Michiel Heyns Research Articles

The Typewriter’s Tale: Re-Exploring the Historical Figure of Henry James through Fiction

This article investigates the relationship between historical fiction, history, and the portrayal of the character and identity of Henry James with specific reference to The Typewriter’s Tale (2005) by Michiel Heyns. Furthermore, it explores how Heyns proceeds to strike a historically responsible balance in his portrayal of the identities of Henry James, Morton Fullerton and Edith Wharton as characters in the novel and the identities of these personae as historical figures. It also explores how Heyns imaginatively bridges the gaps in the historical record or relies on creative licence to reinterpret events and characters. Lastly, the contribution that historical fiction can make to our understanding of the identity and character of historical figures is considered.

Charaxes and Collaborative Becoming in Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat

This article focusses on Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006 [2004] trans. Michiel Heyns) and its fabulation of the magical Overberg of the south-western Cape. While the mother–child bond has received much scholarly attention, what deserves closer examination is the tentacular imbrication of the creaturely world into this dynamic. Adopting a posthuman, ecocritical lens, this article highlights the intermediary role played by creatures in these complex intimacies. In particular, I focus on Agaat’s ‘kin-making’ with the Emperor Butterfly which serves as a mediator between Milla and Agaat. Elucidating the chthonic themes in the novel, I turn to Haraway’s Living with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), which calls for making “kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (2016: 1). I argue that the multispecies kinship practices presented in Agaat provide a “response-able” approach to living on a damaged earth, planting seeds for “worldings committed to partial healing, modest rehabilitation, and still possible resurgence” in these hard times of planetary crises (71).

Fraternelle mélancolie: Melville et Hawthorne, une passion

Fraternelle mélancolie: Melville et Hawthorne, une passion

Foregrounding Boundaries Between Self and Other in South Africa: A Comparative Analysis of The Lostness of Alice, The Good Doctor and Lost Ground

Summary The article considers the descendants of the original white settlers’ experience of space and place in terms of the perception of self and other as represented by the male protagonists who feature in three comparatively under-read novels of the post- apartheid period: John Conyngham’s The Lostness of Alice (1998), Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003) and Michiel Heyns’s Lost Ground (2011). After the election of a black-majority government, many white South African men feel that they can no longer negotiate a place that supplies them with a stable and secure sense of self. The novels’ three subjects, who exemplify the psychological condition of these men, endeavour to discover who they are and where they belong. Through the traversal of boundaries, the protagonists make connections with the outside world and the different other. The authors, likewise, stretch boundaries by implementing the narrative frame of the detective novel. To foreground the characters’ search for selfhood, belonging and meaning, reference is made in the article to aspects of identity formation in relation to the other, such as place, and the expansion of place by the navigation of boundaries.

Whose ‘Lost Ground’? Facets of Outsiderhood

The article considers the concept of ‘home’ and its experiential application in relation to Michiel Heyns’s novel, Lost Ground. A prize-winning novel in South Africa, Lost Ground has taxed interpretation. Is it a detective novel, a novel of ‘gay’ relationships, or a novel of oblique rather than direct political observations on ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa? I argue that the novel is all the above, but tangentially. More centrally, I argue that Lost Ground explores commitment and non-commitment to both a home place and a place of exile; that Heyns is too subtle a novelist to promote an either/or response to a situation which, at least in the narrative, subjects despair to a muted redemption. If the protagonist does not find a home on his ‘home visit,’ neither does he find equanimity in his thoughts of a return to London. Yet, his experience in his brief return to the town of his earlier life grants him fresh insight into his own vulnerability.

