What is historical fiction? Historical fiction encompasses novels that have a basis in biographical detail and/or historical events, set in periods foreign to the author’s or audience’s times and representing characters in interaction with settings, cultures, events and people of the past. Historical fiction has become increasingly popular with the masses, with an increase in these types of novels, as well as film and television adaptations; the likes of Philippa Gregory’s book The Other Boleyn Girl and respective film about King Henry VIII and Mary and Anne Boleyn and Woody Allen’s 2011 film, Midnight in Paris about F. Scott Fitzgerald and other golden age artists.
It was Sarah Dunant that said, “We need a new kind of historical novel because there’s a new kind of history”. But what does this really mean? How can there be a ‘new’ kind of history? Most would say that history is history; it is made up of facts and evidence and cannot be re-written. But what I think that Dunant is saying is that historians now are looking for the little stories in between the facts, people are craving to have a greater understanding of not just what the events of history are, but what it would have felt like to experience them. This gap of information, the craving to be “seeped in the history of emotion, intimacy, the everyday” as Juliet Gardiner puts it, is the vacuum filled by the historical fiction writer. Hilary Mantel once said, “All novelists who write historical fiction are preoccupied with what has been lost, what has slipped away, or was never inscribed in the record” and that all a good historical fiction writer could hope to achieve is to write a story that “could be true”. I believe this is a very interesting sentiment. Personally, I have always found the study of history to be problematic; the dry ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ have always had an unsettling feeling within me. When told what the history books claim is truth, there has always been that niggling feeling in the back of my mind that this is only one perspective of truth. Our own sordid history in Australia is an interesting example, for even the terminology used by the history books appears to favour certain perspectives over others. Does Australia Day represent the date that the Europeans ‘settled’ in Australia or ‘invaded’ it? I think that is why, personally, that the idea of historical fiction appeals to me. Most historical fictions use historical figures or events and relate them from another perspective that perhaps, would not have been heard otherwise. This could be from the perspectives of underrepresented minorities, or even just from different emotional perspectives; bringing back the human element to the ‘dry’ history. For further information about the works referenced: Gardiner, Juliet (2009) "Historical Novels" History Today Vol. 59 No. 10. October 2009. pp. 54-56.
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