Fictionalised Biography or Biographical Fiction?

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

As most of you know by now, I love and adore historical fiction. It's my preferred genre, although I will have a go at most things if it's well-written, has an interesting premise or I'm in the mood. However my go-to, when I need a guaranteed read, a read I can simply fall into with comfort and ease, it will always be historical fiction.

In and around this are books that might be classified as alternate histories (think 1984 or Stephen King's 11/22/63) where the author plays with what might have happened if just one event changed. We can also have books that are historical now by default. I guess you might call them period piece fiction as they are now historical to us, but they were once contemporary (think Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott). The historical time and setting of these novels now plays an important part in understanding what's happening to our beloved characters.

Historical fiction, for me then, pretty much covers everything else. That is, an author sets their book in a period of time before their own and populates it with fictional characters (think Thomas Keneally, Geraldine Brooks, James A. Michener). To refine this even further, you could include authors who write about the immediate past. A time they may have lived through themselves or perhaps their grandparents lived through, providing a personal perspective to the historical context (think Tolstoy, Zola, Harper Lee).

Included within this group, is the fictionalised biography.

Or is that, biographical fiction?

Whichever way you look it, it's where an author takes real events and real people and makes up stuff about what they said and did to make a story. I love this sub-genre. When done well, it can provide insights into a time and place or a much-loved person that would be impossible to know otherwise, due to the sparsity of primary sources (think Hilary Mantel, Robert Graves, Philippa Gregory).

One of the things I love about this particular genre is it's ability to view history through a different lens. A lot of authors are exploring history through a feminist lens or an Indigenous lens (think The Secret River or Alias Grace). Given that the historical record favours the winners who also usually happen to be men, being reminded that other people were involved and impacted is a good thing.

Historical facts are not static; they have always been open to manipulation. Revisionism and re-interpretation is a natural human process. We all adjust our personal stories as new evidence comes to light and as experience and maturity enhance our ability to see beyond our own biases and prejudices.

The history of the world is no different. The stories around the facts, change with time. New information, fresh perspectives and the advantage of hindsight can all have an impact. It opens the doors to exciting possibilities and original ideas.

Which brings me to the massive disappointment I feel, when this story telling process fails to work it's magic over me.

It may be that the weird times under which we now live, are adversely affecting my reading habits. I do seem to be leaning more towards narrative non-fiction lately. But let me tell you about two of the disappointments.

Firstly, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell.

Shortlisted for this years Women's Prize and claiming to tell the story of Shakespeare young son who died at age 11 in 1596, this is a lifelong fascination for O'Farrell come to fruition. It sounded so promising.

I loved the first chapter that shows us a young Hamnet playing with his twin sister Judith who suddenly falls ill. She puts herself to bed and Hamnet goes searching for a family member to help, but everyone is out. This is unusual. Hamnet's search becomes more desperate and tense when he suspects that Judith may have caught the Plague.

But then we switch to back story. The wild, untamed daughter attracts the attention of the dissatisfied tutor to her brothers. Yuck! Her witchy habits means she is an outsider and considered dangerous to know. He knows he shouldn't, but he does, anyway. Blah, blah, blah.

I picked it up and put it down three times, hoping it was just my bad mood or tiredness. But no. This is just trite and awful. Not even the stuff about the Plague was enough to keep me interested (if only a few more world leaders had been like Queen Elizabeth I though "The playhouses are all shut, by order of the Queen, and no one is allowed to gather in public.")

My next fictionalised biography disappointment was a bit closer to home.

I've been looking forward to the new Kate Grenville for some time now. It's an embargoed title until the 2nd July, but some pre-publicity stuff tells me that the premise of this story about Elizabeth Macarthur hinges on the sudden discovery of some "shockingly frank secret memoirs." 

Uh-oh!

I many give A Room made of Leaves closer attention in July, just to make sure, but the blurbs unnecessary use of the words 'notorious', 'miraculously' and 'playful' have turned me off, as has this particular paragraph.

Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in a society that gave women none- this Elizabeth Macarthur manages her complicated life with spirit and passion, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir lets us hear-at last!-what one of those seemingly demure women from history might really have thought.

Yuck!

That has to be one of the worst written blurbs ever. It's made the story sound like some kind of bodice-ripping, pot-boiler.

I am now feeling rather nervous about starting the final book in Hilary Mantel's (so far) magnificent trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, The Mirror and the Light. The reports coming in from customers and other bloggers are encouraging, so all I have to do I is make the time to reread the first two!

A copy of Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld is also lurking on my TBR pile. I love the idea of an alternate history story line with a feminist lens, but what if the writing is dull and awful? I've never read any Sittenfeld before, so I don't know what to expect.

Despite the above, I do in fact, love this genre. Remember how much I enjoyed In Love With George Eliot by Kathy O'Shaughnessy earlier this year. And my most recent Zola (surely the master of fictionalised history), and my current chapter-a-day read of War and Peace plus a whole stack of other classic and period piece books devoured this year alone (ranging from Katherine Mansfield to Angela Thirkell to Mena Calthorpe and just this week Martin Boyd).

I'm certainly not done with fictionalised biographies, but I am a little more wary of late. As always, I'm happy to consider your favourites, in this genre, for future reference.

In Love With George Eliot | Kathy O'Shaughnessy #UKfiction

Kathy O'Shaughnessy has written an utterly delightful and immersive story about the extraordinary Marian Lewes, otherwise known as George Eliot. The book follows Marian from the early days of her unconventional 'marriage' to George Lewes through to her writing days, fame, second marriage and eventual death.

In Love With George Eliot not only refers to the people that surrounded and feted Marian throughout her lifetime but also three modern characters who love her work and are fascinated by her story. O'Shaughnessy herself, as well as her modern-day inventions, Kate, Ann and Han are just as immersed in Eliot's life story as we are. In a few brief chapters, inserted amongst the main story about Eliot, these three organise an Eliot conference in contemporary London and Venice, as they explore their own ethical quandaries. I wasn't completely sure that we need these chapters, but they irked me less as we went along.

As a fiction writer, O'Shaughnessy is able to enter areas considered no-go to a regular biographer. She is able to get inside Marian's head to speculate and wonder. She can imagine conversations and occasionally put people in the room who weren't really there. But it's not all supposition and imagination, the story is littered with direct quotes from Marian's letters and diaries as well as those from others. The research is there, as is the reverence and the curiosity.

I read Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss a lifetime ago. I've always wanted to read more and I hope to one day revisit Middlemarch in particular. My sense is that O'Shaughnessy, not only loves Eliot, but has written a homage to her. In Love With George Eliot feels like reading an Eliot novel. There is perceptive insight, a careful pacing and elegant set pieces with the characters moving and talking amongst each other, sometimes with great insight and sometimes at a complete loss to explain themselves.

Dear Sara,

There is always an after-sadness belonging to a brief and interrupted intercourse between friends - the sadness of feeling that the blundering efforts we have made towards mutual understanding have only made a new veil between us.... We are quite unable to represent ourselves truly - why should we complain that our friends see a false image?

...I have blundered, as most of us do, from too much egoism and too little sympathy. If I am too imperfect to do and feel the right thing at the right moment, I am not without the slower sympathy that becomes all the stronger from a sense of previous mistake.

In Love With George Eliot is a rich, immersive read, best enjoyed slowly and thoughtfully. It's not a story to rush, but to savour.

Now I just have to work out how I'm going to read more Eliot sooner rather than later!

Just Flesh and Blood by Jane Caro

It feels like I've been waiting a VERY long time for Jane Caro to finish her Elizabethan YA trilogy. Just A Girl was first published in 2011, Just A Queen in 2015 and now, finally we have Just Flesh and Blood.

