The Gossips’ Choice: Extending the Possibilities for Biofiction with Creative Uses of Sources: Jane Sharp (active 1671) and Sarah Stone (active 1701–1737); practitioners: midwives

Michael Lackey has explained that “in the past, writers frequently based their novels on actual historical figures, but they changed the name in order to give themselves more creative freedom,” and that this practice fell out of favor from the mid-twentieth century (Lackey and Donoghue, p. 81). Here we might think of Hester Prynne, protagonist of The Scarlet Letter (1850), who some believe to have been inspired by several historical women alive at the time and place of the novel’s setting. For Lackey, the matter is straightforward: biofiction and historical fiction are distinct in that the former is “literature that