My Top Historical Novels - Celia Rees

Like many writers, I have a lot of books. They are threatening to take over the house. It is time for some sorting out and that inevitably means some will have to go. How am I going to decide which to keep and which to throw? The shelves need cataloguing. I'm not talking Dewey Decimal but it would be helpful if the books were in some sort of order. Relevant titles would be easier to find and that would save time. 

As I'm a writer of historical fiction, I thought I might begin with those titles, collect them all together and put them in author order.  These are some of the titles I will be keeping. These are books that mean something to me. Books that changed my perceptions of historical fiction, that have stayed with me, some for a very long time. Books that I discovered as a young reader and as an adult long before I even thought of writing, let alone writing historical fiction. Some are books that I simply admire, that I go to when I think my own writing needs a boost, by writers who leave me in awe to wonder:  'How do they do that? I couldn't do that!'

Here are ten of my 'keepers': 

Margaret Atwood - alias grace

Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights

Charles Frazier - Cold Mountain

William Golding - To the Ends of the Earth Trilogy

Cormac McCarthy -  Border Trilogy

Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall, Bringing Up the Bodies and A Place of Greater Safety

Annie Proulx - Accordian Crimes

Mary Renault - The King Must Die, The Bull From The Sea

Rosemary Sutcliff - Eagle of the Ninth

Leo Tolstoy - War And Peace

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

An Historical Enigma: The Real Grace Marks and Alias Grace - by Anna Mazzola

                                    

In the 1960s, Margaret Atwood read a book called Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush, a 19^th century account of pioneer life by Susanna Moodie, an English emigrant to Canada. A chapter of the book is devoted to the Provincial Lunatic Asylum in Toronto, and to Moodie’s visit to the violent ward to meet the ‘celebrated murderess Grace Marks’.

Grace Marks was a Canadian maid who in 1843, when only 16, was convicted with fellow servant James McDermott of murdering their master, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper-lover Nancy Montgomery. Kinnear had been shot in the left side of his chest. Nancy Montgomery was struck in the head with an axe and then strangled. A post mortem revealed that she had been pregnant.

The Trial of McDermott and Marks

The trial took place in November 1843 and was a great sensation, the newspapers covering the proceedings with appropriate levels of gore and sexual intrigue. On the day of McDermott’s evidence, so many spectators packed into the courtroom that ‘some alarm was created by a report that the floor of the courtroom was giving way’ and a rush was made for the door.

 

During the proceedings, Marks and McDermott blamed each other for instigating the murders. They were both convicted of Kinnear’s death, but only McDermott was ultimately hanged. Before he went to the scaffold, McDermott insisted that Grace had strangled Nancy Montgomery herself with a piece of white cloth.

Murderess or madwoman?

There was much discussion at the time as to whether Grace Marks was in fact guilty. She is said to have displayed little emotion during the trial and, according to newspaper reports, arrived at court wearing clothes that she had stolen from the dead Nancy Montgomery. However, some believed she was innocent, the victim of McDermott’s lies. Others believed she was insane.

She gave three conflicting accounts of the murder, while McDermott gave two. In Marks’ last confession, published in the Star and Transcript, she said that after Montgomery had fired McDermott, he had determined to kill her and Kinnear. ‘He had made me promise to assist him,’ Marks said, ‘and I agreed to do so.’ Marks claimed that she had tried to run away from the house after Kinnear was killed, and that McDermott had tried to shoot her.

Toronto Lunatic Asylum

It’s not clear why Marks was sent to the lunatic asylum. It was suggested variously that she was possessed by the consciousness of her dead friend, Mary Whitney, or had some kind of personality disorder. Another theory was that Marks had in fact died and that Mary Whitney had adopted her identity. According to Moodie, ‘the fearful hauntings of her brain have terminated in madness’. She described her as ‘lighted up with the fire of insanity and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment.’ The asylum superintendent, however, believed that Grace Marks was faking.

