Spilt Milk: Memory, Real Life, and Knowing the Past in Historical Fiction

This PhD by Publication comprises two of my novels, 22 Britannia Road and Spilt Milk, accompanied by a reflective and critical exegesis which investigates the process and context of writing my internationally published historical fiction novel Spilt Milk. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theoretical approaches to memory and narrative as a means to consider the borderlines between lived life and fiction, I consider the ways in which historical fiction can represent versions of real life which contain human truths and emotions. With this in mind, I argue that my novel writing (and reading) practice stem from the shared potential in what I term ‘creative memory.’ This site of potentiality is where worldliness and collaborative knowledge between writer and reader in response to the text exists, illustrating my own belief in the imagination as a place of creative communality. In examining this, I establish my own contribution to the ways in which memory and the imagination impact on the practice of creative writing, and reading fiction. Reflecting on my creative practices offers original and wider ways of understanding how literature represents, or even is, ‘real life,’ and thus has an important role in our lives today