Julia Novak

The Notable Woman in Fiction: The Afterlives of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

ABSTRACT Drawing on gender-sensitive approaches to biographical fiction, this article examines fictional representations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Carola Omans Miss Barretts Elopement to Laura Fishs Strange Music. With a focus on their depiction of her profession, the novels are read as part of the poets afterlife and reception history.

Experiments in Life-Writing: Introduction

The introduction outlines how writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have extended the range of the biographical through formal innovations commonly associated with the fictional mode. It discusses the centrality of the fact/fiction dichotomy for an understanding of experimentation with auto/biographical form and its ethical implications. Distinguishing between experiments that negate and those that expand the premises of auto/biography, it surveys a range of generic terms from the field of life-writing research and examines the textual levels on which experiments have been conducted in modern auto/biographical narratives, also addressing the historicity of auto/biographical experimentation. The introduction concludes by outlining the individual chapters in the collection.

Choosing Between Fictions of Clara Schumann: Interview with Janice Galloway

In this interview, conducted in 2015, Scottish author Janice Galloway reflects on her motivation for writing her award-winning biographical novel Clara (Jonathan Cape, London, 2002) and explains why she chose to write a meticulously researched work of fiction rather than a “biography.” She sheds light on her formal experiments, on the impact of her own national consciousness on her writing practice, on her distrust of language in general and authoritative biography in particular, and on the challenges of conveying in print a life suffused by music.

FEMINIST TO POSTFEMINIST: contemporary biofictions by and about women artists

Abstract Biographical novels about historical women artists have been experiencing a veritable boom in recent years. Written mostly by women, they can be understood as women authors’ attempts to reach out across time (and often, space) to other “artistic” women whose lives “speak to us” today. It has long been a key insight of historical fiction research that a historical novel reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set. As such, it can be assumed that contemporary novels about historical women speak as much to twenty-first-century conceptions of femininity as to particular historical moments of female subjectivity. This paper will compare two novels about historical women artists: Janice Galloway’s Clara (2002) about nineteenth-century German pianist Clara Wieck-Schumann and Priya Parmar’s Exit the Actress (2011) about Restoration actress Nell Gwyn. While based on historical facts, both these novels use the greater freedom of fiction to depart from biographical conventions. It will be demonstrated that although they resemble each other on the discourse level, employing shifts in the narrative perspective, conspicuous typography, and graphic elements, they differ markedly in the biographical and fictional subgenres in which they participate and, hence, in their gender politics.

Biographical fiction to historiographic metafiction : rewriting Clara Schumann

Clara Wieck Schumann was one of the leading concert pianists of the nineteenth century. Her story has been captured in several “fictionalised biographies,” texts which transgress genre boundaries and renegotiate the relationship between historical fact and fiction. This essay will compare Janice Galloway’s novel Clara (2002) with J. D. Landis’s Longing (2000), Werner Quednau’s Clara Schumann (1955), and Dieter Kuhn’s play Familientreffen (1988) in order to point out some of the choices the liminal status of biofiction affords the author and the effect of these choices on the portrayal of the heroine. Analyses will draw on Wolfgang Iser’s reflections on the fictionalising act and Linda Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction, demonstrating that writers’ interest in Clara Schumann has resulted not only in widely differing portrayals of the pianist’s life but also in manifestly different classes of texts.