Treasuring history through fiction, by Gillian Polack

This month other History Girls are writing about favourite books. I did that recently, so I thought, to balance those posts, I’d give you some context. Those books that we read and that we treasure and that we remember are part of a gorgeous cultural pattern. Right now, that cultural pattern means that historical fiction is changing. I want to look at what exactly is happening. 

Photo: Gillian Polack, Sydney 2015

Two decades ago there was a vast gulf between historians and fiction writers. This hasn’t always been the case. It wasn’t so much the case in the time of Walter Scott. And it’s not the case right now. It’s now socially far more acceptable to read certain types of fiction as part of enjoying history. The way history is written into many novels has changed: it’s more sophisticated, more aware and far more researched.

Writers have changed. Some of the writers who changed are here, in the History Girls. They looked at the history they fell in love with and they said “We can do this better.” They researched and they learned and they understood and they brought to their novels a greater depth of understanding. It didn’t happen overnight, but if you look at any of the established writers here, you’ll find that, over the years, their work has developed.

I discovered how this happened when I started researching historical fiction writers. Historical fiction writers have always loved history (why would someone write a novel on a historical theme if that someone didn’t enjoy history, after all) but what I discovered was that their attitude to research is at the heart of the sea-change in historical fiction. Some talk to scholars on their specialist subjects. Some frequent specialist archives. So many historical fiction writers do site tours and understand the place the novel is set. 

When I looked at the different attitudes towards research that writers of different kinds of novels have (for a book, which is still a new release and which I am still celebrating), the attitudes of historical fiction writers were closer to those of academic historians than those of science fiction writers, even of science fiction writers who write time travel or alternate histories. There’s still a big difference between history and fiction, but in recent years, historical fiction writers have worked to diminish that gulf.

Next came the readers. I discovered this very personally when I suddenly became more popular at conferences and conventions. Readers wanted to talk about my fiction with me, but they were even more interested in understanding history. These active and questioning readers of novels don’t just pose their technical questions to the historians: readers can be a lot tougher on the history fiction writers use than they used to be. 

There have always been some readers who knew a lot and questioned a lot and thought deeply about the subjects of novels, but the sea change means that there are a lot more of them. I meet them when they want a signature for the Beast (aka The Middle Ages Unlocked, which I co-wrote with Katrin Kania), for they love checking out the sort of background their favourite writers might use. Their favourite writers are usually those same writers who have done so much extra work on the history for their novels.

Some readers will spend as much money on books related to the history in their favourite fiction as they spend on that fiction itself. I’ve been asked about my sources for Langue[dot]doc1305 so often that I put a list of them on my blog, and written articles about them. And I’m not alone in this. So many writers end up talking about their experience in archives or in exploring primary sources or establishing an accurate date for an event as much as they talk about the characters their readers love and love to hate.

Readers do not work alone. They often join groups with similar interests. The Historical Novel Society has been a critical component of this change in historical fiction, and so have organisations like the SCA and the Richard III Society. 

Popular history and serious history are no longer as deeply divided. This opens the door to readers who want to approach novels with more insight into the history and more of an understanding of what possibilities it holds.

Writers respond to their readers. Often, they share similar interests. Elizabeth Chadwick, for instance, is a member of Regia Anglorum, a re-enactment group. She doesn’t just write the Middle Ages: she researches it, performs it and comes to understand it on many levels and from many angles. She is not alone. I can think of at least a half dozen writers who delve into the past during their spare time and whose novels reflect this. The tales these writers tell are still easy to read, but the history in them is better understood and more carefully thought out. It’s part of a complex feedback loop that has led to where we are right now, where historical fiction is successful commercially while its readers and writers see its historical contexts more clearly. They create possibly the best bridging between history and the general public that we’ve had since Walter Scott.

Compared with the demands of writers and readers, the critical world is a step behind. This is because the critical world is undergoing changes of its own. As I love saying, this is another story for another time, but it’s worth noting here. It’s also worth noting that blogs like the History Girls will help the world of criticism catch up, as it becomes clearer and clearer what audiences demand from historical fiction and what writers are willing to give.

