Historical fiction finally taken seriously
Readers are discovering genre more engrossing than domestic drama or chick lit
Mention historical fiction to the general public, and you’re likely to get several reactions. One, eyes will glaze over — yawn. Two, eyebrows will be raised. There’s little literary merit here. It’s just chick lit dressed up as period pieces. And three, shoulders will be shrugged. Do we really need more war romances and upstairs/downstairs domestic dramas?
But those who love the genre see it differently. They see a body of work that spans hundreds of years, with diversity of theme, geography, period, writing style and, of course, quality. They see a canon packed with compelling research and fascinating detail, but also rich in humanity, with important lessons we can learn from history.
Many such readers also happen to be talented young Canadian writers. And they’re now turning to historical fiction in increasing numbers, using the genre as a springboard to launch themselves onto the national stage.
Case in point: Ellen Keith. The University of British Columbia MFA grad published her riveting debut “The Dutch Wife” in April and it’s swiftly become a big hit, spending week after week on the Toronto Star bestseller list.
Keith says she fell in love with historical fiction as a child, and the passion shaped her entire life, inspiring her to pursue a bachelor’s degree in history and ultimately to move to Europe, where she can live and breathe ancient history every day.
People do tend to think that historical fiction is overly commercial, she acknowledges, but that doesn’t take into account the spectrum of writers within the genre, which includes highly literary authors like Michael Ondaatje.
“I think that we’re very quick to categorize, ‘Oh no, that’s too mainstream’ or ‘Historical fiction is women’s fiction,’” Keith tells the Star, reached on the line in Amsterdam. “I think that that deters readers from engaging with the genre.”
She points out that one of the strengths of historical fiction is that it creates a lasting impression in reader’s minds.
“With the courses that I took in my undergrad, I couldn’t regurgitate that many dates back to you at this point,” she says, “but I still can vividly remember a lot of details from historical fiction novels that I read when I was 10.” Keith recalls trips to Europe when she visited cathedrals that were hundreds of years old, and feeling the presence of characters from books. “It adds such a depth to those experiences.”
She adds that, far from being formulaic, historical fiction poses complex literary problems, including how to best incorporate research.
Her mother once told her about a novel she’d read where every time a character walked into a room, there was three paragraphs on light fixtures and furniture.
“It felt like the author was so caught up in all the research that they had found, that they just wanted to pour it into the novel, and it ended up overwhelming the story,” Keith says. “There’s a very fine balance between creating a world that is very vivid and three dimensional, and still making the research feel organic to the story.”
Natalie Morrill, author of the critically acclaimed debut “The Ghost Keeper,” set in Vienna during the 1930 and ’40s, takes a similar view of research.
“It’s really refreshing and wonderful and exciting to go into a world that requires a lot of research, “she says, reached on the line in Ottawa. “It’s kind of like going to a different country. … It wakes up a part of me.”
At the same time, though, one has to respect certain historical realities — a responsibility that’s “very humbling.” She adds, “It makes the plotting and the character development a lot more challenging for me, and it makes it more thoughtful because of that.”
Significantly, Morrill also believes the genre provides readers with a valuable sense of perspective, a way of stepping back from, and better understanding, the present moment. “It can be very heavy to be thinking about the contemporary social and political reality all the time, “she says. “Maybe there’s just a little bit of a remove in thinking about things that happened fifty, a hundred, five hundred years ago.”
Christine Bolus-Reichert, an English professor at the University of Toronto, agrees. There’s been stories about the past for as long as there’s been storytelling, she says, but we don’t get the historical fiction novel proper until the end of the 1700s, when people started to experience their own historicity — the feeling “that they are living through a moment in time that’s distinct from all other moments in time.”
Novels like Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, in 1814, worked through historical conflicts with famous characters but focused on a central character who was essentially a nobody, representing the common reader. This anti-hero brought the two sides of the conflict together, helping them find a middle way. In such outings, ordinary people had the power to shape history.
All was not hopeless, no matter how bleak things appeared.
Scott’s novels may have been about historical progress, imagining the present was better than the past, but other 19thcentury novelists used the genre to criticize the present — to say that things were actually worse now.
“Historical fiction can hold a mirror up to the present, “Bolus-Reichert says. “It can say: things have not always been this way, and they don’t have to be this way.”
Given that, it’s no wonder so many novelists, and readers, are picking up the genre now.
“Historical fiction is having a moment,” Bolus-Reichert says.