Biographical fiction —that is, fiction which takes for its subject the life of a real, identified individual instead of an imaginary character — has long been considered a minor genre, not to be taken seriously and certainly not to be trusted. The on-line Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, calls it “a hybrid form designed to mate the appeal of the novel with a vague claim to authenticity”. If you were genuinely interested in the life of Vincent Van Gogh, say, or Virginia Woolf (both of whom have been the subject of novels), you would read a reputable biography. But in recent decades an increasing number of biographical novels by writers with solid literary reputations has raised the status of the genre, and biofiction, as it has come to be called, is now respectable enough to be the subject of academic study and conferences.
David Lodge, professor of literature, prize-winning novelist and author of two biofictional novels himself (Author, Author and A Man of Parts about the writers Henry James and H.G.Wells respectively), suggests several possible reasons for the rise of the biographical novel as a literary form:
‘It could be taken as a symptom of a declining faith or loss of confidence in the power of purely fictional narrative, in a culture where we are bombarded from every direction with factual narrative in the form of ‘news’. It could be regarded as a characteristic move of postmodernism — incorporating the art of the past in its own processes through reinterpretation and stylistic pastiche. It could be seen as a sign of decadence and exhaustion in contemporary writing, or as a positive and ingenious way of coping with the ‘anxiety of influence’.’
David Lodge. The Year of Henry James [London: Penguin Books, 2006, 9-10]
But whatever explains the recent proliferation of biographical novels, their imagining or reinterpretation of real lives has not met with universal approval. Readers of a sceptical disposition are suspicious of books that leave them wondering what’s ‘made up’ and what’s ‘true’, as a friend of mine put it. Others are disturbed by the liberties novelists or screenwriters take in fictionalising real lives, particularly when the subject is not a distant historical figure but still living or recently deceased. Professional biographers and historians have been especially critical. One distinguished biographer, Nigel Hamilton, asked:
‘Are novelists running out of characters to invent? Or is the public fascination with celebrities – at least in the West – such that novelists and their publishers are [. . . ] reckoning that the stories biographers relate are stranger or stronger than fiction, and can be exploited in fiction, or dramatization? Are they trading, literally, on the dropping of names the public will recognize. . . ?’
Nigel Hamilton. ‘Reflections on Biography: What Next?’ https://www. biographysociety.org/2016/06/
The implied slur behind these questions might be dismissed as professional rivalry — biographers, after all, stand to lose readers if the public prefers biofiction to biography. But Hamilton has a point, for not only are the writers of biofiction (along with the screenwriters of ‘biopics’ and TV dramas) cashing in on the ready-made stories of real people, but in order to do so they exploit the painstaking research of biographers from whose books they obtain their material. As another critic puts it:
‘Fictionalised biographies – novels based on the life of a famous person – are ten-a-penny. And why not? They’re easy enough to turn out. Other people – the actual biographers – have done the hard work. All the novelist has to do is to twist the “facts” to suit their own interpretation of the life in question, and away they go.’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/27/top-10-fictitious-biographies/jonathangibbs
In defence of biofictional novelists it must be said that embodying an interpretation in a convincing portrait requires hard work of its own kind even if the basic material has been derived from someone else’s research. The more significant accusation here is of ‘fact-twisting’. The freedom with which some writers discard what doesn’t fit or add their own inventions to produce a more sensational and commercially successful story , must be galling to biographers who, unlike novelists and screenwriters, are faithful to the facts, documenting what they write in notes and citing their sources. That doesn’t mean, of course, that biographers never allow themselves to interpret or speculate, or that they entirely exclude rumour and gossip, but they don’t present it as fact. In one respect, however, modern biographers have moved closer to novelists. While novelists have always had free rein to explore the hidden private side of an individual, biographers have traditionally been silent about potentially scandalous aspects of the intimate life. But some modern biographers, committed to portraying the whole individual, no longer feel obliged to suppress secrets, though the decision to ‘reveal all’ remains controversial.
