This year’s Auto / Bio / Fiction series of talks and seminars, opens with talks by biofiction specialists Monica Latham and Bethany Layne.
28 November 2024, 5.30pm UTC (online)
Monica Latham, “Virginia Woolf in the French Imagination”
In this paper, I would like to explore the articulations between biography and fiction, and raise questions about and biographers’ and creative authors’ use of facts, creativity and imagination in the process of writing biography and biofiction. Among the multifarious production of French biographies of and biofiction about Virginia Woolf, I will choose three case studies which illustrate the wide spectrum of creative endeavours, from speculative biography to imaginative biofiction.
I will start with speculative biography as ‘zero-degree biofiction’ (Latham, Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives) by taking as an example Sept Femmes (2013) by Lydie Salvayre. Salvayre reprocesses biographical information about Woolf and builds her life narrative in a quasi-religious attitude of adoration, which started in France in the context of the rise of a feminist consciousness. In order to draw a portrait of her idol, Salvayre selects objective facts, but at the same time she subjectively expresses her admiration for the biographee’s achievements.
Secondly, the Interview avec Virginia Woolf (1982) by Geneviève Brisac could be qualified as a “conversation” beyond the grave between Virginia Woolf and French contemporary writer Geneviève Brisac, who adopts the posture of a journalist interviewing Woolf for Le Monde. This imaginary dialogue is made of twenty-one real questions asked by Brisac and “real” answers given by Virginia, the interviewee. In order to fabricate these “real” answers, Brisac uses various techniques such as quoting “like a writer, not like an academic” (Brisac), cutting, pasting, reshuffling, editing and assembling various fragments of primary sources (Woolf’s Moments of Being, diary, essays). This specific creative practice has been described elsewhere as “first-degree biofiction” (Latham, Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives).
Lastly, I will examine Christine Orban’s biofiction Une année amoureuse de Virginia Woolf / Virginia et Vita(1990 / 2014). Orban is the first contemporary author to have imagined Virginia Woolf composing her prose, eight years before Michael Cunningham’s acclaimed novel The Hours (1998) in which his Virginia is composing Mrs Dalloway. Orban imagines her Virginia working on Orlando and the gradual coming into being of her memorable eponymous male and female character during a year in Virginia’s life (1927-1928), as compared to Cunningham’s exploration of Virginia’s mind during a single day in June 1923. Orban creates a very Woolfian novel of consciousness by imagining Virginia’s inner emotional life: her questions, doubts, setbacks and preoccupations with her work in process. Orban’s “vampiric” method (Frances Wilson, “The Nourishing Blood of the Novelists”) consists of feeding on Woolf’s life and oeuvre in order to confer truthfulness and texture to her novel.
I will conclude on Woolf in the French literary and cultural contexts, which is the topic of the new monograph I am currently writing.
Bethany Layne, ‘”As your Queen, and as a grandmother”: Elizabeth II’s tribute to Princess Diana in two works by Peter Morgan.’
This paper examines two fictional representations of Elizabeth II’s televised tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales.
This belated tribute was recorded the day before Diana’s funeral, almost a week after her death, in an atmosphere of sustained media pressure. The fictional representations are by the same creator, Peter Morgan, but produced seventeen years apart. The first is The Queen (2006), starring Helen Mirren, which was the first fictionalisation of “Diana week”, as well as the first film about a living sovereign. The second is ‘Aftermath’ (2023), Episode Four of The Crown Season Six, starring Imelda Staunton.
Both are dual portraits, with Elizabeth paired with Tony Blair in The Queen and with then-Prince Charles in ‘Aftermath’. They are bridged by Morgan’s play The Audience (2013), in which Mirren also starred, and by The Crown Season Three, Episode Three: ‘Aberfan’ (2019), in which Elizabeth’s response to the mining disaster is used both to anticipate and to recall her response to Diana week.
The talk will comprise a close analysis of the two scenes, teasing out their differences. This allows me to assess the popular significance of the seven days at two distinct historical moments: within a decade of Diana’s death, and in the wake of the Queen’s own passing, and to explore the societal changes wrought in the interim.
Attendance is free but booking is required to receive a link to attend.
The speakers
Monica Latham is a Professor of British literature in the English Department at the Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France, and a specialist of Virginia Woolf and genetic criticism. She has published numerous articles on Virginia Woolf and other modernist and postmodernist authors. She is the author of A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway (2015); Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives: The Author as Character in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (2021); Dans l’atelier de Virginia Woolf (forthcoming 2024); and Virginia Woolf in the French Imagination (forthcoming 2025). Monica Latham is the co-editor of the collection “Langues, Textes, Littératures” and the series “Book, Page, Text, Image” (Editions de l’Université de Lorraine), the co-editor of “Biofiction Studies” (Bloomsbury), and the co-editor of the series “Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks” (Brepols).
Bethany Layne is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, the author of Henry James in Contemporary Fiction: The Real Thing (Palgrave 2020) and the editor of Biofiction and Writers’ Afterlives (Cambridge Scholars 2020). Her current project, to which this talk is related, is a monograph titled Biopics of the House of Windsor: Crisis and Rehabilitation. This is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic for their biofiction series, to be delivered next year.
