In considering the virtues of historical fiction, I’ve left the most obvious until last. As well as being a good story, historical fiction is educational. In fact most stories were told to us as children as if they were history, so the line between storytelling and history has always been blurred. We have all heard stories like these; ‘when you were born, you started yelling blue murder, the moment the midwife handed you over…’

We are used to listening to the stories of the past. When it comes to the stories of important personages from history, then accuracy and consensus comes into play. We have to agree on what the story was. But accuracy is also a shifting line. In my lifetime Richard III has been hunch-backed, then not (it was a rumour designed to discredit him), then hunch-backed again after a certain discovery in a car park. History is always shifting and changing. Yet most of what we know about history comes from stories, films (which are another kind of fiction) or hearsay. The past is really a random collection of people and events, from which we create history in our seach for order and meaning.

For a fiction writer, the same set of data (documents, physical evidence) can yield up very different interpretations. We have to be aware of the gap between our primary sources (written by the actual historical person) and our secondary sources (written by a historian interpreting events) and then find our own layer which interprets the original source, or the historian’s interpretation. In this process, history, accuracy and story become plaited together.

So how can historical fiction be educational, if the history and the accuracy is always an ever-changing horizon? I think the answer is that reading stories of the past allows us a comparison with our lives today – a benchmark of one particular world-view, against which we can set our own.

When students read historical fiction, then, they are encouraged not to think of the past as just one thing after another but to look for patterns and sequences, for causes and consequences, for agents and their motivations. This is an important part of historical understanding.  Keith Barton, www.TeachingHistory.org

When Hilary Mantel gave us Cromwell’s view of the reign of Henry VIII, we suddenly saw a whole other facet to history, one in which one man’s personal demons could affect a whole dynasty, and one in which the evidence or documentation of lineage and inheritance was of supreme importance. As human beings we have an innate desire to understand our past, to bring to life what has been lost, and to forge a line of linkage between what went before and what is now. The facts that can be agreed upon are often scant, but unsasisfying as an answer to the human condition. Fiction puts the flesh on the agreed bones of history.

Historical Fiction inflects the historical or archival record through consideration of the personal, the individual, the unwritten, the unseen, the unheard and unsaid. Jerome deGroot – Remaking History

The sensuality conveyed in good fiction allows the reader to come tantalisingly close to touching the past. Fiction can be bold, and unashamedly present a theory about a historical event that is not currently accepted by historians, or even an alternative outcome. As most history is written by the victors, historical fiction allows us to explore the lives of individuals (particularly women, slaves, or other disenchfranchised members of society) that up until recently have been ignored. This balancing, of the weight of the few ‘great’ or famous individuals against the experience of the many, can provide us with a more rounded view of our history and removes our tendency to ignore gradual societal change and think of history as only led by, and changed by, lone figurehead characters.

Sources: Teaching History

In the Historical Fiction Virtues series, you might also like: Virtue no 1 – Bravery  Virtue no 2 – The Non-fiction Novel Virtue No 3 – Past Does Not Exist Virtue No 4 – Old Crafts and Writing Virtue No 5 – The Absence of Media Virtue no 7 – Servants and Masters

And today I’m also blogging Bed and Breakfast in the 17th Century on English Historical Fiction Authors.

Thank you for reading!