The Audacity of the Historical Novelist by Sheena Wilkinson

When I describe myself as a historical novelist, what do I really mean? Historical fiction is a such a broad term. I’ve written stories set in the past which don’t focus on actual historical events but instead bring to life the daily realities of the era (for example, my Fernside books), and stories about ordinary (fictional) people’s lives being affected by real historical events, such as my Irish trilogy; Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau and Miss McVey Takes Charge).

My Irish Trilogy (1916-1921) 

What I have not (yet) had the courage -- or the audacity -- to tackle is what many people consider ‘serious’ historical fiction, which takes as its central characters actual historical figures (for example, Wolf Hall or Hamnet) or stories which involve the interplay between real and fictional characters, for example, Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. This is partly because I prefer making things up; partly because I balk at the research involved – I LOVE research but not to that extent; partly because I haven’t (yet) come across a real figure that I would want to write a whole novel about. 

My 1930s novels 

But mainly because, however confident I might be in my research of the facts, once you turn a ‘real’ person into a character in a novel, they become a fictional construct. And in today’s post-truth climate, maybe I am chary of misrepresenting the past. 

 

Only occasionally have I written about real historical people. For example, in Miss McVey Takes Charge, the main characters become embroiled in the real-life Battle of Holbeck Moor, an anti-fascist demonstration in Leeds in 1936 and I describe Sir Oswald Mosley, based on contemporary newspaper reports and newsreels. This was straightforward enough: the events of the day were not so widely documented as to give me an embarrassment of material, but well enough to give me the facts I needed. 

 

This was enough to help me place my fictional characters in the scene: 

But we see Mosley here from a distance, and it is hardly stretching historical truth for me to add the authorial description of ‘arrogant’ to the leader of the British Union of Fascists. 

 

Only once have I had the audacity to ascribe a made-up opinion to a historical figure. Here’s the context and the justification. In Star by Star (2017), all the characters are fictional, and their lives are deeply affected by World War 1; the 1918 flu pandemic and the 1918 general election. When real-life suffragist, socialist and republican Winifred Carney stands for election in East Belfast, a seat she had no chance of winning, Stella, for whom Carney is a heroine, is excited. She is even more thrilled to realise that Rose, another fictional character, knew and liked Winifred Carney:  

 

Some of the people in the Republican cause weren’t happy when I married Charlie – him having fought for the King, but Winnie stood by me. She said the cause of labour was bigger than that. 

 

As Carney herself, in 1928, married a Protestant Somme veteran, I felt this was an acceptable opinion to ascribe to her. Funnily enough, last Saturday I was walking my dogs in a park in Belfast when a small dog ran up to make her friends. Her name, her owner informed me, was Winifred. When he went on to tell me that his other dog was Constance I asked, Carney and Markiewicz? Another assumption, but an equally intelligent one – the dogs were indeed named after those two Irish Republican figures; their owner was an expert, and we had a very jolly chat in the course of which he agreed that Winifred would very likely have said such a thing to anyone in Rose’s position.

 

Of course we can never know for sure. I suppose that every historical novelist must decide what balance of ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ events is appropriate for their work, what the implications of these choices are, and how audacious they decide to be.