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Donna Lee Brien
Creative Writing and Cultural Studies Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology
'Appropriating Lives or Telling Women's Stories in New Ways? Jill Shearer's Georgia and the Problem of Biography'
The novelist may begin with a real life, event or historical period but their work is usually ultimately guided by literary demands rather than historical accuracy. A biography is, on the other hand, by definition the written account of a real person's life. Biography must therefore set out to relate someone's life as it happened, and is irrevocably tied to the historical evidence, while the historical novel is not. The two literary forms seem, however, increasingly to be intermingling and intertwining in form and content. A study of Jill Shearer's play Georgia can reveal some of the tensions and opportunities this close relationship offers in the writing of women's stories.
Bio: Donna Lee Brien is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. She is currently writing a fictionalised biography of the protagonists in the infamous Dean Case, a late nineteenth-century poisoning case. The Girl's Guide to Real Estate (co-authored with Tess Brady) was published by Allen and Unwin in 2001.
<d.brien@qut.edu.au>