A Survey of South African Crime Fiction: Critical Analysis and Publishing History by Sam Naidu And Elizabeth Le Roux

Reviewed by: A Survey of South African Crime Fiction: Critical Analysis and Publishing History by Sam Naidu and Elizabeth Le Roux Marzia Milazzo A Survey of South African Crime Fiction: Critical Analysis and Publishing History BY SAM NAIDU AND ELIZABETH LE ROUX U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2017. vii + 200 pages. ISBN 9781869143558 paper. A Survey of South African Crime Fiction makes an original and important contribution to the study of South African crime fiction, a genre that is very popular by South African standards, yet has been the object of few book-length studies. The book covers an impressive amount of ground: it provides both a literary and publishing history, considers the reception of crime fiction, examines the characteristics of various subgenres, offers a detailed analysis of individual literary [End Page 259] works—which include novels by Andrew Brown, Wessel Ebersohn, Michiel Heyns, Deon Meyer, and Margie Orford—and finally explores several important themes, including gender relations and ecocritical discourse. Moving beyond debates about whether crime fiction should be considered lowbrow or highbrow, the book contends that it is both aesthetically and politically important. On the one hand, Sam Naidu and Elizabeth le Roux argue for the need to suspend normative value judgments about crime fiction; on the other hand, they are invested in illustrating the importance of the crime novel, which they describe as "the new political novel in South Africa," as a vehicle for social critique. Rather than being reduceable to a transparent repository of specific ideological impulses, le Roux and Naidu argue, South African crime fiction transcends conventional expectations and displays ideological ambiguities. In the process, A Survey of South African Crime Fiction provides an illuminating analysis of the intricate workings of patriarchy in South African crime fiction, but displays a reluctance to also examine how the structural and ideological force of racism continues to centrally animate South African writing. Chapter one provides an extensive publication history, which challenges the misconception that crime fiction is a new genre in South Africa. While the authors concede that its mainstream popularity originated with the publication of Deon Meyer's first novel, Wie met Vuur Speel (1994), they show that in South Africa the genre goes back at least to Bertram Mitford's The Weird of Deadly Hollow: A Tale of the Cape Colony (1899). Chapter two offers a valuable literary introduction to the genre and its specific South African variants, focusing in particular on the literary detective novel. Naidu and le Roux contend that, different from its predecessors such as Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, whose power of reason assured the consistent success of their investigative endeavors, many South African detectives are misguided "anti-detectives," so that the South African "anti-detective novel" presents a critique of the discourse of reason itself. Considering the ideological work that crime fiction performs in society and focusing especially on Ebersohn's novels, chapter three argues that crime fiction is ideologically ambiguous. The chapter mentions that Ebersohn's post-apartheid novels critique affirmative action but does not problematize this fact, even as this suggests that the novels are not ideologically ambiguous, but invested in reproducing whiteness. Chapter four moves onto the reception of South African crime fiction, using marketing, advertisement, paratext, and book reviews as proxies for readership. Chapter five considers how the South African thriller and farm crime novels engage the colonial and apartheid past. Naidu and le Roux argue that post-apartheid South African crime fiction is ideologically ambiguous because (white) writers aim to expose what the authors call "the 'rottenness' of the post-apartheid state" without over-simplifying "the complex histories that inform and shape the 'new' dispensation" (95). However, in confining racism to the past and turning the farm into "a symbol of the white farmers' vulnerability, of ongoing injustices and inequities" (109), Meyer and Ebersohn's post-apartheid novels, rather than being ideologically ambiguous, mystify the ongoing reality of white privilege in South Africa and reproduce the racist discourse of white injury, which portrays white people as victims in the current racial order. Chapter six provides an incisive analysis of gender politics in contemporary South African crime fiction, focusing mainly...

Performing in the Margins: Intertextual Memory in Invisible Furies by Michiel Heyns

Within the larger context of intertextuality in contemporary South African works of fiction, the article focuses on Michiel Heyns's novel, Invisible Furies, whose characters, plot trajectories, narrative strategies and thematic concerns are closely inscribed over those of Henry James's The Ambassadors. The article questions whether such blatant appropriation of a classic text might not risk becoming a form of self-marginalisation by the appropriating author, acknowledgement of the primacy of the source text and acceptance of an ancillary role. Approaching Heyns's novel from various theoretical perspectives on intertextuality and memory (Kristeva's intertextuality, Genette's hypertextuality, Riffaterre's obligatory intertextuality, Hutcheon's adaptation), the article examines Heyns's narrative performance in the margins of James's text in terms of Hutcheon's redefinition of intertextual parody as “repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of similarity”, and concludes that in Invisible Furies Heyns combines an impressive intertextual feat with an ironic interrogation of intertextuality itself.

