Lindsey Biographical speculation and imagination TEXT Special Issue 50, Life Writing in Troubled Times (original) (raw)
Related papers
TEXT: Literary Journal, 2018
In this article, I explore the challenges and opportunities associated with using 'informed imagination' to write a speculative biography of an historical figure. In the process, I problematize the notion of the archival gap, which has been recently romanced by numerous writers, including myself. By citing archival gaps as a justification for creative license, we neglect the fact that all archives are inherently idiosyncratic in ways that invite, perhaps even demand, the use of both speculation and imagination. Here, I make a case for what I am calling the archival overlap. A careful examination of the existing sources, however sparse or abundant, is likely to reveal reoccurring clues that can be used to shape how we image and construct our subjects. Before we consider the gaps we should tend to these overlaps, I argue, using a current work-in-progress case study of the colonial artist Adelaide Ironside to explore how speculation and imagination are intrinsic to these stages of the biographical process.
'Deliberate freedom': using speculation and imagination in historical biography.
In this article, I explore the challenges and opportunities associated with using 'informed imagination' to write a speculative biography of an historical figure. In the process, I problematize the notion of the archival gap, which has been recently romanced by numerous writers, including myself. By citing archival gaps as a justification for creative license, we neglect the fact that all archives are inherently idiosyncratic in ways that invite, perhaps even demand, the use of both speculation and imagination. Here, I make a case for what I am calling the archival overlap. A careful examination of the existing sources, however sparse or abundant, is likely to reveal reoccurring clues that can be used to shape how we image and construct our subjects. Before we consider the gaps we should tend to these overlaps, I argue, using a current work-in-progress case study of the colonial artist Adelaide Ironside to explore how speculation and imagination are intrinsic to these stages of the biographical process.
Amateur Biographies: Attempting to Fill Archival Gaps
Pamiętnik Teatralny
The biography of nineteenth-century amateur performers defies typical biographical formulae due to the paucity of information available about these performers and their productions. The story of the Lawrence sisters added another layer of challenge: determining how to contextualize an ephemeral art form within the biographical history of two women when one of them left an autobiography that, interestingly, attempts to follow typical biographical structure and yet, upon deeper analysis, only introduces yet more unverifiable knowledge gaps. By acknowledging and analyzing those gaps and the challenges they present, an organic narrative can develop—a narrative which speaks to the complexities of this work and the challenges of telling the lives of those whom history might otherwise neglect. The biography becomes, thus, the story of women whose history is imperfectly recorded and a vehicle for a discussion of a popular art form which does not readily lend itself to being archived, while ...
Portraiture, Biography and Public Histories
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Portraits and biographies play a central role in engaging non-specialists with the past, and hence invite careful scrutiny. Major enterprises, such as the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Dictionary of National Biography, in both its original and Oxford versions, provide rich examples for reflecting on public history and on the relationships between types of writing about past times. These issues relate to literature as well as to history, given the prominence of biographies of literary figures, and the role of literary scholars as authors of biographies. Using materials concerning the artist John Collier (1850–1934), the publisher George Smith (1824–1901) and the surgeon James Paget (1814–1899), this article examines the relationships between portraits and biographies and the types of insight they afford. Colin Matthew's innovation of including portraits in the Oxford Dictionary, together with his own scholarship on William Gladstone (1809–1898), including his portra...
Recent decades have seen the rise of a modern publishing phenomenon: mass public participation in the production and consumption of various forms of Life Writing. Biography has been „democratised‟. The growth and diversity in the informal production of Biography underlines the confidence with which it is produced, effectually a statement that “my life is worth telling too.” Similarly the commercially produced biographical product is subject to media and public scrutiny as never before, dissected for factuality and fairness. There is an expectation that a subject, or a subject‟s friends, enemies, or relatives, have a right of reply to the printed word. The challenge to academics and biographers then, is to admit that the authorial voice is not tenured, and that a greater collaborative approach must be taken which shares power over the writing of a life.
