The Idea of Justice in Historical Fiction – by Anna Mazzola

Dostoyevsky famously said: ‘The degree of civilisation in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.’ Winston Churchill said, ‘The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.’ Or, of course, it’s lack of civilisation. Look at the rising prison numbers in America and the system’s treatment of black people in particular; look at the crisis in our own criminal justice system, and you understand a lot about society and government. Look at the treatment of crime and criminals in a crime fiction novel and you’ll learn a lot about what the author is trying to say, and about the historical era in which they’re writing.

No matter what my novels are ostensibly about – and my second one is about dark folklore on the Isle of Skye, and my next one is about moving clockwork dolls and Versailles – I always end up talking in them about justice and what it means to obtain justice for the victims and survivors. That may be because I’m a criminal justice solicitor, but then again perhaps I ended up in that field because I’m fascinated by how society treats its criminals and its victims.

I’m not alone in finding the topic compelling. We all have highly personal beliefs and emotions about what constitutes a crime; when someone is responsible for their crimes; and how the legal system ought to deal with them. Defining and punishing crime, and protecting citizens from crime, are key roles of government and often lead to public debate: who should we imprison and where and how? How much of a role should victims have in the system? Are there ever circumstances where capital punishment or torture are justifiable? These are debates we’ve always had, only the answers have varied across the ages.

That leads to a rich subject to explore in fiction, where we can walk readers through a search for justice, and through the ambiguities and frustrations along the way.

Window onto the past

What constituted a crime, who constituted a criminal, and how those people were dealt with gives us a unique window onto the past. And punishment of crime can of course be one of the most terrifying uses of state power, capable of ruining lives, producing serious injustice, and sure-ing up the authority of oppressive regimes.

Part of the reason the Tudors have always held such fascination for us is the bloody and tyrannical nature of their so-called justice system, which was as much about settling scores and seeking revenge as it was about attaining justice, something which is depicted most brilliantly in Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose showed us the complex and shady power exercised by the Church in the 14th century. Robert Harris’s An Officer and a Spy exposed the corrupt system that, in late 19th century France led to Alfred Dreyfus being false convicted of espionage, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. Antonia Hodgson’s Devil in the Marshalsea and Sarah Waters’ Affinity showed us the injustice and inhumanity of the prisons of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The protagonist as finder of justice

As well as exploring the justice systems of the era in which they are set, many historical novels seek to attain justice or revenge or payback or some kind of catharsis for their characters within the terms of the novel.

This is of course in line with the classical detective story model, which gives us the story of the crime, followed by the story of the investigation, involving enquiry, revelation and closure. The rise of detective fiction happened at about the same time as the beginning of detective policing i.e. in the mid 19th century. If crime was the problem, then the solution was the capture and removal of the criminal. That was how justice would be achieved. So in fiction, removing the offender from the scene healed the breach in the social fabric. The problem was solved, be it by Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple or Jackson Brodie.

The assumption of the detective genre is that not only is there a motive and a true meaning to the crime, but the detective can uncover it, deliver the criminal, achieve justice and narrate the story in a form that transmits that coherence to the awaiting reader. And that is why it’s so satisfying. Because of course real crime is usually not like that, and I say this as someone whose day job is dealing with where things go wrong in criminal investigations and prosecutions. Even if a crime is reported, it may not be properly investigated. Even if it is, the Crown Prosecution Service may decide not to charge. Even if it gets to court, it may collapse. Even if a conviction is secured, the criminal may refuse to explain why they acted as they did, or the sentence they are given may fail, in the eyes of the victim, to reflect the severity of their crimes. There is rarely any neat conclusion to real criminal cases, rarely any feeling among victims that justice has been achieved and normality restored. Often the detective figures are too busy doing other things or too hampered by funding cuts, poor training and huge caseloads to go about achieving a cathartic ending for the victims.

Not so in detective fiction. Or at least, not usually. Many of the detective figures in modern historical mysteries are focussed on achieving justice for victims. ‘Justice, Sergeant Shardlake. I know you have always believed in it, and have sometimes sought it in dark corners.’ So says Lady Elizabeth to CJ Sansom’s Shardlake who is always questing to find justice for the underprivileged. The same is true of Mick Finlay’s Arrowood, forever fighting for the underdog.

Alternative forms of justice 

Of course obtaining justice within a novel does not always meaning sending the criminal to jail and throwing away the key. Particularly where the justice system is shown to be corrupt and unfair, justice may have to be achieved in a different way.

In my second novel, The Story Keeper, I wanted one of the evil characters to be punished, but – because this was the 19th century and the character was an upper class man of status - I knew there was no chance he would ever be arrested, never mind prosecuted, for sexual offences against poor girls. (Looking at some recent cases, it’s arguable things haven’t changed hugely). I spoke to an academic who suggested that, instead, I use the divorce courts that were beginning in that era: the police might not arrest the man, but his crimes could be aired in a different kind of court.

Other historical authors have found other solutions. At the end of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, Maud also destroys the thing that she knows will destroy the wicked uncle who has abused her: his library. In The Crimson Petal and the White, Sugar never lives out the bloody revenge she has described in her own writings, but she frees the other woman William Rackham has tormented - his wife, Agnes - and she escapes with the little girl to whom he’s never shown any love.

In some novels, the possible injustice or unfairness of the character’s fate is the point of the novel. When Burial Rites opens, Agnes has already been convicted and sentenced to death for murder. In Jill Dawson’s Fred & Edie and Emma Flint’s Little Deaths, both based on real women, unpick the emotional climate of their times and show us – whatever the truth of these cases – these women were damned before their trials even began.