Ireland, the Irish, and Biofiction

Ireland, the Irish, and Biofiction Michael Lackey (bio) In 2006 the novelist David Lodge confessed that before writing about Henry James, his “concept of what constituted a novel . . . did not include the possibility of writing one about a real historical person.”1 The traditional approach to fiction focused on an actual person was to change the character’s name in order to give the author more creative freedom. One thinks of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are based on Woolf’s parents), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Daisy Buchanan on Ginevra King), and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (Willie Stark on Huey Long). But for Lodge 2004 marked a decisive turning point: In that year James was the protagonist of Colm Tóibín’s The Master, Lodge’s own Author, Author, and Michiel Heyns’s The Typewriter’s Tale.2 Although Lodge focused on the confluence of biographical novels about James in 2004, the collection of contributions to this issue of Éire-Ireland offers another way of thinking about this seemingly sudden aesthetic boom of the literary genre. In 2003 Colum McCann published Dancer, a novel about the Soviet icon Rudi Nureyev. In 2004 Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask, a portrait of the artist Anne Damer, and Tóibín’s The Master also appeared. If we focus only on biographical novels—that is, biofiction—about James, as Lodge does, we might look to that subject’s life and work in order to illuminate the sudden surge and subsequent legitimization of this form in the early years of the twenty-first century. However, this exploration of biographical novels by Irish writers and about Irish subjects offers a different conclusion from Lodge’s suggestion of the year 2004 as a turning point for the form. This issue aims to demonstrate how [End Page 98] the study of Irish biofiction represents a promising field of scholarly inquiry and how understanding the form’s origins, evolution, and current popularity necessitates engagement with Ireland’s politics, religion, and movement toward national autonomy. The biographical novel has in fact been a significant literary genre for many years. Klaus Mann’s Alexander (1929); Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels (1933–43) and Lotte in Weimar (1939); Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934); Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951); and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) represent just a few noteworthy examples. Moreover, when we look at the origins and evolution of this literary form from a scholarly perspective, Irish writers played a vital role, using biofiction to create powerful new ways of signifying and being. Their countryman Oscar Wilde, for instance, provided a key theorization of the form and illuminated what the contemporary biographical novel has become; the Mayo-born George Moore, working in the same tradition as Wilde, published biofiction in the form of The Brook Kerith (1916), a novel in which Jesus, having survived the crucifixion, renounces his earlier teachings as dangerously fanatical. The contributions that follow include an essay by Suzanne Hobson analyzing Moore’s The Brook Kerith, a reflection piece by author Sabina Murray on her biographical novel Valiant Gentlemen, and conversations with three Irish biofiction writers of the early twenty-first century—Tóibín, McCann, and Donoghue. Scholars have long had difficulty processing the significance of Moore’s groundbreaking production. But in her contribution to this issue Hobson carefully locates Moore’s novel within a rich tradition of biblical biofiction—enabling readers to understand his novel as a major pioneering work in the subgenre. Murray’s essay, meanwhile, allows us to move beyond Irish authors to consider biographical novels by non-Irish authors about Irish figures (in this case Roger Casement), many of them dissidents within conventional society.3 She reveals the particular relationship [End Page 99] between a major strand of Irish biofiction and the country’s political history as a British colony and its valuation of dissent. Finally, to explore Ireland’s specific contribution to the genesis, evolution, rise, and now prevalence of biofiction, the interviews in this issue consider the ways...

