Biographical Writing

Examining the fine line between biography & fiction

Photo by Yuri Efremov on Unsplash

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I have been interested for a long time in the ways in which women’s writing is often considered biographical, even when it is not.  Whilst it’s true that all writing must contain some kind of element of the truth, and that truth inevitably emanates from the author, I find some of this automatic judgement of women’s writing to be somewhat reductionist.  

This is confused even more when a writer clearly does take huge elements of their own lives and fictionalises them within their work, leaving their ‘stories’ to become conflated with one another.

Take Sylvia Plath and her only published novel, The Bell Jar.  In the book, nineteen year old Esther Greenwood experiences a breakdown leading to her attempt to end her life.  She is found just in time and spends a period of time in a mental institution undergoing both talking therapy with a female psychiatrist and ECT treatment.  She eventually recovers and with the support of her psychiatrist, returns to her studies and her life, helping her to understand that becoming a mother and wife- something she fears- was not inevitable.  Esther’s relationship with her overbearing mother is also central to the story.  

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath the writer, meanwhile, attempted suicide at the age of 20, was found in the crawl space of the family home, was saved just in time and spent a spell in McLean Hospital, where she encountered a female psychiatrist named Dr Ruth Barnhouse with whom she formed a close and supportive bond.  She had a complicated relationship with her own mother, difficulties arising from the unnecessarily early death of her father, and issues around dating men and becoming a mother and a wife.

As this shows, clearly Plath’s life fed richly into The Bell Jar in not particularly well concealed way; probably the reason she decided to publish the original manuscript under the name of Victoria Lucas, such was the treatment of Esther’s mother in the novel.

But this analogy with the real Sylvia and the fictional Esther can also overshadow her other work.

The poems in Plath’s Ariel were written at a time in which she was struggling with both her husband’s infidelity and taking care of two very young children.  She was away from the support network of her psychiatrist and later friend, Dr Ruth Barnhouse, and her mother, and in a cold and foreign place.  Yet, the poems contained within Ariel are arguably some of her best work.  

The collection shows her brilliance as a poet and many feature experiences of mothering, her issues around her dead father, and marriage.

In Claire Dederer’s brilliant book Monsters, she says of Plath that she has been ‘stained’ by her act of violence (against herself).  She claims that Plath ‘is a staggeringly pure example of an artist who can’t be shaken free from her biography,’ going on to suggest that she is imprisoned by her own biography; that when we hear “Plath”, we think: ‘oven, children, beauty, Ted Hughes’.  We then go onto the poems in the blistering Ariel collection if we are poetry readers; if not, just the rest remains; ‘the knowledge of the violence with which she ended her life crowds our brains, whether we like it or not.’¹

In a comparison with the troubled Valerie Solanas- the woman who shot Andy Warhol in an effort to draw attention to her desperation against the forces of patriarchy and a history of abuse- Dederer similarly wonders whether we would read Plath’s work differently had she shot Ted Hughes rather than taking her own life.  

It’s an interesting suggestion, and one I had to pause in my reading to consider: does the very essence of Plath’s biography lead us to grant her work the moniker of ‘Genius?’  I would like to think that Ariel would have flown on its own wings of greatness despite the biography of Plath and Hughes’ relationship and her ultimate suicide.  But who really knows?  It is sadly a moot point.

Dederer suggests that Plath’s texts are ‘placed free of men and yet defined by men.  Places of unfree freedom’, concluding, somewhat ominously, that ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of patriarchy.’  For a feminist for the past several decades, I can sympathise with her assertion.

Another writer who struggled against the insistence of her personal biography was Jean Rhys.

Rhys was an immigrant in a cold and often unwelcoming England, having been sent from her home in Dominica by her parents.  Becoming a chorus girl and travelling around the UK, Rhys often felt displaced and without a personal home.  She missed Dominica and never quite fit in anywhere else, possessing a dialect resonant with her homeland and often stating that she resonated more with the Black population of Dominica, being brought up mostly by her beloved Black nanny.

Sadly, Rhys often lacked agency in her own life, suffering from her experience of displacement.  She was often reported as being quite childlike, even in her later years.  In her brilliant book Stet, Diana Athill describes the process of nurturing Rhys through the publication- and republication- of her novels and short stories, where she and others had to take care of an often helpless and childlike Rhys.

Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

Voyage in the Dark was Rhys’s first novel, started in draft form as a diary in a series of black notebooks in 1911 and stored in a suitcase, becoming her 3^rd novel to be published in 1934.  The autobiographical nature of the material, written originally as a diary, gives some indication as to why critics have long suggested that Rhys represents her own life in many of her female characters, even leading to suggestions that her female fictional characters are merely representations of the same woman, portrayed at different stages of life.

