The Books We Read, by Gillian Polack

This weekend reminded me that big events, especially tragic ones, can touch our lives and change our lives. When they appear in fiction, we have feelings about them. The reason I don’t read a lot of fiction set in Europe during World War II is because when I was six, I realised that a pile of corpses in a picture were not only human beings, but could well have included cousins. I had to ask my parents about the pictures, even though I knew full well they’d not sugarcoat it and they said “Yes, that’s right,” and sat me down and talked me through the Holocaust and some of the things it meant for me. When I read Anne Frank’s diary as an early teen, I was ready.

Why did I ask my parents and not my parents’ friends, some of whom were far more up on history and would have been able to explain things more gently? Melbourne at that time had one of the highest number of Holocaust refugees in the world. I was taught not to ask any of my parents’ friends about their childhoods or about modern history. 

This is one of the historical events that changed my life, even though it happened before I was born. I knew from when I was a child that people would hate me because I was Jewish and that I had to be patient with them, because it was something they’d inherited without question and I was able to question. That it was my responsibility to handle the impossible. I don’t always handle it well, but that’s a different matter.

Today I found out how many parents of Jewish children are having to explain to their children this week, “It’s not safe.” This is what I was told and it hurts to hear any child having to endure it. I’ve heard it said to children whose parents endured the Vietnam War, the Cambodian… this is an aspect of most wars and of far too much bigotry. There are groups who are not respected and who are more likely to be targeted or to be casualties. There are some books, then, we can’t read because of how the shape of history affects us. Fiction is not neutral in our lives.

The hurt can help us find out what kind of approach the fiction writer takes to their work and help us work out of this is a book we should read or not. It can also tell us a lot about the writer and what sort of cultural baggage they carry. 

My research project includes many components and one is to find out how Jews are depicted in historical fantasy. I started the Jewish element two years ago because I could see the rise in hate and I wanted to understand how our fiction could be part of a culture that supports hate. It was research I would have been doing in any case, but it’s slow because I keep taking a break from it. My research is emotionally tough. It tells me over and over, “Your parents were right – you’re not safe.” Not because the writers themselves are going to hurt me. I know many writers and they are good human beings. The problem is that one doesn't have to be a bad human being to unintentionally support the cultural narrative of those who do the hurting.

How does this work?

Let me say up front, that historical fiction is quite different in this to historical fantasy, but there’s overlap. Also, that there are different patterns entirely when the work is by a Jewish writer. Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, for instance, breaks the rules in a glorious way.

The first thing I discovered was that, for most historical fantasy, Jews are seldom allowed to be core characters. When there are central Jewish characters (CJ Sansom’s world, for instance) they do a certain amount of duty or suffer a certain amount before they’re allowed to come forward or they fit a set of stereotypes. Jews can be moneylenders or criminals or spies, for instance (Eric Flint’s work makes one of the great Jewish families subversive in this way). Secret power is given to Jews in fiction (unintentionally supporting the Jewish conspiracy fiction), but actual power is not.

What did this mean to me when the news about Squirrel Hill broke on Saturday? What does it mean to the parents of the children who are scared? It means that the vast majority of strong models (strong characters appearing across fiction ie not secondary characters only, not contained to a tony field) are within noels written by Jewish writers. Jewish readers do not see acceptance of who we actually are in historical fantasy. We see stereotypes. Sometimes they’re fascinating attempts to break stereotypes: Naomi Novik’s new novel about a moneylending family is this. But it fails on the safety test, because her idea of moneylending is so far removed from what I know about real lives in small towns. 

One of the powers of historical fiction (fantastical, realistic , somewhere in between or something else entirely) is that emotional link between events we know or that touch us and the reading we do. When bias emerges within story, however unintentionally, we, as writers, are reinforcing the situation that has parents telling their children, “Don’t tell anyone you’re Jewish – it’s not safe.”

