(Hi)stories of women's lives: imagining the past in Anna Banti's Artemisia, Maria Bellonci's Rinascimento privato, Susan Daitch's L.C., and Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy

Abstract

This dissertation analyses four novels that are fictional renditions of the lives of women from an historical past and combine elements of metafictional and self-reflexive styles. In the first chapter, I discuss Artemisia (by the Italian writer Anna Banti) in relation to other scholars' attempts at appropriating the painter Artemisia Gentileschi as a feminist icon. The second chapter, about Rinascimento Privato (by the Italian writer Maria Bellonci), focuses on the nature of Isabella d'Este's conditional power and her problematical portrayal in traditional historiography. In both these chapters, I explore the relationship between fictional recreation and historical interpretation, and reflect on the process and the implications involved in writing women's history through fiction. Chapter three examines L.C. (by the North American writer Susan Daitch). I point out how by surprising the reader with conflicting interpretations of what should have been the same story Daitch problematises the relationship between historiography and fiction as the novel makes significant theoretical connections between translation and representation. In chapter four, I analyse Poppy (by the Australian writer Drusilla Modjeska). I discuss how Modjeska's narrator reflects on the relationship between biography and feminist historiography, and turns the biography of her mother into a quest for the authority claimed in the name of factual evidence and the discovery of the unexpected pleasure and the enticing promises fiction offers. I show how the four authors at once claim and denounce authority as story-tellers by emphasising the fictionality of their stories and celebrating the power fiction gives them to invent themselves and their characters through writing. I further demonstrate how the four texts reflect on the concealment that the writing of history and biography have traditionally involved.