Michiel Heyns’s <i>Lost Ground</i>: The white man’s sense of identity and place in a decolonised Africa and a democratic South Africa

In Lost Ground, Michiel Heyns portrays the former white settlers’ position and experience in South Africa, Africa and Europe after the overturn of South Africa’s apartheid regime. An analysis of the novel illustrates that the legacy of the colonisation of Africa and apartheid in South Africa still shapes the settler descendants’ perception of self and the other and the formers’ place in South Africa and Africa. After the electoral victory of the African National Congress, contemporary white South African men, as exemplified by the English-speaking male protagonist who features in the novel, tend to dissociate themselves from the country and the African continent as home. Although the original colonisers’ experience of alienation and ambivalence about apartheid has been widely depicted, the significance of this experience in relation to white South African male identity has not been fully explored in a study of Heyns’s Lost Ground, principally as regards the novel’s detective narrative framework and the counterdiscursive technique of intertextual referencing that implies other interpretative possibilities. Lost Ground will be critically analysed in terms of the central character’s experience of space and place, and the influence of these paradigms on Peter Jacobs as he makes strides towards abandoning historical/racial restrictions and locating his identity in people.

Paris as ‘unreal city’: Modernist conceptions in Michiel Heyns’s Invisible Furies

Michiel Heyns's sixth novel, Invisible Furies (2012) is deeply inscribed in the author's profound engagement in and knowledge of the grand modernist tradition. The article aims to illuminate and discuss this underrated novel in terms of some of its modernist attributes by relating the work conceptually to the works of great modernist writers, particularly T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster, in order to demonstrate its impressive literary scope and density of meaning. While there are direct allusions to Eliot's poetry in the text, it is a certain sensibility and perspective that reminds the reader forcibly of Eliot's vision, particularly in The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925). Eliot's image of the "Unreal city", derived from Baudelaire's Les sept veillards, is particularly pertinent. A number of modernist concerns or themes are addressed in this context, in particular the ambiguous merits and value of the aesthetic, social alienation, the city and the concept of Forster's "eternal moment" (his equivalent to Joyce's "epiphany", Virginia Woolf's "moment of being" and Eliot's "moment in and out of time") as a possible means of salvation in the face of the meaninglessness of a spiritu- ally and emotionally arid, modern existence.

‘The conglomeration of flesh and cloth in a beautiful place’: the politics of aesthetics in Michiel Heyns’s Invisible Furies

This article investigates the ideas related to aesthetics that are discussed explicitly in Michiel Heyns’s Invisible Furies (2012). These ideas are communicated in the novel by means of a variety of narrative situations, conversations and artistic reflections on various facets of the aesthetic – specifically on beauty and ugliness as examples of aesthetic properties. This article explores and contextualises Paris as a specific urban space as it provides a narrative frame that enforces knowledge and transformation in some characters. Furthermore, the focus is on beautiful characters that find themselves in the city (mostly exiles from different parts of the world), outer beauty and appearance, as well as beauty and social power. The relationships between beauty and morality, beauty and power, as well as Heyns’s new ways of projecting masculinity are also explored. Essentially, the article seeks to understand the role of beauty in contemporary culture as part of the more general theory of the politics of aesthetics.

Contemporary Afrikaans Fiction in the World: The Englishing of Marlene van Niekerk

Many of the most ambitious and important South African novels of the past fi fty years have been written in Afrikaans, but in order to reach a global audience the authors have had to turn to translators. Focusing on Marlene van Niekerk’s novels Triomf (1994; English translation by Leon de Kock, 2000) and Agaat (2004; English translation by Michiel Heyns, 2007), this article examines the challenges that this fi ction, and the particular character and social status of different varieties of Afrikaans, present to the translator, and discusses the signifi cance of the differences between versions addressed to an English-speaking South African readership and versions addressed to a global readership. Derrida’s claim that the only thing to be translated is the untranslatable is discussed, and the untranslatability of Triomf and Agaat, it is suggested, also means that they can only be translated and retranslated.

Beyond the Allegory: The Grotesque Body and the Limits of Liberation in Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat.

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (translated into English by Michiel Heyns) details the subjectivity of its bed-ridden and paralysed protagonist, Milla Redelinghuys, as well as the complex relationship she shares with her caregiver, Agaat. Through reading Milla’s body in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque, this article aims to explore the ways in which the text problematizes overly allegorical readings of the novel that emphasize Milla’s death as leading to Agaat experiencing rebirth. This is achieved through focusing on the ways in which Van Niekerk undermines the sense of social transcendence that Bakhtin considers indispensable to the carnival. In order to do this, I examine two instances that most closely align Milla’s corporeality with Bakhtin’s idea of the grotesque: the scene in which Milla pretends to be dying in order to play a joke on her neighbour is read in relation to the idea of ‘carnival laughter’, and the scene in which she wakes up to discover Agaat sleeping on her bed is analysed through Bakhtin’s description of the ‘two-bodied image’. I conclude that these gestures towards an association with the grotesque form part of the larger project of incompletion that Van Niekerk stages in the novel.

