Emma Short

Introduction: Histories and heroines: the female figure in contemporary historical fiction

In recent years, the female figure in history has become increasingly visible — previously obscured, she is now palpable, multidimensional, and undeniably present. This figure has flourished in contemporary fiction, the authors of which have worked to establish her as central to historical narratives in a range of both fictional and factual scenarios. This collection explores the female figure in recent historical fiction: the tremendous success of writers such as Philippa Gregory, Kate Mosse and Sarah Waters is testament to the fact that the female figure is now not only desirable but also marketable. The collection interrogates the growth of the contemporary historical fiction genre by examining the implications of these new narratives for contemporary gender politics. Part I, ‘Historical Women: Revisioning Real Lives’, contains chapters which interrogate recent recastings of real women, such as Anne Boleyn, Clara Schumann and Grace Marks, who have previously been misrepresented in historical discourses. Part II, ‘Imagined Histories: Romancing Fictional Heroines’, concentrates on the gender politics inherent in representations of fictional women and their sexuality. Finally, Part III, ‘Rewriting History: Reasserting the Female’, discusses the implications of such representations, reflecting on these repeated rewritings of history in terms of feminism, postmodernism and metafiction, and developing an understanding of the way in which these female figures are received and interpreted within the context of historical fiction.

‘Always Coming and Going’: The In-Between Spaces of Elizabeth Bowen’s Early Novels

As an Anglo-Irish writer, Elizabeth Bowen’s own sense of home, and the location of her national identity, is uncertain. In a recent essay on the author, Vera Kreilkamp refers to the Anglo-Irish as ‘a colonial class uneasily suspended […] between a British and an Irish identity’ (2009: 13). Hermione Lee also comments on Bowen’s ‘particularly acute form of the Anglo-Irish split between confidence and ambivalence, the sense of dislocation and ali-enness’ (1999: 16), intensified by what was, in Bowen’s own words, a ‘cleft between my heredity and my environment’ (1986: 23). Neither English nor Irish, but a hybrid of both, Bowen does not belong to either country, existing instead in an unstable, liminal sphere between the two. Following Maud Ellmann’s claim that ‘the sense of homelessness so prevalent in Bowen’s fiction derives at least in part from the predicament of the Anglo-Irish, an alien enclave marooned in its own home’ (2004: 10), this chapter maintains that, accordingly, her novels explore themes of belonging and exile by foregrounding such in-between, transitory spaces as the Parisian salon/waiting room, the seaside town and the hotel, as well as the ‘doorsteps, docks and platforms’ (Bowen [1935] 1998a: 121) that litter her work. Through an emphasis on the impermanence of such locations, and through recurring contrasts between these and the apparently stable environments of the home, Bowen compels her readers to reconsider the very concept of home, and what it means to belong.

Making up, or making over: Reconstructing the modern female author

It has often been observed that biography as a genre treads a fine line between fact and fiction, between ‘truth and invention’.1 The same is no less true of literary biographies, which, while purporting to offer the ‘real life’ of an author, can only ever offer a version of that life — as Paul Mariani suggests, all a biographer can hope to deliver is ‘not the life itself but a reconstruction, a simulation, a dramatization, an illusion’.2 In the case of literary biography, the line between fact and fiction can become increasingly blurred as the biographer not only relates the significant events of an author’s life, but also, more often than not, does so through allusion to that author’s writings. With the growing popularity of the literary biopic and fictional reimaginings in the form of novelizations, writers’ lives often risk becoming sensationalized, reconstructed beyond recognition. Through an exploration of the links between contemporary reconstructions of three modern and modernist female authors — Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Sylvia Plath — this chapter demonstrates the connections between these and current cultural conceptions of gender and authorship. It examines the ways in which these authors are frequently presented as ‘tragic’ figures, and considers whether or not this quality has become gendered in representations of literary figures.