In 1852, she was transferred back to Kingston Penitentiary (where the mini-series of Alias Grace was filmed). The records show she was suspected of having become pregnant during her time at the asylum. As Atwood points out in the afterword to Alias Grace, ‘the men with the easiest access to patients were the doctors’.

After almost thirty years in detention, Marks was pardoned and moved to New York State. After that, the paper trail runs out.

The Servant Girl to Alias Grace

Atwood would mull over Grace Marks for many years. In 1970, she published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a cycle of poems. In 1974 she wrote the screenplay for the film The Servant Girl, also based on Susanna Moodie's account. In 1979 she wrote a version for the stage (Grace). However, by the time she wrote Alias Grace, Atwood had changed her opinion of Grace Marks, having read a variety of sources and realised that Moodie had entirely invented parts of her account. ‘Moodie said at the outset of her account that she was writing Grace Marks's story from memory, and as it turns out, her memory was no better than most.’

Atwood never reached a conclusion about Grace, noting that ‘the true character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma’.  Hence the subtly and slipperiness of the novel. In the afterword to Alias Grace, Atwood notes that although she stuck to the facts where facts existed, she ‘felt free to invent’ details to fill in the gaps between irreconcilable versions of the murders.

At an interview at the Southbank Centre in October, Atwood recounted how she had seen, in the Inspector's Minute Book, the liberation questionnaire that Grace had completed upon leaving Kingston Penitentiary (confirming she could write). One of the questions asked of all outgoing prisoners was, ‘What has been the general cause of your misfortunes, and what has been the immediate cause of the crime for which you have been sent to the Penitentiary?’

Marks’s reply is typically non-committal. It reads: ‘Having been employed in the same house with a villain.’

The Old Kinnear Place, where the murders were committed on 29 July 1843

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But Is It True? - Celia Rees

I'm  surprised, and a little dismayed, by how many readers want to know if something I have written is true. It is as though readers want some, if not all, of what they are reading to be true, even if it is clearly not. 

Does this happen to anyone else?

Is it a growing trend?

As a writer of fiction, I find this hunger for the actual puzzling. Since Witch Child was first published, I've received a steady stream of letters and e mails asking if the story contained within the pages is true. Witch Child takes the form of a diary or, more accurately, pieces of a diary, written by a girl in the 17th Century and hidden inside a quilt. The quilt is discovered, conservators find the diary, it is collated and published as The Mary Papers. Neat idea, I thought. I was quite unprepared for readers searching fruitlessly online for more information - all roads lead to me - and then taking me to task for lying, duping the reader, making things up. Should I laugh or cry? Making things up is what I do! 

Witch Child is a book within a book. It is a story about a story. It uses the literary device of the 'found document', a tradition as old as the novel itself with a respectable literary history that stretches from Daniel Defoe to Margaret Atwood.

The 'found' diary in Witch Child couldn't possibly be a real diary  (I tell readers) because:

• Real diaries are usually full of trivial, mundane details of everyday life. Which is because they are diaries. Once you begin tinkering about, editing out this or that, adding things in to make something more exciting, you are actually beginning to write fiction.

• There ARE no existent journals or diaries written by young women at the time I've set Witch Child, which is a bit of a point in itself. 

• Even if there were, they would be almost unreadable by the modern reader because of the style and language, especially my readers who are 12+. 

So the answer to the Is It True question has to be:

No. I am a writer of fiction. Of course it's not true!

Or, to be more accurate:

No, well, not in the way you're thinking. It is made up, patched together out of many different truths. 

But really:

What is truth, anyway?

