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) 

Secrets of Historical Fiction: Part 1 - By Anna Mazzola

Don't tell anyone, but I'm starting a secret series on writing historical fiction. This follows on from a highly secret talk I gave at Waterstones Gower Street with the author Anna-Marie Crowhurst. Part 1 will cover how you decide what you’re writing, and how you find the right voice.

What is historical fiction? 

Firstly, what is historical fiction? How far back does a novel have to be set to make it 'historical'? A hundred years? Fifty years? Five? No one seems to agree about this. According to the Walter Scott Prize, events have to have taken place at least 60 years before the publication of the novel. According to the Historical Novel Society, it’s fifty years before publication. I’d in fact say it’s any book set in the past.

Within historical fiction there are many different genres: historical romances, adventure stories, historical crime, espionage thrillers, time slip novels, and the new brand of Gothic fiction which is set in the past but doesn’t specify when (The Silent Companions and The Binding, for example). Imogen Robertson, Chair of the Historical Writers’ Association says, ‘Historical fiction is a setting rather than a genre. It encompasses every different kind of storytelling you can imagine’. 

As Emma Darwin points out in her brilliant book, ‘The most important thing about historical fiction is that it is fiction: a story of events that never happened, told ‘as if’ they did happen.’

Why write historical fiction?

It’s sometimes said that, thanks to Hilary Mantel and the likes of SJ Paris, Jessie Burton and Sarah Perry, historical fiction is having a golden era. However, you never know how trends in the market will work. I assume that the historical novel will continue to flourish for some time yet, but there’s never any guarantee. And as those of you who are already writing historical fiction will know, it’s a pretty darned time-consuming and research-heavy process. Unless you happen to have a doctorate in the subject you’re proposing to write a novel about (and some people do), you’re going to have to spend a long time researching your era. I personally love the research bit, perhaps too much (as I’ll discuss here), but it’s worth bearing in mind that by writing historical fiction you are essentially making life difficult for yourself, so you have to really want to do it. 

It may be that the specific story you want to write is set in the past, which is what happened with me. Or it may be that you really want to write historical fiction, because that’s what you’re drawn to. 

Certainly settings drawn from history give a wonderfully rich background for novels. It’s also a way to give a voice to people who have been left out of the history books: the dispossessed, the suppressed. I think some of the best historical fiction speaks for the people who couldn’t or whose voices were rarely heard: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. My novel The Story Keeper is about the crofting community in the Highlands of Scotland just after the Clearances of the 19th century, people whose voice has been almost completely left out of the records, replaced with the voices of the rich landowners. Which of course makes it tricky to research, but that’s all part of the fun. Perhaps.

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’

Assuming that you’ve decided you’re writing historical fiction and you really want to spend your weekends working out what kind of sheep they kept in Scotland in 1857 or what vegetables were available in 1640 (the answer is turnips), where do you start? 

Step 1 is to read everything you can get your hands on – new fiction, old fiction, non-fiction, history, newspapers, court reports. Go to the theatre. Watch films, drama, listen in to people on the train. One of my ideas came partly from a play, another partly from the ballet. All of my ideas are partly from real crimes. Basically read a lot and go out and have a great time and you might get some ideas.

Also consider the market – which debuts have broken through recently? What might editors be looking for? Being aware of the market doesn’t necessarily mean following it, however. Ultimately you have to write the book you’d like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? 

Which rules are you working with? 

Once you have an idea of what you want to write, the next step is to agree with yourself what kind of novel you’re going to write and what kind of rules you’re going to work with. 

The reason I say that is that when you’re working with recorded facts and known history, you’re going to have to make lots of decisions about what you must keep, what you will change, and what you can invent. That’s far easier to do if you decide some kind of overall policy at the outset. Are you, for example:

- Creating a story based on general historical material;
- Taking real historical events and real people and using their biography as the backbone of the story (as Margaret Atwood did with Alias Grace);
- Using real historical events as the centre of the story, but embroidering around it (as Robert Harris did in An Officer and a Spy); 
–  Using some aspect of a real story as the basis for a largely fictional novel (In The Miniaturist, for example, Jessie Burton used a real doll’s house but made most of the rest up); 
- Or are you perhaps interweaving a historical narrative with stories set in a different times? 

