Biography Matters: Carol Shields, Mary Swann, A. S. Byatt, Possession, Deborah Crombie, Dreaming of the Bones

Abstract

The interest in life writing in recent years has led to an awareness of the close connections between biographical and fictional writing, which in turn has made the art of biography an important theme in contemporary fiction influenced by feminism, New Historicism and poststructuralism. The main issue in works like A. S. Byatt's Possession, Carol Shields's Mary Swann and Deborah Crombie's Dreaming of the Bones is to what extent a biography can be trusted to tell the truth of someone's life, and how far it is compromised by the biographer's motives. Works like these can be said to stand in a metaphorical relationship to the genre of biography, drawing attention to the epistemological problems of biography‐writing by emphasising the slippage between fiction and biography. Yet, while these novels continually question the veracity of biographical evidence, they also make clear that biography is of vital importance for our understanding of literature.