Writing history: Is romance a modern concept?

By Eve Edwards

‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love’ (As You Like It, Act 4 Sc 1)

When I was contemplating this blogpost on the historical experience of romantic love, V.S. Naipaul burst into the news for his outstandingly arrogant views on women writers and their attachment to sentiment. In his view, women writers are always inferior because of their ‘sentimentality, the narrow view of the world’. ‘And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.’

Even Jane Austen cannot hold a candle to the masterful Naipaul, it seems, as her ambitions were also ‘sentimental’. Sorry, the History Girls, we have been dismissed without a hearing: if Jane is damned, then we do not have a hope!

Gosh. I have to take a moment here just to marvel at how many ways he is in the wrong. Picture me reclining on my daybed, wafting my heated forehead with a copy of Pride and Prejudice. If you need a boost to your blood pressure, do go and read the article in the Guardian here.

Now, I am tempted to think that Naipaul is purposely baiting the literary press to get column inches (he is no stranger to controversy), because surely he cannot be so dismissive of writers drawn from half of humanity? Has he not read Barbara Kingsolver, Anita Desai, Beryl Bainbridge, Margaret Atwood – to name but a few contemporaries? We cannot rule out the possibility that he is just a conceited fool. Yet he is useful for my purposes as he does give an extreme expression to the view that writing about love (by this I understand romance of the Elizabeth/Darcy, Emma/Mr Knightly kind) is somehow lesser than the masculine strength of…well, of what exactly? War? Political ambition? Existential crisis? Books as only V.S. Naipaul writes them?

Let us not waste too much time with Naipaul, but it is true there exists a distrust in the wider literary world that romance as we modern writers see it is somehow not properly historical. I offer in evidence the fact that historical romance is shelved separately in many bookshops from mainstream historical novels, almost as if there is a fear of contagion. This could be partly justified by some of the products that creep into this bracket – many novels in this genre are only very superficially historical, an excuse to indulge the ‘I was taken by a Viking/knight/highlander/pirate/regency rake’ (delete as appropriate) fantasy. But bundled along with this chocolate box of sexy day-dreaming, is a suspicion that somehow love is not an important ingredient in true historical experience, at best an episode in a human life hemmed in by the material realities of economics and social developments. As Shakespeare’s Rosalind playfully tells her lover: ‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love’.

And, of course, historical romances almost always commit the fatal error of ending happily. Few Man Booker prize winners would dare be so optimistic – wedding bells do not win literary bouquets these days.

Yet Shakespeare, of course, provides ample material on the other side of this argument, showing that an Elizabethan man was able to write seriously of love being the prime mover of lives as different as the young ‘starcrossed’ lovers of old Verona to the ‘dotage’ of Antony and Cleopatra who wreck an ancient kingdom in their obsession for each other. Love is a serious historic agent of change in lives both great and small in Shakespeare’s plays so it seems we historical romantics are not guilty of projecting back our modern concepts, just inheriting them and reinterpreting them for our own times and understanding of history.

In defiance of Naipaul, I should turn to a female writer for another example. George Eliot’s Middlemarch explores in one plot line how devotion to masculine academic study (Casaubon) with grandiose claims for wider importance turns out to be dry-as-dust and irrelevant. Compared to him, his wife, Dorothea, makes no great claims, content to be a helpmate, yet the novelist finds that admirable: ‘[h]er full nature…spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts’ (Finale, Middlemarch). Her love for Will Ladislaw is one of those acts that improves the world. In a novel by a woman that is often very unsentimental and far from narrow in its view of the world, Eliot makes a plea for the domestic and confined for that is where many of us, men and women, spend our ‘real’ lives away from the false glitter of the public stage.

So the next time I tap away, imagining myself back in the shoes of characters of the past, I need

not be ashamed that I often choose a moment in their lives where love is uppermost in their minds. After all, those historic markers of human lives – the gravestones – are usually graven in ‘loving memory’. Most of us prefer to go down in history as loving wives/husbands/mothers/fathers, not good workers, famous (infamous) politicians or, dare I say it, notable writers.

Eve Edwards' 'The Rogue's Princess' (about Elizabethan theatre and early English puritanism) is available in the UK from July 2011 from Razorbill (Puffin). 'The Other Countess' comes out in the USA, also this July, with Random House: www.eve-edwards.co.uk

Playing With The Past: Counterfactual History (Part I)

by Linda Buckley-Archer

I am not a historian. I am a writer of fictional narratives who attempts, among other things, to evoke the past for a young audience. Like many children’s novelists I started by writing for my own children. I wanted to share the excitement I felt when, as a child myself, I encountered the world of Sutcliff’s Eagle of the Ninth or Dumas’s The Three Musketeers for the first time. There was that time-tourist feeling of visiting different historical periods on a kind of fictional grand tour. I recall being fascinated by the then-and-now aspect of these books and, above all, being surprised that I was able to relate to these people from the past who seemed to think and feel just like me.