This applies to all the core characters in fiction. Are there other minority groups who would have been there in that place at that time (England after the Crusades was not as white as most fiction depicts it)? Are there women? Are there people with disabilities? 

The question is not whether every single novel we read has characters that come from a range of backgrounds. The novel has to work as a novel and it ought to reflect the historical background.

I said this to a group of writers last year and one said, “I’m writing about Richard I – I can keep it white and male and able-bodied because that was who he was and who he mixed with.” A novel about the private life of Richard I may have Jewish characters and someone he knew may well have been murdered at his coronation – that’s within the boundaries of likelihood. A friend of his might have damaged themselves due to archery (for archery is hard on the body and too much archery can hurt. There would certainly be women in his life, too. Just because Richard and his bet friends wee white and male and able-bodied doesn't mean that every single person he mixed with was the same.

Leaving out all these people is a choice the author makes. 

Did Richard ever meet anyone with dark skin? How could he not, when he went to the Middle East on crusade? He was in a place where there was big international trade: not everyone was White European and not everyone was Christian. 

Authors choose what we want in our fiction and those choices reflect who we are. Because of that picture when I was six, I try to include major characters who are Jewish in over half my novels. I want people reading my fiction to know that those people who have told me (as some have), “The only good Jew is a dead Jew” are creating their own fiction, and that there are other stories one can tell.

That’s the thing. It’s not the choices made for a specific book that create our culture. It’s how all the books in a culture fit together. It’s not having everyone from a single background in one or two novels, it’s applying those restrictions to all novels. It's how all the books we read create material which we use to interpret our own lives.

There’s a link between the narrowness of the depiction of characters from a minority background and how that minority is treated in real life. Fagin was based on a real person. Ikey Solomon was depicted as a quite different person in fiction to what he was in real life. Dickens used stereotypes to create Fagin and every time “Oliver!” is shown around me, I can hear the questions and the tensions ramp up a notch.

Writer choices are critical components in how we experience culture and how we interpret our worlds and live our lives.

I didn’t intend to write a polemic. I feel as if I ought to apologise. Maybe I should do something one step better than an apology, though.

If you have favourite historical fantasy that has key characters who aren’t villains from any of those backgrounds (minority religion, minority race, women, has disabilities or mental health problems) please write a comment here telling us about them or send me a note through twitter of Facebook. If the list becomes long enough (I can dream!) I’ll chase down more detail and share it with you all. Let me start the ball rolling with one of my favourite fiction characters: Benjamin January, in a series about him by Barbara Hambly.

Note: I'm adding a note because Google gets into a loop and won't let me answer questions or reply to comments directly.

First, Jewish characters don't have to be 'of faith'. Judaism doen't generally explain religion in the way Christianity does, for one thing. They can be secular, for another or they can be somewhere in between: I have a friend who lives on Squirrel Hill and, fortunately for me, only goes to synagogue on the big days). They can be many and varied in nature and character and language. This kind of research is basic for any novel for any character. When I teach noel-writing, part of it is teaching research and characterisation. The question of how well it's done reflects on the writer, therefore, and affects the quality of the novel.

If writers consistently choose negative stereotypes for a specific culture/religion/race/gender then that's a very particular type of homework to not do because it means the writer is taking a position that sharing the negative stereotypes is less of a problem than doing enough research to create more interesting and diverse characters. When negative stereotypes lead readers in the same direction in novel after novel they can hurt the real-world people being written about. I am told so often that a person knows about Australian Jews because of Fagin. I was even called Fagin in primary school in the same year I was personally accused of killing Christ. Fiction when all gathered together creates cultural frameworks. One book doesn't cause a framework, but when most books in a genre fit into a pattern, then it presents us with cultural bias and has the potential to hurt people. Or not. Research makes a difference and the choices a writer takes can make a difference.

Mrs Maisel sounds delightful. When I have time (not for a while, alas) I'll check her out.