My first novel, The Unseeing, was also based on the life of a real woman, Sarah Gale, who was convicted with her lover of murder in London in 1837. The focus of the novel is whether or not she did in fact carry out the crime she is accused of and if so, why. That is because when I first read about the case I began to wonder whether – due to the inadequacies of the justice system particularly in relation to women, and particularly in relation to so called ‘fallen women’ - there had been a miscarriage of justice. One of the key themes of the novel is what constitutes justice, and the detective character, who is the lawyer appointed to investigate her appeal, must determine what justice means for Sarah.

Perfume by Suskind subverts the ‘justice must be done’ formula altogether. Grenouille escapes the scaffold for the murders he’s committed, but then pours an entire bottle of his final perfume on himself, leading to a group of criminals being so overcome by what they later claim is ‘love’ that they tear him to pieces and eat him.

The impact of the justice system

For Antonia Hodgson, author of the Thomas Hawkins series, it’s not so much about getting justice for her characters as looking at what ‘the pursuit of justice and revenge does to them, how dangerous it can be for their souls (to use an eighteenth-century term). How their life experiences and character lead them to make certain choices, and the consequences of those actions.’

In each of Hodgson’s books, Tom is confronted with a by a (real) authority figure – the Marshalsea keeper William Acton, Queen Caroline, magistrate Sir John Gonson, former chancellor of the Exchequer John Aislabie - only to discover they are self-serving, corrupt, and/ or hypocritical. ‘In a corrupt world, the question becomes - do you take justice in your own hands? How does that look, and what does it do to you?’ We see Kitty and Tom both impacted by the actions they take, and the abuses that have been done to them. By the time we reach the latest in the series, The Silver Collar, the whole question of justice and revenge becomes central - particularly in the final act. Once Jeremiah and Tom know they have found the enemy, Lady Vanhook, they have to decide what they are going to do. How do they punish her? And in fact Hodgson plays a rather clever game to bring the reader into the story. We must ask what we ourselves think is right.

Punishment without crime

And then there are novels where people are punished, but their punishments don’t fit their crimes, or they aren’t remotely guilty at all.  Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell brings offenders to account, but usually not for the crimes they’ve actually committed. People pay for crime, but not necessarily their own. And Cromwell often commits crimes of his own in order to secure their convictions – surveillance, torture, deceit, fraud. The trilogy is so fascinating because we are never quite sure who to root for – the endlessly resourceful outsider, Cromwell, or the more or less innocent but unlikeable people whose heads end up on the chopping block.

A Place of Greater Safety, Mantel’s first work of historical fiction, is a fascinating study of how what started as a just revolution became a bloody massacre, where the so-called justice system descended - by Robespierre’s era - into an arena for different factions to send each other to the Guillotine. She begins one of her chapters with this quote from Robespierre: ‘Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.’

In fact, by that point, so-called justice was terror and retribution, and it wouldn’t be long before it came for Robespierre himself.


Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. She spoke about justice and revenge in historical crime fiction at St Hilda’s Crime Fiction Festival and the video will be available until 31 August 2020. 

Featured image: 'Waiting for the Verdict' by Abraham Solomon (1857) 

The Best Historical Fiction for LGBT History Month - chosen by Anna Mazzola

February is LGBT History Month in the UK and therefore an excuse to pull together my favourite historical fiction novels that explore gender and sexuality throughout the ages.

THE SONG OF ACHILLES BY MADELINE MILLER

An exquisitely-written reimagining of The Iliad, told from the point of view of Patroclus, Achilles’s lover. An entirely fresh take on the Trojan War and its heroes by the author of that other extraordinary novel, Circe.

AS MEAT LOVES SALT BY MARIA McCANN

McGann’s thrilling and erotic debut is a tale of obsession and murder set during the violence of the English Civil War. Dark, complex and unflinching. Everyone should read McCann’s novels immediately.

DAYS WITHOUT END BY SEBASTIAN BARRY

Set in the 1850s and ’60s, during the wars the U.S. fought against the Sioux and the Yurok, and the Civil War, this is a stunning and deeply moving story of two soldiers—an Irish immigrant, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole.

THE SEALED LETTER BY EMMA DONOGHUE

The Sealed Letter explores the story of a divorce trial that scandalised mid-Victorian London, focussing on the reluctant involvement of Emily Faithful and her relationship with the seemingly less-than-faithful half of the marriage, Helen Smith Codrington. An intriguing and cleverly-written mystery.

FINGERSMITH BY SARAH WATERS

Really I could have included most of Sarah Waters’ books here, but Fingersmith remains my favourite: a glorious mystery and love truly with a truly gripping plot.
Also featuring a wonderful cast of villainous characters, brilliant use of 19th century slang (‘Pigeon, my arse!’) and the best twist in the business.

REGENERATION BY PAT BARKER

The Regeneration trilogy is an incredible fictionalized account of the relationship between army psychiatrist Dr Rivers and a group of interconnected patients, including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. It blends brilliantly the horrors of war with gay life in Edwardian England and the newly emerging science of psychology.

THE COLOUR PURPLE WALKER

An epic and heart-breaking tale of perseverance as well as an exploration of race, gender, family, and sexuality in 1930s Georgia. The novel is, among many other things, a story of love between women.

MUSSOLINI’S ISLAND

In 1939 a series of Sicilian men were taken from their homes and imprisoned on the island of San Domino in the Adriatic Sea. Their crime? They were gay. Out of this little-known slice of history, Sarah Day has created a fascinating and beautifully written novel.

And coming soon...

Do also look out for Neil Blackmore's The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle, sauntering your way in April 2020: a dark and funny romp through the Grand Tour - The Favourite meets the Talented Mr Ripley in 18th century Europe.


