood) readings of Tolkien, this fresh reading brought to my attention the problematic representation of race and gender in Tolkien’s work. All the good characters, the heroes and heroines, are white people, some of them are even described that way – the White Lady Galadriel for example. The most noble of the races of Middle-Earth, the Elves, are all white-skinned. Worse, all of the bad or evil characters are often described in language associated with non-white people (Ibata 2003; Fimi 2009; Brackmann 2010; Sinex 2010). Tolkien himself described the Orcs, the principle antagonists and evil-doers of his novels as: …squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types (Carpenter & Tolkien 2012, letter 210, n.p.).

Furthermore, physical descriptions of evil humans indicate that they are dark-skinned, and possibly inspired by middle-eastern or Oriental cultures (Luling 1995; Curry 2004; Sinex 2010). This excerpt, from The Two Towers (Tolkien 2005, 660) when the fictional race the Haradrim first appear, illustrates this: His scarlet robes were tattered, his corslet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword.

Cementing this vision of the ‘wicked’ Haradrim as Orientals is this description from the character Smeagol or Gollum:

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Chapter Eleven ‘Dark faces ... They are fierce. They have black eyes, and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears ... some have red paint on their cheeks, and red cloaks; and their flags are red, and the tips of their spears; and they have round shields, yellow and black with big spikes. Not nice; very cruel wicked Men they look. Almost as bad as Orcs, and much bigger. Sméagol thinks they have come out of the South beyond the Great River’s end.’ (Tolkien 2005, 646)

The only exception to this white is good and dark is bad discourse is, of course, Saruman, the White Wizard, but his presence in the novels does not lessen the sense that the books present white people as noble and black people as degenerate and wicked. This is mainly because Saruman is not intrinsically evil. He starts out as good and is turned evil by Sauron. In contrast, many of the dark-skinned races in The Lord of the Rings are constructed as intrinsically evil, as beyond redemption (Rearick 2004). None of the main characters in The Lord of the Rings are female. There are a number of positive female secondary characters (BrennanCroft & Donovan 2015), particularly, Arwen, Galadriel and Eowyn of Rohan, but none of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring are women. Most glaring of all for me was the complete absence of any nonheterosexual, non-gender-normative characters. Apart from one scene in which Eowyn masquerades as male in order to join in the battle against Sauron, gender performance in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit is starkly normative. Since the release of the films, some fans and commentators have questioned whether or not Frodo Baggins’ relationship with Sam Gamgee can be read as having homosexual undertones.11 This is more a result of Elijah Wood’s portrayal of Frodo in the films than anything present in the books, in which their relationship reads as a platonic friendship with Sam’s commitment to Frodo arising from his role as Frodo’s servant rather than from (sublimated) romantic love.

Writing back to Tolkien The unease I felt with a world I had loved so much percolated over the years and deepened when I noticed the same disturbing elements in other fantasy fiction. It is no overstatement to say that fantasy fiction, and 11

See ‘Were Frodo and Sam Gay?’, Accessed 22nd April 2017, https://www.quora.com/The-Lord-of-the-Rings-creative-franchise-Were-Frodoand-Sam-gay, and ‘Relationship Between Frodo and Sam’, Accessed 22nd April 2017, http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/6497-relationship-between-frodoand-sam

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especially epic fantasy, is dominated by white heterosexual male characters and white heterosexual male authors (Ahmed 2015). With the release of the first Lord of the Rings film in 2001, a film that made visual my concerns with the books, my unease transformed into a desire to intervene in the problematic representations of race, gender and sexuality in Tolkien’s work, and to do this by “writing back” to Tolkien. In order to ensure that this was disseminated beyond scholarly circles, I set out to produce a Tolkienesque fantasy series of three Young Adult novels.12 More to the point, I wanted to create a fantasy world in which women and girls were central and people of non-European backgrounds were represented fairly.

“Writing back” is a commonly used literary strategy employed by feminist, postcolonial and queer writers to reclaim, re-imagine and complicate normative or marginalizing narratives that are canonical or widely disseminated (Tiffin 2003; Klages 2006; Baker 2010). Postcolonial writers often frame this as an act of resistance, as writing back from the margins to the imperial centres of colonisation (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 2003; Tiffin 2003; Yang 1999). As John Yang (1999, n.p.) argues: Resistance theory in post-colonial literature refutes the very notion that idea of representation also connotes further subjugation. Resistance literature uses the language of empire to rebut its 12

The Faeden Chronicles were situated in the Young Adult domain because young adult readers are at the forefront of demanding and embracing diverse fantasy fiction.

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Chapter Eleven dominant ideologies. In other words, the colonized nation is “writing back,” speaking either of the oppression and racism of the colonizers or the inherent cultural “better-ness” of the indigenous people.

Feminist and queer writers characterise writing back as a rewriting, or appropriation and reframing, of dominant, masculinist and/or heteronormative discourses (Hite 1989; Tiffin 2003; Baker 2010). Feminist and queer rewritings of Shakespeare and fairy tales are clear examples of how rewriting can have both a creative and political or social impact (Baker 2010). An example of both postcolonial and feminist writing back is the novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which Jean Rhys writes back to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). In it, Rhys addresses the naturalised assumptions about Britain’s imperialistic enterprise in their many colonies that dominated thinking in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, and that went unchallenged in Jane Eyre. The inspiration for the novel was the shock Rhys felt at Brontë's portrayal of the character Bertha Mason, Rochester's Creole wife, who was imprisoned in the attic of Thornfield Hall for most of the novel (Raiskin 1999, 144). Rhys turned the story of Brontë's “madwoman in the attic” into a full-length novel that was not only a significant re-writing of one of the classics of Victorian fiction but also a narrative in which issues of race, gender and social and economic power are contested. In the context of The Lord of the Rings, my own writing back is an act against forgetting the complicated and ambiguous (textual) Tolkien, an act that aims to produce (creative) discourse that adds to the discussion of race and gender in Tolkien’s writing and in the genre and individual works inspired by him. The Faeden Chronicles, a Tolkienesque fantasy trilogy thus includes all the things we expect of the genre (halflings, elves, dragons, magic and so forth) but also not only features a diversity of race and gender but makes that diversity central to the story.13 The Faeden Chronicles are, however, not a dramatic departure from Tolkienesque fantasy. Writing back is not about creating something completely new or original (Hite 1989; Tiffin 2003; Baker 2012), but rather about strategic appropriation and shifted emphasis (Hite 1989; 13 There is a strong tradition of fantasy, and epic fantasy in particular, engaging with questions of diversity, such as Kameron Hurley’s Worldbreaker Saga (20142017), Lynn Flewelling’s Tamir Triad (2001-2006) and Ashok Banker’s Ramayana series (2003-2010), however there is little explicit, direct appropriation of Tolkien, in terms of the types of characters, races (esp. halflings) and settings. For this “writing back” to work, The Faeden Chronicles needed to be identifiably Tolkienesque.

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Baker 2010). For me, writing back is also about celebrating Tolkieninspired fantasy whilst making it more inclusive and appealing to a more diverse range of readers by contributing a counter voice to the marginalizing readings of High Fantasy. The act of writing back need not completely abandon conventional genre traits or conventions to achieve its ends (Hite 1989). In fact, the opposite – that is, the maintenance of conventional form and familiar characters and settings – is more likely to produce results (Hite 1989; Baker 2010). Even the use of cliché, much derided in fiction of any kind, has a role to play in writing back to genre (Baker 2010). When writing back to a dominant discourse the use of clichés, such as ubiquitous character types (wizards, orphans), stock scenes (final battle) and repeatedly used settings (idyllic village, mysterious forest), is a potent strategy. Indeed, Molly Hite (1989, 4) has argued that clichés ‘tend to have unanticipated potency in relevant contexts, and certainly the notion of telling the other side of the story in many ways describes the enterprise of feminist criticism’. Hite further suggests that ‘changes in emphasis and value can articulate the “other side” of a culturally mandated story, exposing the limits it inscribes in the process of affirming a dominant ideology’ (1989, 4). In other words, the utilisation of familiar characters, stereotypes as it were, in familiar settings, with familiar plot devices but with a shifted emphasis, a revaluation, ‘can have a deconstructive potency that is beyond what one would anticipate for such a, seemingly, simple undertaking’ (Baker 2010). The use of clichés is thus a powerful way to keep the ambiguous (textual) Tolkien alive. The appropriation of Tolkienesque discourses, particularly those ubiquitous character types, fantasy races, stock scenes and common settings, and the re-emphasis of same, promises some considerable deconstructive and resistant potency. Hite (1989) argues that this kind of rewriting – a mixture of appropriation, reframing and shifting emphasis – is a more suitable method to the methods espoused by Postmodernism. She writes that though experimental fictions by women share with Postmodernism certain ‘decentering and disseminating strategies’ these experimental narratives are arrived at ‘by an entirely different route, which involves emphasising conventionally marginal characters and themes, in this way re-centering the value structure of the narrative’ (1989, 2). This different route ‘privileges a politics of representation which, under the influence of Postmodernism, has been largely abandoned despite the fact that misrepresentation of marginal groups in discourse continues to be the norm rather than the exception’ (Baker 2012, 156).

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Thus, the rewritten Tolkienesque fantasy trilogy The Faeden Chronicles employs “decentering” and reframing strategies that emphasise marginal characters and themes, specifically relating to representations of race, gender and sexuality. It is the continued production and circulation of the clichés of the genre – but rewritten to emphasise racial, gender and sexual diversity – that evokes an instability in the (masculinist and heteronormative) narrative tradition. This discursive resistance is potent precisely because the most widely disseminated norms – those that privilege masculinist and heteronormative discourse – are perceived as stable, singular and true. When other discourses (other stories) are circulated a multiplicity, a plurality, arises that reveals the fiction of the dominant normalizing and marginalizing narrative. The excerpt below, another from Waycaller (McPhee 2016a, 304), demonstrates how a revaluing of standard fantasy characters, in this case elves, produces different, more positive, messages about race, especially as it is constructed in this genre: The horn blew again, closer now, and the doors opened. A dozen fearsome-looking elves strode out into the courtyard, all with black skin and brilliant yellow eyes. All but one was armed with spears and wore breastplates and helms of white metal over their long black dreadlocks, helms that took the shape of dragon-heads breathing flame. Jack recognised them at once from the Battle of Bright ... These were members of the Elvish Guard. In the centre of them paced a seemingly young man, unarmed and unarmoured, his eyes more gold than yellow and his skin almost glowing, if the night sky could glow. Jack recognised him immediately. The ornate winged crown of Elvinidd kept his black dreadlocks in place, which otherwise hung well below his waist. The man’s bearing declared him as the elvish Sovereign more than any crown or blaring horns.

In this way, The Faeden Chronicles seek to disseminate different knowledges about gender and race, knowledges that emphasize diversity, powerful women and positive depictions of non-white characters. In terms of negative depictions of race, Tolkien describes the principle villain of his ring trilogy, the Dark Lord, thus: 'Sauron should be thought of as very terrible. The form that he took was that of a man of more than human stature, but not gigantic' (Carpenter & Tolkien 2012, letter 246, n.p.). In the novels themselves the character Smeagol (Gollum), who has come face-to-face with Sauron, describes the Dark Lord with these words: 'Yes, he has only four [fingers] on the Black Hand, but they are enough' (Tolkien 2005, 641). The character Isildur, who had also come face to face with Sauron, says this: ‘The Ring misseth, maybe, the heat of Sauron’s

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hand, which was black and yet burned like fire’ (Tolkien 2005, 253). This strongly suggests that Sauron, the ultimate evil antagonist of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has dark skin. The film adaptations reinforce this, without showing any actual skin, by representing Sauron as a large, blackarmoured being. The messages about race these descriptions and images encourage are far from balanced. In fact, they equate dark-skin with evil. The following excerpt communicates quite different things about race and the notion of evil to those evoked by The Lord of the Rings. This excerpt is the scene in which the main antagonist of The Faeden Chronicles (McPhee 2016a, 64) is revealed: Coming towards him from out of the darkness was a pale woman, beautiful and yet terrifying, with white hair in long dreadlocks. Her eyes shone in the dark, a luminous emerald green. The nausea increased as Jack was struck by an awful stench. His stomach heaved, but he held it down. The woman opened her mouth, parting lips that were blackened and scarred, as if burned. Out of her ashen mouth came a burst of power that knocked Jack onto the ground, spreadeagled on his back.

Whereas in Tolkien, and most High Fantasy, the antagonist is an evil male, dark of mind and often of complexion (and just as often somehow effeminate), the antagonist of The Faeden Chronicles is fair – with pale skin, white hair and green eyes. Based on and named after the Celtic goddess of war and death, Morrigan, she is also, obviously, female. In order to decouple racial associations with the word “dark” when used to describe evil, Morrigan is referred to interchangeably as the Dark Goddess and the Pale Mother. There is a long history of discourse that constructs the female as evil or corrupt and the male as good and incorruptible. Even so, the impression given by much fantasy fiction is that women can never be so powerful that they pose a significant (global) threat. The ultimate evil in David Edding’s Belgariad series (Torak), J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (Lord Voldemort) and Stephen Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series (Lord Foul), and dozens of others, are all male. In Tolkienesque fantasy the most powerful beings on both sides are usually male. In The Lord of the Rings, the Dark Lord Sauron and his opponents, the wizards, are all male. The Lady Galadriel, who does display temporal and magical power, is not present in the final battle with Sauron and plays only a supporting role in the fight against him. I would suggest this is because her powers are constructed as wholly feminine (protective and defensive, prophetic and personal) rather than the “masculine” powers

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accorded to Gandalf and the wizards, that are offensive and destructive, potent and global. The Faeden Chronicles addresses this by making the most powerful beings on both sides of the good/evil spectrum female. Morrigan is the ultimate (and potent) evil who poses a global threat. In contrast, the head of the Druid Order, my version of Tolkien’s brotherhood of wizards, is Kashashem, a black, elvish woman. There are also supporting characters of both genders on both sides of the good/evil spectrum, making it clear that gender is not an obstacle to power and does not determine whether a person is good or bad. Thus The Faeden Chronicles decouple good and evil from race and present women as capable of ultimate power, and able to be as good or wicked as they please, just like men. Despite some fans questioning of Frodo and Sam’s sexuality, the works of Tolkien and other Tolkienesque fantasy are almost completely devoid of non-heterosexual characters. The recent works of George R.R. Martin are a notable exception, however these works, though influenced by Tolkien and in the epic fantasy genre, could not reasonably be described as Tolkienesque. In many ways, Martin’s Game of Thrones series is a refusal of many of the themes (and innocence) of Tolkien’s writing. In writing back to Tolkien, one of my goals was to include characters who occupied the full spectrum of sexuality. The Faeden Chronicles includes heterosexual, bisexual, gay and lesbian characters, whose sexuality is a significant part of their characterisation, but who are not solely defined by it. One of the important secondary characters, Ellisenn, is an elvish bisexual male. Another character, Tru, a Fennling (a kind of halfling) is gay and also effeminate, in a way that does not trivialise or demean effeminacy.14 There is also a lesbian warrior queen (human) and a female bisexual druid (also human). The Faeden Chronicles reflect contemporary questions about whether or not sexuality is inborn or a choice, a question which I believe does not have a single answer, by including more than one pathway to sexual orientation or behaviour for the characters. One of the human characters states that she has chosen to be bisexual. On the other hand, the elves in The Faeden Chronicles experience a thing called ‘the twining’, which is a life-long, magical bonding to a mate in which gender matters not at all. As the character Ellisenn explains: 14

For my scholarly work on effeminacy see Baker, D.J. (2017) ‘(Re)Scripting the Self: Creative Writing, Effeminacy and the Art of Subjectivity’, Writing In Practice: The Journal Of Creative Writing Research, volume 3, n.p., https://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/current-wip-edition-2/articles/rescripting-the-selfcreative-writing-effeminacy-2.html

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“The twining is how elves experience attraction, love. For the elves, love comes just once in their long lives. We do not choose who to love. The twining strikes us and we cannot fight it. When one elf twines with another the bond is unbreakable. It is a magical bond, eternal.” (McPhee 2016b, 263-264)

Thus, the diversity of race, gender and sexuality in The Faeden Chronicles writes back to Tolkien in a way that enriches the field of Tolkienesque fantasy and keeps the questions of how race, gender and sexuality are represented in the genre, and in Tolkien’s writing, in discussion.

