COMMENT Hidden histories
Andrea Mullaney
Hilary Mantel
At the recent Summerhall historical fiction festival in Edinburgh, a varied selection of authors – writing about the first world war, the Romans, Waterloo, the 1950s, the Elizabethan age, suffragettes and many other periods – had one thing in common. Each spoke about, or was asked about, their research: how much, how difficult, how enjoyable. And while it was fascinating to hear their answers, it made me think about the genre as a whole and why it’s become so associated with facts, despite being fiction.
The debate over authenticity is a perennial one: authors tell of frustrations when an inconvenient fact suddenly turns up which throws a spanner in their plot working, or of the pedants who write in to complain that the buttons on an army regimental uniform were in fact brass, not silver as they’ve described. One writer I know literally shouted with joy in a library when she discovered that the main archives of a certain place and period where her novel is set had been subsequently lost in a fire. Freedom! Nothing could now entirely contradict her imaginings, giving her leeway to at least argue that there was no proof something wasn’t so (the fire, by the way, was a hundred years before, or I’d have been rather suspicious of her).
But most are conscientious in their own right, using the real facts to enrich their fictions and feeling a responsibility to the actual history as far as it is known, especially when there are real people represented. Some think of their work as a way into the more factual histories, encouraging readers to check out their sources and there’s definitely a tendency in the genre to ‘show your working’ with bibliographies – and occasionally footnotes – to reassure that the research has been done. I can see why, and it’s often interesting, but it’s curious: we don’t expect contemporary fiction writers to back up all their plots with proof (statistics of how many people in Hampstead commit adultery, perhaps, or the proportion of murders committed in the city of Edinburgh). There, it’s enough to accept that the author is, well, making it up.
Perhaps it’s a hangover from the dodgy reputation that hung around historical fiction for a long time, where it was seen as synonymous with historical romance of the Jean Plaidy or Georgette Heyer schools (and there are obvious implications there for what those assumptions about the ‘value’ of each say about the snobbery and sexism associated with women’s fiction – and the weird hype around the BBC’s ‘Poldark’ series shows it’s still going on). To get away from the bodice-ripper ghetto, maybe historical authors feel required to show that their work has an educational element; certainly some are keen to point out how their writing highlights parallels and allegories with our own time.
But like any writer, everything comes filtered through their own perceptions and tastes. I wonder if the emphasis on authenticity risks us forgetting that this is still fiction; even if the details are all rigorously accurate, the motives are still a guess. Which is fine, of course, as long as readers remember that. Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ has redeemed the reputation of Thomas Cromwell after many years when he was generally seen as the bad guy to the saintly Thomas More; their current reputations are almost switched, thanks to her persuasive prose, but that doesn’t make either the ‘real’ story (as the mischievous Mantel is well aware). And the Richard III Society, which recently triumphed in its efforts to clear his name from Shakespearean calumny by participating in a valedictory reburial, may not be right either. Historians of the factual variety are able to conclude that there isn’t enough evidence of something either way; narrative fiction has to take a view.
But most readers of historical fiction do know this and sift their judgements accordingly, many with as good a knowledge of their preferred period as the authors (which makes for lively Q&A sessions). People tend to specialise: they read about the Romans, or the Napoleonic Wars, or the Victorians (and there are fashions in this: authors, or perhaps their publishers, tend to bunch around certain dramatic periods, some of which are perennials but others ride the wave of a bestseller or a TV show). And often there’s no crossover – if you like swords, you might not be up for the second world war or vice versa. Fair enough; we all have our pet subjects and liking one author who writes about a certain period inevitably leads to another taking a different angle on it. But that marketing angle does make it seem as if ‘historical fiction’ is a less broad church than it really is. What separates the Sharpe novels from Sarah Waters is not just the time period but the type of writing, the pace and prose. About the only thing they have in common is that they’re both housed in the same section of the bookshop or library.
Waters and other writers bringing diversity to historical fiction have shaken up the genre by using it to restore voices which were too absent from literature for too long. Literary agent Laura Macdougall, of Tibor Jones & Associates, predicts that transsexual characters will be the next big trend, showing that while trans rights may be a modern political movement, gender roles were not always as fixed in previous times as perhaps was assumed. There’s definitely a way to go with this – the undocumented lives of peasants and workers is still less likely to be written about than those with at least proximity to wealth. But judges of the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction 2015, to be awarded in June, declared that their shortlist represented ‘the diversity and breadth of style that the genre now encompasses’.
Such ‘hidden histories’ are valuable in giving us a new view of the past, but so, I’d argue, is all good historical fiction in giving us a wider scope to look at our world than just the narrow focus of the here and now. Trivialities dominate our attention-starved days: whether it is celebrity doings or circular political arguments, Twitter memes or a Western-dominated world view, we tend to fall into the habit of taking the short view. It’s easy to think that how certain things are now is the way that they have to be. Historical fiction frees us from that, even if we’re reading about some world view we feel was well lost; it reminds us that change is a constant. We have to fight for the future we want.
But it also reminds us that some things stay the same: people who didn’t have mobile phones or indoor plumbing yet loved and grieved and felt insecure or ambitious or bored, just as we do, just as our descendants – whether in spaceships or apocalyptic wasteland – will. And they may be reading about us and all our funny little ways of living and thinking. Let’s just hope that we’re one of the fashionable periods.
By Andrea Mullaney | May 2015