Whatever it is, you need to get it clear in your mind fairly early on, and I say this as someone who wasted a lot of time because I hadn’t worked out what format I was using for my first novel, The Unseeing, and became hamstrung by the true events and slightly obsessed with the ‘real facts’. 

Finding the right voice

Once you know what you’re writing about, you’ll need to establish the voice in which you’re writing it. Are you going to use quite a modern voice, as Barnes did in Arthur  & George, are you going to use a more archaic voice as Anna-Marie Crowhurst does very successfully in her novel The Illumination of Ursula Flight, or are you going to do what I tend to do, which is use a fairly modern voice but with nods towards how they would have spoken in the relevant era? 

In order to find the right voice, I tend to read a lot of writing of the period and note down particular vocabulary, cadence, sentence structure that I can steal to give a sense of the era, but make the voice my own. Replicating the rhythms of speech and adding in bits of slang can be an effective way of not only defining an era, but also a class system. So in The Story Keeper I replicate some of the rhythms of Highland speech rather than having them all saying ‘Och Awa' an bile yer heid!’, and I’ve included some lovely phrases that I stole from witnesses to a government commission in the 19th century, including ‘a little pimple of a woman’, ‘a Skyeman to my backbone’ and ‘he’s not worth his porridge.’

Beth Underdown (who wrote The Witchfinder’s Sister) says that she spends ‘a few minutes every night, just before going to sleep, reading from the personal writings (the letters, diaries and so on) I’ve collected. Through this habit, I hope that something of the period’s cadence and sentence structure seeps into my characters’ speech, in a way that feels natural and not too laboured.’

If you’re going to use a fairly modern voice, you can intersperse it with letters or journal entries that have a stronger voice, more reminiscent of the era, as Susan Fletcher does brilliantly in Corrag, for example. 

Whichever voice you used, you’ll want to avoid:

a) Anachronisms:  words and phrases which jar, and
b) Ridiculous-sounding archaisms like ‘Zounds!’ and ‘Egad!’ 

The important thing is to give a sense of authenticity and avoid interrupting the flow of the story for the reader. Because of course it's the story that they're really reading it for, not your exact rendering of 15th century speech. 

Here ends part 1 of the Secrets of Historical Fiction. The next section will cover immersing yourself in an era and research. But keep it to yourself.

__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime and Gothic fiction. 

https://annamazzola.com    

https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

Developing Histories by Imogen Robertson

Southwark Park

Over the long dry summer, shadows of Southwark’s past began to emerge in our local park. As lines and curves of yellow grass sketched out former ponds and buildings, it was as if we held a palimpsest up to the light and saw the ghosts of the previous parks under the one we knew. The long summer in fact provided a feast for archeologists as Long Barrows, Tudor Mansions and Bronze Age settlements revealed themselves on the parched landscape. And of course, aerial archeologists don’t need a plane anymore, drones have provided a quicker, cheaper way to get up in the air for a fresh perspective.

This sudden wealth of new evidence about Britain’s deep past is one instance of a larger truth. The study of history, just like the study of science, is a continual process of discovery and reassessment. This year it was the hot weather which provided us with a wealth of new information, but technological advances are constantly adding to what we can know about our ancestors, where they came from, what they ate and how they lived. It’s how we know that the pigs slaughtered at Stonehenge were raised in Scotland, and the Amesbury Archer probably grew up near the Alps. 

Food and Feasting at Stonehenge
© English Heritage (photo by Andre Pattenden)

And Lord knows there’s still plenty to find out. Whenever I start following a rabbity idea into the warren of secondary and primary sources, Old Bailey Archives, British History Online, Parish registers and ordinances, I’m amazed at how little we really know about periods, people, places, that seem to have been thoroughly studied already. Hallie Rubenhold’s upcoming book, The Five, is a case in point. I knew Hallie would bring a fresh eye and perspective to the study of the lives of the women who were murdered by Jack the Ripper, but I assumed that everything which could be known about them would have been studied in some detail already. I was wrong. Hallie’s found an astonishing amount of unexamined material which will, I’m sure, inform fiction and non-fiction writing on Victorian London for years to come. 