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Anna Mazzola is a writer of dark historical fiction. 

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

The Top Ten Gothic Novels - Chosen by Anna Mazzola

As the nights draw in and the spirits move closer, it’s time to huddle beneath your Victorian counterpane with an unbearably creepy book. Many brilliant Gothic reads are being released in time for Halloween: Melmoth, The Corset, House of Ghosts, The Lingering, and The House on Vesper Sands, to name but a few. All play with and develop ideas and tropes that have been ghosting about since the 18th century. Ever since Conrad was crushed to death by a giant helmet in The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic genre has been evolving strangely and blooming darkly.

Here, as a discussion/fight-starter rather than a definitive list, are my top ten favourite Gothic reads.

1. Jane Eyre (1847)

Sinister boarding schools, ghostly visions, eerie laughter, suppressed sexuality and angry women in the attic. Charlotte Brontë used Gothic elements in Jane Eyre to create a new female language. Critics of the time were not impressed, however. The Quarterly Review did 'not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.’

2. Wuthering Heights (1847)

Wuthering Heights was also controversial in its time because of its unflinching depictions of cruelty and its challenge to Victorian societal ideals. Even now, Wuthering Heights remains a raw and powerful read, and many authors cite its influence in their own work. Many of us have wondered what else this formidable author might have written, but Emily Brontë died at the age of 30, saying that she would have ‘no poisoning doctor’ near her.

Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey, were all published in the same year.

3. The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Henry James said he preferred to create ghosts that were eerie extensions of everyday reality: ‘the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.’ For nearly 120 years, readers have been trying to work out whether the ‘strange and sinister’ were only in the unnamed governess's mind, or whether the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are in fact real.

4. Rebecca (1938)

Though dismissed by many critics at the time as romances, novels such as Jamaica Inn, Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel (and many of Du Maurier’s short stories) are more akin to mysteries or psychological thrillers strongly embued with Gothic elements. As with Henry James, the real and the ghostly often elide, so that Mrs Danvers is part human, part malevolent ghost, and Rebecca herself haunts the imaginations of the characters, and also that of the reader, long after they’ve finished the book.

5. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

‘My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.’ 

It’s my favourite first paragraph so had to be quoted in full. We Have Always was Shirley Jackson’s last novel and, in my view, her best. In fact, it’s probably my favourite book on this list: deceptively simple, darkly funny and profoundly unsettling. Jackson's biographer referred to it as a 'paean' to the author's agoraphobia. If you haven’t discovered Shirley Jackson yet, you’re in for a rare and disturbing treat.

6. The Bloody Chamber (1979)

Angela Carter was hailed as the ‘grand-dame of the modern English gothic’, saying that she’d ‘always been fond of Poe and Hoffmann – Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious.’

The Bloody Chamber is perhaps her most gothic work. In her collection of stories about witches, forsaken castles, haunted forests and howling wolves, Carter gave fairy tales a fantastic, feminist twist.

7. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985)

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with an exceptional sense of smell. He survives his mother’s attempt to kill him at birth and grows up in stinking, extraordinary 18th century Paris. Grenouille becomes a perfumer in order to preserve that most precious of smells: his murder victims. Dark, brilliant and building in bizarreness to a climax you’re unlikely to forget. Kurt Curbain wrote a song about it.

8.  Beloved (1987)

Gothic fiction often connects with the fears and anxieties of its time. Beloved is the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver after their escape from slavery. Their home in Cincinnati is haunted by a revenant, whom they believe to be the ghost of Sethe's daughter, Beloved. This astonishing book uses the Gothic to expose the horrors and silence of slavery.

9. The Little Stranger (2009)

Sarah Waters has apparently said she did not set out to write a ghost story, but she seems accidentally to have written one of the best ones. It is the 1940s and, as Hundreds Hall decays, peculiar powers take hold. Superbly measured and deeply chilling. As with the best Gothic tales, we’re left unsettled and unsure. And probably wanting to see the movie.

10. The Loney (2015)

Of the many brilliant Gothic novels from recent years, The Loney stands out like a moss-covered tombstone. Both old and new and suspended somewhere between the supernatural, the strange, and the outright horrific, Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel is, as Sarah Perry has said, a real Gothic masterpiece.

And yes, I realise I’ve missed off many of the classics usually included in lists of this kind. But what would be the point of a Gothic list, if it conformed to expectations?


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Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, is a tale of dark folklore and missing girls on the Isle of Skye.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

THE HANDMAIDEN: Elizabeth Fremantle explores the problems of adaptation

Being a huge fan of Sarah Waters I was curious about The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook's adaptation of her novel Fingersmith, a particular favourite of mine. Had I needed further incentive to see Park's film, which had an impressive 95% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the the critics were gushing with a chorus of praise, dubbing it a 'masterpiece', 'intoxicating' and 'an erotic triumph.'

When a favourite book is adapted there is inevitably a sense of disappointment on finding the screen version doesn't live up to that conjured in the mind of the reader. But as The Handmaiden had transposed Waters' narrative from nineteenth century England to 1930s Japanese occupied Korea, I was prepared for a radically different retelling and that is what was delivered.

Visually glorious and languidly paced, the film utterly seduced me as the young and impoverished Soo-kee, magnificently played by newcomer Kim Tae-ri, was sent to the remote estate of an aristocratic book collector, as maid to his niece Hideko. However, faithful to the original material, Soo-kee has been planted there by a con man on a mission to persuade the wealthy Hideko to marry him, with the ultimate intention of having her committed to an asylum.

