Whose Story is it? Lives and the historian's responsibilities to past and present

The great diva tragedienne Mary Ann Yates was born in Birmingham in 1728. Unless she was, as claimed in her authorised biography, born in London in 1736. Or maybe she was born, as she claimed in 1773, in Edinburgh, at a date discretely left to the imagination. This talk explores the collaboration and co-creation of documenting and writing a life. From the collaboration between subject and biographer (here both the collaboration between Yates and her authorised biographer Frances Brooke, as well as the collaboration across time between Yates and myself) and biographer and archives, including the creative acts of interpretation required by the many silences, contradictions and gaps in the archival traces of even a famous woman’s life. How do we interpret the fact that an actress could be fired for being “fat” in May, but hired by a different theatre in September on the strength of her “figure and beauty”? How do we approach scandals for which there are traces of documentary evidence, but which the subject successfully buried in her own life: what, if anything, do we owe to her clear wishes about how her life should be remembered?