What can artful history teach us about how to write about archives in a way that honours the past yet makes history come alive?

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My thesis will comprise a Research and a Creative Project. The research element (30%) will focus on recovering Bird's work through the study of her letters, books, photographs and biographies and conducting a methodologically-driven analysis of the archive to understand Bird's writing approach. I will use Bird's letters as the basis of exploring truth and affect theories in the management, preservation and use of archives. I will consider how the power of institutions such as the National Library of Scotland can influence the portrayal of the past and how these can impact on what becomes 'history', 'national identity' and 'collective memory' (truth), and how this can impact on the emotional reactions (affect) of users as well as creators of archives. I will explore the theories of Michel Foucault and Edward Said, in order to raise questions as to the relationship between truth, representation and the archive, with respect to the John Murray Collection.In the creative project (70%) I will interrogate those who have followed White's 'Metahistory' (1973) to highlight the overlaps between literature and history: narrative, language, plot and metaphor (amongst others) to conceptualise how I apply these principles to my creative non-fiction essays. White argued against the 'scientific' model of knowledge production, and emphasised instead, the plurality of interpretations and literary strategies in the narration of historical accounts. My own writing is informed by postmodernist histories such as Rosenstone's, 'The Mirror and the Shrine' (1988), and Sachs' and Demos' 'Artful History' (2020). This anthology demonstrates how literary strategies open up history in interesting, emotional ways, and how, like novelists, historians need to find a form that acknowledges subjectivity. Writing essays gives the freedom to write history in the first person, to mergereflexive thoughts and multiple viewpoints with authors' original words. Bird's detailed narratives and poetic prose lifted her work beyond the norm and her letter format brought a vividness to her accounts, rarely portrayed by travel writers. My work verges on critical/creative hybridity and uses subjectivity to open up the past and bring a modern-day perspective to Bird's writing.Artful History uses the classic techniques of storytelling and aims to see history as a branch of literature. It is 'History from the Heart' as opposed to 'History in the Head' (Demos) and as such it activates the senses and the imagination. By exploring Bird's prose, I seek to learn to write about her work in a way that is not only instructive, but also moving - making a conceptual contribution to artful history.Bird's early travel writing took the form of letters composed to her sister. She wrote a number of books on exotic and remote locations, ranging from the Hawaiian Islands and North America, to the Far East and many other destinations. She portrayed a feminine, European, Christian and colonial vision of countries she visited, adjusting her own writing as she also became a pioneer of photography, offering more factual and geographical details in her accounts. Bird's letters offer an intriguing terrain for 'artful history' affording the historian as critic opportunities to explore Bird's rhetorical devices, her language, narrative stratagems and personas. My project will match Bird's work as both writer and historian, the arts of creative non-fiction meeting history in an 'artful' analysis that takes into account shifting voices and viewpoints, prose poetry and reflection, in a similar way to Rosenstone's narratives and Stegner's 'Wolf Willow' (1962).The creative project will consist of ten essays, which will focus on Bird's travels in the Rocky Mountains, Japan and other areas in the Far East. The key voices will be those of Isabella, her Japanese servant-interpreter, Itõ Tsurukichi and John Murray, her publisher, as they had a pivotal influence on Isabella's journeys. I have to date writt