Without revealing too much and spoiling it, I can say that this is a film of two distinct halves. At a certain point the perspective shifts from Sookee to Hideko, exposing things Sookee is not aware of. Problematically the film suffers at this point on, from the loss of the captivating Kim Tae-ri as protagonist and much of the seductive tension is lost when it descends to relentless girl-on-girl prurience.

I'm not averse to a little tasteful lesbian erotica in a film but this was of the sort that was so explicit as to make me want to gouge my eyes out with embarrassment. As for the scenes of hard core torture and finger-chopping, suffice to say I couldn't look at all. It's not that these scenes didn't have a place in Park's film, they made sense within the narrative as he set it up, and there was the triumphant pay-off for the two manipulated women. But something left me uneasy about the adaptation as a whole.

My reading of Fingersmith was (as well as being a beautifully written, cunningly plotted page-turner) as a feminist critique of the male gaze and the infantilisation of women.  Park's film, however, seemed to undermine Waters' central themes. Whilst masquerading as a celebration of female wiles by allowing the women to spectacularly out-fox the men and putting them at the centre of the story, it also undermined the gender politics of the original by offering a lurid lesbian fantasy for the male viewer.

For me an adaptation must be faithful to the spirit of the source material and in this The Handmaiden failed.  As for those panting critics, strangely all male – I suspect they were thinking with something other than their heads.

Elizabeth Fremantle's latest novel The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin. Elizabethfremantle.com

SEEKING THE TRUTH IN A 'BOGUS' HISTORY – Elizabeth Fremantle

A chance encounter with Toby Litt the other day made me go back and take a look at his essay titled Against Historical Fiction. It is an oft-quoted and gently provocative piece that frequently puts the noses of historical fiction writers out of joint by calling their work ‘deeply bogus’ and suggesting the term historical fiction is an ‘oxymoron’. But, though Litt is clearly not a fan of historical fiction, it is easy to take what he says out of context.

He suggests historical fiction is created in ‘bad faith’. Though it is clearly a critical point it is not intended to be insulting or derogatory but to describe the function of fiction about the past and the contract between reader and writer. He takes the term ‘bad faith’, in a philosophical sense, from Sartre, as to mean the vacillation between what is known to be fact and what is purely speculative. He opposes this with history books, which he deems are ‘written in good faith’, meaning by this that they aspire to truthfulness.

It would be tempting to argue that even documented historical ‘fact’ can be subject to unreliability and misinterpretation. We know ‘the truth’ is a slippery concept and that the writers of history often have their own political agendas at play in their work, but it is Litt’s statement about it being only, as it were, ‘proper’ history that seeks, ‘in an honest way,’ to say something ‘useful or truthful about the past’ that interests me more.

What he seems to be saying is that the intentions of the ‘proper’ historical writer and the historical novelist are in opposition to one another. This is tricky territory as it lumps together the aims of all those who set their fiction in the past. Each novelist surely has a different, subjective, aim for his or her fiction. Some may indeed be simply be using history as an exotic screen on which to project stories with contemporary sensibilities, wilfully flouting known 'truths' for the sake of the aims of their particular narrative. Others, though, might be seeking to exploit the imaginative space between the known 'facts' of the past as a way to tell the untold stories, or as attempting to use historical parallels as a way to better understand the present.

Take, for example Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, a fiction which used the Salem witch-trials of the 1660s as a way to speak about the McCarthy investigations into un-American activities that swept through Hollywood during Miller’s time. The parallels of these two events, and Miller’s fictional account of the former, allowed those living through the McCarthy witch-hunts to scrutinise a contemporary event through the lens of a historical parallel.There are many such stories from the past, which could be used to shed light on the present. The recent US election brought to my mind the vilification and downfall of Anne Boleyn – a woman who paid the ultimate price for seeking to operate in a misogynist political arena. Hillary Clinton, like Boleyn, was labelled a ‘witch’, crooked, corrupt, unwomanly, unfit and even as having committed treason. This, for me, makes Anne Boleyn’s story potentially relevant as a feminist narrative. And it is fiction that would have the power and license to put it to work as a mirror to contemporary political misogyny. In this way fiction can be a means to access another, different kind of truth.

The late great Lisa Jardine discussed the role of fiction in history in Radio 4’s A Point of View (2014) in which she talks about her response to Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, a fictional account of a meeting between two scientists who each played a role in the development of the atom bomb. She said, ‘Sometimes it takes something other than perfect fidelity to sharpen our senses, to focus our attention sympathetically, in order to give us emotional access to the past.’ So, where the ‘proper’ historical author might be seeking an empirical truth the fiction writer might in turn be seeking an emotional truth; but there is an inevitable blurring of the boundaries between these apparently opposing positions. Facts and events do not occur in a vacuum without a human response. It is the feelings that events inspire that many fiction writers aim to access.

Fiction is simply another mode through which we can understand history. Take Hilary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell, which go against the prevailing historical narrative of Thomas More as a ‘good’ person and Cromwell as ‘bad.’ Mantel does what a biographer cannot, she depicts Cromwell (a man about whom relatively little is known, given the enormity of his legacy) as a rounded individual, a vengeful and ambitious man who oversaw despicable acts yet also was capable of fierce loyalty and tenderness, who loved his wife and children. She places him as an entire person in her fictional world, extrapolating his love for his daughter from a touching line in his will. This view is assumption – plausible, yet not fact.

But Mantel’s choice of Cromwell as protagonist in her fiction allows us to look at ideas about social mobility, both then and now. The authorial admiration for a man who pulled himself up by the bootstraps from obscurity to high office bubbles up through the text but it doesn't make it any less relevant or useful as a narrative describing both the past and the present. This is not history in the conventional sense but it shines a light into the dark crannies of history making a valid and interesting depiction of an inaccessible past.

