The girl in the locket and imagining lost stories: ekphrasis as a response to archival gaps

Rush, J (2025) The girl in the locket and imagining lost stories: ekphrasis as a response to archival gaps. PhD thesis, Bath Spa University / Cardiff University.

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Abstract

This thesis comprises a novel with multiple timelines – 'The Girl in the Locket' – and a contextualising essay. The two should be read together as a piece of practice-led research exploring the question of how historical novelists can use ekphrastic writing to transform incomplete or distorted archives. Crossing three time periods, 'The Girl in the Locket' seeks to construct a sensitive, evocative and hopeful representation of a fictional West African Tudor serving-woman and her portrait. It explores the potential for paintings to transform our understanding of the past, yet also highlights their vulnerability to misinterpretation, and their incompleteness as records of a life. The essay sets 'The Girl in the Locket' in the context of recent historical fiction which uses ekphrasis to reconsider characters who have been marginalised or misrepresented by history, and also considers parallels with activistic contemporary visual art praxes. In doing so, it offers a methodology to other historical novelists who seek to use ekphrasis to address archival injustices. In section one, I investigate the opportunities and complications that arise when novelists turn to mimetic ekphrases of real portraits as a means of discovering the lost identities of the dead. Chapter one considers Hilary Mantel’s assertion that portraits are works of human artifice, and suggests that her use of real historical portraits in her Cromwell trilogy prompts us to question how much we can know about historical figures. In chapter two, I demonstrate that Mantel also takes seriously the idea that portraits capture something of the inner nature of their subjects, and I consider her trilogy as a case study for writers who seek practical techniques for extracting possible truths from portraits. Chapter three accounts for the ways in which my use of historical paintings in 'The Girl in the Locket' takes its cues from Mantel, and also explores how I have sought to give my notional ekphrasis of Johana Blackmore the “effect of the real”, while nonetheless staying alive to the limits of representation. In section two, I move on from mimetic ekphrasis to consider notional ekphrasis as an approach to archival gaps. The question of how to approach incomplete or distorted records has been a particular focal point of slavery studies, and so chapter four considers the lessons that novelists can learn from twenty-first-century visual artists who seek to redress historic misrepresentations of enslaved people by making new archival traces that celebrate oppositional attitudes of resistance and resilience. In chapter five, I draw attention to comparisons between these artworks and Andrea Levy’s ekphrastic historical novel, 'The Long Song', which celebrates the human spirit’s defiance in the face of enslavement by inventing an oppositional figure and her portrait. Finally, chapter six elucidates how I have applied these lessons of oppositional notional ekphrasis to 'The Girl in the Locket'. It also describes a collaborative art project that is growing out of my novel, in which I am joining forces with visual artist Curtis Holder to explore the impact of bringing my protagonist’s imaginary portrait into real existence. By setting 'The Girl in the Locket' in the context of contemporary works of visual art and ekphrastic fiction which seek to imagine people whom colonialist history has misrepresented or rendered invisible, I hope to point a way forward for future research. I believe there is further scope for methodologies of recovering lost histories to cross-pollinate between practitioners of the ‘sister arts’, and also for visual artists and ekphrastic writers to intervene in the archives together.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Note:	The document attached to this record is the contextualising research section of the thesis only. It does not include the creative component, which is the manuscript for the novel "The Girl in the Locket". This research was funded by the South, West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (AHRC) and took place at Bath Spa University in collaboration with Cardiff University.
Keywords:	PhD by Practice, creative writing, practice-led research, historical fiction, ekphrastic fiction, Tudor period, West African characters, portrait painting, visual art praxes, marginalised groups, archival research, slavery studies, Hilary Mantel, Andrea Levy, Curtis Holder
Divisions:	School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities
Date Deposited:	23 Sep 2025 17:32
Last Modified:	23 Sep 2025 17:42
URN:	https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/17290

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