Whilst it is easy to read Rhys’s female characters as simply ciphers for Rhys herself, none could be said to apply more so than Anna, who identifies with the author in her Creole identity, her disappointment at finding herself in a cold and unwelcoming London, her ‘otherness’, and so on.  But to identify all of Rhys’s characters as being representations of her own experience limits her as a writer; considering Rhys’s considerable oeuvre, the women she writes about represent different aspects and experiences of her own life, perhaps, but are intensely original within her work, perhaps expressing some of the excruciating alienation Rhys herself felt.  

As academic Kathleen Wheeler quotes of Rhys, ‘Writing influences life, and life influences writing – indeed they become inextricable.’² Thus indicating that for Rhys, the way she lived had a powerful and influential effect on her writing.  However, as Wheeler points out, Rhys strived for a unique, individual style of her own, claiming that the women in her novels are similarly ‘uncategorizable’.

In Wheeler’s introduction to ‘Modernist’ Women Writers and Narrative Art, she claims that ‘Rhys herself denied that her fiction was autobiographical, adding the important disclaimer that ‘the feelings are always mine.’  This feels like a significant point: whilst Rhys confirms that she overlaid her character’s feelings with her own, she also created fictional worlds and situations for them.  When Anna tells us after arriving in London for the first time in the very opening pages of the novel: ‘It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known’,³ we can feel Rhys’s empathy for her central character echoing her own arrival in a cold and lonely London from her home on the Caribbean Island of Dominica.  This opening also lends itself to a reading of the book as a bildungsroman: the opening chapter announces Anna’s arrival in a foreign land; a land where she is unsure she will ever fit in or make her way.   

Although Rhys clearly uses a degree of fictionalised autobiography to create her female protagonists, she also created intensely original novels.  She was a modernist writer, but her work is very different from, say, the writing of Virginia Woolf.  Although she utilises many of the commonalities of modernism, her work, for me, exhibits a wholly original register.  

Whilst Rhys wasn’t the first writer to weave elements of autobiography into her work, what is unusual about Rhys’s female protagonists is their almost pathologically repetitive failures.  In a Rhys story, there are often revelations realised at the conclusion of the protagonists’ story- similar to the traditional ‘epiphany’ seen in many modernist texts- but not so much redemption or a resolution.  In Rhys’s depiction of Anna’s story of survival, there is to be no sudden realisation by the central character that she must act a certain way in order to be happy even by the end of the book.  There is merely the hint that she just might survive this latest catastrophe, and be forced to carry on living in the reality she finds herself.  

So it is easy to see why Rhys has been ‘accused’ of autobiographical writing.  Arguably, in all of Rhys’s female characters there is an element of Rhys herself, whether that be the thread of alienation, otherness, loneliness, or longing.  

There is certainly something to be said for the assertion that Jean Rhys’s personal experience added depth to much of her fictional novels, though it is too simplistic to say that she merely wrote fictionalised autobiography.  Rhys simply imbibed her female characters, none more so than Anna Morgan, with her own background and emotional turmoil.   

Many of Rhys’s other novels and short stories also feature incidents of her own life, including her first husband’s stint in prison, her brief spell in a women’s prison herself, and forays into prostitution.  No stone in her own life experience appears to have been left unturned.  

In her book Quartet, Rhys even explores her real life relationship with Ford Madox Ford, her one-time patron, and the time she lived in his house with himself and his wife, Stella Bowen. Through fictionalised characters, Rhys exploits the ‘facts’, showing a complex relationship whereby the young female lodger Marya Zelli is taken in by an English couple after being stranded in Paris by her jailed Polish husband.  Whilst there, the husband undertakes a relationship with the young Marya right under the nose of his wife.

Rhys’s detractors have often cited the frustrating helplessness of her female protagonists within her novels, and I can see the merit in this.  However, I have always found that the utilisation of her own life experiences in order to create wholly original, fallible, imperfect female narrators allows for an astonishing insight into women like herself, often who lived on the fringes of a cold and unwelcoming society.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also enjoy my other essays on Jean Rhys:

‘Jean Rhys and the Mother-Daughter Complex’ 

‘Just Good Friends’ 

‘The Late Revival of Jean Rhys’ 

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1. Claire Dederer, Monsters: What do we do with great art by bad people? (GB: Sceptre: 2023 [2024]).  (Subsequent references are to this edition). 

2. Kathleen Wheeler, ‘Modernist’ Women Writers and Narrative Art, (London: MacMillan Press, 1994), p101.  (Subsequent references are to this edition).

3. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (London: Andre Deutsch, 1967 [1934]).  (Subsequent references are to this edition).