We can’t help but regard the past through the prism of our own particular time. So the Cromwell of Robert Bolt’s mid 1960s play and film A Man For all Seasons is different to the Cromwell of Wolf Hall, more than forty years later, precisely because they are speaking to different generations. So when fiction is historical it is also necessarily contemporary. Fiction exists to ask questions and it is a valid enquiry to ask about how we regard the past and how the past impacts on the present.

Many writers now look to the past to tease out the stories of those who lacked a voice in, or were deemed insignificant by, mainstream history. Often the historical record is partial when it comes to such narratives so fiction serves to fill in the gaps. Previous generations have focused on women’s stories almost exclusively from a romantic perspective, as this upheld the prevailing narrative of the time that women were politically unimportant. You only have to look at the way the Victorians chose to see a figure like Katherine Parr as an obedient nursemaid to a tyrannical husband when contemporary narratives see her as a highly intelligent political activist and author. It is possible she was both of these things but we reject the story of obedience now, as it doesn’t fit with our view of how women should behave in the twenty-first century. We increasingly seek out women from the past who sought to define their own existence in a world that denied them that right, as this chimes with our prevailing ideals of feminism. Using fiction to look between the lines of history urges us to scrutinise our present attitudes and better understand them.

The invisible stories are important. The fact that Homosexuals (even the term is only a century old) and ethnic minority groups barely existed in the received western historical narrative doesn't mean they weren't there. And it becomes the role of fiction to imagine a plausible narrative and fill in the empty spaces as authors like Sarah Waters and Toni Morrison have done to great effect. At this moment in our cultural history we are preoccupied with issues about gender identity and multi-culturism so it seems natural that we might also look to the past even if only to see how far we have progressed but also to ensure we don’t return there.

If we are to learn from the past then we must first seek to understand it and fiction is another tool by which we can do this. Jardine quotes Michael Frayn, to make her point. ‘The great challenge is to get inside people’s heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions, The only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination.’ For me this goes some way to demonstrate that though the term historical fiction may seem oxymoronic there is deception in history just as there is truth in fiction and both serve a useful purpose in helping us to understand the present.

References:

Litt, Toby – Against Historical Fiction – Irish Pages, Vol. 5, No 1. Language and Languages (2008), pp 111-115

Jardine, Lisa – A point of view: When historical fiction is more truthful than historical fact, BBC 2014

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of four novels set in the Tudor and Elizabethan period. For information about Elizabeth Fremantle's fiction see elizabethfremantle.com

HISTORICAL FICTION PICKS FOR 2014 – by Elizabeth Fremantle

As the end of 2014 is approaching I felt it was time for a round-up, so here are some of the historical novels that have made an impression on me this year.

I'm a die-hard fan of Sarah Waters, but with THE PAYING GUESTS (Virago)
she surpassed all my expectations. The novel is set in the 1920s in a genteel suburb of South London where the socially awkward Frances Wray lives with her difficult mother. All the men of the family are gone and the two women strive to maintain appearances in their straightened circumstances. Frances feels their money worries may be resolved with the arrival of Len and Lil Barber who are the paying guests of the title. But the couple burst into the Wray's quiet world with their late-night drinking sessions, loud music and flirtatious behaviour. Inevitably Frances is drawn into this world with devastating consequences.

This begins as a story of love, told with intensity, passion and meticulous writing, but, as so often with Waters's narratives, it is not what it first seems and becomes increasingly dark as a central violent event takes hold of the story. Though it is long and meanders at times, I was completely gripped from start to finish.

I discovered Richard Skinner at a literary festival this summer and was intrigued to hear him talk about his novella, THE VELVET GENTLEMAN based on the life of Erik Satie, whose piano music has always captivated me. It is published in an anthology called THE MIRROR (Faber).

Skinner's approach to historical fiction is highly imaginative – when a novella begins with, 'I died yesterday,' you know your disbelief will be stretched in interesting ways. Satie tells his own story  from a kind of limbo presided over by a Mr Takahashi who is in charge of filtering arrivals through to the afterlife. But in order to move on Satie must choose a single memory to take with him, leaving all the others behind and this provides the opportunity for him to recollect the events of his life. He is characterised as a rather unpleasant individual, plodding miserably through life, but because of the originality of the setting this only serves to make the story more interesting, as does the portrait of a Paris populated by characters such as Cocteau, Picasso and Debussy. An intriguing and memorable read.

Imogen Robertson's latest novel THEFT OF LIFE (Headline), the fifth in her Westerman and Crowther series deals with the slave trade in Georgian London. Robertson draws on the lives of Oludah Equiano and Frances Glass for inspiration for her narrative which highlights the atrocities of the slave trade allowing the reader to understand the extent to which the drawing rooms of England were stained with the blood of slavery. When a slave trader is found dead, spreadeagled in a London cemetery, in what appears to be a case of straightforward revenge murder Robertson's doughty pair of proto-detectives discover that things are far more complex than they first appear. And so begins a gripping story of brutality and evil that uncovers dark revelations about the slave trade.

Elizabeth Buchan has changed direction with I CAN'T BEGIN TO TELL YOU (Penguin), a novel set in rural Denmark in the Second World War. Kay Eberstern is married into a well-to-do Danish family and finds world turned upside down with the Nazi occupation of her adopted country. Her husband Bror is determined to preserve his estate and family legacy by cooperating with the Germans but for Kay this is morally impossible and she becomes embroiled in resistance and espionage for British Intelligence, risking everything for what she believes to be right. This is a well researched and beautifully pitched novel that is full of revelations.

