Writing encounters: framing the use of fiction in biography

Abstract

Debates involving history, fiction and 'truth' also arise in relation to biographical writing that employs fiction. One response may be through making (or reasserting) genre distinctions but this would seem to preserve the paradigm in which the tensions reside and which Virginia Woolf famously characterised as a choice between 'truth as something of granitelike solidity and of personality as something of rainbowlike tangibility' (Woolf 1958, 149). My own recent work utilised the form of fictional biography to better explore and tell the story of its subject, Australia's first woman aviator, Millicent Bryant. Though this approach is now more common as a means of portraying an actual life, it still confronts arguments about genre which demand the choice of either truth or personality, granite or rainbow: that biography must, in other words, be either a product of factual knowledge or risk losing its authority in becoming a literary form that can explore 'personality'. This paper revisits these arguments with the aim of considering other ways in which the use of fiction in biographical writing might be conceived and recognised.