Abstract
This dissertation is a critical reflection on the process of researching and writing a novel about the early life of Frances Dickinson, a Berkshire heiress who married Lieutenant John Geils of Dumbarton in 1838. The novel’s title, An Idle Woman, alludes to the title of Dickinson’s first book, Diary of an Idle Woman in Italy, published under the name Frances Elliot in 1871. Although a successful travel writer in later life, Dickinson first came to public attention as a young woman due to her scandalous (and protracted) divorce in the late 1840s. An Idle Woman is based on extensive research on the case of Geils v. Geils, comprising court transcripts, witness depositions, letters, and newspaper reportage.
In re-telling a story of marital violence and sexual trauma, however, I wanted to avoid a simplistic narrative of female victimhood or heroism. Through the device of multiple narrators, An Idle Woman not only re-purposes a technique associated with the Victorian novelist, Wilkie Collins, but seeks to convey the complexities of the contested narrative of the Geils marriage. Different perspectives are also presented through the deployment of conventions from various literary genres—such as sensation fiction, travel writing and realism—in the hope that the resulting novel allows space for a reader’s own interpretation of events and characters, through engendering an awareness of how stories shape lives, knowingly or otherwise.
An Idle Woman is thus an example of neo-Victorian biographical fiction—or biofiction—which portrays lives of actual historical figures transformed into fictive characters, while also exploring how the Victorian past might be reconstructed and re-interpreted today. This self-reflexive aspect of neo-Victorian biofiction is evident in An Idle Woman through its deliberate blending of archival material with strategies and techniques from Victorian literary genres, informed by current understandings of trauma, coercive control, gender, and class.
This thesis, then, explores the unique contribution that historical fiction can make to re-interpreting the lives of women in the past from our vantage point in the present, as well as outlining the challenges of using fiction to address archival occlusions and historical misrepresentations. Neo-Victorian biofiction, I suggest, implies a kind of ethical relation between author, text, and reader: an author’s conflation of archive and imagination rests on a tacit obligation to retain a core of truthfulness in the story while also showing the limits on truth-telling in any historical record.