Using Multiple Narrators to Recover the Lives of Women from the Past: A Creative Biography of Catherine Spence

Abstract

<p><b>Using multiple narrators to recover the lives of women from the past: A creative biography of Catherine Spence.</b></p> <p>Catherine Helen Spence (1825-1910) has been described as Australia’s first feminist (Magarey 2010 [1985], 20) but the diverse achievements and contradictory recollections make Spence a difficult subject for traditional biography. Drawing on archival research and revisiting Spence’s literary works, I have written her life using the techniques of fiction, including conversations recreated from her letters and novels, underscored by formal referencing, to reimagine the many and conflicted reactions to her pioneering endeavours. My account of Spence’s life, while founded on documented evidence, is ultimately a work of speculation, making a substantial and original supplement to her afterlife by its interpretative methodology. By representing opposing points of view, ‘I knew Miss Spence’ reflects the challenge post-modern theory poses to singular interpretations of past lives in both the disciplines of history and biographical fiction. My technique contributes to the epistemology of life writing by providing a framework for innovative, creative biography, particularly where the protagonist has a significant literary legacy. As a practice-led research project, the creative biography ‘I knew Miss Spence’ is accompanied by an exegetical exploration of how multiple narrators can challenge the genre conventions of biography to portray a many faceted past life by integrating archival investigation with imaginative interpretation. This reflection situates the creative work within an overarching framework of narratology and a field of life writing, demonstrating the application of the theoretical concepts of relational others (Eakin 2019) and heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981).¹</p>