Conclusion It is important that the Tolkien that survives in public memory is not one that silences discussion about gender, sexuality and race. One potent way to work against this forgetting, to keep the ambiguous discursive Tolkien alive, is to produce creative works that contribute to readers’ knowledge about race, gender and sexuality in Tolkien’s writing and Tolkienesque literature. Using fiction to foreground the ways that gender, race and sexuality are represented in Tolkienesque fantasy broadens the discussion beyond the scholarly domain, making such discussions part of everyday culture for many readers. The Faeden Chronicles are one contribution to the broadening of this discussion. They also reframe epic fantasy worlds as places rich in diversity of race, gender and sexuality.

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Tiffin, H. 2003 “Postcolonial Literatures and Counter Discourse.” In The Post-colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge. Tolkien, J.R.R. (1937) 2012. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. —. (1954) 2005. The Lord of the Rings. Fiftieth Anniversary One Volume Edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin. van Dijk, T.A. 1997. “The Study of Discourse.” In Discourse as Structure and Process, edited by Teun A. van Dijk, 1-34. London: Sage. Vink, R. 2013. “ ‘Jewish’ Dwarves: Tolkien and Anti-Semitic Stereotyping.” Tolkien Studies 10: 123-145. Yang, J. 1999. “Representation and Resistance: A Cultural, Social, and Political Perplexity in Post-Colonial Literature.” Political Discourse – Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism. Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University. Accessed 23 April 2017. http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/yang/1.html.

ROMANTIC AND RENAISSANCE LIVES: RECOVERING THE PAST IN THE DIGITAL AND FICTIONAL PRESENT

CHAPTER TWELVE PICTURES OF LYLY: DIGITAL CORRUPTIONS AND BIOGRAPHICAL TRUTHS LAURIE JOHNSON

The power of the image in modern visual culture is such that it may be absurd to imagine any biography being published anymore without the immediacy that photographs lend to the story of a life. When dealing with subjects from eras preceding the photographic age, there is also always the blessing provided by portraiture. Yet what is the fate of a biography where there is no portrait: what to do in the absence of any verified image of one’s subject? In the digital era, biographers confronted with an absence of specific imagery might simply opt to furnish their scholarship with general images or context-specific ones: the house in which our subject was born, for example, or a map of the town in which our subject lived. It would seem that no matter who we might wish to write about, the power of Google Images will provide us with a barrage of viable images to lend visual support to the life writing we produce. There is a risk that this illusion of richness or plenitude may bleed back into the perception we have of our subject – perhaps, somewhere in this visual cornucopia, there is a portrait of our subject. This essay will consider some of the pitfalls of using Google Images, or indeed any site of similar design and architecture, when seeking to compile visual support for biographical writing. My focus will be on the early modern playwright, poet and courtier John Lyly. Using this example, I will also finally raise the question of whether our modern predilection for seeking out pictures of our biographical subjects might at times come into conflict with any subject who, like Lyly, was explicitly opposed to portraiture. A concern for writing biography in the absence of a suitable image is similar to the more general problem facing medieval historians for whom, as Robin Fleming (2009) has explained, there is rarely enough evidence in the historical record to sustain any extended biographical

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narrative – as a result, biographies of medieval figures are often restricted to dealing with kings and holy men, and their focus is on public activity or indeed the mode is shifted to the “times” in which they lived: “Given the unfortunate realities that govern our sources, it is little wonder that scholars in the field often channel their biographical impulses into prosopography, or multiple biography,” with studies populated by “faceless automatons pushed across time and space by anonymous, impersonal historical forces” (607). Fleming contrasts the resulting relative failures of medieval biographies with “those rollicking, life-filled ‘speculative biographies’ so successfully written by early modernists” (607). While she does not explicitly say as much, the inference seems to be that speculation becomes sustainable if it has a face to which to attach the life, distinct from the “faceless automatons” of a medieval prosopography; further, the inference here is that biographers of early modern subjects enjoy a surfeit of faces with which to work. Certainly, as Roy Strong’s work on Tudor portraiture has established over the past six decades, portraiture established itself in the early modern period as a fundamental vehicle for the assertion of both individual agency and the dominant ideology. Any individual worth their salt and the biographer’s eye would, it seems, have been immortalised at one time or another in a portrait. For biographers of early modern subjects, then, there is a concomitant early modern visual culture that speaks in some degree to our own. Clarke Hulse and Peter Erickson’s Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (2000) brought together a number of influential early modernists, writing in the shadow of Y2K, to direct the program of early modern literary studies toward the “visual turn” that had occupied anthropology and other fields in the wake of Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey’s Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1994). In their introduction, though, the editors of Early Modern Visual Culture remind their readers that the project of “visual culture” began as a field of academic inquiry in Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972) and gained wider currency in Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), which is to say that the study of modern visual culture gained its impetus from studies of early modern visual culture, suggesting a lineage from one to the other (Hulse and Erickson 2000, 2). For that special breed of early modernists whose work is captured under the label of Shakespeare Studies, early modern visual culture has, however, proven sufficiently different from our own to create an opening for endless debates about the face of Shakespeare. The two representations

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that are widely accepted to be of him are also, most likely, posthumous: the Droeshout engraving that adorned the First Folio was printed in 1622, six years after his death; and the bust accompanying his monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon (sometimes disparagingly referred to as the “pork butcher”), would undoubtedly have been commissioned in memoriam. Many portraits painted during his lifetime have been raised as possible candidates for contemporary representations, with arguably the widest acceptance given to the Chandos portrait, attributed to John Taylor, circa 1610, but the Cobbe portrait, also most likely to have painted around 1610, has received significant scholarly support as well, not least of all from Stanley Wells (2009). Despite such debates, or perhaps because of them, these images have become associated inextricably with Shakespeare. One or another of them will certainly stand service as a true image of Shakespeare supporting any biographical exercise in relation to the great English playwright. Suppose our biographical impulse has an alternative target, not after the manner of a prosopography but focused instead on, say, one of Shakespeare’s contemporary playwrights? It is perhaps worth noting that Shakespeare tends in any case to have more purchase with publishers, such that many a book that sets out to be about other playwrights ends up being reworked under the publisher’s insistence that there be some coverage given to the Bard, or at least that his name be used in the title. One prominent example can be found in Andrew Gurr’s study of the Lord Admiral’s Men, one company of which Shakespeare was not a member, but which Cambridge University Press published as Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company, 1594-1625 (2009). In a recent book by Lars Engle and Eric Rasmussen (2014) on other playwrights, Shakespeare’s name also takes pride of place on the cover, appearing as it does in the brightest and largest font (Figure 1). Thankfully, neither publisher felt compelled to put Shakespeare’s image on the cover of either book but the choice made by WileyBlackwell in the second case is, I think, a curious example of the pressures of the image in our modern visual culture. While Cambridge opted for an image of Edward Alleyn, the leading actor of the Admiral’s Men, WileyBlackwell did not use an image of any of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Caravaggio’s “Cardsharps” (1594) is perhaps only relevant to the extent that it was painted around the time of the formation of the Chamberlain’s and Admiral’s companies, and perhaps, allegorically, because Caravaggio marked his emergence as a painter in his own right with this painting, finally breaking free of his master, Arpino (Witting and Patrizi 2007, 22). The same might be said of the attempt to elevate Shakespeare’s coevals out from under the shadow of the Bard. In the content of the image, wherein

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Figure 1. Cover, Lars Engle and Eric Rasmussen, Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries (2014)

two streetwise boys are in the process of swindling an unworldly boy out of his money via a game of cards, it is hard to see what relevance the publishers saw. It might be argued, in their defence, that pictures of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are not easy to come by, if that were true. Yet it is not true – portraits of all of the major playwrights covered in their study, such as Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton and John Webster, have been well established. One might argue that the authors would have preferred to avoid using a portrait of any one playwright, to be fair, but this prompts me to ask why one of the most famous (or infamous) paintings of a gathering of playwrights and luminaries was not considered for the cover of this collection (see Figure 2). Painted by John Faed in 1851, “Shakespeare and his Friends at the Mermaid Tavern” is an imaginative recreation of the gatherings of men of letters that Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have supported. While no evidence exists that Shakespeare ever attended the so-called Friday Street

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Club, Katherine Duncan-Jones (2001) argues that the club certainly existed and that Shakespeare’s business dealings with the proprietor, William Johnson, lend support to the idea that he would have been a welcome participant (249). In any case, the painting draws on existing portraits of Raleigh (standing to the left of Shakespeare), Thomas Dekker (seated, facing forward, to Raleigh’s left), Jonson (at Shakespeare’s shoulder, trying to be noticed), John Fletcher (seated opposite Jonson, looking away disinterestedly), and Francis Beaumont (standing above Fletcher, with his hand on the back of the chair occupied by Francis Bacon). My point is thus that while the vocation of playwright was not a particularly lofty one, the majority of playwrights of the period did see fit to sit for portraits at a time when doing so was a symbol of status. All of this leads me to pose a riddle of sorts: where are the pictures of Lyly?

Figure 2. John Faed, “Shakespeare and his Friends at the Mermaid Tavern” (1851), in David J. Brewer (1900, 1491)

Playwright, poet, courtier – Lyly’s influence on Shakespeare alone should be sufficient grounds for history to want him in its pages. Three of his plays – Endymion, or the Man in the Moon; Love’s

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Metamorphosis; and Gallathea – are well understood by theatre historians and literary scholars to have been key sources for components of both Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hunter 1962, 298-349; Scragg 1977), and his Campaspe is arguably the first romantic comedy of the period (Weld 1975, 101-35). Moreover, his earlier prose writings, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580) cast the mould for English allegorical prose that would be followed closely thereafter by Robert Greene and the University wits for many years (Scragg 2003, 17-18). More to the point, Lyly’s fame need not be measured after the fact by virtue of his influence on those who came after – as Andy Kesson (2014) notes, “Lyly became the most famous Elizabethan writer in his own time ... outselling any contemporary literary work” (3-4). His prose writing “was the best-selling and most widely read literary work of the period” and his Campaspe went into three editions in the year of its publication, a feat not equalled until the publication of Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour in 1597 (Kesson 2014, 4). Surely such fame would demand a portrait? For the biographer who might wish to locate a portrait of Lyly, though, it would seem the search is destined to fail – as far as the historical record can reveal, Lyly never sat for a portrait, nor did any of his contemporaries feel the man worthy of a sketch from memory. Yet in the digital era, we seem to be prepared to fill this gap most egregiously. In Figure 3, for example, we can see the first screen shot of a Google search for the terms “john lyly pictures,” aggregated by the results in the Images tab. What do we make of such an array of images? The first cautionary note to heed is that not all results on a Google image search are to be understood as images of what was entered into the search. An image appears as a ‘hit’ if the metadata contains the search terms, which would be the case in every one of these images of title pages or small quotations. The user might be forgiven for thinking, though, that the remaining images strewn across the screen here may include at least one picture of John Lyly. Let us consider the fifth picture on the top line of results, for example, which is the cover slide for a presentation by Katherine Pepler (username Kadi), released via Slideshare on 30 November, 2010. The 13-slide presentation is a brief account of Lyly’s life and works, drawing on credible sources including John Dover Wilson, Kent Cartwright, and the compilers of . Yet Kadi’s choice of image is an unfortunate one, since this is in fact the Corpus Christi portrait, generally held to be one of the few portraits of Christopher Marlowe. How could the author of this slide presentation in 2010 mistake a Marlowe portrait for one of Lyly?

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Figure 3. Google Images search for “john lyly pictures” via screen capture 13 April, 2016

Knowing something of how Google searches aggregate hits may help us to understand Kadi’s innocent mistake, but also to understand how the mistake begins to introduce more corruption into the Google system over time. By looking at the display for each item in the search, we are able to trace when each image was added to the web and what information is displayed to the user. The second image, for example, is identical to the one used by Kadi, to the extent that even the same cropping has been applied to the Corpus Christi portrait. This does not mean that Kadi searched for Lyly, found this image, and then cut and paste it into her presentation. How do we know this? Quite simply because clicking on this second image takes us to the blog, “My Poetic ‘Slide’”, wherein we find a “John Lyly Bio” with this image attached to it (Figure 4). Searching the HTML code for the site reveals that the page was created in May, 2015. In other words, rather than Kadi using this page as her source for the Lyly image, it appears that the anonymous creator of this page uploaded Kadi’s image, retaining the tag for John Lyly. How, then, might Kadi have misidentified Marlowe’s image as Lyly’s? We may find an answer in our search when we notice that the full Corpus Christi image can be seen in our initial list of hits in the fourth row, third along from the left.

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Figure 4. “Myy Poetic ‘Slide’’” Blog Site. Sccreen capture, 1 3 April 2016

Cirrca 2010, the image would have appearedd as a result iff a search for pictures of John Lylyy by virtue off the fact thatt it was inclu uded on a Wikipedia ppage, “Universsity wits”, thee text of whichh includes Joh hn Lyly’s name. While the captionss provided on n the Wikipeddia site clearly y identify the portrait as being that of Christopheer Marlowe, tthe hit page on Google merely reproduces the image and is accompaanied by thee caption “University wits”. To anyybody not welll-versed in th e way Googlee tags and returns searcch results, a search for a picture p of Johhn Lyly, revealing this picture withh the generic caption c “Univ versity wits” ccould easily have h been assumed to have produceed a picture off Lyly. Once one person makes m this mistake, thee potential forr corruption to o spread is maagnified by th he Google system: it dooes not distingguish textual content c appearring in close proximity p to an image from tags annd metadata atttached speciffically to that image. A name appearrs within the page p content near n an imagee, so a name iss assigned specifically tto an image – both are thrown up as equiivalent in statu us as hits. A similar exxplanation liess behind the various appearaances of Shak kespeare’s face on our search result (one ( on the seecond line, onne on the third d, and two on the fourrth). In each of these insstances, the iimage is iden ntified as Shakespearee, but Lyly’s naame appears somewhere s onn the web pagee. Thee same is truue, it seems, of the first image on th his page: Godfrey Knneller’s portrrait of the ph hilosopher Joohn Locke, painted in 1679 (Figurre 5). This imaage is tagged as “John Lylyy” on one web site, an

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Figure 5. Goddfrey Kneller, Portrait P of John n Locke (1697). From the colleection of Sir Robert W Walpole, Houghton Hall. Public domain

emaze.com slideshow on o Lyly, up ploaded in 22015, hence its first appearance hhere. Yet, as far f as I can tell, nowhere ellse is Kneller’’s portrait of Locke taggged as Lyly or reproduced d in proximityy to content containing Lyly’s namee. How did it end up here, then? I suspeect the issue iss with the third image in our initial list, l which is a frame from an engraving of Locke that was preepared by Geoorge Vertue in 1738, based oon the Knellerr portrait. It is tagged in the metadaata, appropriattely enough, aas John Lockee, and the page to whicch this search result links iss the freedictioonary.com bio ographical page for Loocke. So, againn, how does this t image ennd up on a seaarch page for images of Lyly? The issue is thaat this page, like any goo od online dictionary, pprovides at thhe very bottom m of the pagee a menu allo owing the user to scroll to all contiiguous entriess, and here wee find entries for none other than JJohn Lyly. Beecause this paage thus appeaars in a Goog gle search

