When I arrived at Library Journal in 1986, most works of historical fiction, with high-end exceptions like E.L. Doctorow’s oeuvre, were passed to the review editor handling popular rather than literary fiction (that’s my bailiwick).
Such works were seen as strictly genre fiction, either adventure-filled saga or rosy romance. That wasn’t always true‚ Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which I’d definitely toss in the literary pile despite all its adventure and romance, was the historical fiction of its day, chronicling events that had happened 60 years before its publication. But for a time historical fiction came mostly wrapped in bodice-ripper covers.
In recent years, with the appearance of books like Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (a “brainy novel whose passion is ideas,” said the New York Times) and awards winners like Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, and Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, our understanding of historical fiction has broadened considerably. In fact, today’s historical novels vary so widely in tone, depth, and audience (fans of Wolf Hall aren’t likely to pick up Philippa Gregory’s Tudor romps) that bunching them together can seem a little odd. Should these titles even be called historical fiction?
It’s a question I got to debate last Thursday while serving on the panel Historical Fiction: An Enduring Genre in a Changing Landscape, sponsored by the Women’s National Book Association’s New York City Chapter. My fellow panelists included Kathryn Harrison, whose most recent historical novel is the vivid Enchantments, which imagines a friendship between Rasputin’s daughter and the Tsarevitch Alyosha.
Also on hand: Carole DeSanti, Viking Penguin Vice President and editor at large (her authors have included Chevalier), whose first novel, The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R., is set during France’s Second Empire; Writers House agent Daniel Lazar, who’s given us Anne Fortier, Michelle Moran, and, most recently, Regina O’Melveney’s The Book of Madness and Cures; and Heather Lazare, currently at the Simon & Schuster imprint Touchstone, whose interests as an editor include historical fiction.
Such is the protean nature of literature in general that we couldn’t exactly define the parameters of historical fiction‚ not even the time frame, though World War II came up as a dividing line. I did like DeSanti’s wonderful term hybridity to describe the current climate, one in which historical fiction has gotten richer and deeper and might best be summed up through compound terms, e.g., literary historical, historical romance, historical thriller, time-travel historical, and more.
In the end, it seems best to think big, keeping books like Francine du Plessix Gray’s austere and magisterial The Queen’s Lover (see interview) in the historical fiction fold, along with more obvious choices like Madeline Miller’s current Mary Renault readalike, The Song of Achilles. Publishers must simply market them wisely (Lazare’s point), and reviewers must stress the nuances (my point). For despite those nuances, works of historical fiction have one thing in common: through them, we enter a world different from our own, almost as in a fantasy. But it’s a real world, and with the best books we leave with some real understanding.
Not that historical novels are encapsulated history lessons. That would be a bore, and in any case novelists take an entirely different tack. Don’t go to historical fiction to learn history, warned Harrison. We use history, we don’t remain faithful to it.
What historical fiction instead delivers is an era’s sensibility. For her novel, DeSanti relentlessly examined Second Empire artifacts, from clothing to cookbooks, visiting Paris’s Musée Carnavalet to study its coins, signs, ceramics, and even a bit of bread preserved from the time of the Paris Commune. Her purpose? I wanted to feel myself into the time, to live there. She so immersed herself in the Second Empire that she feels she’s still living there, which makes The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R. seem less historical to her than contemporary.
When you read DeSanti’s novel, you’ll feel that you are living in that world, too. Gray’s The Queen’s Lover will take you back to the French Revolution and O’Melveney’s The Book of Madness and Cures even further back, to late 1500s Venice and beyond. And just as the novelist’s continuing research can change the arc of a story‚ having discovered efforts to raise silkworms in 17th-century Spain, Harrison made the narrator of Poison a Spanish silk grower’s daughter‚ we’re changed by our reading of these novels. It’s an easy way to make our fantasies come true.
