AustLit

'What happens when an autobiographical project is taken up by film? How can visual media extend, distort, and reshape the image of the author? Janet Frame was a writer particularly concerned with modes of authorial representation, both visual and writerly. Her posthumous novel In the Memorial Room (2013) describes the writer Harry Gill's tenure of the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship in Menton, France. At the reception celebrating his arrival in Menton, he is greeted by Connie Watercress, benefactor of the fellowship, her husband Max and their son Michael, a 'handsome richly bearded young man, the perfect stereotype of the 'young writer''. At this reception, the mayor of Menton approaches the foursome to take a photograph with the new Watercress-Armstrong Fellow - and mistakenly extends his hand to Michael. Though the mistake is immediately recognised, and the mayor sheepishly turns to Harry, it is too late - the photographers have already taken their photo, memorialising the event..  (Introduction)

'How can writers' lives be interesting when they spend all their time writing?

'What did Henry James get up to? Probably not very much. And Rimbaud's life became much more exciting once he gave up writing. And Jane Austen? Lola Ridge, on the other hand, tempts us with a number of puzzles - who was she, what was she really like, is she most significant as a poet or a progressive woman or as a political radical? In terms of a wider picture, Ridge offers entrée to a milieu, the New York avant-garde of the First World War and 1920s. She also offers a poet of uncertain position, slippery in status and contradictory in literary classification; and perhaps she offers a parable of the New Woman and What Happened After; and also a Tale of American Modernism and What Happened After. This combination of stories to be told therefore proposes and promises much. And finally, for New Zealanders, what of Ridge's 23 formative years in New Zealand where she began her writing practice and her publishing career? The problem for a biographer is how to combine these facets so they cohere, rather than finding the puzzles a little obvious, or the world she inhabited already told, or her poetic output a series of glimpses, or her social narrative slightly too idiosyncratic.'  (Introduction)