Amateur Biographies: Attempting to Fill Archival Gaps

Abstract

The biography of nineteenth-century amateur performers defies typical biographical formulae due to the paucity of information available about these performers and their productions. The story of the Lawrence sisters added another layer of challenge: determining how to contextualize an ephemeral art form within the biographical history of two women when one of them left an autobiography that, interestingly, attempts to follow typical biographical structure and yet, upon deeper analysis, only introduces yet more unverifiable knowledge gaps. By acknowledging and analyzing those gaps and the challenges they present, an organic narrative can develop—a narrative which speaks to the complexities of this work and the challenges of telling the lives of those whom history might otherwise neglect. The biography becomes, thus, the story of women whose history is imperfectly recorded and a vehicle for a discussion of a popular art form which does not readily lend itself to being archived, while also providing a narrative of the historiographical and historical possibilities that the past presents through its gaps.