“We need to talk”: Recovering conversations from the archive

Abstract

<p>Dialogue is a prominent feature of creative non-fiction used to reveal character, anchor narratives in a context and present different perspectives. But how can conversation be recovered if your subject has passed from living memory? I faced this challenge in my creative biography of Catherine Helen Spence – Australia's first female novelist and first woman political candidate. Her public and private lives were complex and many-faceted, which became clear from a close reading of her archival record, containing letters and recollections by friends and family, and her vast literary legacy. Building on Paul John Eakin's theory – that our lives become stories through our "relational others" – I chose to tell Spence's life from the perspectives of those around her. I imagined oral history interviews with them, listened for their speech patterns and applied Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia – many voices in a text – to my investigation. Conversation is frequently cited as a signpost of fictionality, but it can also lend a sense of verisimilitude and empathy. My depiction of Spence demonstrates how life writing at the confluence of history and fiction can illuminate archival evidence to reveal character and present different perspectives of a complex life.</p>