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for pictures of Lyly, it would seem, during the last few years, that users have been unquestioningly adopting it on their pages as an image of Lyly, leading to these pages appearing in the Google search results of future users, who then “tag” their pages accordingly, and so on. Then, when a user decides that a grainy black and white engraving is not good enough for their page, they seek out the Kneller portrait on which the Vertue image is based, and add that to the list of Lyly images. Corruption spreads, this time in full colour. The biographer of Lyly must therefore be carefully forewarned: Google creates the false impression of visual plenitude when in fact all that awaits the biographer in search of Lyly’s face is abysmal absence. This should hardly surprise anybody with a deep appreciation for Lyly’s work. In what is considered to be Lyly’s first foray into dramatic writing, the play Campaspe (c. 1581; pub. 1584) features the character of the portrait painter, Apelles, whose infatuation with his subject, the title character, drives the primary plot. While the resolution, happily, sees Apelles and Campaspe allowed to pursue their love for each other, the role of the portrait sets up the initial complication, with questions raised about whether Apelles is more in love with the image he produces than with its subject. In order to prolong his time with Campaspe, the painter damages his own painting – is Apelles, at that moment, damaging his love? As Michael Pincombe (1996, 46) points out, these questions are subsumed by Lyly under questions of royal authority: Alexander hired Apelles to paint a portrait of him, but the artist refuses to idolise the warrior leader and insists on painting him scars and all – a scenario played out throughout the Euphues narratives and repeated in this early play – so the painting of Campaspe becomes a vehicle for Alexander to assert control over both his beautiful Theban captive, Campaspe, and the portrait artist. She will be exposed before the artist’s gaze, and he shall gaze upon her beauty only from a distance. In any case, as the character of Aristotle explicitly claims in the play, portraiture is hardly the vehicle for eternal glorification: “nothing better becommeth kings,” he suggests, “then literature, which maketh them come as neere to the Gods as wisdom, as they do in dignitie” (1.3.65-67; qtd. Pincombe 1996, 46). The play thus represents Lyly’s early drawing of a line in the sand to set his chosen craft apart from that of portraiture: if he himself is to be remembered at all by history, then it should be by his works, and not by any mismanaged portrait. It is little wonder, then, that the dominant biographical mode adopted by scholars in relation to Lyly has been critical biography. Based on this approach, as Leah Scragg (2006) has argued, “the career of the most influential prose writer of the Elizabethan period, and foremost

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dramatist of the 1580s, has been constructed in terms of a rapid ascent and decline linked to literary taste” (210). Scragg sets out to trace Lyly’s ongoing cultural presence into the 1590s, but even then her work remains focused on Lyly as literary figure. A significant biographical project remains to be done, I suggest, to resurrect Lyly’s other lives from the footnotes of the biographies of others. He appears, for example, as a contender for the position of the Master of Revels, albeit usually as a peripheral character in accounts of the success of George Buc in gaining the reversion of the role. His repeated attempts to petition the queen for additional preferment are also readily available in the historical record, yet no work seems to have done to explain his repeated failure and his demise as a public figure in the early 1600s, leading to his death, poor and marginalised, in 1606. Was he, therefore, to some extent his own worst enemy? From the perspective of the modern biographer, it may seem so – our desire for images to fuel our biographical stories may strain too hard upon the edges of the biographical impulse where Lyly is concerned. His mistrust of images, perhaps never better expressed than in the description of the portrait of Cynthia in Endymion, might also spell out the fate of the biography of the man who protested so hard against the role of the portrait artist: There – ay, portrayed to life – with a cold quaking in every joint, I beheld many wolves barking at thee, Cynthia, who having ground their teeth to bite, did with striving bleed themselves to death. There might I see Ingratitude with an hundred eyes, gazing for benefits, and with a thousand teeth gnawing on the bowels wherein she was bred. Treachery stood all clothed in white, with a smiling countenance but both her hands bathed in blood. (Lyly 1894 [1584], 5.1.131-38)

Works cited Brewer, David J., ed. 1900. The World’s Best Essays from the Earliest Period to the Present Time: Volume 4. St. Louis: Ferd. Kaiser. Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds. 1994. Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. 2001. Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life. London: Arden Shakespeare. Engle, Lars, and Eric Rasmussen. 2014. Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Fleming, Robin. 2009. “Writing Biography at the Edge of History.” The American Historical Review 114 (3): 606-14.

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Gurr, Andrew. 2009. Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company, 1594-1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hulse, Clarke, and Peter Erickson, eds. 2000. Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hunter, G.K. 1962. John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kesson, Andy. 2014. John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyly, John. (1584) 1894. Endymion: The Man in the Moon. Edited by George Baker. New York: Henry Holt. Pincombe, Michael. 1996. The Plays of John Lyly: Eros and Eliza. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Scragg, Leah. 1977. “Shakespeare, Lyly, and Ovid: The Influence of ‘Gallathea’ on ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.” Shakespeare Survey 30: 125-34. —. 2003. “Introduction.” In Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and His England, by John Lyly, edited by Leah Scragg. 1-20. Revels Plays Companion Library. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —. 2006. “The Victim of Fashion: Rereading the Biography of John Lyly.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 19: 210-26. Weld, John. 1975. Meaning in Comedy: Studies in Elizabethan Romantic Comedy. New York: State University Press. Wells, Stanley, ed. 2009. A Life Portrait at Last: Portraits, Poet, Patron, Poems. Stratford-upon Avon: The Cobbe Foundation and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Witting, Feliz, and M.L. Patrizi. 2007. Caravaggio. New York: Parkstone Press.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN THE TUDOR PAINTRIX IN RECENT FICTION CATHERINE PADMORE

The figure of the artist is a popular one in fiction, investigated in multiple studies.1 This article examines a particular subset of the trope: literary portrayals of female artists who served the Tudors. It considers two artists from this period and the ways authors of recent historical biofictions have used what is known and what is unknown about these women to construct narratives across multiple genres. I argue that these figures are useful to contemporary authors partly because elements of their biographies aid world building and the mechanics of plot, but also because struggles about female agency and authorship in two of the novels place them within current debates about gender and writing. The two artists I discuss are Susanna Horenbout (or Hornebolte) (1503 to before-1554) and Levina Teerlinc (1510/20 to 1576). Both were daughters of renowned illuminators of the Ghent-Bruges school (Gerard Horenbout and Simon Bening respectively). They are thought to have been trained within the workshops of their fathers, later travelling to England to serve the English Court. Horenbout came to England in the 1520s (James and Franco 2000, 91) while Teerlinc arrived in 1545 and painted up to her death in 1576 (James and Franco 2000, 94). Sadly, few works survive that can be definitively attributed to these women (Coombs 1998, 24), and even these attributions are subject to debate (Coombs and Derbyshire 2015, 242; James 2009, 263). What we know of both painters comes mainly from court records of payments and gift registers, and legal documents of wills and marriages.2 While male artists like Hans Holbein (1497-1543) and Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619) might be familiar figures, James and Franco suggest that these two female artists and their works have been “consistently ignored, marginalized or dismissed as inept” 1

See, for example: House 1988; Lent 2006; Meaney 2004; and Woodward 1988. See, for example: Campbell and Foister 1986; Coombs 1998; James 2009; James and Franco 2000; Strong 1983 and 1984.

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(2000, 94), in comparison to their male contemporaries, a process which has “relegated to the shadows of Tudor art literature these two singularly important Flemish artists” (James 2009, 263). A sketched biography follows, to outline the lives of these women before discussing their later representations in fiction. Horenbout was an accomplished painter. At eighteen, she sold one of her miniatures (a Salvator Mundi or Saviour of the World) to Albrecht Dürer, when he visited Antwerp in 1521, for the same price as he would have charged for a small canvas of his own (Campbell and Foister 1986, 725; James 2009, 243). He wrote in his diary that “[i]t is a great wonder that a woman should be able to do such work” (Campbell and Foister 1986, 725; James 2009, 243; James and Franco 2000, 95). Campbell and Foister suggest she may have been the first of the Horenbout family to serve Henry Tudor (1986, 725). In England she married John Parker, one of Henry’s high-ranking yeomen (Campbell and Foister 1986, 725). Records show that she and her husband were favoured with New Year gifts from the king and that she was listed as a gentlewoman (Campbell and Foister 1986, 725; Frye 2010, 78). After Parker died and she remarried, Horenbout was sent to accompany Anne of Cleves to England (Campbell and Foister 1986, 726). She is thought to have lived in England until her death, which was some time before 1554 (James 2009, 254). Teerlinc was brought to England from Bruges in 1545 to serve Henry VIII after the deaths of his two portrait painters, Holbein and Lucas Horenbout (Susanna’s brother) (James and Franco 2000, 96; Strong 1984, 54). In the records, Teerlinc was described as a “paintrix” (Coombs 1998, 24; James and Franco 2000, 97; Nichols 1863, 39). She was awarded a royal annuity of forty pounds (Strong 1984, 54), which Elizabeth I made lifelong in 1559 and paid until Teerlinc’s death in 1576 (Frye 2010, 80).3 Like Horenbout, she was classed as a gentlewoman of the queen’s chamber and her husband was a gentleman pensioner (Strong 1984, 54). From 1552 there are records of her works being given as New Year gifts to the monarch (James 2009, 310; Strong 1984, 55), and she was generally given valuable gifts of gilt in return (James 2009, 310). Elizabeth was so pleased with one work that she kept it “[w]ith her said majestie” (Goldring et al. 2014, 249; Strong 1984, 55), a rare occurrence and notable enough to be recorded. Teerlinc is also thought to have drawn portraits for official documentation (James 2009; Strong 1984). She died in 1576, apparently 3

Skidmore provides a comparison that gives a sense of the relative value of this annuity: in 1560, 50 pounds would have been worth about 140,000 pounds today (Skidmore 2010, xiii).

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painting right to the end; her last New Year gift to the ruler was “the Quenes picture upon a Carde” (Strong 1984, 55). The novels I analyse use this archival record in particular ways, sometimes taking what is known and extrapolating or speculating from it, while at other times interpolating into its gaps. Like many writers of historical fiction, these authors note where they have strayed from the accepted record, or outline the gaps into which they have written.4 In the case of these two Tudor paintrices, the gaps are wide. One of the authors, Elizabeth Fremantle, writes that “[i]t is largely the story of Levina Teerlinc that has required the full force of my imagination as so little is known about her” (2014, 451). For Michelle Diener: “Susanna Horenbout is even harder to pin down” than her husband, John Parker (2011, 299). The paucity of the archival record means that these historical figures move readily into fiction. Yet the same can be said of many personages from the same era. I argue that it is not just the gaps that are important – the specific characteristics of the Tudor woman artist “type” make her especially useful to writers of our own time. Here I examine Elizabeth Fremantle’s Sisters of Treason (2014), Michelle Diener’s In a Treacherous Court (2011), and Judith MerkleRiley’s The Serpent Garden (1996). Fremantle’s Sisters of Treason (2014) is a work of historical fiction. It features Teerlinc, who in this representation is sympathetic to the plight of the Grey sisters, possible rivals for the throne during the queenships of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. The point-of-view alternates between Teerlinc (third person) and Katherine and Mary Grey (first person). Diener’s In a Treacherous Court (2011) is a work of historical fiction with detective and romance elements. In it, Susanna Horenbout (known hereafter as ‘Susanna H’) witnesses something on her journey to England that puts her life at risk. The book chronicles her quest, along with her protector and later betrothed, King Henry’s trusted man, John Parker, to understand the significance of this. The third-person pointof-view moves between Horenbout and Parker. Merkle-Riley’s The Serpent Garden (1996) is a work of historical fiction with supernatural, romance and detective elements. The main character is called Susanna Maartens (known then as ‘Susanna M’). While she is represented as English-born of a Flemish father, she is linked to Horenbout by her first name and by mention of a Salvator Mundi she made (Merkle-Riley 1996, 16). The point-of-view moves between Susanna and other characters, in first and third person. 4

De Groot notes how rarely readers of this genre are given the novel’s text unaccompanied by explanatory material like author notes, timelines, character lists and sources (2010, 6-9, 63; 2015, 41-3).

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These novels have been selected for the following reasons: the fictional portrayals bear close resemblance to actual historical figures (in these cases, Susanna Horenbout and Levina Teerlinc), rather than to artists in general; the artists are women; the artists are (mostly) working in England; and the artists are major characters rather than in cameo or ‘walk-on’ roles. Novels containing some but not all of these criteria have been excluded.5 Such limiting criteria mean the artists’ portrayals are similar enough to each other to allow analysis of the features and usages of their particular types, rather than the many other sub-sets possible within this. In particular, I examine how elements of the Tudor paintrix’s biography have been used by authors. Gillian Polack writes about the manifold ways writers use history in their novels, and the effectiveness of these techniques. For her, “information about the past has to serve specific narrative functions. The more strongly historical data are linked to narrative function and particularly the emotional aspects of the novel, the more real they are likely to seem to readers” (2014, 529). Drawing from this, my argument is twofold: that attributes of the Tudor paintrix function within the narratives to support each author’s quest for realism and the needs of the plot, while also making parallels between the characters and our contemporary world. I will first address this narrative functionality and then discuss the wider implications of these figures. Within the selected novels, the features of the Tudor paintrix generally serve world building and plot development functions simultaneously (using the efficient “double duty” technique dear to many writers). The paired aesthetic project of these novelists and their subjects is the first of many manifestations of this. With both writer and painter engaged in the pursuit of realism, seeking “to imitate the face of mankind … so near and so well after the life” (Hilliard 1992, 55), the world of the novel is more easily established as “real” for readers. This contributes greatly to readers’ acceptance of the events of the stories, many of which pivot around schemes for the crown. The three female artist characters are enmeshed in such plots, albeit reluctantly. Levina’s husband warns her off a scheme to marry Katherine Grey to Spanish royalty: “Veena, you can’t get involved 5

See, for example: Sonia Overall’s A Likeness, in which a fabulously grumpy fictional male painter interacts with characters based on real figures; Melanie Taylor’s The Truth of the Line, which centres on Nicholas Hilliard; Vanora Bennett’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman, which features Hans Holbein the Younger; Susan Vreeland’s The Passion of Artemesia, about Italian painter Artemesia Gentileschi; or Karen Harper’s The Fyre Mirror, in which Teerlinc plays a minor role.

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in all this. These politics. It is too dangerous” (Fremantle 2014, 195). Susanna H tries to distance herself from the political machinations of the court: “She was an artist; she knew nothing of this kind of intrigue” (Diener 2011, 26). Susanna M likewise asks, “what have painters got to do with plots” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 404). In these novels, painters have everything to do with plots. Their involvement in political intrigues is the narrative engine of these novels, assisting with the revelation or concealment of key information and increasing tension and drama.6 Since their world building and plot functions are necessarily interlinked, both will be addressed simultaneously. I will outline key examples below.7 Like their historical counterparts, the artists are portrayed either as migrants or the daughters of migrants. This means they are positioned slightly outside of native-born English society, a little estranged from it, and are thus able to note its details. Polack notes a similar use of “a stranger exploring a strange land as an excuse to present details” (2014, 530) in one of the historical novels she examines. This approach enables the narrative’s acquisition of detail without reducing credibility or plausibility (which is vital for keeping readers immersed in the worlds of the novels): “The datum must be a part of the world of the story and be fitted into that world as part of the world building. It must help make the world of the novel appear real, in other words” (Polack 2014, 540). In this way, the artist’s migrant background supports the realist project of all three novels analysed here. This is bolstered by another aspect of the women’s biography: the visual acuity assumed by the authors to have been honed by artistic training. Such observational skill often comes in handy when the characters are at risk, providing a means of escape from tricky situations. MerkleRiley’s Susanna M has perfect recall: “My visual memory is perfect. Once I’ve seen something, I don’t forget it, and in the first flash of sight, the plan of this room had been impressed on my brain” (1996, 409). This 6

The particulars and extent of this seem to vary depending on the demands of the genre. The two ‘Susanna’ novels incorporate into the historical fiction mode elements of romance, detection and fantasy. The more multi-hyphenated the genre, it seems, the more useful the traits of this ‘type’ of figure. Reciprocally, Fremantle’s portrayal demonstrates fewer of these repeated characteristics than the other two. Of the three, this work is the most firmly placed within the traditional historical fiction genre, in which some of the ‘action hero’, ‘love interest’ or ‘detective’ character traits of the artist type are not required by the plot. 7 There is not space here to mention other recurring characteristics in these portrayals, including the artists’ physical appearance and strength or the narrative usage of their creative fugues.

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helps immediately afterwards in the novel when their room is plunged into darkness. Diener’s Susanna H has “good instincts”, partly “because she was an artist, sensitive to atmosphere” (2011, 13). When under attack in this book, it is she who suggests they might actually use the cart-load of crossbows they ferry to the king, rather than just hide behind them (19). Practised at observation, the women are familiar with the many expressions of the human face and are consequently quick to judge character. Susanna M states, “I see a lot in faces. I can see thoughts and hurts and dreamings and sometimes very great evil well concealed” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 36). Likewise, Susanna H soon sees if someone is lying (Diener 2011, 105). As focalising point-of-view characters, they are the lens through which readers assess personality, too, so their observation is partly a reader’s own, providing the emotional “pathway to the readers into the foreign world” of the novel (Polack 2014, 526). In Sisters of Treason, perception is emphasised but in a different way. The plot is driven partly by what the artist misses, rather than what she sees. When Katherine Grey and Juno Seymour plot Katherine’s secret marriage, it is a young Hilliard, rather than Teerlinc, who notices (Fremantle 2014, 305). This failure has great poignancy – had she seen it earlier, the marriage between Grey and Hertford might have been prevented. Neither does she register her husband’s marital drift, until it is too late. In this work, Teerlinc’s observation skills serve a different narrative purpose: her role is instead to bear witness to the atrocities of the age and record them through her art (Fremantle 2014, 448), sending them beyond England’s borders to John Knox. Images produced by these artists are valued for what their observation reveals. Those by Susanna M are described as: “[c]haracter, truth, shining up from two inches of burnished parchment” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 120). Power-brokers in the novel quickly understand the value of this ability. A fictional Cardinal Wolsey sees the worth of someone “who can depict the soul with a brush” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 74): “a painter who could depict character in the span of a man’s hand was a treasure beyond belief to a diplomat who must assess motives at a thousand miles of distance” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 123). Wolsey sees additional strategic potential in Susanna M: “What cleverer, what more innocent and more flattering way to gain a pair of ears than to lend to a gentleman’s household a portrait painter to take a likeness?” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 119). Similarly, John Parker notices Susanna H’s eyes “were never still, taking in everything around her. She would make a good spy” (Diener 2011, 6). This ability draws the artist figures (and readers along with them) into the great political intrigues of the time.

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The artists’ narrative involvement in such intrigues is aided by the documented social position of Horenbout and Teerlinc, who were noted in the records as gentlewomen as well as court painters. In the novels this translates to increased social mobility. The position of royal artist gets the characters into places they would not normally enter. Their “gentle” status increases this narrative liberty, allowing them intimate access to the private world of the monarch. Thus the artists move easily between the lower orders, religious spaces and the tight circles of the nobles. Diener’s Susanna H befriends ragged dockland boys but can also meet with the king, and Merkle-Riley’s Susanna M can speak with nobles but also tradesmen and poor widows. Unusually, being female only increases this narrative liberty. A fictional Wolsey again notes how useful this makes Susanna M: “And a woman – she could enter circles where no man could ever gain admittance” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 119). This includes female-only spaces, to which Susanna M has free access: “In this midst of all this hubbub, jockeying and jealousy, I passed in and out of the chambers of great ladies with hardly any notice, carrying my paint case where I willed” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 258). Later in both books, it serves to protect the women; Susanna M hides in a women’s religious community (Merkle-Riley 1996, 433) and Susanna H takes refuge in Queen Katherine’s chambers (Diener 2011, 251). From a writer’s perspective, this mobility is useful because it moves the plot into new areas, ensuring necessary information can be obtained and shared beyond the character’s immediate circle. Along with the characters, readers are also given admittance to usually private spaces and encounters, which can also increase narrative appeal. We might question the credibility of such fictional suppositions, but there is a real-world corollary in the archives for the strategic usefulness of these artist women. When Henry VIII was betrothed to Anne of Cleves, he sent Susanna Horenbout to Cleves as his ambassador (Campbell and Foister 1986, 726; Coombs 1998, 24; James 2009, 249). This seems most likely due to a shared language between Horenbout and the king’s prospective bride, but for historian Susan James it suggests other possibilities: “that Henry, already regretting his marital bargain, wanted to place a Flemish-speaking spy in the heart of Anne’s privy chamber” (James 2009, 250-51). James describes this appointment as “one of the earliest documented examples of Tudor employment of a royal artist or musician in this capacity” (2009, 251). The writers of these novels have used the strategic possibilities offered by biographical details in the archives to build credible worlds and dramatic plots.

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What archives give us no access to is, of course, the inner world of the Tudor paintrix: her thoughts, attitudes and emotions. In the three novels the writers have speculated into the gap. Perhaps drawn from the professional experience of working in their father’s atelier, the two Susannas are characterised as thinking quickly under pressure. Susanna H uses her copper pomander as a flail (Diener 2011, 221-22) to fend off one of the many attacks on her, and she is as steady under pressure as experienced fighters (18-19). Susanna M is similarly resourceful; after her husband’s death she makes a living painting lewd religious works and negotiating a fair recompense from a monk trying to buy her off (MerkleRiley 1996, 41). She knows the tricks used to create religious relics and is not afraid to use them to save herself, creating a waxen image of her corpse to escape capture (Merkle-Riley 1996, 439). Levina is again the exception. Certainly she demonstrates bravery during Mary’s Catholic reign by sending sketches of Protestant martyrs over to John Knox in Geneva (Fremantle 2014, 96 and 171), which puts her and others at risk later on (100 and 132). Yet when almost caught with one of these images, it is Mary Grey whose nimble thinking saves them (132). Beyond this, the Tudor paintrix is portrayed in Diener and Merkle-Riley’s novels as familiar with men’s way of functioning and not put off by it. In fact, they often play it quite tough. Susanna H’s frankness surprises John Parker: “Shock straightened his spine. She spoke like a man. Like him. And why not? She was employed by the King” (Diener 2011, 196). Susanna M is similarly straight-speaking, seen as “shrewd” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 426) because she calls the novel’s great Secret “totally ridiculous” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 425): Either Our Lord was crucified and rose again, which proves his divinity and makes it impossible that he sired the Merovingians, or he was just another earthly king who produced a useless line of descendants, which makes him not the Son of God at all … You can’t have it both ways, you know (Merkle-Riley 1996, 425-6).

In such ways, the two Susannas are portrayed as strong and appealing heroines, which may offer a strong selling-point for works in a genre generally seen to have a female readership (de Groot 2010, 66-67). Despite their confident attitudes, however, the two fictional Susannas frequently have to defend or prove their abilities as paintrices. A widow does not believe Susanna M made the works: “Only a man could paint this well” (Merkle-Riley 1996, 32). Many assume at first that the work of Susanna M is by a foreign apprentice (72), and she has to prove to Wolsey that she actually did it (132). To him the idea of a woman painter

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is “[a] curiosity, like a two-headed calf or a dog that has been taught to count” (117). She is seen as “a prodigy and a freak” (134). When she paints, she often has an audience (134), as if it was a kind of parlour trick (136). Those watching often question her role: “What’s she doing painting? It’s like teaching a good hunting mare to jig” (134). The king in Diener’s work likewise wonders if Susanna H’s painting is really by a woman: “He cast a glance across at Parker, as if to confirm this really was the work of a woman’s hand” (Diener 2011, 34). A landlord is just as astonished: “If I hadn’t seen yer there with me own eyes, painting it, I’d never believe ’twas a woman done it” (79). The prospect of a skilled female artist makes a fictional Wolsey distinctly uncomfortable in MerkleRiley’s work: An unwanted thought came to him [Wolsey]. Suppose women might express themselves with as much ability as men if they were given the same training that men had? Ridiculous. He pushed the idea away with mental explanations. In some strange, instinctive way, this God-created freak had probably absorbed her skill from watching her husband (122).

Earlier aspects of the portrayals have been strongly linked to Polack’s “specific narrative functions” (Polack 2014, 529), especially world building and plot. The perceived peculiarity of the Tudor female artist works alongside these functions to further develop “the emotional aspects of the novel” (Polack 2014, 529). Designed on one level to create sympathy for the artist figures encountering such prejudice, it prompts readers to feel for and with the characters. If we assume, with Jerome de Groot, that such works are “[h]istorical novels by women for women” (2010, 67), then the repeated refrain clearly operates on another level as well. De Groot writes that “women writers have used the historical novel to express multiple, complex identities and used them as sites of possibility and potential” (2010, 67). The paired aesthetic project of historical fiction writer and portrait painter, described earlier, enriches this. The works are “written by women artists about women artists”, as Tina Lent writes of others based on the life of painter Artemisia Gentileschi (2006, 213). Within the novels by Diener and Merkle-Riley, the Tudor paintrix’s uneasy reception and her continual need to defend her authority and authorship turns the clock hands forward to our times. In this way the Tudor paintrix functions as a proxy for the female authors of the works. This usage follows novelist Lion Feuchtwanger’s assertion, originally made in 1935, that historical fiction is never really about the past but instead makes a comment about the present:

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I have come to the conclusion that the artist [writer of historical fiction] had no other intention than to give expression to his own (contemporary) attitudes and a subjective (but in no sense historical) view of the world, and to do so in a way that these could be perceived directly by the reader (2015, par. 4).

Rose Tremain writes overtly of this understanding: Restoration, written over twenty years ago in 1988, was my fictional response to the climate of selfishness and material greed that began to prevail in our society during the Thatcher years … I looked for – and quickly found – a period in English history where some of the material obsessions occupied people’s minds (Tremain 2009, xi).

In the moment of recognition when the struggles of the female painter and her female writer are aligned, a powerful doubling ruptures these texts. According to de Groot, all historical fiction is characterised by a “double effect”, the “uncanny, almost uncomfortable, moment, as the ‘real’ and the ‘wrought’ stand together in the same room” (2015, 24), but the alignment between the creative projects of female painter and writer amplifies this effect. Suddenly, a reader is pulled out from the carefully constructed realist narrative and forced to consider the conditions of the text’s construction, namely the hurdles still faced by contemporary creative women.8 The Tudor paintrix figure, as rendered by Diener and MerkleRiley, thus functions in a meta-fictive way, offering commentary on the status of female writers in our own world. Examples abound of the struggles of contemporary female writers: Australia’s Stella Prize emerged in response to the under-representation of women in literary review pages and prize shortlists (The Stella Prize 2016); The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange Prize for Fiction) came about for similar reasons: because the 1991 Man Booker Prize shortlist contained no women (Mosse 2016); and the VIDA Count gives a yearly break-down of gender disparity in literary publications and book reviews, finding that “men dominate the pages of venues that are known to further one’s career” (VIDA: Women in Literary Arts 2016). Fremantle’s portrayal is again the exception – Teerlinc’s gender generally goes unremarked upon in her rendering of Elizabeth’s court. This may be because a female painter is not such a peculiar creature in a world where three queens have ruled in 8

Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014) deals with this directly, taking its title from Margaret Cavendish and recounting the measures taken by a female artist to have the quality of her work recognised.

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succession (if we include the brief reign of Jane Grey). While these queenships may have done little to change the everyday conditions of women’s lives at the time, they certainly challenged the boundaries of what was acceptable and possible. The meta-fictive impulse of Fremantle’s Teerlinc invites readers to consider a future in which an artist’s gender has little bearing. The fictional portrayals of Tudor paintrices function effectively in the novels analysed. While at one level they help develop a convincing world and plot for the Tudor paintrix to inhabit, they also underscore meta-fictive elements in the texts, presenting readers with thoughtprovoking portraits of our own times and perhaps even sketching out possible futures.

Acknowledgments Many thanks to those who offered comments on early drafts of this work at the Forgotten Lives symposium (University of Southern Queensland, April 2016), ANZAMEMS (University of Queensland, July 2015) and Representing the Tudors (University of South Wales, July 2015), as well as to the academic writing group within the Department of Creative Arts and English at La Trobe University. This research has also been supported by La Trobe’s Disciplinary Research Program in English, Theatre and Drama, for which I am grateful.

Works cited Bennett, Vanora. 2008. Portrait of an Unknown Woman. New York: Harper. Campbell, Lorne and Foister, Susan. 1986. “Gerard, Lucas and Susanna Horenbout.” The Burlington Magazine 128 (1003): 719-727. Coombs, Katherine. 1998. The Portrait Miniature in England. London: V&A Publications. Coombs, Katherine and Derbyshire, Alan. 2015. “Nicholas Hilliard’s Workshop Practice Reconsidered.” In Painting in Britain 1500-1630, edited by Tarnya Cooper, Aviva Burnstock, Maurice Howard and Edward Town, 241-251. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Groot, Jerome. 2010. The Historical Novel. London: Routledge. —. 2015. Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions. London: Routledge. Diener, Michelle. 2011. In a Treacherous Court. New York: Gallery Books.

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Feuchtwanger, Lion. 2015. “The Purpose of the Historical Novel.” In Feuchtwanger’s Writings, translated by John Ahouse. University of Southern California. Accessed June 10, 2016. . Originally published as “Vom Sinn des Historischen Romans” in Das Neue Tage-Buch (1935). Fremantle, Elizabeth. 2014. Sisters of Treason. London: Michael Joseph. Frye, Susan. 2010. Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Harper, Karen. 2005. The Fyre Mirror. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Hilliard, Nicholas. 1992. A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning by Nicholas Hilliard. Together with A More Compendious Discourse Concerning ye Art of Liming by Edward Norgate; With a Parallel Modernized Text Edited by R.K.R. Thornton and T.G.S. Cain. Ashington, UK: The Mid Northumberland Arts Group, Carcanet Press. House, Elizabeth. 1988. “Artists and the Art of Living: Order and Disorder in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 34 (1): 27-44. Hustvedt, Siri. 2014. The Blazing World. London: Sceptre. James, Susan. 2009. The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485-1603: Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. James, Susan and Franco, Jamie. 2000. “Susanna Horenbout, Levina Teerlinc and the Mask of Royalty.” Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen. 91-125. Lent, Tina. 2006. “ ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’: The Fictionalization of Baroque Artist Artemesia Gentileschi in Contemporary Film and Novels.” Literature/Film Quarterly 34 (3): 212-218. Meaney, Gerardine. 2004. “Regendering Modernism: The Woman Artist in Irish Women’s Fiction.” Women: A Cultural Review 15 (1): 67-82. Taylor and Francis. Merkle-Riley, Judith. 1996. The Serpent Garden. New York: Three Rivers Press. Mosse, Kate. 2016. “History.” Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. Accessed June 10, 2016. . Nichols, John Gough. 1863. “Notices of the Contemporaries and Successors of Holbein. Addressed to Augustus J. Franks, Esq. Director.” Archaeologia: Or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity, 17701992 39: 19-46. Goldring, Elizabeth, Faith Eales, Elizabeth Clarke, Jayne Elisabeth Archer, and John Nichols. 2014. John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources (Vol. 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Overall, Sonia. 2005. A Likeness. London: Harper Perennial. Polack, Gillian. 2014. “Novelists and their History.” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 18 (4): 522-542. Taylor and Francis. Skidmore, Chris. 2010. Death and the Virgin: Elizabeth, Dudley and the Mysterious Fate of Amy Robsart. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Strong, Roy. 1983. Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered 1520-1620. London: Victoria and Albert Museum. —. 1984. The English Renaissance Miniature. Rev. ed. London: Thames and Hudson. Taylor, Melanie. 2013. The Truth of the Line. MadeGlobal Publishing. The Stella Prize. 2016. “About the Stella Prize.” Accessed June 10, 2016. . Tremain, Rose. 2009. “Introduction” to Restoration. xi-xv. London: Vintage Books. VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. 2016. “About the VIDA Count.” Accessed June 10, 2016. . Vreeland, Susan. 2003. The Passion of Artemisia. New York: Penguin Books. Woodward, Wendy. 1988. “The ‘Natural Outlawry of Womankind’: Four Artists in the Novels of Christina Stead.” Journal of Literary Studies 4 (1): 74-85.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN REMEMBERING LAURA CERETA: PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIVES OF A HUMANIST SCHOLAR JESS CARNIEL

[A]t this point I believe that public acclaim has built a solid enough foundation for my immortality, and in this way an initial reservoir for my glory has been established…A public acknowledgement of one’s fame is, in the order of things, quite important. – Laura Cereta, letter to Ludovico di Leno (Robin 1997, 49-50).