I'm sure that Caro must get asked all the time, why Elizabeth? In her acknowledgements at the back of Just Flesh and Blood, she says, 

I want to express my gratitude and admiration to Elizabeth Tudor herself. Her existence and commanding presence in history has always mattered to me. Whatever her mistakes and cruelties - and she was a monarch of her times so they were many - she proved to me when I most needed the proof that women could lead, they could wield power at least as well as any man, and they could do so on their own. I hope she helps young readers new to her story in the way she helped me when I was a girl in search of a hero.

Her Elizabeth is based on facts and known history, but she imagines what it must have been like to be this lone woman, in power, surrounded my men trying to manipulate her and use her for their own purpose. Caro explores the life-long impact on Elizabeth to have lost her mother at so young an age and in such horrific circumstances, at the wishes of her father. The ultimate act of domestic violence in fact.

Caro paints a very human queen, full of desires, impulses and incredible strength of will. A monarch who had to know her own mind in public, but was full of doubts and questions in private.

Just Flesh and Blood brings us to the end of Elizabeth's reign and life. She spends the book reflecting on the important, defining moments of her childhood as well as many pivotal events from her long and glorious reign. I found her voice, in all three books to be authentic and believable.

During an interview with L.J.M Owen on her blog: The Emotional Journey of Writers: Jane Caro, Feb 14 2018, Caro described her writing style as 'an act of imagination...an act of empathy',

I never set out to write her as a teenager or an old woman. I don't think about that. In the same way as in life, you don't think, 'Oh, I'm a teenager… Oh, now I'm an old woman'. You are just you, and so you just write as you.

That's what Caro brings to this story, a new, very personal and intimate way of viewing Elizabeth I. It's a chance for Elizabeth to step outside the history books and for us to see her in all her human glory, warts and all. There's a lot to admire.

Just A Girl
Just A Queen

See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt

Lizzie Borden is a fascinating character.

Did she or did she not kill her father and stepmother with a hatchet one summer's day in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1892?

So much has been written and said about these rather gruesome murders over the years. So much speculation and innuendo. What more is there possibly to say?

Firstly, in 2012, the journals of Lizzie's attorney, Andrew Jackson Jennings were bequeathed to the Fall River Historical Society.

Since then, the Society have had the journals transcribed by curators Michael Martins and Dennis Binette.
Snippets of information have been leaked out during this time, but apparently we are awaiting the publication of a book from the Society for the full reveal!

In the meantime, we have another book fictionalising Lizzie's story, Sarah Schmidt's See What I Have Done.

It's hard not to believe that Lizzie committed the murders. She was in the house at the time. She had the opportunity and the motive. And well, let's face it, from everything we've read ever since, she was rather unstable and most likely had a narcissistic and/or borderline personality disorder going on (not that everyone with NBPD is capable of murder, but it's just another one of the factors stacked against Lizzie in this case).

Schmidt tells her story from multiple perspective - Lizzie, Emma (the sister), Bridget (the maid) and Benjamin (a 'friend' of Uncle John's). This is where her tale diverges from some of the others.

Benjamin is a very dubious low-life thug that Uncle John meets en route to Fall River. He engages Benjamin to rough up/talk to Andrew in an attempt to dissuade Andrew from certain financial actions that John wasn't happy about.

Schmidt then uses Benjamin to 'see' things that others in the house at the time couldn't as well as using his presence to explain why the police couldn't find a murder weapon. Later on, he acts as the catalyst for the life-long estrangement of the two sisters in 1905.

This was a satisfying explanation, although somewhat frustrating at the same time. Benjamin is a fictional character in a story with real life well-known people. He provided us with some plausible possibilities, but ultimately, he's not real, so therefore his solutions are not the ones we need to solve this case once and for all.

I guess we will never know for sure, unless Jennings' journals prove to be as earth-shattering as the curators have promised.

