We might like to believe that it’s the original product of the author’s imagination, but it’s often closer to the truth to say that it emerges from the reading of other books. From childhood on, our minds are imprinted with narrative tropes and patterns that we reproduce in the stories we tell. It can even happen that a children’s book provides the template for a grown-up novel. I’m by no means the first to have suspected that behind the central triangle of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover lies Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden with its trio of unhappy Mary, her crippled cousin, and Dickon the country boy with his Yorkshire accent who introduces them to the healing touch of the natural world.
Novelists engage in many ways, conscious or unconscious, with the predecessors whose imaginings have triggered their own. What I have in mind here is not the flood of prequels and sequels that Jane Austen’s novels have inspired, but something more complex than imitation — a reworking that questions the certainties of the original, explores realities it left unacknowledged, gives an alternative version, as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea did with the story of the madwoman Bertha in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and more recently Jo Baker’s Longbourn has done through the eyes of the Bennett family servants from Pride and Prejudice.
One of the most complex, brilliant and daring examples of a reworking of the classics is J. M. Coetzee’s Dostoyevskian novel The Master of Petersburg, which makes the Russian author himself the protagonist of a story that echoes situations and characters from his life and fiction. Similarly, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs takes the convict Magwitch from Dicken’s Great Expectations and fills in those parts of his story Dickens didn’t tell juxtaposing them with a crisis in the life of a fictional novelist resembling the young Charles Dickens.
A more conventional form of engagement with a predecessor is biographical fiction or ‘biofiction’ as it’s often listed — the narration of a writer’s life (in part or whole) sticking more or less faithfully to the facts, but presenting them as experienced from within. While any historical individual can serve as subject of biofiction (the leaders of the French revolution, for instance, in Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety), novelists seem particularly drawn to imagining the experience of a fellow-writer. Dead writers as diverse as Byron, Conan-Doyle, Henry James, Samuel Johnson, Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf, to name just a few, have figured in author biofictions (by Benjamin Markovits, Julian Barnes, Colm Tóibín and David Lodge, Jay Parini, and Michael Cunningham respectively).
Some of these biographical fictions focus on one central figure; in others the writer character is one of several to whose inner world we have access as in Adam Faulds’ The Quickening Maze where the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson share space with several other characters into whose various levels of delusion and self-delusion we enter.
My own novel — A Promise on the Horizon — is part biofiction since it recounts three months in the life of Henri Beyle (better known under his later pen name Stendhal), and part straight fiction since his story is intertwined with that of an unknown woman whose path he briefly crosses.
I should never have thought to write such a novel had I not stumbled upon one of those small coincidences that set the imagination racing. I read in the opening pages of W.G.Sebald’s Vertigo about Henri Beyle’s arrival in Italy as a seventeen year old in the rearguard of Napoleon’s army. This sent me to Stendhal’s diaries which I’d never looked at before, though I’d read and reread his novels. And there I happened upon a page where, recounting his 1811 return to Italy, Beyle reported finding a book by Mary Wollstonecraft in the Paris-Milan diligence. Who could possibly have been reading a book by an English feminist in Napoleon’s France, I wondered (as did Beyle himself).
I woke one morning a few days later with a sentence forming in my mind and knew it was the start of a novel. My imagined Wollstonecraft reader would be a female counterpart for Henri Beyle whose own story interested me equally. I had no plot, no structure beyond Beyle’s itinerary to shape my story, but I decided to interweave the two journeys and see where it would take me.
At first I tried to confine myself strictly to Beyle’s diary but, as the story of his fellow-traveller developed, the imbalance between the purely biographical and the entirely fictional became a problem. Despite misgivings, I started fictionalising Beyle’s story, creating scenes out of bare statements in the diary, imagining his inner world, though always anchoring it in his autobiographical writing. My doubts lessened once I discovered that I wasn’t the first writer to make Stendhal a character in a novel. Not only Sebald, but four French novelists had preceded me, and Jack Robinson’s clever metafiction An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B. came out as I drew close to the end. Nonetheless, careful as I’ve tried to be, I remain uneasily aware of John Mullan’s judgement of biographical fiction as ‘something perhaps more entertaining than the truth, but something less than the truth, too.’ ( Guardian, 30 April 2005)
From Sebald to Stendhal to Wollstonecraft, with both my characters ardent readers, mine is a very ‘bookish’ book. And there is, I realised belatedly, yet another book behind it. On October 30, 1811, at the very moment my novel approaches its climax, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was published, which struck me as another nice coincidence. But much as I admire Austen, I was writing consciously against her. I wanted to escape the conventions of the courtship plot, to write about sexuality, male and female, to have my characters think and talk about the great issues of the day as Austen’s never do, to portray a more complex world than an English village. Yet Austen’s title might well be on my cover. My protagonists are torn between reason and feeling —Marie-Honorine self-restrained, fearing the consequences of surrendering to desire, Henri impulsive, valuing feeling above good sense. Prudence and Folly I might have titled it in the Austenian manner.
Was it impossible to tell a story set in 1811 without echoing Austen’s scenario? She has profoundly shaped our idea of what it was to be a woman (a young middle-class Englishwoman, at least) in the early nineteenth century. But Wollstonecraft offers an alternative, and if her own life and that of her fictional heroines was too unhappy to serve her contemporaries as a model, her refusal to accept the limitations society imposed on women allowed me to imagine a fictional woman who could set off for Italy alone in search of a larger and more fulfilling life than a small provincial town could offer.