Despite feeling confident in her claim to immortality, as expressed above in a letter to her maternal uncle, Laura Cereta has only just begun to achieve this fame five hundred years after her death. In her lifetime, Cereta published a single volume of letters, known as a letterbook. This appeared only in manuscript form, which meant that there were perhaps three or so copies in limited, private circulation. It has only been since the republication of this letterbook in English during the late 1990s – translated by Diana Robin, a scholar dedicated to making the writing of female humanists readily accessible – that Cereta’s work has started to appear regularly in discussions of early modern humanism and women’s writing, thus securing her immortality. Since the release of Robin’s English translation, scholarly recognition of Cereta’s work has certainly increased among early modern scholars; her letterbook is a rich source for analysis of various humanist themes, and for understanding the life of an educated woman in the fifteenth century. Analysis of Cereta’s extant works reveal the construction of a literary persona that is fluid and malleable to alterations in personal situation and rhetorical standing. From her adolescence, Cereta sought to balance family responsibilities, including working with her father, with diligent attention to her humanist studies and literary ambitions. Cereta strategically deploys her public interventions into family business, including her father’s

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professional exile and her brothers’ humanist education, to help construct her literary persona. Cereta was able to reconcile her personal ambitions with her family duties so that, technically speaking, she fulfilled them both simultaneously. As Amyrose McCue Gill has observed, “Cereta’s epistolary production is deeply engaged in a thorough rewriting of conventional oppositions: the public and private, the intellectual and personal, the philosophical and emotional” (2009, 1126). The tension between Cereta’s public and personal life is central to her construction of a public, humanist persona, but also to her eventual withdrawal from public life. As was the intention of humanist education, Cereta’s learning was of direct benefit to her family and their affairs and, conversely, her family was of direct benefit to ideas within her writing. That is, although these letters initially appear to only be evidence of a dutiful wife and daughter, their inclusion within the letterbook suggests that Cereta possibly had dual intentions at the time that they were written, or that she used her varied domestic and public experiences to forge a unique perspective in the humanist world. Cereta often expresses a sense of being torn between family obligation and her desire to study. Cereta elaborates upon how she reconciled this tension between domestic and familial duties with some thrifty time management of the hours of her insomnia. She further resolved the conflict of interests by infusing her workaday correspondence with her humanist interests, just as her humanist writings were thematically engaged with the domestic. The fact of the inclusion of this everyday correspondence within her letterbook, the manuscript edition of which was edited and compiled by Cereta herself, is integral; the inclusion of these letters demonstrates Cereta’s awareness of their rhetorical value and of their demonstration of both her learning and her writing flair. While Cereta is not unique as a female humanist scholar, nor as an educated woman who sought to use her learning to the benefit of her male relatives, she is notable for her attempt to engage with humanist learning on the same pragmatic level expected of her male peers. The eventual dominance of humanist learning as a practical form of education arose out of a change in mentality. Classical Latin and Greek texts were revalued and liberal arts education framed in more practical terms that would better serve the increasing bureaucratisation of public life (Nauert Jr 1995, 13). A new bureaucratic ruling elite was developing alongside the merchant economy of northern Italy, requiring a general broad education with strong emphasis on the oratorical skills and social attributes most needed by the ruling elite. A practical humanist education thus provided sufficient rhetorical skills to enable effective participation in political life, with an emphasis on moral training and moral obligation. This definition

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of humanism as a movement in education to further civic priorities and responsibilities appears to exclude women by definition and, to an extent, this is correct. Leonardo Bruni advised Baptista Malatesta against several subject areas, such as mathematics, geometry, astrology, and, perhaps most importantly, rhetoric, because such studies had little to no practical application for women. Bruni writes: The great and complex art of Rhetoric should be placed in the same category [of subjects beyond the range of women]…I have in view the cultivation most fitting to a woman. To her neither the intricacies of debate nor the oratorical artifices of action and delivery are of the least practical use, if indeed they are not positively unbecoming. (1963, 126)

However, the revival of interest in classical works, Plato’s Republic in particular, encouraged seemingly more egalitarian education practices, wherein the father commonly took personal interest in his daughter’s education (Schibanoff 1994, 194). Many women did receive an education but this was solely for the purpose of making them better wives for their future educated husbands, in order to contribute to the comfort and entertainment of her husband, not to provide her with the means for fulfilling public office or to promote her own literary career. Women entering into the public sphere of humanism had to be prepared to face the onslaught of criticism that was the customary reaction to their transgression of gender boundaries, and be armed with the appropriate rhetoric and vocabulary to defend their position as women and as scholars. Although the hurdles to fame were greater and more frustrating for women than for men, it was not entirely impossible to utilise their education in the public sphere. That the women who achieved various degrees of success and renown were all of the ruling elite or urban professional class was a result of the social circumstances of the time; such a high level of education was only available to those who could afford it (Nauert 1995, 42). Their class positioning also afforded them an additional advantage in the pursuit of a humanist career, as it put them within the social strata most advantageous for associating with prominent, and notso-prominent, humanist scholars. Although women humanists could not associate so freely with other, male humanists partly because they could not enter into physical areas that were designated as male-only, such as universities and other public fora, they could associate with them quite freely in the world of letters. This correspondence with male humanists proves to be somewhat problematic when reviewing the historiography of female humanists. Lisa

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Jardine (1985) has argued that the names of Cassandra Fedele, Alessandra Scala and the like have survived in histories of humanism because of their correspondence with male greats in the sphere, and that this correspondence is an indicator of their relative greatness. Jardine’s focus on the “twofold mythologizing of the real intellectual competence of Alessandra Scala and her quattrocento sisters” (1995, 801) depends upon the analysis of the interaction between male and female humanists, but her criteria for valuation of a female humanist’s worth cannot be universally applied. The suggestion that, in order to be of significance, the woman in question must have corresponded with a famous male humanist severely limits the names and bodies of sources we have to work with. According to this criterion, Cereta’s historical subjectivity is severely impaired. Unlike the renowned Cassandra Fedele and her literary friend Alessandra Scala, Cereta did not correspond with anyone who was considered, either in her own time or now, a great figure in humanism – with the exception of an unanswered address to Fedele, which does not count according to Jardine’s problematic criterion. Although this has been seen to be an impediment to her career in historical evaluations of her career and works, her failure to do so, in a sense, freed her literary persona from the conventions imposed upon learned women existing within the male sphere of humanism. Other women, such as Fedele and Scala, secured their positions within male circles though correspondence and association with important male humanists, but it came at the cost of their independent literary personas (Jardine 1985, 814). That is, they were accepted within those circles because of their great learning as women, among men, but being women among men they could not fully engage in the culture of humanism. Scala and Fedele were encouraged to correspond with one another in terms of flattery and self-deprecation revolving around the ideal of the female scholar, but they did not engage in rhetorical debate with one another or with any of the male scholars. Thus Scala and Fedele were bound by literary conventions governing correspondence between women in a way that Cereta was not, or did not allow herself to be. Jardine puts this tension in terms of the “normality … of the women’s performance as quattrocento humanists” and the “contrivedness of the figurative manipulation of their performance (both by male colleagues and themselves)”, arguing that in the tension between these is also the “tension between two possibilities for inserting humanism itself into a quattrocento civic context: accomplishment and profession” (Jardine 1985, 815). Within the humanist ideal, accomplishment was notionally access to humanism as a profession, but for women education was an accomplishment in itself. Relating the gap between accomplishment and profession to the similar

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position of learned noble, Jardine equates humanist learning to the “male equivalent of fine needlepoint or musical skill” (1985, 817). In other words, for women and noble men, humanist learning was a commodity, whereas for other men it was a tool for their career, or a career in itself. For Cereta, however, a humanist education was of both practical and philosophical value; she sought to be useful to her family while also pursuing humanistic pursuits. It was into this environment of education for civic duty in men and the gentle cultivation of women’s minds that Laura Cereta was born in late August or early September of 1469 to an urban upper middle class family in Brescia, a town in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, which was, at the time, part of the Venetian republic (Rabil 1981, 4).1 Her father, Silvestro Cereto, whose family originated from the town of Cereto,2 was an attorney and magistrate in Brescia and her mother, Veronica di Leno, was from an old and respectable Brescian family. Laura was educated in a convent for at least two years, from ages seven to nine, where she learnt reading, writing, embroidery, and rudimentary Latin from a nun, who also taught the sleepless child how to use her insomniac hours for further study. She was removed from the convent for unknown reasons, but was returned soon after for a further two years instruction in the Latin canon.3 Laura was then sent home again, aged eleven, to help care for her brothers and sisters. Cereta never returned to formal education or cloistered life, but was further instructed by her father in Latin, Greek and mathematics (Rabil 1994, 67). She also studied sacred literature and astrology, and developed a particular passion for moral philosophy. Using her childhood training by studying in the hours after her siblings had been put to bed,

1

Biographical information about Laura Cereta is taken from Rabil, unless otherwise cited. A second biography by Rabil can be found in Rinaldina Russell ed., Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 67-75. 2 Robin gives Silvestro’s surname as the masculine “Cereto” as opposed to Rabil’s application of the feminine “Cereta” to both father and daughter. As Silvestro originated from the town of Cereto, the masculine form of name is likely the family’s actual surname. Robin notes in her “Translator’s Introduction” that “Cereta” appears to be the humanist name the author took for herself, although she uses this form of surname for her family members when addressing letters to them in the letterbook. 3 Citing some inconsistencies in Cereta’s account of her education, Rabil disputes that Cereta received this second section of her education, and that she remained at her family home and under her father’s tutelage after her first withdrawal from the convent at age nine.

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Cereta was able to reconcile her family duties and her desire for study (Robin 1997, 5). During the war of Ferrara, between 1482 and 1484, Venice fought to acquire the papal fief of Ferrara (Hay and Law 1989, 162) and Silvestro was sent to Lake Iseo to supervise the fortification of the town (Robin 1997, 5). Laura alone accompanied her father, presumably to aid him in his official affairs and to continue under his tutelage. Shortly after the war, Laura married a Brescian merchant, Pietro Serina, possibly of the prolific Serina family wool merchants (Ferraro 1993, 64). Their short marriage was characterised by long absences from one another and domestic frustration whenever they were together, and ended in Pietro’s death from a fever in 1486 (Robin 1997, 5). Pietro had often escaped from their frustrating domesticity by prolonged business trips to his shop on the Rialto, which was destroyed in a fire in 1485. He was also absent from the marital household during the last few months of his life in order to nurse his ailing brother, who died weeks before Pietro fell fatally ill himself. Meanwhile, Laura remained in Brescia, taking care of the domestic affairs in a household including both her husband and her natal family, and acting as her father’s surrogate and amanuensis after he was mysteriously forced to retire from public office.4 After Pietro’s death, Cereta was subsumed in mourning, and this grief is documented in her letters. At first rejecting her learning, Cereta found that quiet study helped to allay her grief but that her studies were of a more spiritual and religious nature, as is reflected in her later letters. Brother Thomas of Milan, with whom Cereta shared a series of correspondence, further encouraged Cereta’s renewed spirituality and was instrumental in the closure of Cereta’s mourning period (Robin 1997, 102-3). Cereta died in 1499, at the age of thirty, of causes unknown. Mourned by the city of Brescia and immortalised in her brother Daniel’s poem in praise of the city and its great individuals, Cereta was buried in the church of San Domenico (Robin 1997, 7). Rabil (1983, 8) suggests that, aside from her dedication to her books and to her father, Cereta did not live an isolated life but was an active member of the local learned community. Several of her addressees are local men of learning, and in her letters Cereta also makes reference to visits to Santa Clara, or Chiara, a nearby monastery where she participated in intellectual debate during the years documented within the letterbook. Rabil also cites evidence that Cereta and her brother, Daniel, participated in a group of intelligentsia known as the Mondella Academy, named in 4

There are no reasons given for Silvestro’s exile and retirement, although he did remain on the list of public officials until his death in 1488.

