In 1990 Nell Irving Painter insisted that biographers must not cede biography to ‘subjects who had the education and resources to ‘leave the usual sources for the usual kinds of biographies’. Instead, to counter the violence of the archive we must develop new approaches that subvert and transcend the prejudices of the past. This presentation considers how the relatively new variant of speculative biography might be used to retrieve those who are poorly represented in the historical record and then reconstitute their lives into compelling historical narrative. What is at stake when historians employ ‘informed imagination’ to fill in archival gaps and what sort of protocols might best guide this process? Drawing upon a current historical biography research work-in-progress concerned with colonial artist and republican Adelaide Ironside (1831-1867) this paper teases out the methodological conundrums associated with this relatively new variant of biography and sketches out possible next steps and approaches for researchers and writers.