Hallie’s work also demonstrates the importance of the changing perspectives from which we view history. Reading histories from the 1950s, I’m struck not so much by the misogyny of some of the authors, though there is plenty of that, but the fact it never even occurs to many of those writers that women might have had significance, let alone intellects and abilities equal to those of the men on whom they built their ‘authoritative' accounts. We are, quite rightly, now asking about how the assumptions of previous generations have filtered out women, working people and people of colour from the cannon. We also find in our Alice in Wonderland journeys, that stories, repeated in books and articles as unquestionable facts can often rest on very questionable sources or interpretation.

Current events shift our perspectives too, when I was studying German history in the early nineties, it was quite common to find historians searching for particular reasons in the societal makeup of Germany to explain the rise of Nazism, the unspoken assumption being it could never have risen / could rise anywhere else. The rise of populism now, makes us reassess that idea, and our look harder at own histories. 

Writing about history in fact or fiction is a constant reminder to be yes, questioning and skeptical, but also empathetic, open-minded and imaginative. To study history and create stories within it is to be curious about past and present, to be challenged and be challenging, to open up, for better or worse, to the wealth of human stories, to judge and to be judged.

This is my last regular post for the history girls, and I give up my slot with much regret. I’ve learned a great deal from the other bloggers here, and very much enjoyed being part of these discussions. I hope I’ll be able to pop in for the Cabinet of Curiosities or other events in the future, and in the meantime I shall continue to applaud all of those writers and researchers who realise an enquiring understanding of the past deepens and enriches our understanding of the present, and of each other. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

Down the Rabbit Hole: Researching for Historical Fiction - By Anna Mazzola

As I regard the enormous mound of books I’ve already read in preparation for my third novel, I find myself wondering: am I doing all this research in order to immerse myself in the world of my characters, or am I just putting off writing the darned book?

I think any writer of historical fiction would agree that research is important. You have to understand the period about which you’re writing, and it’s by evoking a realistic world that you draw the reader into your story. But how much research should you do? Should you research in depth before you begin, or only as you go along? Crucially, how do you avoid getting lost down a research hole?

Different approaches 

An entirely unscientific survey confirms that writers approach their research in completely different ways.

Catherine Hokin says, 'I research masses at the start and then it's ongoing as I realise what I don't know.' Laura Shepherd-Robinson starts by reading one or two books for inspiration while planning and plotting. 'Then I stop researching altogether when I write the first draft, only doing more if I need it for the plot.' Claire Fuller says, 'I never research before I start. Just little bits as I go along.' Meanwhile Ben Johncock advises researching ‘as much as you need, that is: as little as possible’, and Linda Stratmann says, 'I don't decide in advance. I go where it takes me and have fun along the way.'

Many have fallen down the research hole. Rowan Coleman admits to spending an entire day researching 17th century bee keeping for a single paragraph. SD Sykes spent two days investigating 14th century Venetian chimneys, or rather the lack of them. Where did the smoke go? She never found out. Nor did the point make it into her novels. William Sutton read a biography of Henri Dunant and two biographies of Disraeli for a novel that ultimately featured one conversation with Disraeli and nothing at all about Dunant. I myself spent months researching 19th century convict ships for my first novel, The Unseeing, only to throw out almost the entire section that was set on a convict ship.

Even the great Hilary Mantel acknowledges it can be difficult to let go of the facts and move on to the fiction. In her first BBC Reith Lecture she noted, 'I didn’t like making things up, which put me at a disadvantage. In the end I scrambled through to an interim position that satisfied me. I would make up a man’s inner torments, but not, for instance, the colour of his drawing room wallpaper.'

Research, plot, write, research

My own approach is to do quite a large amount of research at the outset in order to spark story ideas, to feel reasonably confident about the world I'm creating, and to be able to map out the broad plot. I want to be sure that my plot and my outline characters are plausible and don't lead to months of rewriting further down the line. (Although of course there are always months of rewriting further down the line).

Then, as I write the terrible first draft, I note down further questions that I need to answer. I try to avoid doing too much research during my writing time, as it's far easier to research than it is to write, and I find that my two hours' writing time has somehow morphed into two hours reading (and tweeting) about some obscure and ultimately irrelevant point.

How to drag yourself out of the research hole

Having fallen down into Wonderland, how do you climb back out? 

• Set a word count or a deadline

To prevent myself from remaining in the research warren I find it useful to set a weekly and daily word count. If I have to write actual words, the amount of time I can spend researching 18th century cooking is limited, albeit glorious. I also determine the cut-off date for my main research, marking the point I must plunge into the novel.

