Parmar’s liberty is a familiar one to readers of these novels. Is there something in that silence we ought to respect?

In her author’s note, novelist Priya Parmar regrets that she almost has too much truth to work with: “It is not easy to fictionalize the Bloomsbury Group, as their lives are so well documented.” They therefore leave little space for “invention,” which perhaps invites the question as to what invention gains, beyond allowing a character to voice thoughts like “Who knew I would like sex as much as I do?” As Parmar also tells us, Vanessa Bell never kept a diary in which she recorded a liking for sex or anything else. This month sees the publication of Vanessa and Her Sister, a novel constructed as the fictional diary of Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s sister. Zelda Fitzgerald, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, all the other Hemingway wives, all Wright’s other women, Sigmund Freud’s lover Minna Bernays-these real women have no defense against being shoehorned into romances that presume to tell us what we secretly want to know about famous people. In the past few years, a flood of what amounts to biographical fan fiction has swept conventional literary biography out of the way. The success of Nancy Horan’s 2007 novel Loving Frank, about the private life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, followed by Paula McLain’s 2011 hit The Paris Wife, told from the point of view of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, has made publishers eager for stories that draw heavily on biography but wriggle out of its ethical constraints. Scott Fitzgerald, fiction writers are happy to step in and describe it. If the biographer won’t speculate exactly how it felt to have sex with F. Novelists, however, have no reason to be so coy.

The paris wife novel