Suzannah Dunn has a way of getting to the heart of any story by exploring the edges of the action. In THE MAY BRIDE (Little Brown) it is the intriguing story of Katherine Filliol, wife of the ambitious courtier Edward Seymour, who was rumoured to have cuckolded him with his father. Fascinating enough on its own, this story is as much about its narrator as it is about its protagonist. She is the quiet observer at Wolf Hall, a woman who will become queen, Jane Seymour. Told with the benefit of her hindsight, allowing the silent narrative of her queenship and her ultimate tragedy to hover at the margins. Dunn is a master of the ordinary, making the mundane seem extraordinary with her attention to detail.

I don't normally read fiction which inhabits the same historical space as my own whilst writing but I read this in preparation for the Harrogate History Festival where we appeared together and I'm very glad I did.

What I will be reading over Christmas: I can't wait to hunker down with a hot water bottle and these two highly praised novels over the holidays.

I always look forward to Vanora Bennett's fiction, for the depth of her research and the deftness of her storytelling. Her latest novel THE WHITE RUSSIAN (Century), set in the Russian emigre community in Paris, tells of Evie a rebellious young American who leaves New York in search of art and adventure in Europe, finding herself embroiled in murder plots, conspiracies and illicit love affairs.




Antonia Hodgson's debut novel THE DEVIL IN THE MARCHALSEA (Hodder) has been recommended to me by so many people that I simply have to read it. Set in London in 1727 the wayward Tom Hawkins finds himself in the Marchalsea prison, a place gripped by fear and suspicion in the wake of the brutal murder of one of the inmates and Tom is sharing a cell with the prime suspect. He must risk everything to uncover the truth, or be the next to die. It sounds un-put-downable.



My own novel SISTERS OF TREASON sequel to QUEEN'S GAMBIT is out in hardback and will be out in paperback on January 29th. For more about me and my books, go to elizabethfremantle.com

The Little Big Things - Louisa Young

As a history undergraduate at Cambridge in the early eighties, I learnt a lot about Balkans, Corn Laws,  Reforms Acts, Causes of Wars. I had no female teacher after the age of 16. I loved history, but it really was the wars and the laws, the high thoughts and the doings of great men. If I had then the knowledge curiosity and confidence that I have now, I would have said: I've had it with the economic, can we do some social now?  Enough men, bring me women. No more big things please - I want the small. 

By the small, I mean of course the big small. I mean, while Mussolini was making those speeches, what were the farmers' eating? When all those Jews were waiting on the Polish border, what did they sit on? Those cholera figures - so what did those parents actually do, when symptoms appeared in their children? Who did you turn to? What colour was it? What was the greeting commonly used? When did you get your money? How did you clean your bed?

As novelists we need the small - but it's not just that. It's not irrelevant. It's not just amusing, or a curiosity. It's the finding of a voice for those who had none. This is why we need Sarah Waters, single-handedly, it sometimes feels, reintroducing the lesbian to a history which entirely left her out, blanked her, removed her even. Radclyffe Hall's line 'That night they were not apart' is no substitute for a true and proper set of accounts for innumerable lives lived in shadow - or at least loves loved in shadow. And she gives us housework. God, the joy of lying in a warm delicious bath, listening to the washing machine tumbling my sheets, reading in The Paying Guests exactly how much elbow grease and copper-boiling and boiler-twiddling and lugging and bleach and mangling and hanging women were putting into washing sheets in houses just like mine, ninety years ago. 

Jo Baker, in her superb novel Longbourn, based on Pride and Prejudice, describes the maid, Sarah, cast down not only at Lizzie Bennet's carelessness with mud and her petticoats, but at the time of the month when all five daughters, Mrs Bennet, the maids and the cook are - literally - on the rag, at the same time as happens in households of women - and it's Sarah's job to deal with those rags. Esther Freud, in Mr Mac and Me, tells us so movingly and delicately about a small boy's response to his mother's miscarriage. These everyday historical things, tragic but small, normal but fascinating, novelists can give us back, when official history - or mainstream literature (ie, most literature) chose to, or had to,  ignore it. I LOVE that these voices are being slipped back into history through novels. 

My favourite at the moment happens only in the 1970s, the poet Salena Godden's memoir, Springfield Road. It's her life, her childhood. Her mother the go-go dancer, her father the jazz cat, her grandmothers, English and Jamaican (and a great grandmother with a pipe and a red bandana), her brother, her sister, holidays, sweets, chopper bikes, fingerless gloves, skateboards, dandelions, squashing berries with a stick, going farther than you were allowed, falling in love aged seven with the new boy, who pulled up his shirt and said: 'Punch me. Go on, harder.' Her father left, to join the house band of the QE2. Her new dad was not nice. The shared bedrooms, the housing estates, the ice cream vans, white carpets, a tea tray with a pictorial map of Jamaica on it . . . root beer . . . Liking being upside down. Waiting. Missing your dad. Tragedy, comedy, life . . It is another wonderful book.  

I never quite knew what root beer actually is, so when a historian turned micro-brewer turned up at dinner last night I thought well, how convenient, and asked him. He told me about sassafras, and the market for non-alcoholic fun beverages during prohibition. (We looked up sassafras and discovered that its chemical, safrole, was also used in MDMA, and had been banned by the FDA at various stages.) Why was I asking, he wondered. I told him about the book. We'd been talking about grandmothers - his was there; she ran a home store in Boise Idaho in the 60s and 70s. One of Salena's Jamaican great great grandmothers was a Maroon. We knew it meant runaway rebel slave, but  none of us knew the origin of the word - was it the same root as being marooned? Was that anything to do with mare, the sea? Marrone, the big sea? No, marrone means chestnut, or brown . . .  Or the Jamaican band, the Cimarrons? 

