Brian Matthews, Louisa (Melbourne: McPhee, 1987)
Louisa is both an anguished reflection on biography and its problems and the story of the life of Louisa Lawson, mother of the more famous Henry, but a significant Australian literary figure herself, as editor of a woman’s journal, Dawn, and as poet and suffragette.
Frustrated not only by the gaps in the record but also by the inherent limits of biography as a genre, Matthews interrupts what is often a conventional (but good) biographical narrative with an alternative text, the reflections of ‘Owen Stevens’, Matthews’ alternative self:
Owen Stevens, the biographer’s untrammelled self, will say, do, essay and gainsay all those things that formal scholarship cannot condone and which life, unrounded by a style-sheet, uncompleted and unexplained by footnotes, is teeming.
The ‘alternative text’ also contains experiments in form, such as a short story imagining a woman from the 1970s returning to Louisa’s past, and a music-hall drama to convey Louisa in ways conventional biography would not allow.
I have no doubt Matthews expected or even courted controversy, and he did get it. The book sits as the new far end of a spectrum. It has not been taken up as the new way of writing biography, nor was it expected to. But it does demand fruitful reflection from biographers, scholars and readers on just what is permissible and what is desirable in biography.
In a sense, it is a book which wears its postmodernism loudly and, although it has aged well, it still feels to belong to the milieu when the postmodern was still shiny, exciting and the way forward. Today, nearly thirty years on, my feeling is that the biographer is able to wear the influence of postmodern more quietly. Some of the question and objections ‘Owen Stevens’ raises, some of his speculations, could be integrated with the primary narrative – they don’t need to be exiled and, by extension, highlighted.
The relegation of consideration of sources to some brief notes at the end is a strange move. Surely the whole point of the alternative text is to draw some attention to the scaffolding, to the process of arriving at the settled narrative of a biography. Footnotes are a good place to provide the reader with some awareness of the process.
In How to do Biography (Harvard University Press, 2008), Nigel Hamilton argues that it is only when there is an authoritative biography of a subject already published that a biographer is free to be experimental. Louisa Lawson did not have such a biography in 1987, as far as I know, and no doubt this added to some of the criticism Matthews received. On the other hand, the biography was praised as well, and for good reasons.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 
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Hi Nathan, I’ve come here via The Australian Legend, and want to pick up on what Hamilton says about when “it is only when there is an authoritative biography of a subject already published that a biographer is free to be experimental”. I feel a bit uneasy about a prescription like this, because it implies something about the subject of the bio, i.e. that there is a wealth of information about the person and what the biographer should do is assemble it all and tell the story of that life.
But we know, as the biographers of Louisa Lawson certainly know (have you come across a woeful self-published effort called That Mad Louisa?) that the lives of people on the periphery of power don’t usually have a neat and tidy drawer full of useful sources just waiting for the biographer to come along and use it. Biography, IMO, contributes to the narrative of the nation, and it ought to tell the stories of all of us: women, indigenous people, people of ethnic diversity, people who are poor or disadvantaged, people who escaped the Holocaust without a document to their names, and so on. So IMO there is a place for experimentalism and imagination in telling these stories, because the usual methods won’t work.
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Yes, I agree with you and I rate Louisa as one of the great Australian literary biographies. We would limit far too much the life stories which could be told if we’re restricted to those with that neat and tidy drawer full, as you put it! I was quoting Hamilton’s point as my understanding of why Brian Matthews’s book was criticised by some. (I don’t remember the details, but I think there were some strong objections to it.) He uses the example of the first biographer to have full access to Ronald Reagan (interviews, personal papers), who was then widely condemned for producing an experimental biography (but sounds like the only bio of Reagan I would want to read). This post also came as I was just starting my biography and I was weighing up how experimental to go. I like the experimental but am playing a straight bat for my first effort, mainly because there is so much material on Katharine Susannah Prichard.
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Appreciate you bloggging this
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