Historical Fiction and Historical Fantasy: A Question of Genres by Catherine Hokin

This is a slightly different blog this month, a picking-all-your-brains exercise if you will. I've been asked to be the historical fiction voice in a discussion about the differences/overlaps and, who knows, clashing points between historical fiction and historical fantasy and I'd love your help. Actually I'm desperate.

 Tom Gauld, The New Yorker 2016

Trying to get an historical novelist to pinpoint  the bit of this widespread genre we all write in can feel a bit like a trip to the pick and mix counter. As authors we want to sell our books so the temptation is to try and slot our work into as many sectors as possible - it's historical yes, but it's also got a crime and a bit of a romance and it's got these great sweeping themes of loss and guilt and... Booksellers and publishers also want to sell books (not necessarily the same ones as us but that's a different post). They, however, take the opposite approach, and want neat pigeonholes which signpost readers in a clear direction. To keep them happy, your historical crime-busting romance needs to pick one category and stay there.

The point is that the genre historical fiction covers, and doesn't cover (bear with me) a lot of ground. Obviously the story has to be set in the past but even that is open to interpretation - the period has to be fifty years ago or more according to the Historical Writers' Association but only thirty for the Historical Novel Society. However, even if a novel fits that criteria, it may not be counted as historical. Joanna Cannon's The Trouble With Goats and Sheep is set in the 1970s and therefore, by the HNS definition, is an historical novel. It wasn't marketed that way but to anyone under 35 it's evocation of the period would surely feel that way. So perhaps it's a question of perspective, or life lived. Author Emma Darwin has talked about a period passing out of adult living memory for it to be counted as historical. She also suggests we consider historical novels as being a marker of historical change, not in the sense of  there being different "haircuts and menus" but "hearts and minds." There is also the question of what "counts" in our examining of the past. For some commentators, historical novels must deal with real events and real people, with all the problems of privilege this brings. For others it is the previously unheard voices that need to be brought to light. 

 The Daily Snooze

Add up all that and then throw the word literary into the mix and the whole thing gets even more complicated - Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall was definitely historical but also, according to those who decide such things, definitely literary. A category Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl, which was a huge commercial hit, would never find itself slotted into. And should we even care?

So, if defining historical fiction is complicated, what about historical fantasy? The accepted definition (yes, Wikipedia but I also asked some people who know) is the addition to an historically-based (and Earth-based) story of an element which comes from outside reality - vampires, werewolves, dragons and magic, that kind of thing. All very straightforward: something like Jane Eyre and Zombies is an obvious fit, as is Game of Thrones (let's not even talk about the people who don't believe that statement). But what about Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? Or stories that cross into Arthurian myths or Celtic legends and relate them to actual events? Where do the boundaries start to blur? What about time-slip novels? Or novels set in a period when things we can now explain through science were considered as witchcraft or magic? If a medieval character firmly believes an illness or misfortune was caused by a demon and the novel follows this line of thought through, is that historical fantasy or historical realism? What about if your preacher sees angels? Or your healer sees ghosts? And where oh where do we put Lincoln in the Bardo? Real events, real people, contemporary texts quoted - and a whole cast of ghosts. Is that where we throw in the towel and just call it literary?

Readers, my head is exploding which I think puts me firmly into the fantasy genre. While I go off and harness a dragon, please send me your thoughts.

Personal Names in Historical Fiction - Katherine Langrish

'Fair Rosamund' by John William Waterhouse

Here, in the imagination of John Waterhouse, is the Fair Rosamund, leaning out of a rose-bedecked tower window, longing for her lover King Henry II while her cruel rival and soon-to-be-murderer Queen Eleanor peers at her from behind the arras. Most of this is pure fiction. The reason I'm depicting her here is that back in the 12th century 'Rosamund' was an extremely unusual given name. It was possibly unique to this particular woman and was rare throughout the entire medieval period, probably because rosa munda (pure rose) and rosa mundi (rose of the world) were epithets reserved for the Virgin Mary.