Yesterday the History Girls turned five years old. I’m hoping it has many, many good years ahead because it’s very much a part of these changes in the way we see history and think about the past. It helps bring the work of scholars out of the university and gives it directly to the reader, whether the reader is on the train, on the beach or sneaking in a few pages of a favourite book on an e-reader.

Author Maths, by Y S Lee

The US/Canadian cover (Candlewick Press)

One of the things I find consistently surprising in historical fiction is how very long it takes to get from one place to another. My Mary Quinn Mysteries (called the Agency series, in North America) are set in London between 1858 and 1860. They’re too urban to make use of the railways that criss-crossed the country and a shade too early for the first intra-city underground trains (the Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863). Most of the travel in my novels takes place either on foot or by horse-power: carriages, cabs, and of course, simply riding on horseback. By 1858, there were also horse-drawn omnibuses that, like our present-day buses, plied regular routes through the city. 

The UK/Australian cover (Walker Books)

The climax of Rivals in the City features a fair amount of running around between locations in central London. One of the first things I did when plotting it was create a chart showing the different sites, the distances between them, and how long it would take to move from one point to another. In order not to spoil the plot (Rivals will be published next week in the U. S. and Canada; it’s already available in the UK), I’ve renamed the locations after four of my favourite North American cities. This, of course, is a fiction upon a fiction; the real locations are London landmarks. Otherwise, here’s what my chart looks like:



Timing the final action

Locations	Distance in miles	Walking (in mins)	Running (in mins)	Horseback (in mins)
Vancouver to Toronto	2.7	54	27	22
Toronto to New York	3.2	64	32	25
New York to Montreal	1.9	41	19	16
Montreal to Vancouver	1.9	40	19	16
New York to Vancouver	1	20	10	8

I assumed an average running speed of about 6 miles/10 km per hour - a pretty fast clip for a woman burdened with heavy clothes on slick, inconsistently paved, and poorly lit urban streets (it’s after dark). But I’m talking about the women of the Agency, an elite detective firm. Not only are they are in excellent physical form, they are responding to an emergency.

I assumed a horse trot of 7-8 mph, since poor road quality and night-time visibility again make it impossible to canter. With horseback, I also needed to allow tie-up time and the need to rest or change horses. Riding turned out to be not much faster than running, but riding made it possible for a character to arrive at an important location looking respectable.

As it worked out, the time elapsed for a series of important messages to be relayed was:

- 57 minutes: for a character to run from Vancouver to Toronto and back again

- 41 minutes, plus delays while tying-up a horse: for a character to ride from Toronto to New York, and then from New York to Montreal

- 30 to 35 minutes, plus time for marshalling and instructions: for a large group to walk quickly from Montreal to Vancouver

This left me with a space of 2 ¼ hours, the minimum period during which my heroine, Mary Quinn, would be alone in “Vancouver” after sounding the alarm. It turned out to be the perfect window of time to allow her to take action, imperil herself, yet receive help at just the right moment.

I love this kind of concrete plotting, and wonder if any of you do the same. How do you work out timelines, near-misses, and rescues?
--
Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press), a quartet of novels featuring a girl detective in Victorian London. Rivals in the City, the last in the series, is published in the US and Canada on March 10.

Writing Historical Fiction by Celia Brayfield

We have a huge extra treat this month from Celia Brayfield, whose new book with Duncan Sprott, Writing Historical Fiction sounds like a must-read for all History Girls - and Boys.



A bit about Celia:


Celia Brayfield’s first novel, which began in Malaysia in 1938, was written when historical fiction was the love that dared not speak its name. She subsequently smuggled revolutionary St Petersburg, Paris with the Ballets Russes and the Barbary Coast in the eighteenth Century into some of her nine bestselling novels. Her next novel is about the love affair between a French man and an English woman that finally brought Mary Queen of Scots to justice; in retelling this tragic episode in English history, she has used recent research to follow the lives the ordinary people trapped Mary’s doomed court-in-exile. Celia also tutors award-winning students on two of Britain’s leading Creative Writing programmes, at Bath Spa University and Brunel University in London. She is the author of Bestseller (Fourth Estate) 1996, one of the very few guides to writing successful popular fiction from a bestselling author.