I was inspired to write my first novel while listening to the historian Lucy Moore talking about eighteenth-century criminals and their vernacular. She spoke of the dangers of Covent Garden, of highwaymen, footpads, anglers and straw men. A ‘prancer’ was a horse, ‘velvet’ a tongue, murderers were ‘scragged’ at Tyburn, and so on. I started to research the period and read about a case of ‘half hanging’ (surviving the noose) in the Newgate Calendars. I remember thinking that my son would love all of this: the darker side of eighteenth century London in all its ramshackle glory.

So writing about history did not used to concern me in the same way that, say, characterisation or pace or narrative voice did. Now, increasingly, it does. Long gone are the days when ‘history’ was taught as an ideologically neutral set of dates and facts which could be learned by rote. History tends now to be viewed as fragmentary and selective; it is concerned with viewpoint and weaving its own narratives. And this means that an accurate depiction of ‘history’ becomes challenging – if it is possible at all. Nevertheless, the writer of historical fiction is obliged to create a credible, coherent and vivid idea of the past. Fiction sometimes has to go where history fears to tread.

Then there are questions related to the responsibility of children’s / YA authors to their readership. For example, even though writing a novel with the primary intention of educating its readers lacks appeal on many levels, the notion of a historical novel which does not care if it misinforms is worse. On the one hand writers are not teachers, on the other, irrespective of the author’s motivation and expertise, children’s historical fiction contributes to the idea of history. If I have a mental picture of Roman Britain it has nothing to do with my assorted history teachers and everything to do with the imagination of Rosemary Sutcliff.

Historical fantasy fiction (in my own case the timeslip genre) provokes its own specific debates. There are those who prefer to take their historical fiction ‘straight’ and who may feel that there are too many pitfalls in writing time-slip, ‘alternative’ history and other species of historical fantasy to justify the attempt. What are the ramifications of using famous historical figures in one’s fiction, of having, for instance, a twenty-first century boy berate Dr Samuel Johnson for writing his dictionary and dooming him to the prospect of weekly spelling tests? It is ironic, however, that ‘playing with history’ can necessitate research that is just as - if not more - rigorous than ‘sticking to the facts’.

In next month’s post I am going to write in detail about my experience of writing counterfactual fiction, of asking the question: What If...? Of all the episodes in my time-travelling trilogy writing my counterfactual endeavour undoubtedly gave me the most pleasure. It was also, by far, the most difficult thing I have written. Appalled at learning that England had ‘lost’ America, my eighteenth-century villain, Lord Luxon, took it upon himself to find a way to sabotage the American War of Independence. Trying to identify, on my villain’s behalf, the potential turning points of America’s early history was a fascinating enterprise. The project engendered months of research. I visited New Jersey and was given invaluable advice by a Princeton historian. One thing I learned during the process was that imagining what didn’t happen certainly teaches you a lot about what did.

Thank you for visiting History Girls and over the next month I shall very much look forward to reading my fellow contributors’ posts and our readers’ comments.

My thanks to Mizan, my Indonesian publisher, for permission to use one of their lovely illustrations from Gideon the Cutpurse. Thanks also to David Lewis for permission to use his cartoon. www.davidlewiscartoons.com

We're here!

by Mary Hoffman

Welcome to the brand new History Girls blog! There are 28 of us who plan to put up a new personal post every day, leaving a few spaces at the end of the month for reviews, interviews, guest blogs and competitions to win books by our members.

You can see who we all are by clicking the About Us header above and take a look at our most recent historical fiction - and us - in the slide-shows on the right. Some of us write entirely for Young Adults or younger readers; some for adults and some do both. Some write an interesting sub-genre of fantasy history and you'll be hearing more about that.

There's safety in numbers and we aren't the only writers contributing to joint blogs. There are Crime Central  and Girls Heart Books - both spin-offs from the Awfully Big Blog Adventure (ABBA), started by Anne Cassidy, and many others. It's a wonderful way to celebrate writing within a specific genre and to share information and ideas with each other and with readers.

You have some real treats coming up this month from posts about flying in the theatre to horses in history and lots about objects or places or people that have inspired whole books by our contributors.

There was a time when historical fiction was enormously popular and fashionable, in the days of Anya Seton, Mary Renault and Georgette Heyer, and then it became an absolute no-no with most publishers. But in the year that Hilary Mantel won the Booker prize with the wonderful Wolf Hall, the majority of the books on the shortlist were about periods well before the present day.

When does historical fiction begin? World War Two? 35 years ago? A generation in the past? These have all been offered as definitions. I know I found 1980 harder to write about than 1208, because there are people alive who remember it and can write in to correct you if you've made an error about, say, what month a particular book was published in that year.

And then there is Anthony Beevor who possibly thinks we shouldn't be doing it at all. We'll return to these ideas many times in the months to come, I suspect. Meanwhile, enjoy the blog.

We've had a lot of support and help setting up the blog so thanks to Damian Harvey, Elen Caldecott, Romy Berlin, Anne Rooney and all our wonderful contributors.

And don't forget to Follow us here and on Twitter (@history_girls) and on Facebook (The History Girls). And do please comment; we want to know what you are interested in reading about and what you think of our blog.