It is very difficult to have any entirely truthful account of anything. Everyone knows that eye witness accounts of the same incident can vary enormously. One person will notice one thing, someone else another. Even when an incident is forensically examined over and over again, as in the Madeleine McCann case, new versions of the same event keep being uncovered. Which is true? Perhaps all of them are, to some extent. Or none. Perhaps nobody saw, nobody knew for sure. Enter the omniscient narrator. Fiction can take all these inexact, fragmented view points and fashion them into a whole. When we are reading, we seek these patterns. Fiction can get to the essence of the thing, create a different truth. 

www.celiarees.com

Is the historical novel the ultimate novel? - Emma Darwin

As soon as you start researching a historical novel, you discover that the past really is a foreign country, and they really do do things differently there. That's part of the fear and part of the fun: you're the pioneer in this strange land, hacking back the jungle and getting the measure of the natives, before you go back to collect your readers, and lead them through it in their turn.

And yet they also say that the first person you meet when you travel abroad is yourself. We read and write historical fiction to experience our own time and our own selves from another angle and sometimes a more revealing one: to find out the constants in human nature, as well as the variables. When Rose Tremain wanted to write about Eighties Britain, she wrote Restoration, about the court of Charles II. When I wanted to conjure up the last, pre-digital generation of photojournalists, for The Mathematics of Love, I shared their story with the first stirrings of photography 150 years earlier. And it's because of this dual nature of historical fiction - the way that, like history-writing, it embodies Now, as well as Then - that I want to suggest that the ultimate kind of novel is the historical novel.

As philosopher and novelist Richard Kearney puts it, in all storytelling the storyteller works with bits and pieces of experience from their world: things the listeners know, and things they know about from others past and present. The storyteller spins the bits and pieces into a tale which makes sense of them and shows the world in a new and clearer light.

Non-fiction-storytelling confines itself to giving the reader a logical experience of the probable: the best description possible of how things actually are or were. Fiction-storytelling offers an imaginative, affective experience of how things might be, or may have been. Our minds' neural pathways can't tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real one, and so fiction also tells its tales "as if" they really happened, to give us the experience of other lives and worlds. You could say that fiction offers us the memories we don't have ourselves. And in her essay about her novel Alias Grace, which is based on a true story, Margaret Atwood says this:

Fiction is where individual memory and experience and collective memory and experience come together, in greater or lesser proportions. The closer the fiction is to us readers, the more we recognise and claim it as individual rather than collective. [Canadian novelist] Margaret Laurence used to say that her English readers thought [her novel] The Stone Angel was about old age, the Americans thought it was about some old woman they knew, and the Canadians thought it was about their grandmothers.

I think Atwood has put her finger on two important things. First, her "memory and experience" is clearly the same as Kearney's "bits and pieces": fiction is where particular stories can be shaped and related to general ones. Second, she's saying that being distanced from the world of the story helps us to see the general (old age) underlying the particular (grandmother's) life. She's talking about geographical distance, but of course temporal distance comes to the same thing.

Some literary critics hate historical fiction, because it doesn't deal "authentically" with the experience of Now, but by definition can't be authentic to Then, either. No writer now setting a novel in the mid-eighteenth century is seriously trying to convince the reader that it's a long-lost manuscript by Henry Fielding, whatever games she or he plays with us along the way.

And some historians hate historical fiction because History, as a discipline, depends utterly on being honest about the distinctions between a provable fact, a trustworthy record, a reasonable assumption, and pure speculation. But to tell a story "as if" it all happened, novelists must waltz to and fro between probable and possible, across the historians' all-important boundaries, without the reader ever feeling the bump.

But to me what these historians and critics hate are some of the greatest strengths of the historical novel: the kind of strength which comes from growing up on disputed ground. When you write about history in any way you have to work under the tension built into a story which is about "not only Then, but also Now". And when you write a novel you have to work under the tension built into "not only Is, but also Might Have Been". So, if Atwood is right about what fiction is, then historical fiction has to hold together all four poles. It has to stretch backwards as well as sideways, reach across time as well as space, evoking particular experience to bring us collective memories beyond our individual reach. A historical novel, in other words, is doing explicitly what other kinds of novel only do implicitly. The ultimate novel, you could say, is the historical novel.