“So we beat on, boats against the current,

 borne ceaselessly into the past.”

- Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

 

​The historical novel has made a significant return in the past few decades. Enter any book store and there is guaranteed to be a section primarily for historical fiction. From Philippa Gregory to Ken Follett, there are many different authors, who have explored some area of history or another.

​Why is it that historical fiction has become such a popular genre? Why do readers go back to these novels again and again?

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​If anyone remembers their own history lessons from school, you would probably agree that the textbooks were not the most fascinating narratives. Yes, they contain essential information about what actually happened in the past, but many textbook histories do little more than state the facts, pivotal events and their consequences. There is no sense of character, a lack of human feeling from these historical figures, towards the world around them.

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​I often ask myself, whilst reading these textbooks, how did the people feel during all of this? How did this character react? What was she really like?

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​James Harmon argues that, as a historian, ‘the writer cannot enter into the consciousness of his subject’. They cannot tell us, as readers, what a medieval king was thinking as he rides off towards war, or how an elderly peasant woman copes in a Victorian doss house, or the taste of foods they consumed.

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For many readers, much of what they know of history is owed to historical fiction. As Joyce Saricks acknowledges, we might not ‘respond to the often-dry style of straight historical texts or biographies’ purely because they tend to alienate us through academic language, or coldness and lack of humanity from the historical figures mentioned.

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Think of a historical text as a skeleton, the ‘bare bones’ of the past. Adding layers to the skeleton, a creative spark, the human features give the reader something to touch, to observe; something that resembles our own world in many ways, but is strange in others.

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                                          Duncan Sprott is not exaggerating when he says that 'historical fiction is the                                                 beating heart of history'.

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                                         In bringing a character to life in historical fictions, we are able to observe events                                           from the inside, from the perspectives of the characters. Camilla Nelson and                                                 Christine de Matos revive Walter Scott’s idea that a historical novelist creates                                               an ‘extensive neutral ground’, where the actions and motives of their characters ‘                                         are common to us and our ancestors’, bringing the past and present together. In                                           other words, we compare aspects of our own lives to those found in the                                                       historical novels we read. In many ways, historical fiction can give insight into                                               how we came to live as we do today.

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For readers, the genre might be a means of exploring a section of history previously excluded from contemporary accounts. For instance, much of history has been written by men, and is predominantly focused on male figures.

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Anne Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn propose that women have been ‘pushed to the margins of the…historical canon’ where their lives are only mentioned in relation to men. One reason the fictional form has become widely popular is because it offers women a chance to voice their experiences, to ‘undermine the fixed or truthful nature of the historical narrative’ and create their own ‘counter-histories’. They challenge the accepted authority of history by giving their own version of the past.

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You only have to look at the shelves of a book shop to see how women of history have become a popular subject within the historical fiction genre.

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The same can be said of others who have not had a say in history, whether it is due to race, beliefs, or social status. Through fiction, writers and readers can explore a period in which they are rarely documented, and discover how their own people lived. Who knows? You might even learn something about yourself.

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​“The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction.

A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.” 
― Hilary Mantel in A Place of Greater Safety

 

In the online forum, Goodreads, a discussion was used to explore the question, ‘Why do we read historical fiction?’ One participant said that they ‘enjoy historical fiction for this peculiar sense of nostalgia that I feel for an era (e.g. Edwardian) that was never mine to begin with’. This nostalgia is seen as a desire to understand how people lived before them, and how this has led to the lifestyles carried out by people of the present day.  Fiction provides an easy way of doing this. 

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By highlighting the similarities of the past and the present, fiction reminds us of the repetitive nature of humanity; that the mistakes made in history can be made again, emotions they had are identical to those we experience in the present. It allows the reader to step into the shoes of these historical figures, to consider how they might react in a similar position.

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You might think to yourself, whilst reading a piece of fiction, is this what I would have done in the same situation? How would I have responded to this way of life?

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An author takes a historical figure and transforms them into a real human, so to speak. They are given a voice, thoughts, movement, and the reader walks through the events they know with these characters, and sees the world through their eyes.

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Readers no longer need to choose between reading for pleasure and reading for the facts. Both aspects are available in historical fiction. Many historical novelists do extensive research of the period they are going to write about, especially if their novel focuses on a particular person who lived in that time.

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 Most novelists make no claim towards objective truths. Hayden White

reminds us that ‘the conjuring up of the past requires art as well as

information’. It is the ‘undocumented areas’ of history which are generally

of most interest to writers. The events ‘away from the public stage’, those

 human moments of imagination, often suppressed in history, are what make

characters seem real.

On the other side, Robert Rosenstone suggests that historians tend to ‘hang

on to outmoded kinds of narrative and analysis’ and this alienates many

readers in their desire for knowledge of the past, but who wish to be

entertained at the same time.

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Fictional authors find ways to incorporate the evidence they have gathered

into an engaging narrative. Without it, the reader is left with the ‘dry facts',

unappealing to those of us who are not history academics. 

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Where a historian attempts to explore, and establish a true history, a novelist of historical fiction gives readers a taste of reality; a chance to empathise with characters, to see what life was really like for these people we hear about, read about, but never truly know.

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Of course, we can never truly know them. Writers can only give the illusion of a real past, and the past is elusive. According to The Trouble with History and Fiction, a historian is forever chasing something which has ‘gone around the corner and is out of earshot’. No matter how convincing the evidence, history writers cannot recreate a dead time completely. It is, after all, dead. They can only interpret what is left behind, and even that can contradict itself. Historians are constantly arguing over whether their texts should be accepted as true, and someone, somewhere, is always going to disagree with the ‘facts’.

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The characters we encounter in historical fiction were likely not as they are portrayed in these stories. Sabrina Murray states that historical fiction writers are not ‘governed by what can be proven to be true, but rather the experience of it’. What matters is that the author makes them feel real in the way they interact with the world around them. A good author will bring to life people who have been forgotten, misunderstood by their contemporaries, or have yet to tell their own story.

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History consists of overlapping narratives, and historical texts are often subjective, and not the unbiased narratives they claim to be. Often the authors personal opinions will creep into the text, twisting the reader’s perspective of the subject. As an alternative, fiction does what history ought to do, but doesn’t. It gives readers an opportunity to explore possibilities and potentials of ordinary people, where history promotes an authoritative truth.

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Why do you like (or dislike) historical fiction?

Is there a historical character you enjoy reading about in history books or fiction? What draws you to these characters?

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We would love to hear your opinions, questions or comments.