Where Biography Meets Fictionality: Imaginative Incursions in Anna Funder's Wifedom and Kiera Lindsey's Wild Love

Biographers set up an expectation, often described as a 'truth contract', with their readers to present a non-fiction account of a life. But, as Julia Novak asks, how much authorial imagination will 'contaminate' a biographic narrative and transform it into a novel? This question continues to perplex writers, publishers and readers, and is highlighted by two recent works by Australian authors who challenge definitions of biography through their style and paratextual inclusions. Anna Funder's Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life and Kiera Lindsey's Wild Love, the life of Australian colonial artist Adelaide Ironside, are marketed as biographies, yet both display fictional passages and novelistic techniques alongside referential protocols. Each author grapples with the need for imaginative incursions to recover a past life with contextual and sensory detail to engage readers in the lives of their subjects. By applying Dorrit Cohn's signposts of fictionality, this article contests the definitions of a fact/fiction binary in evaluating biographical narratives.