(Mis)appropriating Caravaggio in Michiel Heyns's A Sportful Malice

SummaryCaravaggio's painting, David with the Head of Goliath (ca. 1609) is the central iconic intertext in Michiel Heyns's novel, A Sportful Malice: A Comedy of Revenge, which was awarded the 2015 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. The article demonstrates how Caravaggio's depiction of the young David looking at the severed head of Goliath at the end of his outstretched arm is transposed in A Sportful Malice into a secular subject, and the symbolic import of the painting into a comic mode in a very funny work of fiction that might possibly suggest comparable degrees of artistic self- reflection. The article examines the implications of the painting as a complex self- portrait by Caravaggio, and the disdain and compassion, and repulsion and identification, in the relationship between the youthful beheader and his victim, as a metaphor for gay cruising, and for the ironically amused tone of Heyns's protagonist, Michael, and his camp sensibility. “Camp” is theorised with reference to Susan Sontag's pioneering “Notes on Camp” in which she defines camp as an aesthetic experience of the world, disengaged, anti-serious, frivolous and extravagant, as well as to subsequent theorists who emphasise its rootedness in queer/gay identity and its politics, and as referring to strategies of queer parody. In his comic novel, Heyns parodically updates debates about artistic representation from traditional figurative art to present-day conceptual and performance art, as well as the narcissistic self- portraiture of Facebook. A Sportful Malice presents a complex (self)portrait of its camp protagonist in a camp narrative that performatively and self-reflexively holds camp itself up to critical scrutiny.

Urban ecology and the property rights of baboons

This paper examines the transdisciplinary field of urban ecology through a discussion of cities, their literary representation, the opportunism of nature, and urban sustainability. Starting from the premise that too many people squashed into too many cities is a recipe for a massive environmental disaster (the sixth extinction), this paper argues that literature can promote awareness of the benefits of urban ecology. An ecocritical analysis of The reluctant passenger: A novel (2003) by Michiel Heyns shows how this awareness can be promoted without either eco-proselytising or technical scientific discourse. Set in Cape Town in 1994, this rollicking satire on emerging post-apartheid South Africa has a distinctly urban environmental thread. The theme is introduced in the novel's epigraph and unfolds around the legal battle to save the habitat of the baboons or chacmas that live at Rocklands on Cape Point. The story of these baboons is used to support the paper's argument that urban ecology may offer part of the solution to the environmental crisis of the twenty-first century.