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honour of the doctor in whose home the group gathered, but adds that neither Cereta nor her brother mention this salon in their writings. Cereta’s “career” lasted for almost four years, from 1485 until 1488, from age fifteen until eighteen (Rabil 1983, 28). Her activities as a humanist appear to have ended in 1488 with the publication of her letterbook and the death of her father. Rabil (1983, 23) believes Silvestro’s death was the key event in her decision to withdraw from a public career of humanism for, with the loss of both husband and father, Cereta had lost her greatest male supporters and consequently sought a more socially acceptable lifestyle. Brescian historical tradition, however, holds that she lectured in philosophy at age eighteen, and publicly taught for another seven years after the age of twenty (Rabil 1983, 22). This tradition, apparently begun by Ottavio Rossi, who owned the manuscript copy of her letterbook that was later used by Tomasini, is not supported by any public records or other independent evidence. Despite this, Rabil advises us not to denounce the tradition as false, as Cereta might have lectured informally, an activity that did not require legal provisions or generate official records. Jennifer Cavalli (2012, 156) argues that Cereta is an exemplar of the goals of humanist education, but observes that her pursuit, as a woman, of an active public life was contrary to the existing social structure, whereas the male humanist education was designed to sustain these structures. Humanist education at this time was very much tied to state government in a form sometimes referred to as ‘civic humanism,’ wherein a practical angle on the usual humanist pursuits provided the necessary rhetorical skills for active participation in political life, with an emphasis on the moral training and moral obligation directly relevant to the ruling elite (Nauert 1995, 15). Although many girls were tutored alongside their brothers, women were not permitted to hold public office, consequently excluding them from the practical applications of a humanist education (King 1980, 68). The sons, however, equipped with the skills for public life provided by their education, then became representatives for their families in the public arena (Chojnacki 1991, 142). It is evident that Cereta intrinsically valued her humanist education, particularly for its practical and civic benefits. At the time that Cereta first began compiling her letterbook, her brothers – Ippolito and Basilio – were just beginning their formal humanist education at a boarding school under the tutelage of Giovanni Olivieri, one of the most well-known and reputable humanist teachers in the Veneto region (Robin 1997, 52). Although their sister had already achieved considerable fame by this time, it was Ippolito and Basilio who, by virtue of their gender, had the best

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chance of using their humanist learning on a civic level. In a letter to her brothers, Cereta advises them to avoid frivolous behaviour and to study hard as their “effort is of crucial importance, since either pleasure will separate you from the great men of this city or virtue will distinguish you from the dregs of the populace” (Robin 1997, 56). These sentiments echo the letter she had written to their teacher several days earlier, in which she had entrusted the care and education of her brothers to Olivieri, who appears to have been a long-time family friend and associate of Silvestro Cereta (Robin 1997, 53-4). Cereta expresses the combined hopes of both herself and her father that, with Olivieri as their guide, Ippolito and Basilio will “prefer virtue to pleasure” (Robin 1997, 54). This is followed by a promise of better things to come from Silvestro Cereta’s favour should Olivieri succeed in his charge. As noted previously, Cereta is not alone in records of women aiding husbands and fathers in their affairs, but she is notable for her attempt to leverage this assistance for her own literary fame. For example, Natalie Tomas (1992) has demonstrated how Florentine Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi used her affluence and correspondence to act as a political go-between and informant for her exiled sons, and Margaret L. King (1980) has listed several examples of learned humanist women who have used their learning and writings in order to help achieve the political or social ends sought by their male relatives. The relationship between Laura and her father is undoubtedly one of the more subtle, yet complex and important, influences upon her career. Silvestro was her mentor, teacher and greatest moral support; Albert Rabil Jr. has even argued that Silvestro’s death in circa 1488 directly contributed to Laura’s decision to withdraw from her public humanist career (Rabil 1981, 23). However, the role of her father in shaping the course of her career is far more complex than a simple provision of support and tuition. During the war of Ferrara (1482-4), Silvestro provided his daughter with the opportunity for practical experience in public affairs, which Laura later used on her father’s behalf after his dismissal from public office. We can place an approximate date on Silvestro Cereto’s dismissal to mid-1485, as it is around this time that Cereta writes many letters that, as Rabil also observes, should have been written by her father (Rabil 1981, 56). The first of such letters, dated August 1, 1485, is the letter addressed to Giovanni Olivieri, referred to above, dealing with her brothers’ education. In this letter Cereta first mentions her father’s banishment from the city which, due to her references to Silvestro’s difficulty in travelling and communicating efficiently, appears to have been relatively recent. According to Rabil’s chronological ordering of Cereta’s extant works, this

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letter appears as the sixth written, the first being dated July 6, 1485 (Rabil 1981, 52-6). At this point, the significance of this letter lies not so much in its content as in the fact that it was written by Cereta instead of her father. During this particular period, fathers were directly responsible for the education and life training of their sons (Chojnacki 1991, 142). Regardless of how educated she was, such duties were not within the realm of a woman’s, let alone a sister’s or daughter’s, authority. Yet somehow Cereta, aided by the experience she received as a young girl acting as her father’s amanuensis at Lake Iseo, successfully acted as her father’s surrogate and mediator in his affairs without much scandal at the time. The majority of the extant letters written on behalf of her father are appeals to his former friends and colleagues to re-establish or maintain their associations with her father in his time of need. To Silvestro’s long-time friend and associate, Brescian attorney Alberto degli Alberti, Laura writes a plea for Alberti to forgive her father for the breach in their relations. The breach appears to be due, in part, to Silvestro’s debilitating anguish and shame of his own exile: The divine spirit of friendship must instead be given to undoing the wrong that has been cultivated with intense efforts on both your parts – yours, father Alberti, and that of my parent. For when he strives on a daily basis to write to you, tears suddenly flow down from his eyes in great drops. Thus, he often took up the pen he dropped, and then dropped the pen he had taken back up, groaning and sighing to himself as he did so, as though he were a man who envied you, desperately and self-destructively ... Therefore I beg you to want to absolve both my father of the wrong he did you through his silence and his daughter of her sympathy for the wrong … Nor will you be welcoming me back into a friendship from which I never withdrew, but instead you will be pardoning me for the sin of rusticity here in my rustic peasant’s hut. (Robin 1997, 60)

The breach between Alberti and the Cereta family was soon mended, as letters during Laura’s mourning for her husband and a congratulatory letter in celebration of Alberti’s daughter’s wedding attest (Robin 1997, 96-7, 99-100, 134-6). Although admirable, these concerns of a dutiful daughter for her father are still not adequately explained by an argument founded in social norms and practices, such as the importance of upholding family honour in Renaissance Italian culture. However, as a humanist scholar, it was Cereta’s place to observe and expound upon the nature of friendship, a common humanist trope. Within humanist rhetoric regarding the family

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and, in particular, wifely duties, such activities as Cereta engaged in were discouraged and labelled unseemly, as illustrated by Alberti’s treatise on the family, I Libri Della Famiglia (1433-4), in which the ideal wife is portrayed as illiterate, which prevents her from interfering in her husband’s affairs. Cereta surpassed both her husband and, perhaps to a lesser extent, her father in education, eloquence and acquaintance. Using her skills was an obvious and practical solution to her family’s need for a correspondent. Likewise, Cereta depended upon them. The humanist letterbook was intended as a showcase of the author’s learning and social connections with life events used as points of departure for discourse upon standard humanist tropes (Robin 1997, 3). While Laura had the humanist education and personal experiences necessary to write her letterbook, she did not have access to the public world of men’s experiences that was commonly used as the framework for a humanist letterbook. Consequently, Cereta had to find a way to reconcile her sense of familial obligation to her husband and to her father, with her ambitions and her lack of useful life experience. The solution was to incorporate her humanist learning and ambitions into what she referred to as her “pedestrian, quotidian type of writing” (Robin 1997, 61) so that, instead of separating her duties from her ambitions, she combined the two. Cereta uses her family affairs to extend her social connections and to illustrate the practical benefits of her learning when used in the public arena. In doing so, Cereta both demonstrated great ingenuity with humanist tropes and family business, and developed a successful time management strategy that allowed her to perform her family duties and continue with her studies. Due to her status as a woman within Quattrocento Brescian culture, a life of public civic duty was essentially closed to her, but aiding her father in his affairs provided her with a means of demonstrating her abilities publicly, while the support of the male figure of her father to some extent negated the fact that she was a woman working in this sphere. This use of her learning neatly dispatched both her family duty and the civic activity that was a crucial part of the humanist identity. What we see in Cereta’s letterbook is the climax of her intellectual, emotional and spiritual life. As humanist letterbooks were a combination of a showcase of the author’s learning, a display of their social connections, and a sort of intellectualised autobiography (Robin 1997, 3), the most significant aspects of her life inform the dominant themes in her works. Through these acts of writing, Cereta succeeds in demonstrating the practical benefits of the humanist education, regardless of the student’s gender. Despite the conscious understanding of constructed

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gender norms and barriers in her writing, Cereta’s eventual retirement from public life after the deaths of her husband and her father indicate that, despite her personal convictions, she understood the very real limitations of fifteenth-century Venetian society. The gaps in our knowledge of Cereta’s life force us to engage with her text more than we would if we knew the intimate details of her life because the autobiographical nature of humanist letterbooks lead us to suspect that her words will provide the answers. With great poignancy, Rabil reflects that “[what] we see of [Cereta] is a snapshot rather than a full portrait” (1981, 23), but the rich detail and great promise evident in her work reveal much about those few years in her life when she experienced family, marriage and bereavement, as well as constructed a career, albeit a brief one. To some extent, it is the fragmentation of her story and its mysterious gaps that make Cereta such an intriguing figure in women’s history and in the history of humanism, yet these mysteries and uncertainties regarding Cereta’s life also make it difficult to construct her as a defined historical subject.

Works cited Bruni, Leonardo. 1963. “Lionardo D’Arezzo Concerning the Study of Literature, A Letter Addressed to the Illustrious Lady, Baptista Malatesta.” In Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators, edited by William Harrison Woodward, 122-33. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University. Cavalli, Jennifer. 2012. “Fashion the Female Humanist: Selfrepresentation in Laura Cereta’s Letters.” In Representing Medieval Genders and Sexualities in Europe, edited by Elizabeth L’Estrange and Alison More, 145-159. Farnham: Ashgate. Chojnacki, Stanley. 1991. “ ‘The Most Serious Duty’: Motherhood, Gender and the Patrician Culture in Renaissance Venice.” In Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, edited by Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari, 133-54. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ferraro, Joanne M. 1993. Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jardine, Lisa. 1985. “ ‘O Decus Italiae Virgo,’ or The Myth of the Learned Lady in the Renaissance.” The Historical Journal 28 (4): 799-819. King, Margaret L. 1980. “Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism In The Early Italian Renaissance.” In Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, edited by Patricia H. Labalme, 66-90. New York: New York University Press.

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McCue Gill, Amyrose. 2009. “Fraught Relations in the Letters of Laura Cereta: Marriage, Friendship, and Humanist Epistolary.” Renaissance Quarterly 62 (4): 1098-1129. Nauert Jr., Charles G. 1995. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rabil Jr, Albert. 1981. Laura Cereta: Quattrocento Humanist. Binghamton, N. Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. —. 1994. “Laura Cereta.” In Italian Women Writers: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, 67-75. Westport: Greenwood Press. Robin, Diana. 1997. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schibanoff, Susan. 1994. “Botticelli’s Madonna del Magnificat: Constructing the Woman Writer in Early Humanist Italy.” PMLA 109 (2): 190-204. Tomas, Natalie. A Positive Novelty: Women and Public Life in Renaissance Florence. Clayton: Monash University.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN BIOGRAPHY AND BEYOND: THE REANIMATION OF MARY SHELLEY ALISON BEDFORD

The restorative, reanimating power of biography in recognising forgotten lives is well established. In the field of literary criticism, this has led to the (re)discovery of many writers and works now considered canonical. Feminist biographers of the 1980s such as Spark, Poovey, and Gilbert and Gubar performed a successful biographical recuperation of Mary Shelley, lifting her from her husband’s shadow, where she had languished for more than a century. This essay will argue that once biographical recuperation has (re)established critical interest, it is possible to go beyond biography, which identifies and reanimates figures worthy of study, to reimagine our understanding of criticism and broader theoretical approaches. As such, although biographers have recognised Shelley as an important Romantic figure and a progenitor of the science fiction genre, I go beyond that to assert that her work provides an understanding of science fiction as a discursive space. In presenting this new view of Shelley as a founder of discourse, I will demonstrate the potential long-term benefits of recovering forgotten figures through biography. Contextual studies of how place, time and personality shape authors can enrich our understanding of the emergence of new cultural forms, such as science fiction, and also give insight into the formation of discourses that reach beyond genre.

Biographical Reanimation The reanimation of Shelley began almost a century after her death. Prior to this, she was regarded only as a biographical footnote in works focused on her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. While a few critics took interest in her directly, their commentary remained concentrated on the luminary figures in her circle; her famed parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, her husband, and the other Romantic writers, such as Byron, who

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made up her milieu. These early critics reviewed Shelley’s work for evidence of the influence of the important figures in her life, rather than critiquing the work on its own merit; her work was worthy of study, but only as a dull reflection of her circle’s brilliance. This approach would be common until the 1980s, with the vast majority of criticism seeing Shelley only as an appendage of Percy (as wife, mother of his children, and as occasionally praised editor of his work). One of the earliest attempts to recognise the significance of Shelley in her own right was Rosalie Glynn Grylls’ 1938 biography. Perhaps one of the most significant insights Grylls offers is that, “Inevitably [Mary] suffered … for the conflict there was in her nature between the feminine and the artist” (1938, xxi). This conflict in her nature has become a key idea in the study of Shelley – the dichotomy between the way she sought (and largely failed) to reconcile her sense of self as a woman and mother with her creative ability and role as author. Grylls’ insight was slow to gain ground and it was not until 1980s feminists placed a new emphasis on the value of Shelley’s works, while also continuing to acknowledge the important role her womanhood had in shaping her work as an author, that Shelley began to gain real recognition. Gilbert and Gubar’s ground-breaking feminist reader, The Madwoman in the Attic, aimed, “to show new ways in which all nineteenth-century works by women can be interpreted … [I]n the process of researching our book we realized that, like many other feminists, we were trying to recover not only a major (and neglected) female literature but a whole (neglected) female history” (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, xii). In this act of recovery, we see Shelley begin to emerge as an important literary figure in her own right. The feminist approach places great emphasis on Shelley’s ‘femaleness’ – her roles as a mother, wife and daughter are integral to their reading of the texts. Mary Poovey’s work, “My Hideous Progeny: The Lady and The Monster”, is more a biography of authorship than a biography of womanhood, and so marks the transition from criticism based on Shelley’s femaleness to criticism focused on her work as an author, albeit a female one. Poovey posits that Shelley felt trapped between the irresistible influence of imagination and her creative ability, fostered and fuelled by the most important (predominantly male) figures in her life, and the role expected of women in her increasingly conservative, proto-Victorian society. “Taken together, the two editions of Frankenstein provide a case study of the tensions inherent in the confrontation between the expectations Shelley associated, on the one hand, with her mother and Romantic originality and, on the other, with a textbook Proper Lady” (1984, 121). Poovey attributes the increasing emphasis on domesticity as

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good, and imagination or the creative drive as an unstoppable force, akin to fate, in the later edition of Frankenstein, to Shelley’s own selfperception at this time. She concludes, “As a young girl she discovered both the monstrosity and the price of her own ambitions; as a grown woman she experienced a persistent desire to disguise that aggression beneath the manners of the proper lady her society promised that every girl could grow up to be” (142). This would align with elements in Shelley’s life, particularly her father-in-law’s demand that she keep her and his son’s names from the public eye (Luke Jr. 1965, xi). Hence the pressure to retire to an entirely domestic circle competed fiercely with both her own creative ability and the economic reality of needing to supplement the meagre stipend she was awarded from Percy’s estate. However, Poovey also offers criticism that goes beyond Shelley’s biography, asserting that the triplenarrative of Frankenstein – and particularly the revisions in the 1831 edition reflect Shelley’s beliefs about creativity, imagination and the work of the author. This marks a shift in works focused on Shelley’s life to more direct literary criticism. The value of second-wave feminist readings of Shelley’s life and work lie in their emphasis on the anxiety or tension that she experienced in navigating between being a woman and an author. While early criticism looked at her life largely in terms of her relationships with the significant males that made up her circle, feminist readings looked at her response to the position these relationships put her in throughout her life, and how this shaped her works. This moves the criticism beyond simple biographical readings to a deeper understanding of both how significant Shelley’s experiences are to understanding her works, and how significant her identification as author is to any critical understanding. Shelley’s author function cannot be separated from her place, time and personality – her works address the tensions that were so prevalent in the Romantic era as the role of women began to shift. While it was possible to be both woman and writer, this was the exception rather than the norm: women writers were under pressure to conform and return to the domestic sphere rather than lead the more public life of an author. The shift from the relative disinterest in Shelley’s life and work for their own sake, to a broader and more focused critical engagement was cemented in 1987.With unprecedented access to Shelley’s personal papers in the Bodleian’s Abinger collection, Betty T. Bennett’s The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1980) and Feldman and Scott-Kilvert’s The Journals of Mary Shelley (1987) are the most comprehensive and wellregarded editions of Shelley’s personal writings. The almost simultaneous release of these two edited collections reinvigorated a biographical

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approach to criticism of Shelley’s work. Another significant text of the late 1980s was Muriel Spark’s biography of Shelley (1988). Like Grylls and Gilbert and Gubar, Spark recognises the anxiety created by being both woman and author, particularly when speaking of the changes made to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, concluding that, “it was, however, a decided conviction that she was being denied admittance to ‘society’ that she [Shelley] began to concede more and more, and too much, to public opinion” (1988, 126). Importantly, Spark also goes beyond a reading of Shelley’s circle of significant personalities to acknowledge the significance of the time in which she lived. “As Frankenstein clashed with his Monster, so did fixed religious beliefs with science: so did imaginative and emotional substitutes for religion with scientific rationalism; so did the intuitive and lush passions for a new era with the dialectical, material and succinct passions of the eighteenth century” (1988, 166). What Spark foregrounds here is the point that Michel Foucault makes that the nineteenth century was a time of rapid discursive development as entirely new fields of study emerged (1973, 238), and I argue that Shelley was both witness to, and participant in, this momentous change.

