Fictional biography examples
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Autobiography and the fictional autobiography each present an unwieldy and intriguing entanglement of lives. An autobiography does not simply represent its writer's life; a fictional autobiography often conflates the lives of its writer and narrator. The writer's and the narrator's lives are situated in the autobiography and the fictional autobiography, which in turn are situated in a larger matrix: the culture that contains these texts. Three fictional autobiographies — Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse-novel Aurora Leigh (1856), Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations (1861), and Graham Swift's novel Waterland (1983) — all test how sharply and accurately the fictional autobiography renders the development of a life and its intersection with culture.
In The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature, Clinton Machann argues that the formal conventions of autobiography and the development of a life are naturally suited to each other and, moreover, inextricably intertwined.
Any attempt to describe a substantial portion of a human life must result in narrative,
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What Is Biographical Fiction?
My forthcoming book There Will Be Consequences(February 2022) is a biographical novel. Unlike my previous works, which incorporate both fictional and nonfictional characters, this book contains only people who exist in the historical record, but is still written as fiction.
Biographical fiction as a genre strives to present “real life” people in a way that moves beyond the strictly biographical to imagine their emotions at specific moments in their lives. It also bridges the undocumented gaps that strict biography can’t cover by imagining what might have happened, given what we know.
The earliest biographical novel is believed to be W. Somerset Maugham’s 1919 The Moon and Sixpence about painter Paul Gauguin. Perhaps the most famous are Irving Stone’s 1964 Lust for Life about Vincent Van Gogh and Michael and Jeff Shaara’s books about the Civil War.
More recent biographical fiction include Hillary Mantel’s Wolfe Hallandnovels about the British royalty or that focus on people active during World War II. These books may or may not be stri
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Biographical novel
Novel containing a fictional account of a person's life
The biographical novel is a genre of novel which provides a fictional account of a contemporary or historical person's life. Like other forms of biographical fiction, details are often trimmed or reimagined to meet the artistic needs of the fictional genre, the novel. These reimagined biographies are sometimes called semi-biographical novels, to distinguish the relative historicity of the work from other biographical novels
The genre rose to prominence in the 1930s with best-selling works by authors such as Robert Graves, Thomas Mann, Irving Stone and Lion Feuchtwanger. These books became best-sellers, but the genre was dismissed by literary critics. In later years it became more accepted and has become both a popular and critically accepted genre.[1]
Some biographical novels bearing only superficial resemblance to the historical novels or introducing elements of other genres that supersede the retelling of the historical narrative, for example Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter follows
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