Redefining Shared Narrative in Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Questions of ownership occupy a central place in recent South African fiction. On one hand, novelists seek ways to develop a new sense of ownership for those dispossessed by racism and poverty. Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006), Kopano Matlwa's Coconut (2007), and Sifiso Mzobe's Young Blood (2010) exemplify this concern. On other hand, numerous writers struggle to own up to history of apartheid in face of denials that characterized apartheid system. Thus, while literary critics have celebrated freedom to explore a broader range of subjects than apartheid and its legacies (see, for example, Chapman; Frenkel and MacKenzie), a dominant strain in fiction of past fifteen years has nevertheless returned to violence of past in order to analyze nuances of guilt and responsibility. Yet paradoxically, such efforts to confront a history of violence often end in reinscribing a desire for control over that history. Emphasizing a commonality of experience, many of these novels deflect attention from different ways of experiencing same events and ongoing inequalities that underlie such differences. In 2000, Michiel Heyns analyzed how several confessional narratives by white writers, including Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples (1993) and Jo-Anne Richards's The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1998), exculpated their protagonists--and by extension white beneficiaries of apartheid-while seemingly acknowledging varied forms of complicity apartheid had engendered. Novels with more complex approaches to guilt and responsibility have sometimes left same blind spots. Published in first decade of new millennium, Jann Turner's Southern Cross (2002), Sarah Penny's The Beneficiaries (2002), which was well reviewed by Heyns, and Rachel Zadok's highly praised debut Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005) explore interconnections between privilege, oppression, and culpability as a means of taking ownership for authors' own complicities. But each ultimately relegates questions of responsibility to past. These texts illustrate a pervasive desire to reclaim individual and collective feelings of belonging through shared narratives of past and its implications; yet they also reveal how that desire for belonging can entrench further divisions. Lisa Fugard's Skinner's Drift and Zoe Wicomb's Playing in Light, both published in 2006 by expatriate South African writers, explore alternatives to this quandary. This is not to suggest that Fugard and Wicomb are only South African writers to grapple with importance and risks of shared narrative as a foundation for reconciliation. Their approaches to this issue position them within a literary community that includes authors such as J. M. Coetzee and Achmat Dangor, who interrogate the idea that past trauma may be wrapped up and put to rest and acknowledge that remembered violence does not necessarily lead to reconciliation (Barnard 659-60). Like their contemporaries, Fugard and Wicomb insist on importance of excavating traces of past in order to create new narratives for future. But they consider how predicating reconciliations on shared accounts of past can oversimplify complexities of present. Taken together, novels intimate that shared narratives with power to build new relationships require ceding control over limits of one's story in a necessarily incomplete responsibility for voices of others--the stories they have to tell, experiences they have undergone, and conditions in which they live. At same time, Wicomb complicates this vision. She explores ways in which an ethics of self-dispropriation, whereby a person is dispossessed of his or her identity in order to enact hospitality toward someone else, wars with need for those who still face unequal opportunities to reappropriate their identities and surroundings. …

Imposing Eliot: On Translating Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk

Summary Amongst the contributions to the special edition of the Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir literatuurwetenskap on the oeuvre of Marlene van Niekerk (Volume 25(3) September, 2009), the task of translating her works into English was discussed. This article adopts a critical focus on four instances of the presence of T.S. Eliot's poetry in the translation of her novel Agaat (2004) for the South African English-speaking reader by Michiel Heyns (2006).

The Public, the Private and the Power of Love: Decisive Tensions in Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day

In 1939, as Europe lay shadowed by the frightening reality of a militant Fascist totalitarianism and was about to enter a cataclysmic struggle for the survival of individual freedom, E. M. Forster published his famous essay “What I Believe,” which opened with the significantly paradoxical statement: “I do not believe in Belief” (Forster 77). While, as David Medalie (38) has pointed out, Forster has often been hailed as a spokesman and defender of (the ideology of) liberal humanism, this striking opening statement in fact introduces not a defence of one ideology against another, but a scepticism towards ideology, a stand against any universalized public claim to social wisdom. Instead,

The Typist's Remains: Theodora Bosanquet in Recent Fiction

Secretary; suffragist; incisive critic and parodist of Henry James; witness to and recorder of his death bed dictations; writer of one of the best memoirs about James; tireless psychical researcher who channeled a marvelously verbose James after his death, Theodora Bosanquet was a novel waiting to happen. This article analyzes Bosanquet's recent appearances in Michiel Heyns's The Typewriter's Tale (2005), Cynthia Ozick's "Dictation" (2008) and David Lodge's Author, Author (2004) to consider the ways in which the boom in novelizing James might be seen as intimately bound up with the compelling figure of the turn-of-the-century secretary.

The Typist's Remains: Theodora Bosanquet in Recent Fiction

Secretary; suffragist; incisive critic and parodist of Henry James; witness to and recorder of his death bed dictations; writer of one of the best memoirs about James; tireless psychical researcher who channeled a marvelously verbose James after his death, Theodora Bosanquet was a novel waiting to happen. This article analyzes Bosanquet's recent appearances in Michiel Heyns's The Typewriter's Tale (2005), Cynthia Ozick's Dictation (2008) and David Lodge's Author, Author (2004) to consider the ways in which the boom in novelizing James might be seen as intimately bound up with the compelling figure of the turn-of-the-century secretary.