About Barbara Hoffert
Fifty years is the length of time often used to determine historical fiction. The Walter Scott Prize requires sixty years (based on Sir Walter Scott’s WAVERLEY, OR ‘TIS SIXTY YEARS HENCE).
I disagree. Historical fiction should remain as faithful as possible to historical fact. How boring to just use history to sugar coat our own time.
I agree with you mostly, as I’m a history buff and typically love books that stick to fact. However, I think the ‘fiction’ part can be equally wonderful in the context of an era that I love. I don’t have anything against books that use a historical setting for a new, completely invented story. It’s refreshing for a history buff like me to read something new, regardless of whether the characters (or story) existed or not. I’m reading a book right now that is a bit like that, “A Tainted Dawn” by BN Peacock (http://www.bnpeacock.com). It’s set in 1789 Europe and the context seems quite accurate, but as far as I can tell, the characters and story are completely new. I LOVE it so far.
Is there a false distinction here between fact and fiction? I believe that a book can be essentially factual when talking about a period: when describing the manner of dress, the manner of speech, the way people thought – even when it uses made-up characters and events, even places. Perhaps not to the extent of inventing a second French Revolution, for instance, but certainly when describing the everyday minutiae of ordinary people’s lives. Please forgive me if I’m completely misunderstanding your point.
I have been writing fiction about the 1950s lately (I was a boy, but see the 1950s as an aging adult today, 60+ years later). I find that the 1950s were a terrifying, alien time period in so many ways (relative to today, and maybe ‘relative’ is the key). As a few quick examples, in the US, blacks sat at the back of the bus, Jews were still censored out of many colleges and universities, women were not able to obtain insurance on their own (chattels of men), and most recently we saw old news footage of how a woman trying to run in a major marathon was roughed up and bullied by male event monitors. Gays were still pre-Stonewall…in short, in the era of McCarthyism, fire hoses in Little Rock, and other grayscale terror, it was a different age entirely. The US was #1 in per capita income, whereas we are #29 today. Most tellingly, a person could be arrested, fined, or even jailed or selling — or bringing in to the country — a copy of such forbidden books as James Joyce’s Ulysses or DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (to name half of today’s compulsory English Dept. reading list). The landmark Supreme Court decisions overturning such primitive, bigoted laws did not come until 1957 or 1959. In short, the “line” or penumbra of historical fiction may be argued as being long past World War II, and sweeping fast like the line between day and night, or the long hand of a clock. One alternative definition for historical fiction might be: beyond the living memory of today’s middle-aged persons. Then again, as I travel through my sixties, I find that, as I reflect back on my own life, some of it seems so long ago and far away that I wonder if things really happened that way. Like when I was a young soldier, stationed in West Germany of the 1970s…nobody thought the Wall would ever come down…and that’s less than 50 years ago…then again, not by much…seems like yesterday to me. Yet ages ago in a country that no longer exists, in a world of the past…
Hey, John. And they call this the “greatest generation”?
Actually, I refuse to believe I’m one of a few who is a “fan of ‘Wolf Hall’ that does also read Philppa Gregory’s “Tudor romps” . I love that! Balancing non-fiction historical works with some “light reading” (both in perspective *and* physical weight!) is how I live my life. I find I learn at least one new tidbit no matter which I read – that’s what makes the Journey worth doing. As a researcher, I almost always am gifted with some new (to me, of course!) ditty to research, no matter which ‘version’ of history I’m sampling. And, I’m grateful that this discussion of the different kinds of historical fictions has come up – it’s fascinating! Thanks for posing a truly interesting question.
One area of historical novelizing that get ignored, dissed or neglected these days is any story set in the transMississippi West. Skip the ones that are big on Very Important Symbolism (i.e. The Wake of Forgiveness) or feature 19th-Century Characters Who Constantly Talk Like Valley Girls (West of Everything) and instead investigate spare, disturbing novels like Liar’s Moon, or the excellent Deep Creek.