In a quote that can serve as the modus operandi of the historical novelist, Oscar Wilde observed, “The one duty we have to history is to rewrite it.” Who has not fantasized about a “do over” in one’s life? What might have been and the road not taken continually beckon, and if the temptation to rewrite one’s life story is irresistible, what about revisiting and redrafting the historical past? It is not surprising that the historical novel has proven to be such a durable and popular form of fiction, offering reader and writer access to the past and new possibilities in the seemingly dead facts of history. “What is history but a fable agreed upon,” Napoleon famously declared. If history is a narrative in search of meaning, then historical novelists, as well as professional historians, are key guides in that search. If the historian is confined to the known, the historical novelist is privileged to add the resources of the imagination to deepen and broaden our understanding. Like Dorothy’s arrival in Oz, history, in the hands of the skilled historical novelist, can be transformed from the black-and-white world of dates, dynasties, and shadowy events to the technicolor world of living individuals and vivid representation. Accordingly, the historical novel remains our only effective time machine to bridge the gap between our era and the recent or distant past. Certainly that is why the form still commands a wide audience and attracts some of the best fiction writers.
The historical novels collected here from the first half of 2008 all share the common enterprise of rewriting a particular portion of the historical past. Drawing on what is known, these novels extend and expand our knowledge of eras, cultures, and individuals in intriguing and compelling ways. Some re-introduce us to the familiar or provide new contexts and contours for what we thought we already knew. Others shock us with the strange and offer us new acquaintances or events that alter our sense of the past and our understanding of the world. Each re-write offers us the means of re-visioning history, or what novelist Toni Morrison has called the act of “re-membering”: reassembling the past into a living present.
Selection Criteria
More so than any other fictional genre, it is essential to define exactly what constitutes a historical novel. All novels deal with the past, except science fiction that is set in the future, or fantasy novels set in an imagined, alternative world outside historical time. Yet not all novels are truly historical. Central to any workable definition of historical fiction is the degree to which the writer attempts not to recall the past but to recreate it. In some cases the time frame, setting, and customs of a novel’s era are merely incidental to its action and characterization. In other cases, period details function as little more than a colorful backdrop for characters and situations that could as easily be played out in a different era with little alteration. So-called historical “costume dramas” could to a greater or lesser degree work as well with a change of costume in a different place and time. The novels that we can identify as truly historical, however, attempt much more than incidental period surface details or interchangeable historical eras. What justifies a designation as a historical novel is the writer’s efforts at providing an accurate and believable representation of a particular historical era. The writer of historical fiction shares with the historian a verifiable depiction of past events, lives, and customs. In historical fiction, the past itself becomes as much a subject for the novelist as the characters and action.
Most of us use the phrase “historical novel” casually, never really needing an exact definition to make ourselves understood. We just know it when we see it. This listing, however, requires a set of criteria to determine what’s in and what’s out. Otherwise the list has no boundaries. If the working definition of historical fiction is too loose, every novel set in a period before the present qualifies, and nearly every novel becomes a historical novel immediately upon publication. If the definition is so strict that only books set in a time before the author’s birth, for example, make the cut, then countless works that critics, readers, librarians, and the authors themselves think of as historical novels would be excluded.
My challenge here, therefore, has been to fashion a definition or set of criteria flexible enough to include novels that pass what can be regarded as the litmus test for historical fiction: Did the author use his or her imagination–and often quite a bit of research–to evoke another and earlier time than the author’s own? Walter Scott, who is credited with “inventing” the historical novel in English during the early nineteenth century provides a useful criterion in the subtitle of Waverley, his initial historical novel, the story of Scottish life at the time of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745: “‘Tis Sixty Years Since.” This supplies a possible formula for separating the created past from the remembered past. What is unique and distinctive about the so-called historical novel is its attempt to imagine a distant period of time before the novelist’s lifetime. Scott’s sixty-year span between a novel’s composition and its imagined era offers an arbitrary but useful means to distinguish between the personal and the historical past. The distance of two generations or nearly a lifetime provides a necessary span for the past to emerge as history and forces the writer to rely on more than recollection to uncover the patterns and textures of the past. I have, therefore, adopted Scott’s formula but adjusted it to fifty years, including those books in which the significant portion of their plots is set in a period fifty years or more before the novel was written.
