“Very Secret Kept”: Facts and ReCreation in Margaret Hannay's Biographies of Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth

This essay explores the difficulties faced by literary biographers, in particular those who attempt to uncover the relatively undocumented lives of early modern women. In order to suggest ways in which these gaps may be re-created, it addresses the complex intersections between literary biography and biofiction; for example, the early example of Virginia Woolf’s parodic biography, Orlando. The essay analyses Margaret P. Hannay’s works in terms of two key aspects of literary biography: verifiable facts and the imaginative re-creation of events in order to ascertain if it is ever possible to uncover what is intentionally kept “secret.”