We looked it up.  Cimmaron means wild, feral, fugitive and runaway; maroon is from cimarron. It's from the Taíno. Taíno? An Arawak language, historically spoken by the Taíno people of the Caribbean, in the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the northern Lesser Antilles. This leads us to the Garifuna, the Caribs, and to this, which I offer direct from Wikipedia: 

In the Lesser Antilles, the Carib conquest (which had advanced to Puerto Rico by the time of the Spanish conquest, and is still occurring to some extent among the Carib and Arawak in South America) created a sociolinguistically interesting situation. Carib warriors invading from South America took Taíno wives, or raided north and took female Taíno captives back to the southern Antilles. The women continued to speak Taíno, but the men taught their sons Carib. This resulted in a situation where the women spoke an Arawakan language and the men an unrelated Cariban language. However, because boys' maternal language was Arawak, their Carib became mixed, with Carib vocabulary on an Arawak grammatical base. 

That shut us up. Different languages for the different sexes! 

Here are some more words from that language none of us had heard of. 

barbecue - barbacoa

potato - batata

cacique (Latin American native chief) - cacique

cannibal - caniba

canoe - canoa

Caribbean - Caribe

cassava (yucca) - casaba

coquí (a small frog found in Puerto Rico) - cokí

guava - guayabo

iguana - iguana

hammock - hamaca

hurricane - hurakan

cay - kayo

mauby (a type of Caribbean tree whose bark is used in making a fermented drink) - mabí

tobacco - tabacú

maize (corn) - mahiz

mangrove - mangue

papaya - papáia

savanna - zabana

Mauby! The brewer got excited at that. We looked it up. The internet tells us it's sort of like - haha! - root beer. Only nicer. 

I remembered, later that night, a sweet appley drink a friend at school's dad used to make, back in 70s, known to us as mavvy. I looked it up: you can buy it.  Get some in, for the next barbacoa. 

Ah, the joys of going round in circles.

It's all history. Keep it coming. Big and small. And poo to the Corn Laws.



(NB The novels I mention are all widely available. Springfield Road though is published by Unbound, so most easily found here.)

Sarah Waters - Celia Rees

Last week, I went to see Sarah Waters at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. I was there purely as a punter, a fan, no magic access to the Green Room this time. Just like any other reader, I like to go and see my favourite authors and hear what they have to say about their writing. As a writer, I go to see if there are any tips I can pick up - you never know - and as a sometime performer, I like to see how other authors present themselves on the platform or stage. I've appeared at Cheltenham a few times myself and I like both the town and the Festival. One tiny gripe about the latter. I was there in the evening. Waterstone's Book Tent in full swing. I looked in vain for Children's and Y.A. titles, however. Then I noticed another, smaller tent, shut and darkened. 'The Children's Books are in there,' I was told, as if any fule should know, delivered with a look that seemed to say: why would the Children's Bookshop be open at 7:30 in the Evening? Children will be in bed, for goodness sake. 

That apart, it was a very rewarding evening. Sarah Waters has a quiet, unassuming way about her which readers warm to immediately but which speaks to me of enormous assurance and confidence. She is not afraid to use self deprecating humour or to admit to problems, confusions, worries and concerns about her books as they are being written. With that, she's won over the writers in the audience (well, me, anyway).  Not that I needed winning over. I've been an avid fan since I first picked up a copy of Tipping the Velvet in 1998. 

I was flying to Belfast and was looking for something to read in W.H. Smith's in Birmingham Airport, which I feared might be a fruitless task, when I saw Tipping the Velvet. I have a passing knowledge of Victorian Underworld slang and was intrigued. I'd never heard of Sarah Waters but the title was enough for me. I started reading on the plane and went on reading when I got to my hotel. I tried to slow down, to make the book last, but just couldn't stop. I recognised immediately that here was a story teller of rare power, writing about a 'hidden' history, exploring a world that seldom appears in period fiction or non fiction.  Better than that, I'd discovered a new writer and I've followed her ever since.

She said at Cheltenham that she makes 'an imaginative leap into [her characters'] perspective', and that the story comes from 'what the characters need to do and how they feel about it.' Her knowledge of her period, the period in which her characters live, is immaculate.  It is built up through intense research, using the writing of people who lived at the time: letters, diaries, novels. This seems a good model for any historical writer. It seems a simple idea. If you are going to write about people living in a particular period then that's where you need to go to find out what they thought and felt, but what they did actually think and feel is often surprising. Our ideas about what it was like to live in wartime or post war Britain, as in The Night Watch, or The Little Stranger, are often coloured by hindsight, filtered through modern pre-perceptions or the distorting glass of memory. Waters' unearths the unexpected, continually confounding lazy, cliched views of the past.

She never allows her research to overburden the text. She uses it to make her period come alive to the modern reader and to give validity to her characters as they move through it. Her extensive reading of contemporary sources imbues her writing with a feeling of the times she is describing, not pastiche, more authenticity, and her plots work with the precision of a swiss watch. Her latest novel, The Paying Guests, the subject of her talk at Cheltenham, is just as clever, accomplished and absorbing as the others, a kind of Suspicions of Mr Whicher from the inside out.  

I'm just left thinking, 'How does she do that?'