Because a rigid application of this fifty-year rule might disqualify quite a few books intended by their authors and regarded by their readers to be historical novels, another test has been applied to books written about more recent eras: did the author use actual historical figures and events while setting out to recreate a specific, rather than a general or incidental, historical period? Although it is, of course, risky to speculate about a writer’s intention, it is possible by looking at the book’s approach, its use of actual historical figures, and its emphasis on a distinctive time and place that enhances the reader’s knowledge of past lives, events, and customs to detect when a book conforms to what most would consider a central preoccupation of the historical novel.
I have tried to apply these criteria for the historical novel thoughtfully, and have allowed some exceptions when warranted by special circumstances. I hope I have been able to anticipate what most readers would consider historical novels, but I recognize that I may have overlooked some worthy representations of the past in the interest of dealing with a manageable list of titles. Finally, not every title in the Western, historical mystery, or historical romance genres has been included to avoid unnecessary duplication with the other sections of this book. I have included those novels that share characteristics with another genre-whether fantasy, Western, mystery, or romance-that seem to put the strongest emphasis on historical interest, detail, and accuracy.
Historical Fiction Highlights in the First Half of 2008
The Romanov Bride (2008) by Robert Alexander
Recent trends in the genre remain in play. Series have retained their hold on the way many historical novels are packaged and marketed. Long a fixture of the historical mystery and adventure novel, series increasingly serve all kinds of historical fiction. Collected here are installments of several well-regarded and popular series, including Bernard Cornwell’s Sword Song, David Donachie’s A Flag of Truce, Conn Iggulden’s Genghis: Lords of the Bow, Kathleen and W. Michael Gear’s People of the Weeping Eye, and Jeff Shaara’s The Steel Wave. Morgan Llwelyn in 1999 brings to a close her fascinating series on Irish history during the twentieth century. There are also several intriguing sequels: Tony Earley’s The Blue Star, book two in Anne Rice’s life of Jesus, Christ the Lord, and Robert Alexander’s account of the Romanov’s, The Romanov Bride. Also present is an interesting prequel. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables, Budge Wilson’s Before Green Gables offers an account of Anne Shirley’s orphan years before her arrival in Avonlea.
Wilson’s take on an established literary classic suggests another trend, at least based on several of the novels collected here: using existing works of literature as launching points. Examples include Lenore Hart’s Becky, a retelling and expansion of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer from the perspective of Tom’s girlfriend Becky Thatcher, Edward Chupack’s Silver that provides a back story and continuation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island from the vantage point of Long John Silver, Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth that reflects Shakespeare’s play from the distaff side, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions that retells the great Indian epic the Mahabharata, and Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia that offers a different viewpoint on Virgil’s Aeneid.
Le Guin is not the only well-known writer with historical novels represented here. Others include Pat Barker, who returns to the consequences of the Great War in Life Class, and Richard Bausch who explores combat during World War II in Peace. Joyce Carol Oates’s Wild Nights! provides the last days (and in one case the afterlife) of five American literary icons from Poe to Hemingway; while Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence explores the connection between Renaissance Italy and the Mughal Court of Akbar the Great. Historical novels have attracted others of non-literary fame: Newt Gingrich provides another chapter of his alternative history series with Days of Infamy, Gene Hackman co-writes a rousing Civil War adventure tale with Escape from Andersonville, and Gene Wilder’s second novel, The Woman Who Wouldn’t is set in a sanitarium in 1903 and features an appearance by Russian writer Anton Chekhov.
Besides attracting the well known, historical fiction is the preferred genre for several first-time writers, such as Eric Lerner (Pinkerton’s Secret), Jennifer Cody Epstein (The Painter from Shanghai), Karl Iagnemma (The Expedition), Nick Taylor (The Disagreement), and Sara Young (My Enemy’s Cradle).
The list includes one significant last novel as well: George Macdonald Fraser’s The Reavers. Fraser is the author of multiple historical novels but is best known for his inventive Flashman series in which the bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays is shown misbehaving and blundering across the nineteenth century at some of the milestone moments and alongside the era’s most famous individuals. The one characteristic missing aspect of the historical is humor, and Fraser countered this deficit with some of the wittiest and amusing historical fiction in the canon. He will be missed.
