Ireland, the Irish, and Biofiction

In 2006 the novelist David Lodge confessed that before writing about Henry James, his “concept of what constituted a novel . . . did not include the possibility of writing one about a real historical person.”¹ The traditional approach to fiction focused on an actual person was to change the character’s name in order to give the author more creative freedom. One thinks of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are based on Woolf’s parents), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Daisy Buchanan on Ginevra King), and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (Willie Stark on Huey Long). But for Lodge 2004 marked a decisive turning point: In that year James was the protagonist of Colm Tóibín’s The Master, Lodge’s own Author, Author, and Michiel Heyns’s The Typewriter’s Tale.²

Although Lodge focused on the confluence of biographical novels about James in 2004, the collection of contributions to this issue of Éire-Ireland offers another way of thinking about this seemingly sudden aesthetic boom of the literary genre. In 2003 Colum McCann published Dancer, a novel about the Soviet icon Rudi Nureyev. In 2004 Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask, a portrait of the artist Anne Damer, and Tóibín’s The Master also appeared. If we focus only on biographical novels—that is, biofiction—about James, as Lodge does, we might look to that subject’s life and work in order to illuminate the sudden surge and subsequent legitimization of this form in the early years of the twenty-first century. However, this exploration of biographical novels by Irish writers and about Irish subjects offers a different conclusion from Lodge’s suggestion of the year 2004 as a turning point for the form. This issue aims to demonstrate how the study of Irish biofiction represents a promising field of scholarly inquiry and how understanding the form’s origins, evolution, and current popularity necessitates engagement with Ireland’s politics, religion, and movement toward national autonomy.

The biographical novel has in fact been a significant literary genre for many years. Klaus Mann’s Alexander (1929); Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels (1933–43) and Lotte in Weimar (1939); Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934); Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951); and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) represent just a few noteworthy examples. Moreover, when we look at the origins and evolution of this literary form from a scholarly perspective, Irish writers played a vital role, using biofiction to create powerful new ways of signifying and being. Their countryman Oscar Wilde, for instance, provided a key theorization of the form and illuminated what the contemporary biographical novel has become; the Mayo-born George Moore, working in the same tradition as Wilde, published biofiction in the form of The Brook Kerith (1916), a novel in which Jesus, having survived the crucifixion, renounces his earlier teachings as dangerously fanatical.

The contributions that follow include an essay by Suzanne Hobson analyzing Moore’s The Brook Kerith, a reflection piece by author Sabina Murray on her biographical novel Valiant Gentlemen, and conversations with three Irish biofiction writers of the early twenty-first century—Tóibín, McCann, and Donoghue. Scholars have long had difficulty processing the significance of Moore’s groundbreaking production. But in her contribution to this issue Hobson carefully locates Moore’s novel within a rich tradition of biblical biofiction—enabling readers to understand his novel as a major pioneering work in the subgenre. Murray’s essay, meanwhile, allows us to move beyond Irish authors to consider biographical novels by non-Irish authors about Irish figures (in this case Roger Casement), many of them dissidents within conventional society.³ She reveals the particular relationship between a major strand of Irish biofiction and the country’s political history as a British colony and its valuation of dissent. Finally, to explore Ireland’s specific contribution to the genesis, evolution, rise, and now prevalence of biofiction, the interviews in this issue consider the ways...