• Remember the purpose of research 

As Emma Darwin points out in her excellent Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction, it's important to remind yourself of the point of research, which is, she says, to ‘fill the larder of your imagination with food and fuel for your storytelling mind.’ The fact that the larder is full doesn’t mean you have to use everything in it. In fact, you won’t use most of it at all.

Tracy Chevalier says 'Think of it this way: the research is not really for your readers, it's for yourself, so that you understand the time and place and people you're writing about. All the reader really needs is to feel confident that you know what you're talking about; they don't need the specifics. So by all means do research and take notes and talk to experts and look at paintings and visit places. Absorb it all. Then set it aside and write the story.’

I think that’s key. It’s very easy to let research become procrastination – to convince yourself that you can’t possibly write your novel unless you know what kind of potato your main character would have been peeling in Part 1, or what kind of horse they were riding and whether they were in fact riding it side-saddle. I know someone whose work on a particular novel stalled entirely due to not being able to work out the laws of property inheritance in 1910. As far as I know, she's still stuck in 1910.

Shun shoehorning 

It's tempting, having spent months researching some particular subject, to find a way of shoehorning it into your novel. Don't. It’s obvious when writers do that and it takes the reader out of the story.

Val McDermid has a rather lovely tip, which is to ‘Only use historical detail when you would use that same detail in a contemporary novel.’ If you wouldn't describe the car someone is driving in a modern novel, why are you expending three paragraphs on the coach and horses in your Victorian mystery?

Trust the imagination of your reader. You don’t have to research for two days what kind of writing bureau your character uses, then spend a page describing it, in order for the reader to see it.

Ultimately, it's the story that they care about. It's for the characters and their journeys, rather than your descriptions of the cornicing, that they're reading the novel. So do the best you can with your research. Then leave it behind and write the darn book.

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her first novel, The Unseeing, was published in 2016. Her second, The Story Keeper, will be out in July. 

https://annamazzola.com/about/

Holes in History, by Gillian Polack

Most people in history are not well-documented. Some of the most interesting people to write fiction about are the people we can’t hear. A peasant from the twelfth century, the younger daughter of a noble who doesn’t believe women need to read and write, a Jew pretending not to be Jewish in order to save their own lives and keep their family lands in sixteenth century Spain, a child in fourth century Rome. I could give you pages and pages of examples.

The writer has a special task when we bring these people into a novel. These people are not in historical sources, or we look at the wrong historical sources to find them (traditional sources, perhaps, or modern analyses when they're still caged inside primary sources). When we write about them, we don’t have their voices. And yet we still want to hear them. 

We write what we can, drawing on what we know about people and creating a person of that type to fill that hole. This is one of the subjects I have been working on recently. My research goal is to understand what we draw on to fill those holes. When we break through the silence to give a young Jewish girl (pretending to be Catholic) in seventeenth century Latin America a voice through a novel, I like to know how we do it.

If this were an academic article, I’d analyse case studies of what writers do for at least eight thousand words. (I’m full of things I won’t do, today.) This piece is not an academic study. Also, I’m not where I need to be with my research yet, which means I can’t give you a simple case study to explain things This means I need to do something quite different to explain the holes and what we do with them.

Deep analysis and big studies can wait. We need to start talking now. The way we fill those holes shows why: the history we put into fiction is important. What we say about the past helps us live in the present. Right now, this is trickier than it’s been in years. This means that the history in our fiction is terribly, terribly important.

Why is this so critical to understand?

One of my ongoing concerns is how we carry biases with us. If we don’t know how we read novels, or a bit about the methods we use to encode culture within them, we end up in a place where, despite being wonderful human beings, we’re supporting bigotry and prejudice. Culturally, we’re doing this. Writers and readers are using stories that leave other people out in ways that can hurt them. And yet we’re not trying to hurt anyone.

I haven’t see analyses of the levels of racism and bigotry in the writing/reading community, but my experience of it is that we’re a set of communities that care about people. We're not writing our fiction in order to hurt anyone. Many of us are writing it as socially-aware people working towards a better world. What we’re doing is interpreting the past from certain directions and not realising the implications of this.

One of the easiest ways of seeing this in operation in a novel is to look for female characters. Count the number of female characters who have important parts in that novel.

Or count the number of characters of particular religious background . Judaism is the simplest to see in this instance: many writers don’t have Jewish characters in novels set in periods and places where there would be Jewish people. 