She is also the guest editor of the winter 2013 edition of Mslexia.

Here she muses on why anachronistic attitudes to love and sex have sometimes given historical fiction a bad name.

Bodice-ripper. Shall we just think about this for a moment? Yes, it’s publishing slang for popular historical fiction for women and it tells us about the mindset, fixed in the Mad Men era, that put historical writing beyond the literary pale for decades. Bodice-ripper believers are sure that that our ancestors were randy as stoats, at it like crazed weasels and permanently breathless with passion.

I think not. The eminent historian Lawrence Stone thought not, in his tome The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) which transformed thinking about relationships in the early modern period and in which observed that people had far less sex at that time than we imagined they did.

Likewise with love. History certainly offers us epic romances – the love of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, which endured thirty years and his first two highly advantageous marriages to other women, or the coup de foudre which led Eleanor of Aquitaine to dump the King of France for the unprepossessing Duke of Normandy – later Henry II of England. But the writer who tries to tread a path between accurate history and engaging fiction is confronted by the fact that neither love nor sex have meant the same to our ancestors as they do to us today.

Worse, we have very little evidence to tell us how ordinary people felt, thought and acted about love, and what we do have – the poetry, the erotica, the court testimonies – was not created to provide a record, but to serve a purpose at the time. Finally, worst of all, many authors have made considerable fortunes by ignoring these facts and having Tudor noblewomen act like Essex girls.

Love is the stuff of fiction, particularly popular fiction, but love has not always been the intense, intimate and sexual emotion we recognise today nor was it always considered the best foundation for a marriage and family. History is not on the writer’s side. Mostly, love has been an anarchic challenge to the social order.

Love and the novel have a shared history. Romantic love was defined by the romantic movement of the late eighteenth century, in which the idea that emotions should be all-powerful and should triumph over reason was central. The novel itself emerged at the same time and their linguistic origins are intertwined, with the word romance having double meaning – a love affair or a story. The sociologist Anthony Giddens has suggested that romantic love introduced the idea of a narrative into an individual's life and reinforced the link between self-realisation and freedom.

It is ironic that the period of English history that is currently such a focus of fiction was one of the least romantic. To modern readers, the true Tudor attitudes to love and marriage e are depressingly pragmatic. The immense dynastic marriages of the time, such as that of the Earl of Shrewsbury and Bess of Hardwick, a three-couple alliance which included four of the couple’s adult children, seem cruel and incomprehensible to us.

Equally hard to understand is the story of Lady Catherine Gray, heir to the English throne, who fell in love and married Edward Seymour, the Earl of Pembroke, in secret while negotiations for a diplomatic alliance for her were under way. Within months Catherine’s young husband was sent abroad and his sister, the only witness to their marriage, died. Catherine lost the legal document that proved their marriage, and the priest who married them disappeared. She found herself pregnant, with a child that was, to all intents and purposes, illegitimate. Queen Elizabeth suspected a plot and Catherine was imprisoned for the rest of her life. To modern readers, and to fine novelists including Alison Weir and Ella March Chase, this is a tragic story of true love. To an Elizabethan audience, this is a tragic story of an unbelievably silly and disloyal young couple. And to male historians, alas, it has been proof that Queen Elizabeth was an embittered spinster.

Does it matter that a novelist in pursuit of more readers makes a Tudor lady act like an Essex girl? To me, yes. Surely the reason we explore the past is to find out what human nature really is. If we traduce our ancestors’ feelings, there’s no reason to get to know them at all. And besides, a bodice meant exquisite fabric imported from far-off lands, jewels, gold thread, skilled embroiderers, weeks of work for dozens of people – the man who ripped it wouldn’t be anyone’s favourite.

Extracted from Writing Historical Fiction:The Writers’ and Artists’ Companion, by Celia Brayfield and Duncan Sprott, published by Bloomsbury Academic, December 5 2013.