Abstract
Clara Wieck Schumann was one of the leading concert pianists of the nineteenth century. Her story has been captured in several “fictionalised biographies,” texts which transgress genre boundaries and renegotiate the relationship between historical fact and fiction. This essay will compare Janice Galloway’s novel Clara (2002) with J. D. Landis’s Longing (2000), Werner Quednau’s Clara Schumann (1955), and Dieter Kuhn’s play Familientreffen (1988) in order to point out some of the choices the liminal status of biofiction affords the author and the effect of these choices on the portrayal of the heroine. Analyses will draw on Wolfgang Iser’s reflections on the fictionalising act and Linda Hutcheon’s notion of historiographic metafiction, demonstrating that writers’ interest in Clara Schumann has resulted not only in widely differing portrayals of the pianist’s life but also in manifestly different classes of texts.
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