Most biographers, of course, are talented writers and many possess as great a gift as any novelist for bringing people and events to life. Nonetheless, their professional code restricts what they can do. For instance, a biographer can report that A met B, (and where and how and why), but will not use dialogue, unless the conversation was recorded. But a novelist can invent dialogue, using it along with all fiction’s other methods of dramatisation to make readers experience the meeting. Most importantly, while the biographer can only describe the subject’s innermost feelings if they were recorded in a personal diary or letter, or confided to a reliable witness, a novelist is free to imagine their most secret thoughts and impulses. It’s that combination of dramatisation and intimacy that gives the biographical novel its great appeal.
Biographers find this freedom shocking. As Hermione Lee (biographer of Virginia Woolf and other writers), says:
‘Biographers don’t [. . . ] invent their subject’s conversations, or take their clothes off and put them into bed, or fantasise their secret memories and unacted desires. Biographers (if they have any decency) don’t freely paraphrase their subject’s writings, or quote from their letters without footnotes. But novelists are allowed to make free.’ Hermione Lee. ‘The Great Pretender.’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/mar/20/featuresreviews.guardianreview17
Lee is raising a serious ethical issue. What right does a novelist have to invent a real person’s inner life, imagining their most intimate experiences and feelings? Can this intrusion into the privacy of the individual ever be justified? She was reviewing Cólm Tóibín’s 2004 novel The Master about the writer Henry James, which she began reading, she admits, in a hostile frame of mind: ‘How dare Cólm Tóibín, for all his great gifts as a novelist [. . . . ] have the chutzpah to pretend to be Henry James, to know what [James] thought, to make up his life?’
But Lee admits that she read on ‘absorbed and moved’ because ‘Tóibín has created his own invention, with remarkable boldness and subtlety, out of the life of “The Master” [as James was known]’. In particular, she notes, he has imagined James’ ‘process of turning his own “personal store” of memories and relationships into fiction.’ It’s not surprising that this process is what most interests one writer in another, which is perhaps why so much biofiction takes a writer as its central character.
In the right hands, as Hermione Lee acknowledges, a biographical novel can deepen our understanding of the individual it portrays. Fiction’s great power is to imagine and reveal the hidden inner life of the self, which is a vital element of the novel, sometimes its main subject as in the Modernist novels of Woolf and Proust. Even in the most action-oriented novels (crime fiction, thrillers, spy stories), the protagonist’s inner life has become important. Fictional detectives are often tormented souls with complicated personal lives to satisfy the modern reader’s interest in individual psychology. The simple ‘whodunnit’ is no longer enough.
Biographers are not the only critics of biofiction, however. Historians, too, look down on it for its romanticization of the past, especially the many novels about queens and royal mistresses which the historian of Tudor England David Starkey has notoriously derided as ‘chick lit’ or ‘Mills and Boon romance’, written by women and for women. It’s safer to take as a subject someone obscure and unglamorous, such as Grace Marks, a young maidservant imprisoned for murder in 19th century Ontario, whom Margaret Atwood wrote about in Alias Grace. In this type of historical biofiction, the writer may be seen as rescuing an individual from what E.P. Thompson, historian of the working classes in England, has called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, and granting them a fairer hearing than social prejudices allowed in their own time.
The branch of historical studies known as ‘history from below’, which focuses on such marginalized or previously invisible figures, is particularly fertile territory for the novelist, who is free to imagine when the archives are silent. As Annabel Abbs, author of The Joyce Girl (the tragic story of James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia), puts it: ‘… novelists can wriggle into the spaces closed to biographers, the omissions, repressions and evasions of history, those tantalising gaps that potentially reveal so much more than a string of facts.’ https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/why-should-we-trust-biographical-fiction-1.2838176 Biographical fiction, Abbs says, can explore what’s been left out or suppressed from the official version, allowing us ‘to view major events and significant personalities through the eyes of a narrator displaced from history. It can give a voice to the marginal, the disempowered and the suppressed.’
