Chapter 20. “Resourceful Reinvention”: Speculative Biography as Public History?

Abstract

Chapter 20 "Resourceful Reinvention": Speculative Biography as Public History?"Only Connect!" That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.E.M. Forster, Howards End, 1910What is speculative biography and how might it constitute a form of public history that enlivens the way we make histories in the twenty-first century? I am something of a hybrid-historian, trained by the academy but with roots that draw their sustenance from the subversive waters of literature. I am interested in writing, how we bring the past alive and make it enjoyable for general readers. For me, the answer lies in great stories that convey their arguments, as Peter Cochrane once suggested, in narrative, "by stealth" (Cochrane 2007, np). I am excited by the relatively new subgenre of speculative biography for a range of reasons, all of which relate directly to the imperative issued by Margaret Schlegal, the fictional heroine of Forster's Howards End.In this chapter I want to tease out how speculative biography can encourage ways of writing the past that might connect us to that which is not at our fingertips nor the forefront of our consciousness. In the process, I will also reflect upon how the motivations and methods associated with writing speculative biography blur the boundaries between so-called expert and amateur historian in ways that are aligned with the more capacious understanding of public history being explored in this book.First, however, I would like to respond to an invitation offered by Hilda Kean in her 2010 article History: Demystifying the Process of History Making, where she suggests that if we are to create more expansive and egalitarian conceptions of what public history might be in the twenty-first century we should begin by weaving personal pasts into our thinking about public pasts (Kean 2010, 31). In so doing, these new conceptions of public history can be predicated, she hopes, upon the common "need to share, participate and engage", not so much as "experts" in "history", but as "people with an interest in the relationship between the past and the present". Kean's ideas speak to a formative moment from my childhood that has shaped my own practice. Recounting this personal past therefore seems a fitting beginning to my exploration about what speculative biography can bring to the contemporary history making.