Cette communication a été filmée dans le cadre du colloque international  "Writers in Neo-Victorian Fiction" organisé par l'équipe anglophone ERIBIA le 11 octobre 2019 à la Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines de l'Université Caen Normandie, sous la responsablilité d'Armelle Parey (ERIBIA, Caen) et Charlotte Wadoux (19-21, Paris 3).

‍Patricia ‍Duncker ‍is a British writer and academic – she is Professor emeritus of Contemporary Literature at Manchester University. Patricia Duncker's novels include Hallucinating Foucault, James Miranda Barry, The Deadly Space Between, Miss Webster and Chérif and The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge, and more recently, Sophie and the Sybil, a Victorian Romance. She has written two books of short fiction (Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees,  and Seven Tales of Sex and Death) as well as a collection of essays on writing and contemporary literature, entitled Writing on the Wall.

Abstract

In this lecture, I examine the tensions between three modes of writing: history, biography and fiction. I then proceed to discuss two biographical fictions of Victorian writers, written at the beginning of the 21^st century in very different literary registers. The first text is Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) which dramatizes the later writing years of Henry James. The second text is Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me (2001) which reinterprets the relationship between Charles Dodgson, the Oxford don who became Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell.  Neither of these novels were consciously written as Neo-Victorian biographical fictions.