Thirteenth century Montpellier had Jews... and a mikvah.

Gender, religion, race – there are so many things one can check. There’s been an outcry on the web about the latter. So many people are pointing out that English history is not all white, for instance, and that Alexandre Dumas was a person of colour. Some of these issues are on the map, therefore, and we’re beginning to look at them.

I say ‘beginning’ because the moment we move into what we think of as pure history that describes a classic incident or Great People, we (writers) tend to fall out of this tree of self-realisation.

Good intent is not sufficient. My second most popular free article of all time is one I wrote about Neil Gaiman’s work. Gaiman, as a human being, is supportive of people from many backgrounds and cares about feminism. He unintentionally devised a universe of gods for American Gods that is problematic for women.

This and the awareness that many writers have of some of the issues also shows that we’re moving to a better vantage point to see what’s happening. We beginning to change the ground rules and allow more women in, more people of colour, more people of backgrounds who existed historically and who somehow miss being put in traditional fiction from a period. 

Only Christian males? This is the right place  to set a historical novel in. This region otherwise has women, Jews and much more.

But… You knew there was going to be a but, didn’t you?

We still have tools we use to write these new characters into novels. We will always have tools to write anything into novels. And we don’t yet know the effect of those tools.

I was alerted to this many, many years ago through the tools actors bring to their parts. I discovered in “Oliver!” almost all the interpretations of Fagin were of Jews with Eastern European accents. Fagin was based on Isaac ‘Ikey' Solomon, who would have had a London accent. If he had been born elsewhere, then his accent would have reflected that, certainly, but he wasn’t. He was born in London. Giving him an accent that couldn’t possibly be his own is part of the ‘othering’ of Jews, someone saying “He was different to other Londoners – let’s give him an accent to show this. What’s the accent that shows Jewish difference? Ah, I know.”

That particular tool used by some writers to bring history into their fiction is finding ‘common knowledge’ about a people or gender and applying it, whether or not it fits that particular  case. This common knowledge is partly stereotype, for that’s what we draw on when we haven’t focussed on a subject. Fagin’s accent. Making history male. Both of these are stereotyping.

Another thing we draw on when we haven’t focussed on a subject is the culture we live in. In a way, calling on stereotypes is just that, but it’s also possible to call on positive attributes and give them to a character. Turning female characters into American teenagers, for instance, or turning children into characters that reflect our own upbringing. When they’re quiet at table, what sorts of subjects they study and what methods they use to study. 

When I teach this, I explain that we’re missing a key element that some students used to gain basic literacy in Early Modern England. Some instructors served delicacies in letter form (some of the moulds survive) to young students. This fuelled a student’s approach to basic literacy and it also fuels the sentiment of those who aren’t taught. The servant boy watching at the door never gets to taste a thing, but carries all the food back and forwards. Will never get to taste a thing, for he’s among the unlearned classes. 

This different experience due to class might include eating different food at the dinner table on special occasions, and even having a different everyday dinner table eventually, but in the sixteenth century most English families treated their servants as extended family. They were often children in status and asked permission to do this or that, so not eating those letters is handy way of overcoming modern views of them and giving them more accurate lives.

This is what I’m working on now. Normally I wait until I’m much further in my research before discussing a subject. Writers have been asking me what they do in their work (the unintentional stereotyping and the drawing on their own culture to fill gaps) and I’ve been teaching it. This means it’s more than time I give you these examples. It’s only the beginning, but it’s an important subject to talk about.

If you want more of this and you live in England, you’re luckier than I am, for there’s a conference. It discusses a whole order of things related to history in fiction. It may or may not cover the work I’ve talked about here, but it will help writers see how other people see their work (which is a big part of writing better fiction) and it will help give contexts for both fiction and history. You can find more here. 

For the rest of us, there is this blog, and other online places. None of us have to work alone.

How we talk about history - Gillian Polack

Last month you had a light post. This month you have a more solid one. This is because I want to talk about the effects the effects of the worlds writers create. I was in England for a few days at the end of October. It was entirely unexpected, and this was the reason I forgot half my blogpost. I took a ten thousand mile return trip with only a few days warning and quite a few things were affected by it.