Among such figures (though by no means invariably ‘disempowered’ or ‘suppressed’), the wives and lovers of great men may be worth discovering for their own sake. Whether as privileged insiders or as individuals in their own right, they offer rich material for biofiction, and not only in the historical novels dismissed by Starkey but in more recent times. As Abbs says, citing Karen Mack’s Freud’s Mistress, Gavin McCrea’s Mrs Engels, and Naomi Woods’ Mrs Hemingway, a novel about Ernest Hemingway’s four wives: ‘Novels like these dislodge the iconic male, giving centre stage to someone with a very different viewpoint.’
It is in the very nature of biofiction, perhaps, to be revisionist. Free to imagine the private world and hidden self, the novelist reveals the public figure from a different angle, creating an alternative and more complex vision of the life that may challenge the official version. But the writer who does so must be prepared to raise hackles. Hilary Mantel’s sympathetic portrayal of the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell in her Booker prize-winning trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light) challenges the traditional image of the man and has been attacked by some historians, not just for perceived biases (since historians, too, may differ in their assessment of a historical figure), but because however extensive her research, she goes beyond what can be deduced from the evidence: she imagines and reconstructs, presenting historical events as experienced from within the consciousness of a central participant.
David Starkey (the Tudor specialist cited earlier) while praising Mantel as an admirable writer, called Wolf Hall ‘a perversion of history’ and said, revealingly: ‘Frankly, I’d be grateful if she stayed off my patch as a historian.’ Disturbed (with some justification perhaps) that the general public gets its history from TV series or bestsellers rather than professional historians, he said in an interview: ‘We really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians. [. . . .] They are very good at imagining character: that’s why the novels sell. They have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources.’ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10049866/David-Starkey-it-is-ludicrous-to-suggest-that-historical-novelists-have-authority.
But another professor, Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of a major new biography of Thomas Cromwell, is far more sympathetic to Mantel’s project: ‘We have not got tired, Hilary and I, of talking about the fascinating difference of looking at the same person from two points of view – one the historian, one the novelist. What she can do is tell the stories which I cannot, because the facts simply aren’t there.’ As a historian he can only speculate, prefacing any suggestion with “probably” or “might have”, but a novelist, he says (with a hint of envy), ‘is liberated from all that.’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/13/diarmaid-maculloch-thomas-cromwell-a-life-interview-hilary-mantel
The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick (a specialist in the Soviet Union) expresses a similar envy in her review of Julian Barnes’ novel The Noise of Time about the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich: ‘How I would have liked to invent a few interior monologues in my recent book on Stalin’s team! It would have made it so much easier to bring the characters to life. But as a historian you’re not allowed to invent interior monologues, only to quote texts that can be footnoted.’ [Sheila Fitzpatrick. ‘Zanchevsky, Zakrevsky or Zakovsky?’ London Review of Books Vol. 38 No 4, 18 February 2016] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n04/sheila-fitzpatrick/zanchevsky-zakrevsky-or-zakovsky
Fitzpatrick also envies novelists’ freedom to play around with chronological sequence and withhold facts until they choose to reveal them, which not only creates drama and suspense, but provides a shifting perspective on the subject. Yet while she praises Barnes’ ‘brilliant impersonation’ of Shostakovich, ultimately she judges the novel from a specialist’s perspective as a romantic portrayal for a Western audience of a Cold War stereotype (the artist crushed by the totalitarian state). While she had jokingly asked at the start if novelists were ‘trying to put historians out of business’, her review reminds readers that the professional historian’s expertise is irreplaceable.