Biographical Method Having seen the restorative power of biography in reanimating critical interest in Shelley, it becomes possible to argue that criticism can go beyond biography to provide new insight into not just the author and her works but their broader role in our culture. For an author whose body of work has been read through a biographical lens for almost a century, it may seem counter-intuitive to take on a Foucauldian approach, which seems to strip the author of the significance of their biography. As Foucault asserts, “author function … does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects – positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals” (Foucault 1984, 113). However, I do not seek to read Shelley’s biography to find the “real individual”, because, as Hermione Lee points out, “there is no such thing as a definitive biography” (2009, 18). Rather, an analysis of Shelley’s biography reveals the conditions that made it possible for her to found a discourse, while recognising that she experienced a conflict between her several selves – the roles in which her society cast her and the roles which she sought. This conflict of self was not unique to Shelley: many women writers struggled to establish themselves during the period. However, her conflict was exacerbated by

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her circumstances – famed parents, infamous husband, and a circle that included some of the most well-regarded authors of the age meant the mantle of author held a particular significance to Shelley – and this is reflected in her works. Having this contextual understanding allows us to see what enabled Shelley to become a founder of discourse. The method used to establish this link between Shelley’s life and works is contextual biography. While this term has been in use for some time, it remains poorly defined and rarely explained at length. One exception is the half-page devoted to contextual biography in Nadel’s Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form; an introduction to the field of biographical writing. This text states: in examining the life with the work in its social/historical context, the biography provides a broader vision and greater breadth to the subject while expanding the nature of the genre. Contextual biography incorporates the concern of group biography with the social aspects of psychobiography creating a form that enlarges the foundations of biographical writing … contextual biography redresses the emphasis on chronology to one of totality (1986, 200).

This is a sound outline of the scope of contextual biography, but Nadel does not consider the weight that should be given to various components of context or clearly describe a methodology. When searching academic databases for contextual biography the most frequently cited paper is Vidal’s “Contextual Biography and the Evolving Systems Approach to Creativity” (2003), which summarises the key elements of the methodology. Vidal states that: First, the individual is considered as an evolving system structured as a network of intellectual and existential projects. Writing a biography implies tracing and reconstructing such a network. The network image emphasizes the nonlinear nature of an individual life and highlights the interaction between the different dimensions of existence. Second, different conceptual levels are distinguished: the internal environments that regulate the subject’s activity ‘from the inside’ … the immediate environments involved in the processes of socialization and individuation, and the distant contexts (history) ... Third, the subject of the biography is attributed an intrinsic and existential psychology. His productions are not seen as the manifestation of some underlying essence, but rather as part of the construction of a mental universe ( 81).

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In summary, Vidal is looking at the works of the subject, their sociohistorical place, and their personal response or approach. Vidal provides some important points for consideration, yet continues to place significant emphasis on the internal processes of the biographical subject. Vidal’s concept of biography as tracing a network clearly suggests that research must focus on contemporaneous materials that reflect the author’s place and time. To do otherwise places the author within our modern critical context, and not their own. Despite this, what is most often found when searching for contextual biographies are summaries of current responses, rather than actual contextual, contemporaneous materials. For example, educational publisher Gale has a large online database titled “Biography in Context” that collates documents and evidence that are seen as relevant to a historical figure based on a name search. In the case of a search for “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley”, biographies, news articles, journal papers and other resources are provided (Gale Cengage Learning n.d.). However, this is not in fact a genuine resource for contextual biography as the materials are not from Shelley’s time, as Vidal’s “tracing and reconstructing” of the author’s networks suggests should be the case. To construct a genuine contextual biography, Shelley’s life and times must be explored more directly. To use Vidal’s suggestion that a contextual biography should explore the relationship between works, socio-historical place and personal responses, there is ample evidence for a contextual biography of Shelley. All of Shelley’s works are readily available. Extensive personal writing in the form of diaries and letters are also available through the Abinger Collection; these resources provide insight into Shelley’s thoughts and feelings on various issues. What is most often overlooked in contextual biography, however, is the significance of broader sociohistorical materials. In the case of the Shelleys, we are fortunate that we have direct evidence of what they were reading, and so what ideas and discourses they were engaged with, since they kept a list of what they were reading as a part of their shared journals. Additionally, a large amount of correspondence from members of their milieu is also available, as further evidence of the ideas that their circle pursued. We can also turn to the broader historical record for corroborating evidence of major events and social changes that impacted the lives of the Shelleys, such as the Greek Revolution. Consideration of all of these factors allow for an understanding of the conditions of and influences upon the creation of Shelley’s works. Working towards a clearer articulation of the methodology of contextual biography strengthens the analysis of Shelley’s position as a

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founder of discourse. Understanding her personal experiences in relation to the world around her and, in turn, how her works reflect and respond to the broader social and discursive context in which they were written allow us to evaluate not only the meaning of the text but its significance within its society and ongoing impact in the world today.

Beyond Biography Foucault views the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries as a period of significant change, “certainly one of the most radical that ever occurred in Western culture” (1973, 220), during which there was, “a modification and shifting of cultural interests, a redistribution of opinions and judgements, the appearance of new forms in scientific discourse, wrinkles traced for the first time upon the enlightened face of knowledge” (238). Contextual biography allows us to see that Shelley was well-equipped, well-placed, and well-timed to bring to life something new, as she stood at the intersection of traditional beliefs, radical thought, religion and secular science: the old world and the new. What Shelley created with her publication of Frankenstein was the foundation of the discourse that allows for moral boundary-making in response to new science. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, we can clearly see Brian Aldiss’ description of the core elements of science fiction manifest for the first time. Aldiss (1986, 122) explicitly outlines this in his description of H. G. Wells’ work: Firstly, he begins by drawing a recognisable picture of his own times, ‘the present day’ … Secondly, he uses the newer scientific principles of his times … as a hinge for the story. Thirdly, he allows a criticism of his society, and possibly of mankind in general, to emerge from the narrative.

While Aldiss’ triad of veracity, capacity, and universality is not the only definition of the science fiction genre, it is one approach that identifies some broad commonalities without getting caught up in the nuances of sub-genres. It is also useful in considering works that contribute to the discourse that Shelley established as, regardless of genre, these works all function in the same broad way: they are based in the realm of possibility, reflect the concerns of the period, and allow the reader to question the potential outcomes for both themselves and their society. Frankenstein is clearly set in Shelley’s time, with the radical university of Ingolstadt, Mer de Glace and Mont Blanc familiar backdrops

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to her readers. She uses the science of galvanism, which had yet to be disproven as a possible source of reanimation, as the “hinge for her story”. Finally, and most importantly, she allows a criticism of her society. Current readings of Frankenstein suggest that Shelley may be critiquing topics ranging from the dangers of a literate working class to the problems of motherhood and creation. Most importantly, Shelley’s work does not condemn Victor for his wayward creation; she leaves the judgment to the reader. In doing so, she creates a space for moral boundary-making, allowing the reader to decide whether Victor went too far and so reflect on the role of science in their own lives. Given the “universality” element of Aldiss’ science fiction triad, I would argue that most of what current literary criticism identifies as the genre of science fiction is in fact a discourse in the sense outlined by Foucault: as a condition for the possibility and the rules of other texts. Foucault identifies the characteristic features of a discourse using Marx and Freud as examples: ‘initiators of discursive practices’ not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but, as importantly, they also made possible a certain number of differences. They cleared a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of discourse they initiated (1984, 114).

It is this concept of the creation of space, as opposed to the repetition of tropes, that defines the origin-point of a discourse. I argue that Shelley can be considered one of Foucault’s “founders of discursive practices” as Frankenstein is not only, as Aldiss asserts, a pioneering work of science fiction, but the creation of a discursive space that allows Shelley’s readers to consider how new science may intrude upon moral and physical boundaries. Importantly, it is not only Shelley’s readers, but other authors who consider these questions, operating in the discursive space Shelley established. A space opera like Star Trek is clearly not of the same sub-genre as a post-apocalyptic zombie narrative, yet both offer a representation of the world as we know it (even in the far future, what is presented is a replica of our current society). They use science as a hinge for the story (interstellar space travel or an unstoppable plague), and allow the reader to make judgements about how they would respond to the potential outcomes suggested by the authors. Shelley herself wrote another science fiction story, The Last Man, which although of a different subgenre, remains within the discursive space she established with her authorship of Frankenstein.

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The Last Man’s complex frame structure and its distinct differences from Frankenstein illustrate the breadth of the field of science fiction and the discourse that undergirds it. The ‘fiction’ in science fiction is fundamental to the operation of the discourse. The distance offered by the imagination makes it safe–not a new concept but deployed in a new and specific way. As Steerenburg describes, “For writers like William Godwin and Mary Shelley, the experience of the revolutionary era not only rendered disease metaphors more virulent, but it also prompted a shift in literary form. In place of the abstract universals of eighteenth-century philosophy, Godwin and Mary Shelley turned to the novel and experimented with confessional and gothic conventions” (1978, 336). This, “shift in literary form” was a move towards what has been narrowly viewed as the genre of science fiction. It is in fact a much larger discursive shift; a new way for cultural critics such as Shelley to use imagination and narrative to explore the “pregnant space” (Morton 2003) of a rapidly changing world, replete with possibilities, and in turn create a literary space for readers to establish moral boundaries. The Last Man provides a space for the reader to reflect upon the effectiveness of various political structures and, in turn, how they would respond should the government change, in much the same way that Frankenstein allows readers to consider the impact of science. The Last Man is an example of Aldiss’ notion of science fictions texts that are based on a model of “veracity, capacity, universality” (1986, 122), and operates in the same way as many other science fiction novels, although the science is not the focus of the work, merely the “hinge” that allows the narrative to proceed. While The Last Man is set in the future, it is clearly a reflection of Shelley’s own time. The global plague that man cannot halt provides the catalyst for governments to fall. Audrey Fisch argues that, “‘plagues’ don't come merely from germs or viruses, they come from a society's inability to handle those germs, because of a lack of both medical knowledge and, more importantly, sociopolitical capability” (1993, 271). Fisch’s observation that a lack of socio-political capability to deal with significant change (such as a plague outbreak) reflects Aldiss’ three-part model. Society has the capacity to create significant changes through science, yet does not have the structures in place to respond to this change. Science fiction is a culture’s response to its own inability or capability to respond to rapid change: what Shelley established in her works, and contributes to the science fiction genre, is the discursive space for readers to consider how we may be best able to react, and to consider what limits or boundaries they may establish in their rapidly changing world. This is the element of universality that Aldiss identifies.

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Without the restorative work of Shelley’s biographers, it would not be possible to suggest that she is the founder of the discourse that undergirds science fiction. Understanding Shelley’s biographical context is fundamental to understanding how she was able to achieve this. Few authors experienced the confluence of personality, place and time that is reflected in Shelley’s works. Her parents’ Enlightenment ideals, her husband’s Romantic vision, the developments, both scientific and social, that she lived through and witnessed, and her own experiences of rejection, motherhood and loss culminated in her writing. These experiences allowed Shelley to create a new way for literature to respond to the emergence of the modern scientific age. In viewing Shelley as a founder of discourse we witness the ultimate power of biography: to restore figures worthy of study and so give critics the opportunity to go beyond biography in order to assess the emergence of new cultural forms, and offer new insights into the discourses that underpin how we engage with our modern world.

Works cited Abinger Collection. December 9, 2014. http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/15001900/abinger/abinger.html (accessed May 26, 2015). Aldiss, Brian W. 1986. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. New York: Anthenum. Bennett, B.T., ed. 1980. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Vol. 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Feldman, Paula R, and Diana Scott-Kilvert, eds. 1987. The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fisch, Audrey. 1993. “Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction and The Last Man.” In The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, edited by Anne K. Mellor, Esther H. Schor and Audrey Fisch, 267-286. Cary: Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. —. 1984. “What is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 101-121. Penguin. Gale Cengage Learning. Biography in Context. n.d. http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/bic1/person/actionWin?resetBreadCrumb=& query=&prodId=BIC1&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&disp lay-query=&mode=view&limiter=&showDisambiguation=true&u=

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inspire&displayGroups=&p=BIC1&action=e&catId=GALE%7CAAA 000041805&scanId= (accessed June 2016). Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1979. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. Grylls, R Glynn. 1938. Mary Shelley. New York: Haskell House. Lee, Hermione. 2009. Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luke Jr., Hugh J. 1965. "Introduction." In The Last Man, by Mary Shelley, edited by Hugh J. Luke Jr., vii-xiix. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Mellor, Anne K. 1988. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. London: Routledge. Morton, Timothy. 2003. "Mary Shelley as Cultural Critic." In Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, by Esther Schor, 259-273. Cambridge University Press. Nadel, Ira B. 1986. Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Poovey, Mary. 1984. "My Hideous Progeny: The Lady and The Monster." In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, by Mary Poovey, 114-142. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seymour, Miranda. 2000. Mary Shelley. New York: Grove Press. Shelley, Mary. (1818) 2000. Frankenstein. Edited by Paul J. Hunter. New York: WW Norton. —. (1831) 2002. Frankenstein. Edited by Johanna M. Smith. Boston: Bedford/St Martin's. —. 1826. The Last Man. Edited by Hugh J. Luke Jnr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Spark, Muriel. 1988. Mary Shelley. London: Constable. Sterrenburg, Lee. 1978. "The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 (3): 324-347. Vidal, Fernando. 2003. "Contextual Biography and the Evolving Systems Approach to Creativity." Creativity Research Journal 15 (1): 73-82.