One of my pet bug-bears about historical novels set in ‘medieval times' is when authors call their characters by names which are unhistorical for the century in which the story is set: after all, the term 'medieval' covers about half of a millenium during which an awful lot of changes in fashion occurred. Fantasies (I'm sorry to say) are some of the worst offenders, perhaps because a vague medieval ambiance is all the author really wants. This is fine if the story is set in some fantasy-land or fairyland in which dragons dwell, where wicked knights in black plate-armour inhabit grim stone castles at one end of the village, fair damsels live in rose-smothered cottages at the other, honest peasants toil in the fields somewhere in the middle, and the whole is surrounded by darksome woods. But – but! – if you start telling me the wicked knights are Normans and the peasants and the heroine are Saxons, and if you set the story ‘just after the Norman Conquest’, then I feel you, the author, ought to get a grip and do your best to present me with a reasonably accurate picture of the time.

The period of active Saxon rebellion against the Norman invaders lasted till about 1070: after that, any widespread popular resentment, if indeed it existed, was probably short-lived. True, the Normans displaced or eliminated most of the Saxon nobility, but for the peasants, free or unfree, life did not change very much. So in a novel set during the century after 1066, the wicked knight will be wearing chain-mail, not plate armour. Unless he is very important indeed he will live not in a stone castle but in a wooden fort on a mound surrounded by a stockade (as the Montgomery lords did at Hen Gomen, not building their stone castle until 1223). And though the peasants will certainly still be toiling in the fields, the fair damsel’s cottage will have no red roses around the door, since cultivated roses would have been a hugely expensive rarity. Moreover, if she’s a Saxon she ought to be called something like Aelfthryth or Eadburh or Edith – not Mary or Alison, names which won't appear for about another two hundred years. If the heroine is a Norman lady you may name her Rose so long as you spell it Roheis, Rothais or Roesia: but be aware that after the 12th century the name goes out of use for about seven hundred years. 

Here, for the benefit of all of us, is a masterclass from Lord Raglan (1885-1964) in nomenclature for the early medieval period. “Let us start with the Saxons,” he begins,

and note without surprise that they were called by Saxon names. Examples of such names may be found in any history – Godwin, Stigand, Siward, Leofric.  The Saxons were not called William, Walter or Robert, because these were Norman-French names which were introduced into England by the Normans. A pre-Conquest Saxon would be no more likely to be called by a Norman-French name than a modern Englishman to be called Marcel or Gaston.

So much for the Christian names of the Saxons; now to surnames. The Saxons had no surnames. A Godric might be referred to as ‘the timberer’ or ‘the son of Guthlac’, but these were not his names; whether he was earl or churl he had one name, and one name only. This single name was never a place name. Like the Scandinavians, Irish and Welsh, the Saxons never used place-names as personal names. It is clear then that when a Saxon ‘ancestor’ is claimed to have been called Bertram Ashburnham or William Pewse, he must be a fake, since no Saxon was ever called Bertram or Ashburnham or William or Pewse. 

The case of the Normans is different. During their residence in France the Normans had almost completely dropped their Norse names, and had adopted such Frankish names as Richard, Hugh and Baldwin. William [the Conqueror’s] army contained many Frenchmen and Flemings, as well as Normans, but their names were much the same. There was also a contingent of Bretons, who had some names of their own. Of these, Alan was the commonest, though the ancestor of the FitzAlans ... did not come over till the next century. 

In that century [the 12^th] a few Biblical names began to creep in, probably under the influence of the Crusades [the First Crusade began in 1095]; previously such names as John and Thomas are not found among either Normans or Saxons.

Unlike the Saxons, the Normans had surnames, but before about 1150 these were personal and not hereditary. William, son of Hugh and lord of Dinard, would be called William FitzHugh and William de Dinard, or both. His son would be called Richard FitzWilliam, and would be called Richard de Dinard only if he owned it. If we find Robert de Dinard succeeding Richard de Dinard, it by no means follows that they were relatives; Richard might have sold, or died without heirs, or been dispossessed.