Not only biographers and historians, but some literary critics too have reservations about biofiction, even in the best of hands. As the professor of literature John Mullan put it in a Guardian article comparing Tóibín’s portrayal of Henry James in The Master with that of David Lodge in Author, Author: ‘These two clever and engaging novels unsettle each other’s assumptions, prompting the thought that biographical fiction might, unavoidably, condemn itself to a kind of triviality. The more it stacks up its evidence, its sources, its academic credentials, the more it condemns itself to a secondary status — something perhaps more entertaining than the truth, but something less than the truth, too.’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/30/fiction.colmtoibin
Biographical novelists have responded to such criticism by questioning the binary opposition of biography and biofiction, with its underlying assumption that one offers the truth and the other is a lie. As Louisa Treger, author of a biographical novel The Lodger (2014), about a love-affair between the writers Dorothy Richardson and H.G.Wells, points out :
‘Biography is only as reliable as its sources: it can be made up from letters and friends’ reminiscences, which are less than objective. [. . . . ] We all carry our own subjective impressions of people: biographers, as well as novelists, cannot help but view the world through their own subjectivity. Prominent figures from Henry Kissinger to Virginia Woolf have had multiple conventional biographies written about them, which portray them very differently. Everyone has a different image of the same person. Somewhere within that myriad of images the truth lies.’
For this reason, she argues, fictional biography may be just as valid as any other portrayal: ‘Of course, one can argue that all fiction is lies, but biographical fiction might be a lie through which the truth can emerge [my highlighting].’ Louisa Treger. “Biographical Fiction: The Pleasures & Responsibilities.” in Writers & Artists: The Insider Guide to the Media [no date] https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/writers/advice/915/a-writers-toolkit/developing-an-idea/
While Treger’s questioning of biography’s truth claims is pertinent, it has to be said nonetheless that her account of the liberties she took with the facts in her own novel (shrinking the time-frame in the interests of creating a tighter narrative, suppressing individuals (Wells’ two children) who would have been a distraction from or complication of her main story) somewhat weakens her case. But her book has been praised by H.G.Wells’ most recent biographer, Michael Sherborne, as ‘a vividly imagined novel, more compelling than any biography.’ [Author’s web-site https://www.louisatreger.com ] Moreover, Treger’s fictionalization of the affair seems less questionable once we know that Wells himself portrayed his lovers in his novels and that Dorothy Richardson fictionalized her relationship with him (as Hypo G. Wilson) in the tenth part of her autobiographical novel sequence Pilgrimage, offering a portrayal of the man that led one critic to say: “Miss Richardson may be recognised as Wells’ most authoritative “biographer” thus far.’ [Gloria Glikin. “Through the Novelist’s Looking-Glass.” The Kenyon Review, Vol. 31, No. 3 (1969), pp. 297-319. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4334907
The final word on the matter might go to another professor of literature, Jay Parini, who having written many writers’ lives both in conventional biographies (William Faulkner, Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Gore Vidal) and in biographical fiction (Walter Benjamin, Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy and St. Paul), has a claim to more insight than most. There is, he asserts, ‘a truthfulness in fiction that is simply unavailable to the academic biographer.’ https://lithub.com/reading-in-a-boom-time-of-biographical-fiction
Questions remain, nonetheless, about the ethics of using real lives as material for fiction, particularly in film and television where the ‘bio-pic’ and biofictional series such as The Crown portray living individuals, not just in their public life but in their intimate private life as imagined by scriptwriters and director. Apart from the intrusiveness of such portrayals, it’s troubling that some viewers take them as fact, just as some readers (to judge by popular listings and web-sites) make no distinction between biofiction and biography proper.
What is the biographical novelist’s or screenwriter’s responsibility to their subject? Should there be limits to how far a writer can go in fictionalising a real life and imagining its secrets? How does the writer (and even more so, the screenwriter) ensure that readers (or viewers) understand that this is fiction, not fact? Is it sufficient to add ‘a novel’ after the title, or should there be an explanatory ‘Author’s Note’ ?
These were questions I had to face in writing my own partly biographical novel, A Promise on the Horizon. But I’ll leave that for a separate piece. In the meantime, I would love to hear from other readers and writers, either about their own reactions to the issues or simply about any particularly interesting or problematic biographical novels.