CONTRIBUTORS

Dallas John Baker, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in writing, editing and publishing in the School of Arts and Communication at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. He has published dozens of scholarly articles and creative works. Under the pen name D.J. McPhee, he has written three Young Adult fantasy fiction novels, Waycaller (2016), Keysong (2016) and Oracle (2017). He is special issues editor of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses. Since 2015 Dallas has edited or co-edited seven special issues in various journals, including New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. He is also the convenor of the Scriptwriting as Research Symposium held each year in Australia. A number of his scripts, both stage and screen, have been produced. Dallas’ study and research intersect with a number of disciplines: creative writing, scriptwriting, publishing studies and cultural studies. Debra Beattie, PhD, is an Australian filmmaker, screenwriter, scholar, and teacher. She has produced, written and directed documentaries in Australia for over thirty years with a diverse group of communities: Indigenous, Indonesian, and Melanesian. She researched and wrote Fairweather Man (2008) an ABC television documentary on the life and times of an artist who lived on Bribie Island in the sixties, and most recently was associate producer on the story of Zenith Virago in Zen and the Art of Dying (2015). Beattie is an innovative creator, a scholar of new media documentary and social engagement. In 2001, she directed The Wrong Crowd a pioneering web-based documentary for ABC Online; and in 2004 developed design best practice for online counselling as Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery grant-funded project with Kidshelpline. Since 2006, she has engaged in the delivery of documentary in public places such as galleries, museums and libraries, and published screenplays depicting historical Australian stories. Alison Bedford is a secondary English and History teacher in Toowoomba, Queensland. She is completing a PhD at the University of Southern Queensland, focusing on Mary Shelley as a founder of discourse as defined by Michel Foucault. Using the method of contextual biography to establish Shelley’s works within their place and time, her work argues

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that the discourse Shelley established underpins the genre of science fiction and provides a new way of speaking about, and moralising about, scientific developments. Donna Lee Brien, PhD, Professor of Creative Industries, Central Queensland University, Australia, is widely published in the areas of writing praxis and specialist genres of creative nonfiction. Her biography John Power 1881-1943 (MCA, 1991) remains the standard work on this expatriate artist. Other books include the bestselling Girl’s Guide self-help series for Allen & Unwin, New Directions in 21st Century Gothic: The Gothic Compass (co-edited with Lorna Piatti-Farnell for Routledge). Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice in Australasia (co-edited with Quinn Eades for University of Western Australia Press) will be published in 2017. Past President of national peak body, the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, Donna is founding convenor of the Australasian Food Studies and Australasian Death Studies networks, and sits on the editorial advisory boards of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Locale: Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies, and Aeternum: International Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies. Jessica Carniel, PhD, is Lecturer in Humanities in the School of Arts and Communication, University of Southern Queensland. Drawing upon a broad humanistic tradition, she teaches the history of ideas, ethics, and international relations. Her PhD was awarded by the University of Melbourne and examined representations of Italian identity and ethnicity in the autobiographical works of various Italian Australian writers. This essay revisits an almost forgotten Honours thesis that emerged when she discovered an untouched volume of Cereta’s works in the University of Queensland library many, many years ago. Located within the field of cultural studies, her broad research interests encompass multiculturalism, gender and cultural representations. She has published various works on soccer and gender, and multicultural literary and film cultures. She is currently researching Australian fans of the Eurovision Song Contest. Libby Connors, PhD, is senior lecturer in history at the University of Southern Queensland. She is author and co-author of four books on Australian history, the most recent of which, Warrior (Allen & Unwin), won the Premier’s Award for a work of State Significance at the Queensland Literary Awards in 2015 and was short-listed for the Asher Peace Prize. Her research interests centre on questions of environmental

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and social justice in Australian history and she is currently president of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society. Laurie Johnson, PhD, is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Queensland, and current President of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association. His publications include The Tain of Hamlet (2013) and The Wolf Man’s Burden (2001), and the edited collections Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind (with John Sutton and Evelyn Tribble, 2014) and Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares (with Darryl Chalk, 2010). At the time of writing, he was completing a book on the Newington Butts playhouse in which Shakespeare’s company performed for 11 days in 1594 – this study will consider the extent to which a history of this venue and these performances, using modern research tools, provides a significant challenge to a number of received orthodoxies in Shakespeare Studies. Ira McGuire is a current creative writing PhD candidate in the School of Humanities, Griffith University, on the Gold Coast, where she has also guest lectured and tutored in creative writing. Her PhD artefact comprises the writing of a conjoined memoir and exegesis, creating a hybrid nonfiction: non-linear stories about growing up on the Gold Coast after immigrating from Finland, intertwined with research and the processes undertaken for memoir production. Her short stories, non-fiction and reviews have been published in various online and print literary journals. Bernadette Meenach is a graduate of NIDA (Grad Dip Voice Studies) and QUT (MA Research). She has performed in productions for companies including La Boite, New England Theatre Company, Chris Canute Productions, Qld Arts Council, Imaginary Theatre and the ABC. She has directed productions for JCU, QUT, USQ and Actors for Refugees. As an acting and vocal coach she has worked for QUT, JCU, Australian Ballet School, NIDA Open Program and QTC. She has presented papers at national and international Voice conferences. Bernadette is a PhD candidate and a Voice Lecturer for the USQ School of Arts and Communication. Patrick Mullins, PhD, is a lecturer in journalism and communications at the University of Canberra, from where he obtained his PhD in 2014. He was the Donald Horne Creative and Cultural Fellow in 2015, a research fellow at the Australian Prime Ministers Centre at the Museum of Australian Democracy (2015-16), and the winner of the Scribe Non-

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Fiction Prize for Young Writers in 2015. He is a former research officer in the Department of the Senate, where he fact-checked and contributed entries to the fourth volume of the Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate. His biography of Sir William McMahon will be published by Scribe in 2018. Catherine Padmore, PhD, has taught literary studies and creative writing at La Trobe University since 2005. Her first novel, Sibyl’s Cave (Allen and Unwin, 2004) was shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel Award and commended in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (first-book category). Catherine has been awarded two retreat fellowships at Varuna, the Writers’ House, for novels-in-progress about the Tudor women Amy Dudley and Levina Teerlinc. Her short creative works have been published in Island, The Journal of Australian Writers and Writing, The Big Issue, The Australian, Dotlit and Antithesis, and in the anthologies Reflecting on Melbourne (Poetica Christi, 2009) and Grieve (Newcastle Writers’ Centre, 2015). Catherine’s scholarly work has been published in Australian Literary Studies, TEXT, JASAL, Life Writing and Lateral, with chapters in Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature 1935-2012 (MUP, 2013) and Expanding the Canon of Early Modern Women’s Writing (CSP, 2010). Jayne Persian, PhD, is a historian of twentieth-century Australian and international history at the University of Southern Queensland, the author of Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2017) and Co-Chief Investigator on a 2016-19 ARC Discovery Project, Displacement and Resettlement: Russian and Russian-speaking Jewish displaced persons arriving in Australia via the ‘China’ route in the wake of the Second World War. Nike Sulway, PhD, is the author of several novels, including Rupetta, which – in 2014 – was the first work by an Australian writer to win the James Tiptree, Jr Award. The Tiptree is an annual award for a work of ‘science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender’. Her previous publications include the novels The Bone Flute, The True Green of Hope, and What The Sky Knows. Her works have won or been shortlisted for a range of national and international awards, including the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers Award, the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year Awards, the IAFA Crawford Award, the Aurealis Awards, and the Norma K Hemming Award. Her most recent novel, Dying in the First Person,

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was released by Transit Lounge in 2016. She teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Queensland. James Vicars, PhD, has conducted extended research in the areas of biography and fictional biography as well as writing an account of the life of Australia’s first woman pilot, Millicent Bryant. He has ongoing literary interests in the contemporary novel, life writing and twentieth century English and Australian literature, and has been the recipient of fellowships from the NSW Ministry for the Arts and the Eleanor Dark Foundation. His other academic interests include hermeneutics, critical and literary theory, and continental philosophy and Indian philosophy. He is an Adjunct Lecturer and teaches in the School of Arts at the University of New England.

INDEX

Aboriginal attack, 27-32 children, 34, 38 guides, 30-31 laws of payback, 35 leader, 31, 33 men, 27-28, 30-33 war cry, 33 women, 37-38 children, 34 abuse, sexual, 34-5, 39 Ackroyd, Peter, 16, 17 aggression, 37-38 Aitkin, Don, 44 Alberti, Alberto degli, 179 Aldiss, Brian, 189-191 anti-communist, 81,83 Arendt, Hannah, 102-103 audience reception, 115-118 Australia, 2-10, 11-22, 27-39, 4250, 72-74, 78-85, 88-98, 100, 103-105 Australian Dictionary of Biography, 45-50 Australian Love Letters of Raymond Chandler, The, 1718 autobiography, 2-3, 11-16, 56-60, 180 Aviary, Astral, 60-64 Barbara: The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius, 56-60 bas-relief, 92 Beneš, 79, 80, 84 Bennett, Betty T, 185 Benny, Benjamin, 45 biofictions, 158-168

Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, 5, 42-50 Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 43 biographical novel, 100, 103-104 biographical research, 4, 5, 42 biographical space fiction as a, 105 biographical theatre, 110-120 biographical truth, 104, 146-156 biographies of children, 53-67 biography, 2-10, 11-26, 42-52, 5367, 78-87, 88-98, 99-109, 110122, 146-157, 158-170, 183-193 as failure, 106, 147 Bolton, Geoffrey, 44 Borin, Vladimir Ležák, 78-86 Brescia, 171-182 Brisbane, 27-41, 73-74, 89-96 Brisbane City Hall, 92-93 Britain, 80, 84, 134 Brooke, John, 45, 49 Bruni, Leonardo, 173 Bryant, Millicent (1878–1927), 102103, 107 Buc, George, 156 buried history, 68-77 bush legend, 29 bushmen, 28 Caravaggio, 99, 148 Cereta, Basilio, 177-178 Cereta, Daniel, 176 Cereta, Ippolito, 177-178 Cereta, Laura, 171-182 Cereto, Silvestro, 175-179, 175n2, 176n4 child authors, 54-55, 54n4 children, 38, 55-67, 74, 79, 89

200 Close, Alan, 18 collaborative biographers, 56-60 colonial frontier, 27-41 colonialism, 27 communism, 78-86 conjecture, 14-16, 21, 78, 85 contextual, 9, 11, 48, 110, 183, 187189, 197-199, 206 creative writing, 11, 14, 22, 123-143 Czechoslovakia, 78-86 de Groot, Jerome, 160n4, 165-167 Democratic Labour Party, 46, 78, 81 di Leno, Ludovico, 171 di Leno, Veronica, 175 Dictionary of National Biography, 45 Diener, Michelle, 158-170 In a Treacherous Court, 158-170 discourse, 2-4, 7-9, 93, 102, 106107, 119, 125, 129, 132, 134-137 displaced persons, 78-86 disruption, gender, 88-98 double duty, 161 Edel, Leon, 12, 14-15 effeminacy, 138, 138n14 embodied practice, 110-122 Evans, Harry, 48-49 exploitation, 35, 37-38 family biographies, 53-67, 68-77 Fedele, Cassandra, 174 female artist, as spy, 163-164 portrayals of, 158-170 female writer, 165 feminist, 38, 68, 88, 94, 127, 133135, 183-185 Ferrara, 176, 178 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 166 fictional biography, 99-109, 158170 fictional strategies, 70, 72 Fitzpatrick, Peter, 18-19 The Two Frank Thrings, 18-19 Follett, Barbara Newhall, 54-67

Index The House Without Windows and Eepersip’s Life There, 45, 54n2, 54n2, 59, 63 Follett, Helen, 53n2, 56-60, 65 Follett, Helen & McCurdy, Harold Grier Barbara: The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius, 56-60 Follett, Roy Wilson, 53, 54n3, 5456, 65 Foucault, Michel, 186, 189-190 France, 84 Frankenstein, 184-186, 189-191 Fremantle, Elizabeth, 160-170 Sisters of Treason, 160, 163 French Revolution, 46 Gair, Vince, 46 Garland, Judy, 110-122 gender, 5, 7, 8, 27, 37-39, 88, 98, 100, 116, 123-143, 159, 167168, 173, 177, 180-181 gender identity, 39 Germany, 72, 79-80 Gilbert, Susan, 183-4, 186 Gill, Mary Ann, 19-21 Glasgow, Sir William, 96 Glendinning, Victoria, 13 Google Images, 146, 151-153, 155 Grenville, Kate, 104-105 Grylls, Rosalie Glynn, 184, 186 Gubar, Sandra M, 183-184, 186 high Fantasy, 123-143 Hilliard, Nicholas, 158, 161, 161n5, 163 historical biofiction, 158 historical fiction, 85, 160, 162n6, 166-167 double effect, 167 relation to contemporary world, 161 histories, 2, 6, 46, 49, 83, 107, 174 obscured by time or neglected, 2 as fiction, 15 marginalised, 4, 71, 107 of humanism, 171

Recovering History through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives Horenbout, Susannah, 158-170 In a Treacherous Court, 158-170 interpretation, 5, 11, 14, 22, 47, 50, 71, 94, 95, 125, 126, 129, 131 Italy, 90, 95, 97, 171-182 James, Henry, 21 Johnson, Samuel, 44-45 Jonson, Ben, 149, 151 Journals, 185, 188 Kneller, Godfrey, 154-155 Lahey, Vida, 91-92, 94-97 Latin, 172, 175 Leckie, John,, 46 Lee, Sidney, 45 letters, 11, 17-18, 57-58, 59n9, 82, 91-92, 95, 97, 113, 149, 171173, 175n2, 176, 178-179, 185, 188 life writing, 2, 12, 94, 101, 146 Lindsey, Kiera, 19-21 The Convict's Daughter, 19-21 liveness, 119-120 Locke, John, 153-154 Lyly, John, 146-157 Campaspe, 155, 155 Gallathea, 151 Endymion, or the Man in the Moon, 150, 156 Malatesta, Baptista, 173 Marlowe, Christopher, 149, 151, 153 masculine practice, 38 masculine solidarity, 38 masculinity, 27, 37-38, Matthews, Brian, 16 Louisa, 16, 18, 107 McPhee, DJ, 123, 130, 137, 139 Keysong, 123 Oracle, 123 The Faeden Chronicles, 123, 133n12, 134, 134n13, 136138 Waycaller, 13, 130, 136 memoir, 2, 4, 11, 62, 68-77 memory, 105, 126, 139, 151, 162 Merkle-Riley, Judith, 160

201

The Serpent Garden, 160 metafiction, 105 migrant artists in fiction, 162 Millar, Anne, 42-43, 44 Mondella Academy, 176 Motion, Andrew, 21, 100 Murphy, Lionel, 46 Namier, Lewis, 45, 49-50 narration, 102, 105 and remembrance, 102 narrative identity, 71 National Biography Award, Australian, 18, 99, 100 national identity, 28 native police, 33 new woman, 88-89, 97-98 not-known, the, 107 Olivieri, Giovanni, 177-178 photographs, 11, 21, 69-71, 74, 94, 147 Plato, 173 Plutarch, 44-45, 100-101 Polack, Gillian, 161-163, 166 Poovey, Mary, 184-185 portraiture, 146-147, 155 Power, John Maurice, 45 practice-led research, 116 quattrocento,171-182 Queensland Art Gallery, 92, 95-98 Rabil, Albert Jr., 175, 175n1, 175n2, 175n3, 176-179, 181 racism, 94, 126-127, 134 recall, 10, 27, 28n1, 68, 74, 93, 95, 162 Rees, Lloyd, 90-91 reflection, 18, 129, 184, 191 re-imagining, 22 Robb, Peter, 99 Robin, Diana, 171, 175n2 Robinson, William, 46 Rydon, Joan, 46 Scala, Alessandra, 174 Schabert, Ina, 102-106 science fiction, 63, 183, 189-192 sculptor, 88, 90, 96

202 sculptress, 89-91, 93, 97 seizure, sexual, 38 senate, Australian, 42-52 Serina, Pietro, 176 sexism, 125-129 sexual identity, 38, 94 sexuality, 37, 94, 123-143 Shakespeare, William, 57n7, 100, 101, 111, 134, 147-150, 153 Shelley, Mary, 183-193 The Last Man, 191 Sieyes, Abbe, 43 Soviet Union, 78-79, 81, 84 speculation, 5, 11, 15-23, 147 speculative biography, 11-26, 78, 147 spinsters, 95, 98 Stanislavski, 112-113 Stephen, Leslie, 45, 47, 50, 52 Stratford-on-Avon, 148 Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi, 178 subversion, 96

Index Suetonius, 44 Teerlinc, Levina, 158-170 Tolkien, JRR, 123-143 The Hobbit, 124, 127, 130, 132 The Lord of the Rings, 129, 134 tragedy, 58, 60, 61n13, 65, 111-115, 117-118 Tremain, Rose, 167 truth of fiction, 103 Tudor paintrix, 158-170 visual acuity, 162 tympanum, 92-94 unconscious autobiography, 56-60 Venice, 176 Vertue, George, 154-155 Vidal, Fernando, 187-188 visual culture, 146-148 women’s history, 105, 107 world building, 124 writing back, 123-143 World War 1, 89-90, 96 World War 2, 68, 70, 95