Feminist to Postfeminist

have been experiencing a veritable boom in recent years. Since the turn of the millennium, the lives of Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath, Murasaki Shikibu, Artemisia Gentileschi, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Austen, Gwen John – to name just a few – have been made subjects of imaginative re-tellings, some of them in multiple versions. These biofictions are the product of both biographical scholarship and authorial imagination. As most of them are written by women, they also mark women authors’ attempts to reach out across time (and often, space) to other “artistic” women whose lives “speak to us” today. Thus, while for Martin Middeke (3) self-reflexivity constitutes a chief characteristic of postmodern biofictions in general, novels by and about women artists are self-reflexive in two ways: as narratives of artistry and femininity. This paper compares two novels – Janice Galloway’s Clara (2002) about nineteenth-century German pianist Clara Wieck-Schumann and Priya Parmar’s Exit the Actress (2011) about Restoration actress Nell Gwyn – in view of the particular images of women artists they present. While contemporary biofictions about historical women artists must be situated in the context of a general boom in biofiction since the 1980s, the origins of this trend can also be traced to the mid-twentieth-century surge in biographies about “notable” women of the past, as part of the so-called second wave of feminism. Reacting against Thomas Carlyle’s famous dictum that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men” (Carlyle 26), feminist biographers aimed to “restore” women to the historical record. Many biographers aimed specifically at making women’s achievements visible, and this strand of exemplary feminist biography still continues today – in individual women’s biographies as well as in inspirational collective biographies such as Caroline Criado-Perez’s recent Do It Like a Woman... and Change the World. Their purpose is to offer readers stories about