Historical Mysteries
The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte (2008) by Laura Joh Rowland
The largest sub-category of the novels collected here continues to be historical mysteries. Like the form as a whole, there is a wide range of historical periods and a diversity of approaches. Series continue to be the preferred format for the historical mystery writer, and there are new installments of several popular and acclaimed serials, including Boris Akunin’s Special Assignment and Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk, David Dickinson’s Death on the Holy Mountain, Rhys Bowen’s Tell Me, Pretty Maiden, Alan Gordon’s The Moneylender of Toulouse, Anne Perry’s Buckingham Palace Gardens, and Jacqueline Winspear’s An Incomplete Revenge. Several popular serial mystery writers have launched new serials, or at least prospective new serials: Ian Morson changes his scene from the middle ages to thirteenth-century Venice in City of the Dead; Stephanie Barron, the author of a Regency era series featuring Jane Austen as sleuth, moves into the Victorian period in A Flaw in the Blood, Sharan Newman shifts from medieval France to Portland, Oregon, during he 1860s in The Shanghai Tunnel, and Laura Joh Rowland takes a break from medieval Japan to create a mystery also set during the Victorian period featuring novelist Charlotte Bronte as sleuth in The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte.
Among the other unusual sleuths detecting in the novels collected here are Oscar Wilde, who joins forces with Arthur Conan Doyle in Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance, Leonardo da Vinci in Diane A.S. Stuckart’s The Queen’s Gambit, and real-life detective novelist Josephine Tey in Nicola Upson’s Expert in Murder. Among the historical figures who are featured as characters, there are French painter Paul Cezanne in Barbara Pope’s Cezanne’s Quarry, Eleanor of Aquitaine in Ariana Franklin’s The Serpent’s Tale, and Julius Caesar in Steven Saylor’s The Triumph of Caesar.
Fictional Biographies
Another mainstay sub-genre of the historical novel is fictional biography in which a historical figure’s life is presented in full or in part. Among the well-known figures treated, there are American poet Robert Frost in Brian Hall’s Fall of Frost, Genghis Khan in Conn Iggulden’s Genghis: Lords of the Bow, Elizabeth Tudor in Alison Weir’s The Lady Elizabeth, and the Kennedy clan in Laurie Graham’s The Importance of Being Kennedy. Several novels take on Biblical figures, including Deborah (Eva Etzioni-Halevy’s The Triumph of Deborah), Solomon and Sheba (Doreen Virtue’s Solomon’s Angel), the apostle John (Niall Williams’s John), Mary (Marek Halter’s Mary of Nazareth), and her son Jesus in Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord and Kathleen and W. Michael Gear’s The Betrayal: The Lost Life of Jesus.
Several novels introduce readers to lesser known but fascinating figures (or less well known incidents in the lives of famous individuals). May I introduce you to: Benjamin Thompson, colonial America’s most renowned inventor (Nicholas Delbanco’s The Count of Concord), Louise de la Valliere, mistress of Louis IV (Sandra Gulland’s Mistress of the Sun), sixteenth-century Zionist David Reubeni (Marek Halter’s The Messiah), poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (Exiles), or the father of American medicine William Osler (Lawrence Goldstone’s The Anatomy of Deception)? What about one of the leaders of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, Anne Farquharson (Janet Paisley’s White Rose Rebel) or Chinese painter Pan Yuliang (Jennifer Cody Epstein’s The Painter from Shanghai)? Consider scenes from novelist George Eliot’s marriage (Deborah Weisgall’s The World Before Her) or the relationship between American writers Catherine Fenimore Woolson and Henry James (Elizabeth Maquire’s The Open Door). How about a round of golf with the great Ben Hogan (John Coyne’s The Caddie Who Played with Hickory)? What about experiencing the great scandal of the nineteenth century involving preacher Henry Ward Beecher from the perspective of his sisters-suffragette Isabella Hooker and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe (Patricia O’Brien’s Harriet and Isabella)?
Several biographically-based novels take considerable liberties with the facts, placing historical figures in interesting invented situations or relationships. Samantha Hunt looks at the end of the life of famous inventor Nikola Tesla in the Bronx during World War II (The Invention of Everything Else). Jay Neugeboren imagines Hitler’s childhood physician, Eduard Bloch, in the same city during the same period (1940). Perhaps the most amusing twisting of biographical facts is the linking of writer and scholar Henry and William James with their long-lost brothers, the outlaws Jessie and Frank James in Richard Liebmann-Smith’s The James Boys. Who wouldn’t want to attend that family reunion?
Historical Fantasy
Violating the known with the supernatural and disrupting the space/time continuum have created another increasingly popular sub-genre of historical fiction: historical fantasy. Here, history gets either a complete re-write or a mind-blowing make-over. Collected here are several alternate histories. Besides Gingrich and Forstchen’s what-if in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor and the Gears’s alternative biography of Jesus, Owen Sheers presents a story of occupied Britain during World War II in Resistance, while Peter Schilling offers a decidedly different history of baseball during the war as Bill Veck integrates the game long before the arrival of Jackie Robinson in The End of Baseball.