The English branch of my family has been in Australia since the middle of the nineteenth century. This means that my relationship with England is mostly through literature and history. Given I’m a writer and also an historian (an historian of England, to boot) it’s not a simple relationship, but it’s not the same relationship that locals have. I noticed this when I walked through the streets of Exeter and when I talked to people at the university. As an Australian, I’m a favoured visitor, but I’m definitely not a local.

Exeter, autumn, 2017 picture: Gillian Polack

I’m giving you pictures I took in Exeter to remind you of this, for it’s important. Very important.

I teach writers how to write about people who come from different cultural backgrounds to themselves. Many writers have no idea how to do this. They write everything from their own viewpoint, as if another viewpoint is impossible to tell a novel from. 

One thing I love about History Girls and why I am delighted to be writing for them is that these writers are aware of who they are. They write in a complex world. This means they’re less likely to fall back on stereotypes due to lazy thinking. 

Exeter's Halloween 2017, picture: Gillian Polack

All fiction writers use stereotypes and tropes. It’s essential to make a novel work. The problem is when we use them unthinkingly. This is why I have such respect for writers who write about others with that bit of care. 

The thing about historical fiction is that it’s ALL about others. We bring the past into the present in a very personal way. We’re bring the lives of others into our lives. This is why respect is so important. 

Those we write about are dead: they can’t argue back. I wanted to argue with a writer all this afternoon, for she wrote Jews into her fiction in a negative way, as if there is no good in our existence. She’s still around and maybe, one day, I’ll get that discussion. I can’t ask any medieval Jews how they feel about work that associates them with the blood libel, for they’re gone.

‘Respect’ doesn’t necessarily mean being nice. It means understanding. It means taking intellectual and emotional steps and working past stereotypes and past hate and past tradition and finding out as much as we can about the real person.

Respect is complicated, Exeter 2017 picture: Gillian Polack

How does this apply to English history? 

I want to talk about two key points here.

First, England is one of the most written-about places in historical fiction, and certain periods are written about more than others. Regency England, Victorian England, the Middle Ages: these all have their own character for us. This character doesn’t come from the actual places and times, but from the number of novels written about them. All the themes and character types are brought together in our minds and create a fictional England.

The England of our dreams picture: Gillian Polack

This is a subject that’s been really well studied for Regency England in particular. Scholars have traced the differences between the actual England of that time and the influence of Georgette Heyer in creating the way we think about these things fictionally. 

I’m one of a number of Medieval historians who work on understanding these things for the Middle Ages. I’m also part of a number of historians who spend time teaching writers how to look beyond the fictional view and to see the people hidden beneath the stories and stereotypes. This is why The Middle Ages Unlocked exists. Writers said to me “We like it that you want us to think harder and do more research, but it isn’t easy – write us a reference book.” Katrin Kania and I did that. That was a much earlier stage in a conversation between historians, readers and writers that will probably last my whole life.

The stage I’m at now is a more troublesome one. 

When I teach world building to writers, I teach them how to think about and research the world for their novel. Traditionally, world building is a subject taught to writers who use fantastical worlds: science fiction and fantasy, for the most part. I teach it to all writers. Novelists who are setting a story in their own street are not actually setting it in the precise world they live in. We write fiction, after all. I use world building techniques as tools to help writers sort this out and create a better story.

Many writers who use history in their fiction tend to ‘own’ the history. They’ve built it for their novel, with a great deal of heart and a truckload of work. This is not a problem if they see it as building a world for their novel, for they’re owning the history for the world of their novel. It can be close to us, but it isn’t us. It can be based on real history, but it’s not the same thing. 

When they say it’s real history, a writer claims deep and special insights into the lives of others. Some of these claims are genuine: they share their characters with us. They don’t share all interpretations of historical people, however, only their own. 

Going back to where I began, this is important in another way, which is my second point. When I or someone else from outside England write about England, when any of us write about a place and time that’s not our own, we need to remember that our special ownership, as writers, doesn't have a more important cultural place than the lives of people who live there. 

Real people lie in our dream places   picture: Gillian Polack

If I were to write a story of Exeter or even a history of Exeter, I’d be writing it as an outsider. This isn’t actually a problem. Outsiders have special insights. Our responsibility is to remember that those who live in a country are connected more strongly than we are. That we write about their home. 

Even our special insights should never be permitted to eradicate their relationship and understanding of their own homeland. 

We entertain. We enrich. We create. But we should do all this with respect.