The paradox of writing the dead: Voice, empathy and authenticity in historical biofictions

In the 1980s, Stephen Greenblatt wrote his famous phrase, “I began with the desire to speak with the dead” (1988: 1). While Greenblatt’s motives and methods are different to my own, the same desire inspires my work-in-progress: a novel about the life and death of Amy Dudley (1532-1560). Her husband was Robert Dudley, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth I and widely rumoured to have been her lover. Amy was found dead at the base of a stairwell, with speculations including murder, suicide, illness or accident. Writing this dead woman is an attempt to raise her up and let her speak, all the while knowing this is an impossible task. It requires the dangerous assumption of empathy between bodies dislocated in time and place, and it risks inserting my voice into the space where Amy’s used to be. Contextualizing this example alongside other fiction, biography and wider scholarship, I assert that it is both possible and impossible to write the dead, that to write historical biofiction is to hold opposing ideas together, to let the impossible be. Despite risks and paradoxes, this paper argues that we can write the dead and, further, that we should, for who else will speak for them now?