Custom-Breaker: Writing the Life of Elizabeth Cary

Abstract

This chapter offers a practice-based account of a biography-in-progress. When attempts to write a conventional literary biography of Renaissance playwright Elizabeth Cary (1584–1639) foundered, I developed an experimental form in order to accommodate the increasingly urgent questions of genre, gender, and historical narrative that arose as I began to research and write the extraordinary life of a pioneering author, social activist, and religious dissenter. Writing a text that attempts to make transparent the processes of biography steered my practice away from the conventions of literary biography and turned me towards the rich heritage of experimental fiction, where the staging of biographical processes as simultaneously historical fiction and autobiography becomes the most “truthful” way of presenting the narratives.