If you'd like to read more versions of Lizzie's story you could try Angela Carter's The Fall River Axe Murders and Lizzie's Tiger, Elizabeth Engstrom's Lizzie Borden and Brandy Purdy's The Secrets of Lizzie Borden.

The murders and trial of Lizzie have also attracted a number of movie adaptations over the years. Actresses who have portrayed Lizzie include Elizabeth Montgomery, Christina Ricci, Alison Fraser and Chloe Sevigny.

See What I Have Done is a debut novel by Australian writer, Sarah Schmidt. She has a blog that details her writing journey.

Hachette Australia will publish See What I Have Done in April 2017.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Angle of Repose is Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer prize winning novel from 1971.

Stegner created a part fact/part fiction story of life in 1880's America based on the real letters and journals of Mary Hallock Foote. After his book was published, a controversy brewed with some of Foote's descendants about how Stegner went about this merging of fact and fiction and his use of Foote's letters.

My edition of Angle of Repose carried Stegner's brief note explaining that,

though I have used many details of their lives and characters, I have not hesitated to warp both personalities and events to fictional needs. This is a novel which utilises selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history.

To my mind then, it was pretty clear, as I read the book, that this would be a kind of fictionalised biography.

Stegner combined real life people with fictional characters. His fictional characters spoke the words of real life people and the letters written by the real life Foote were liberally used (with minor changes) to tell the story of her fictional counterpart - Susan Ward.

Real and imaginary events existed side by side.

As the fictional Lyman Ward re-imagined his grandmother's life to suit the needs of his own personal narrative, so too, did Stegner, re-imagine this amazing story of a New York artist living life in the wild, wild, West with her adventurous, engineering husband.

The Irrigation Ditch, 1889, Mary Hallock Foote

Past and present informed each other as the fictional Lyman looked for lessons or clues to help him come to terms with his own life and failed marriage.

It was also very clear that Stegner (and his character Lyman Ward) had a great deal of affection and respect for Mary Foote/Susan Ward.

The time spent in Boise, Idaho, planning the building of a new dam, that could transform the barren desert, was particularly evocative - you could taste the dust and heat and feel Susan's growing isolation.

The Foote home, 1885, Idaho

The Angle of Repose is also a story about marriage.

The choices we make for love and for security and the courage required to see it through.
Stegner explores loyalty, hope, frustration and how to maintain a sense of self and independence.

We see the importance of open communication, but also how to turn a blind eye and hold your tongue at times. He delves into the daily negotiations and the battles of will. He shows how the small discontents can build into seemingly insurmountable mountains over time, so that guilt and forgiveness become the thing that keeps a couple together.

Angle of Repose was a tremendous read. It's another example of a fabulous Pulitzer winner that completely embraces and encapsulates a period of time and way of life in American history.

It felt like this book has taken me ages to read. But it was only 3 weeks in the end.
Angle of Repose was a book to savour slowly. At 557 pages with small font and minimum line spacing, it wasn't a small undertaking, however it was worth every minute, every page, every letter. In fact, for me, it was Mary's many original letters that made this story such an absorbing gem.

9/20 Books of Summer (winter)
57/110 Classics Club

Addendum, or the dangers of writing a review too soon.

As some of you know, I avoid reading reviews about the book I'm currently reading. I like to write my own review unfettered by anyone else's opinions.

However, every now and again, a book does cause me to do some research on it as I'm reading it. 

Angle of Repose was one of those books. I felt the need to find out about Mary Hallock Foote and where the fact and fiction existed in this story. I found a fascinating PDF of Foote's life at the Newsletter of the Idaho State Historical Society.

Reading this brief bio about the Foote's made me realise just how much of Mary's life was actually in Angle of Repose.

The main facts and figures and people are straight from Mary's real life. Stegner imagined conversations, motives and feelings to suit his literary purposes. When questioned afterwards, Stegner never denied his use of Foote's diaries and letters but it is curious that he didn't chronicle this properly at the time as one would expect of such a well-regarded academic.

