Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Virginia Woolf and biofiction’

A roundtable on “Biography, Biofiction and Ethics” was a highlight for me at the June 9-12 Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. The panelists, all knowledgeable on the topic, included two authors of Woolf biofiction who defended the genre.

Two views of Keynes

Susan Sellers, author of the 2008 Vanessa and Virginia and the recently released Firebird: A Bloomsbury Love Story (about Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova), pronounced fiction as “the ideal medium for exploring the tangle of personal history” and “an ethical arena in which to speculate and imagine in the gaps of what the historical record can tell us.”

Emma Barnes also chose Maynard Keynes as the subject of her 2020 novel, Mr. Keynes’ Revolution. She said: “Fiction is a lie, by definition. But it’s also a lie in pursuit of some essential truths, or should be. If we recognize the practical and aesthetic constraints imposed on us as writers, we can try to write fiction about real people with integrity.”

The devil’s advocate on the panel was Mark Hussey, Woolf scholar extraordinaire and author of the recent biography, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism. For Mark, a novelist’s changing facts raises an ethical red flag: “The shift of emphasis from the biographical subject of a biofiction to the writer of that biofiction’s own ‘vision of life and the world’ strikes me as a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand.”

A view from the fence and more

As a selective and skeptical reader of biofiction, I’m on the fence. What’s fact and what’s fiction? Should I care? (I do.) Can and should a novelist distort the facts to embellish the fiction?

For the reader, perhaps it’s a case of caveat emptor: she knows she’s reading fiction and she can enjoy it as such, consult factual sources to verify facts. I’ve read biofiction that the author appends with a list of references and comments about her fictionalizations. That works for me.

In addition to those mentioned above, other biofiction novels mentioned or referenced include:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham, 1998

Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez, 1998

But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury, Gillian Freeman, 2006

Vanessa and Her Sister, Priya Parmar, 2014

Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, Maggie Gee, 2014

Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf, Norah Vincent, 2015

 

Read Full Post »

The latest issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany is now online. Issue 93, Fall/Winter 2018 has been posted to WordPress at this link.

Guest-edited by Michael Lackey and Todd Avery, the issue focuses on the special topic of Virginia Woolf and Biofiction. In addition, the issue features a section dedicated to Jane Marcus Feminist University: The Document Record, the event honoring Jane Marcus that was organized by J. Ashley Foster, Cori L. Gabbard and Conor Tomás Reed and held at CUNY Graduate Center on Sept. 9, 2016. 

Also included in the issue are book reviews by Danielle Gilman, Steve Ferebee, Elisa Bolchi, Jeanette McVicker, and Stephen Barkway as well as the Call for Papers for the 29th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, organized by Drew Shannon.

Other issues of the VWM can be found on the Virginia Woolf Mischellany website.

Read Full Post »

%d bloggers like this: