AustLit

'Biographers exist in a tight partnership with their chosen subject and there is often during the research and writing an equivalent reflective personal journey for the biographer. This is generally obscured, buried among an overwhelming magnitude of sources while the biographer is simultaneously developing the all-important ‘relationship’ required to sustain the narrative journey ahead. Questions and selections beset the biographer, usually about access to, or veracity of, sources but perhaps there are more personal questions that could be put to the biographer. The many works on the craft of biography or collections about the life-writing journey tell only some of this tale. It is not often enough, however, that we acknowledge how biography can be unusually ‘double-voiced’ in communicating a strong sense of the teller in the tale: the biographer’s own life experience usually does lead them to the biography, but also influences the shaping of the work. These are still ‘tales of craft’ in one sense, but autobiographical reflections in another. Perhaps this very personal insight can only be attempted in the ‘afterlife’ of biography; the quiet moments and years that follow such consuming works. In this article, I reflect on this unusually emotional form of life writing.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay engages with life writing in Janet Frame’s 1957 novel, Owls Do Cry and Jane Campion’s 1990 film biopic of Frame’s autobiographies, An Angel At My Table. It aims to consider the physical and socio-political constraints on women’s writing, and how these may be deconstructed through non-conventional forms of intellectual exploration. Communication between women is explored in the formats used in both Frame’s novel and Campion’s film. With a primary focus on letter writing, this essay also considers diary entries, published literary work, the film text, and silence as areas of interest. This essay employs the form of letter writing in attempt to explore the medium used by Frame and the characters in Owls Do Cry as an alternative form of intellectual scholarly practice. In doing so, it aims to consider Frame’s literary legacy as a paradigm for academic study, in which women’s varied creative practices can be considered for academic exploration. The letter form also signifies an attempt to recontextualise the letter form, in order to compare the constraints on women’s writing in 1940s and 1950s New Zealand with twenty-first-century concerns about gender equality in academia and creative writing.' (Introduction)