The Newsletter above states at the end in it's bibliography that Angle of Repose is "A fictionalized telling of Mary Hallock Foote’s life, Angle of Repose is a great book, but don’t look to it for historical accuracy".

In the reviews and articles I've now read, I've come across a lot of literary regard for the character of Lyman. To my mind, as a character, he was nowhere near as interesting as his grandparents were. And I've now been wondering about the patriarchal attitudes that were still alive and kicking in the 70's, that not only saw Lyman's story as more relevant than Mary's, but also allowed Stegner to claim and bend a little known female writer's life to his own purpose, without any consequence.

I'm surprised that new editions of the book haven't rectified this oversight. Stegner clearly held his female characters in high regard and he wrote about them with warmth and affection. Yet, the more I read, the more it feels like something a little dishonest has happened here.

Should I have left my initial enjoyment of Angle of Repose alone?
Or does my new found knowledge, although tinged with shadows, allow me to view the book and the author(s) and the controversy in a more correct context?

The Pulitzer Project has several reviews for Angle of Repose which you can find here.
Jean @ Howling Frog Books review.
Rosemary and Reading Glasses' review.
Lisa @Bookshelf Fantasies review.

Just a Queen by Jane Caro

It has been a long wait between drinks in this Tudor trilogy by Jane Caro. But the wait has been worth it.

Just A Girl was a tremendously good read in 2011. Four years later, Just A Queen surpassed my very high expectations.

Caro has written a thoroughly researched, thoroughly convincing version of Elizabeth's first 25 years or so as Queen of England.

She uses the same device as she did in Just A Girl, whereby Elizabeth reminisces about the events leading up to the main purpose of the story.

In Just A Queen this purpose is all about the execution of Queen Mary of Scotland in 1587.

Caro has written a novel based on real events. Some of her dialogue references authentic documents, but most of the emotion, motivations and discussions are fictionalised.

Elizabeth is a strong, dynamic, complex protagonist. Caro takes the time to show us how daunting it must have been for a woman to rule during such patriarchal times. She gives us some insight into the daily life of women during Elizabethan times - just enough to make us truly thankful for our more enlightened, modern times.

Just A Queen ticks all my boxes - fabulous fictionalised history, a fascinating female character, well written and an engaging story from start to finish.

This book is classified as teen/YA, but it's perfectly satisfying fare for anyone who loves their Tudor/Elizabethan history in any way shape of form.


I just hope that Caro doesn't make us wait four more years for the final book in this "big, hairy, audacious" trilogy.

Just a Girl by Jane Caro

I do read books outside the historical fiction genre, but looking at my reviews so far...not very many! But they're just so darn satisfying and interesting!

In 'Just A Girl' we have young Elizabeth on the eve of her coronation, passing a restless night in anticipation of her coronation. She spends the night reflecting on the path that has led her to this night. A young life beset with tragedy, pathos, danger, imprisonment, illness, glamour and death.

She is surrounded by people who change allegiance at the drop of a hat, who are quick to judge, condemn and believe the worse. Elizabeth makes mistakes and learns from them and she is quick to observe and learn the lessons from the mistakes of others as well.We see how she develops the strength of character to become a Queen that is capable of ruling her people through a period of nearly 50 years into a Golden Age.

Caro's story is simply written, but never trite or dull. I was completely caught up in the feelings and dilemmas of the young Elizabeth. I felt empathy and sympathy for her. I finished the book wanting more. More Elizabeth and more Caro (you may know her from the Gruen Transfer on ABC TV).
Jane Caro interview SMH

Having read (and loved) Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall' over Christmas I felt quite familiar with the history of that time and I was very ready to enter into that time once again. 

Caro has made some concessions to her younger, modern readers, but this simply gives Elizabeth's story a poignancy and immediacy.


Highly recommended for 12+ readers.