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

THE MARMITE TENSE: Pondering on the Present Historic – Elizabeth Fremantle

There are lots of people who don't like stories from the past retold in the present tense and they can be very vocal about this aversion, especially on Radio 4. But the present tense is the mode of drama, it is the mode of conversation, so why not too, the mode of story telling? Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion but as an historical novelist, I tend to seek the best possible way to recount a particular story depends on many factors, not least, and particularly with first person accounts, the fate of the narrating character. Often in historical fiction the reader is aware of the protagonist's outcome but even if the reader knows that, say, Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard are going to end up on the block, the fact that the character does not have the benefit of hindsight creates an effect that is filled with dramatic irony and tension.

Hilary Mantel employs this to spectacular effect in Bring Up the Bodies, a novel that is tightly plotted, like a thriller, and written in a third person that is so close to protagonist Thomas Cromwell that it creates the illusion of the world seen through his eyes alone. We watch in horror as Cromwell unravels the Queen's world and even though we all know what will become of Anne Boleyn and the five men she is accused of adultery with, neither she nor they know and somehow we, as readers, are drawn into their world so completely we forget what we know about the outcome and are shocked when it comes. 

Another example, though one much more straightforward and written in the first person, is from Philippa Gregory in The Boleyn Inheritance.  The teenaged narrator Catherine Howard is about to be carted off to the Tower. She still believes she will be pardoned when her uncle Norfolk comes to tell her she is to die. 

'You should acknowledge your sins, and ask forgiveness,' he says promptly.

I am so relieved I could almost weep. Of course I will be forgiven if I say I am sorry.

We are entirely drawn into this poor child's world watching her articulate the belief that a simple apology will suffice, when we know that nothing can save her. It is a powerful device. This moment simply wouldn't have the impact or poignance if written with hindsight. And indeed, how does one write a first person past tense account of someone who is about to die, and get away with it? But then again, anything is possible in fiction if you can make it work. 

Other writers use the present historic to create layers of meaning in a text. Take Sarah Waters for example:

I do not know who cries it, she or I: I reel away unnerved. But in the second I have her skin between my fingers, my own flesh leaps in a kind of relief. I shake horribly for almost an hour. 'Oh, God!' I say, hiding my face. 'I'm afraid, for my own mind! Do you think me mad? Do you think me wicked, Sue?' 'Wicked?' she answers, wringing her hands. and I can see her thinking: A simple girl like you?

This quote from Fingersmith, illustrates the intensity and immediacy of the present. We inhabit the flesh of narrator Maud as it 'leaps' and 'shakes', and we are able to observe her watching Sue, who is not party to what the reader and narrator know. We are drawn right into the plot because we are on the inside of Maud's narration. Waters has used both present and past tenses to tell this story. Sue, the sly cockney girl relates her part in the past. This seems to be an inversion of our expectations; wouldn't a girl like Sue employ the more casual tense of the raconteur? But the past is the knowing tense, and Sue knows, or thinks she knows, exactly what is going on. Maud's narration is told in the moment, as if without hindsight. Again there is an oddness to it; Maud is a refined girl employed to read to her uncle and surely more suited to the formality of the tense of literature. 
This quote from 

Waters's subterfuge is clever here because, as it turns out, neither girl is what we first think and so the tense they narrate their stories in works as a key to our overall understanding. But the action is almost subliminal because, if the writing is good enough, the reader, lulled into the voice and world of the novel, loses awareness of the tricks perpetrated by the author.

Viennese author from the early twentieth century, Stephan Zweig, uses tense in a very particular way moving between present and past like a conjurer. In Beware of Pity he introduces his story in the voice of a kind of faux author; a writer who encounters a man, a so called, 'historically authentic hero,' Hofmiller, in a cafe. The story is then told as if from Hofmiller's mouth, going back in time twenty years, and shifting in an apparently casually conversational manner between past and present tense: 

So one afternoon – it must have been the middle of May 1914 – I was sitting in the cake shop with one of my occasional partners...We had long ago finished playing our usual three games, and were just idly talking about this or that... but the conversation was drowsy, and as slow as the smoke from a cigarette burning down. At this point the door suddenly opens, and a pretty girl in a fulll-skirted dress is swept in on a gust of fresh air...

This is exactly what happens when people tell stories, they slip back and forth from the now to the then. But beneath this appearance of veracity lies a device that manipulates the tone of the piece. We are with the narrator in his provincial town, in his state of lassitude and boredom and something happens. The girl is characterised as a breath of fresh air, which is the function she performs in the story, bringing the excitement of possibility with her, we are jolted out of our torpor into the moment. Indeed the appearance of this girl heralds the true beginning of Hofmiller's story. Zweig is using this mode of story telling to enhance our experience of the atmosphere in which our narrator exists. It is a beautifully conceived trick, hidden behind the guise of an 'authentic' raconteur's voice.

Fiction is, by its very nature, a deceptive art and writers have only a limited number of tools at their disposal: mostly grammatical; so the use of tense is crucial to the crafting of a novel. To simply use the past tense because we are recounting past events is missing the point. after all, any narration is necessarily describing past events, even if they happened only a few moments ago. Novelists are creating an artificial world and how better to bring the distant past, its sounds, smells, textures, the inner worlds of its inhabitants, to life, than to speak of it as if it's happening now. It is sometimes said that the 'fashion' for the present tense is the result of the ubiquitous Creative Writing MA, with the suggestion that it is the preferred tense of such courses. This is nonsense of course, the use of the present tense is more a natural progression of Modernism, via authors like Zweig, in which writers strive to build ever more convincing worlds and climb further into the minds of their characters. So it could be seen as a contemporary style, and let's not forget that even historical fiction is contemporary fiction.

Find out about Elizabeth Fremantle's novels Queen's Gambit, about Katherine Parr, and Sisters of Treason, about the younger sisters of Lady Jane Grey, on ElizabethFremantle.com