Surely using different kinds of sources results in different kinds of writing? Of course it is a matter of degree with both imagination and empirical research informing novels and biography on a continuum: sometimes novelists research and historians sometimes imagine. Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley (1849) was based on her research of the Leeds Mercury newspaper of 1814 to 1816. 2 Some historians, while wary of crossing genres and writing fiction, have no problem using contemporary historical literature. Thomas Carlyle wrote a novel in 1836 before writing biographies of great male leaders and lesser ones on his friends and relatives. 3 Certainly, different kinds of biography tend to rest more heavily on different kinds of sources. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Lucy Frost observed that convict biography based on fragmentary and biased sources involves epistemological concerns:
Traces across Time: investigating an unfinished portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Interfaces, 2024
The portrait I explore in this paper is an enigma. It has been identified both as the Countess of Schaumburg-Lippe and as the Countess of Devonshire. Although it is firmly ensconced in the literature, the sitter has never been securely identified and nor has the date. Nor has any attempt been made to examine whether the Countess of Schaumburg Lippe could have sat to Reynolds who painted her husband (an illegitimate grandson of George I) between 1764 and 1767. When exhibited in 2014 at Tate Britain it bore the Schaumburg Lippe name, even though David Mannings (2000) had upheld (albeit tentatively) the Devonshire identification first proposed by E.K. Waterhouse (1941). It was certainly painted, at least in part, by Reynolds (Kirby Talley, Jr.1986) but he left it unfinished; only the female sitter's face and a large diamond breast jewel were completed along with two fragments of textile. Though face and jewel are highly finished they are depicted using very different techniques. The two collectors known to have chosen to purchase this portrait are both celebrated connoisseurs: John Ruskin and Kenneth (later Sir Kenneth) Clark. It remains in the collection of the latter's family. Thanks to the preservation of E.K Waterhouse's papers at the Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, we know that as he prepared his catalogue raisonné of the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Waterhouse was aware of the fact that the Schaumburg Lippe identity was inscribed on the stretcher, as he wrote a note to this effect on the back of the black and white photograph he was working from. Clark and Waterhouse must have known each other well; they collaborated in 1937 in hanging a small loan exhibition in London of the portraits of Reynolds and both were leading figures in the nascent world of British Art History. The portrait is first referred to in Ruskin's collection in 1869. Clark knew of it from the engraving in the Library edition of The Works of John Ruskin which was in his school library and, as he states in his autobiography, he fell in love with it and, seeing it in the sale of Ruskin's effects in 1931, bought it. He was twenty-eight and had already published The Gothic Revival (1928) for which he must have studied Ruskin's The Stones of Venice. Ruskin, for his part, wrote eloquently about his unfinished Reynolds portrait which he calls The Lady with the Brooch in an essay on Landscape in Modern Painters. It is clear that it was the very fact that the portrait was unfinished, allowing him to infer (whether accurately or not) the artist's working methods, that he loved. Piecing together Clark's view on Reynolds and close reading Ruskin's dense commentary on his portrait by Reynolds permits us to begin to understand how the allure of such a work might attract a discerning writer to purchase a portrait of a totally unknown woman and one that offers the barest minim qua portrait. This very rarely reproduced and even more rarely exhibited portrait brings together two of my research interests over many years, eighteenth-century portraiture and the display culture of jewels. Given that it is unfinished and almost entirely undocumented, we might reasonably have expected this painting to have remained as at most a footnote in the history of eighteenth-century English grand-style portraiture. Instead, I place it centre stage, deploying those very uncertainties in order to ask questions not only about this particular strange but haunting assemblage of motifs but also about how we research historic portraiture. By reference to what we know of the life of Frederick William Ernest, Count of Schaumburg Lippe (1724-1777), and to the portrayal of his wife by Johann Georg Ziesenis, I explore whether a portrait of Countess of Schaumburg Lippe by Reynolds is at all a possibility. Furthermore, addressing this problematic canvas permits us, I suggest, to ask questions about portraiture and its functions over a longue durée. I am interested in how the unknowns of this portrait oblige us to ask different questions from the accustomed ones in a portrait analysis. What, for example, may we infer from the accounts of the collectors who were drawn to this mysterious object? How do judgements about sitters’ identities change according to how, when and by whom they are made? What kinds of data are assembled to make those judgements? What do we mean by finish and unfinish? On what do we base our judgements of this? How might traces of ownership of a particular work over time - what tends to be called in a formulaic way ‘provenance’ - contribute to our understanding of the work itself? What can we tell from the material of a painting, that is, from its pigments and support, how an artist ran his studio and what his priorities might have been? To what extent can, or should, what we can discover about context determine our judgements of a historical work? By addressing some of these questions I hope to disentangle and identify some of the things we take for granted when discussing historical portraiture while at the same time re-evaluating a disputed and neglected work.