Other novels combine the real and the surreal or supernatural in intriguing ways. Francis Clark locates Satan’s minions in Savannah, Georgia, in the 1870s in Waking Brigid; Jonathan Barnes teams up a magician and a mute giant as detective partners in The Somnambulist; and Lauren Goff uses the discovery of a sea monster to launch an exploration of a family and a community in upstate New York in The Monsters of Templeton.
Unusual Eras, Events, and Oddities
What finally sustains the historical novel as such a popular fictional form year after year is the resourcefulness of its writers to transport readers to the by-ways and back alleys of history, introducing them either to the unknown or finding new slants on the familiar. There are several examples of such original excavation of the past on display here. Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project takes an actual 1908 murder case of a Jewish immigrant in Chicago to launch a globe-spanning exploration with contemporary relevance. Ellen Feldman explores another actual crime and trial in Scottsboro. Mary Doria Russell’s Dreamers of the Day injects an ordinary Midwestern matron into the Cairo Peace Conference of 1921 and association with the likes of Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. Karen Essex’s Stealing Athena presents the story behind the famous Elgin Marbles of Athens’ Parthenon: when they were first created and why they came to be called the Elgin Marbles and wound up in the British Museum. Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book follows another great work of art, the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the earliest illuminated Jewish texts from its creation in Seville in 1480 to its discovery in 1889. Sara Young’s My Enemy’s Cradle takes readers inside the Nazi’s Lebensborn birthing center; while Jeffrey Hanover transports readers to sixteenth-century Burma in The Jewel Trader of Pegu.
These novels and the others collected from the first half of 2008 suggest that the historical novel is still going strong after nearly two centuries, and that readers still have much to learn and enjoy from these multiple rewrites of history.
Recommended Titles
Here finally are my selections of the 30 most accomplished and interesting historical novels for the first half of 2008:
The Blue Star by Tony Earley
Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones
The Count of Concord by Nicholas Delbanco
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Exiles by Ron Hansen
Fall of Frost by Brian Hall
The Fire Walker by Ben Pastor
Harriet and Isabella by Patricia O’Brien
Johnny One-Eye by Jerome Charyn
An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear
The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir
Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
Life Class by Pat Barker
The Moneylender of Toulouse by Alan Gordon
The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein
Peace by Richard Bausch
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
The Reavers by George Macdonald Fraser
The Reserve by Russell Banks
The Romanov Bride by Robert Alexander
Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman
The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
Song Yet Sung by James McBride
The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst
Stealing Athena by Karen Essex
Sword Song by Bernard Cornwell
The Steel Wave by Jeff Shaara
Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates
The World Before Her by Deborah Weisgall
For More Information about Historical Fiction
Printed Sources:
Lynda G. Adamson, American Historical Fiction: An Annotated Guide to Novels for Adults and Young Adults. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999.
Lynda G. Adamson, World Historical Fiction: An Annotated Guide to Novels for Adults and Young Adults. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999.
Daniel S. Burt, What Historical Fiction Do I Read Next?. Detroit: Gale, Vols. 1-3, 1997-2003.
Daniel S. Burt, The Biography Book. Westport: Oryx/Greenwood Press, 2001.
Mark C. Carnes, Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other). New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
Donald K Hartman, Historical Figures in Fiction. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1994.
Electronic Sources:
The Historical Novel Society (http://www.historicalnovelsociety.org). Includes articles, interviews, and reviews of historical novels.
Of Ages Past: The Online Magazine of Historical Fiction (http://www.angelfire.com/il/ofagespast/). Includes novel excerpts, short stories, articles, author profiles, and reviews.
Soon’s Historical Fiction Site (http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~soon/histfiction/). A rich source of information on the historical novel genre, including links to more specialized sites on particular authors and types of historical fiction.
- Dr. Daniel S. Burt is a writer and college professor who teaches graduate literature courses at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he was a dean for nine years. He is the editor of The Chronology of American Literature (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), and the author of What Historical Novel Do I Read Next? Volumes 1-3 (Gale, 1997-2003), The Novel 100 (Facts on File, 2003), The Literary 100 (Facts on File, 2001), The Biography Book (Greenwood/Oryx, 2001), and the forthcoming Drama 100 (Facts on File, 2006). He lives with his wife on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
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