About 1400 place-names began to be borne as surnames without ‘de’ or ‘of’ before them, and it was then, and not till then, that it became possible for men to be called Bertram Ashburnham or William Pewse. 

From ‘The Hero’ by Lord Raglam, 1936, Ch 2

And what about women? Well, ‘the most popular names’ for the 12^th century look quite unusual to us now. They include (see this list) Edith, Aethelflaete, Alfgyth, Burwenna, Botilda, Annora, Rikilda, Cecily, Godeva, Ingrid... all much more common than ‘Rosamond’ or ‘Rosmunda’ which turns up only three times between 1206 and 1282. Of course there were unusual names in every century. I really adore the wonderful Dayluue or ‘Daylove’ [OE *Dæglufu], which also turns up three times.

In the 13^th century (see here) Matilda comes top of the list, followed by Alice, Agnes or Agneta, Edith, Emma, Margaret, Mabel, Alviva, Isabella or Ysabel, Christiana and Juliana. Most of these are still common in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, but Joan or Johana now joins the list, as do Katherine and Elizabeth. 

By the 16^th century (see here) Elizabeth seems most popular, along – in diminishing order – with Margaret, Jane, Agnes, Isabel, Anne, Alice, Katherine, Jennet, Elinor, Margery, Mary, Dorothy, Ellen, Barbara and Susanna. 

 

Returning briefly to the Fair Rosamund: she was born circa 1148 at Clifford Castle in Herefordshire, became Henry II's mistress probably around 1166, and died in 1176, not yet thirty. Her wikipedia entry calls her Rosamond Clifford, but as Raglan points out, that wouldn't have been how she was known during her life. She was Rosamund, daughter of Walter FitzRichard (aka Walter de Clifford). Her mother was Margaret. And she had two sisters, Lucy and Amice. 

Rosamund, Lucy and Amice: Pure Rose, Light, and Friendship... I wonder which parent it was who chose such fancy names for their three beautiful daughters? 

Picture credits

Fair Rosamund by Waterhouse, Wikimedia Commons 

Fair Rosamund by Dante Gabriel  Rossetti, Wikimedia Commons

An interview with Stephanie Burgis, by Y S Lee

Stephanie Burgis’s Masks and Shadows (Pyr Books) is a bold historical fantasy set in Hungary, 1779, at the height of the Habsburg monarchy. Featuring opera, alchemy, political intrigue and “the most famous castrato in Europe” as its romantic hero, it’s an astonishing, richly detailed novel. As both a musician and a music historian, Burgis writes about the power of music with unusual freshness and subtlety. She also has a keen eye for social and cultural detail. And, as fans of her middle-grade Kat, Incorrigible trilogy might expect, there’s a difficult and compelling sibling relationship at the heart of the story.

Masks and Shadows stayed with me long after I finished it and I’m so eager to read its companion novel, Congress of Secrets, to be published this November (also by Pyr Books). Steph has kindly agreed to answer a few questions for us here.

YSL: So, the Habsburgs! And the astonishing rococo confection of Eszterháza Palace! What first drew you to this time and place?

SB: It all started with my love for late-18th-century opera. Vienna was seen as a cultural capital of Europe – but Joseph Haydn, one of the two legendary composers of the era (along with Mozart) only ever got to visit Vienna in the winters. He spent most of his life stuck in the middle of the Hungarian countryside, in his employer Prince Nikolaus’s palace, Eszterháza. He and Mozart form a really interesting contrast to each other, because Mozart was the first famous composer to strike out on his own, move to Vienna and try to support himself as a capital-A Artist - whereas Haydn was a loyal retainer to the Esterházys for almost all of his life. He lived where they lived and composed what they wanted him to compose. He wasn’t even allowed to sell his music elsewhere without their permission – and since he wrote his operas to suit Nikolaus’s particular taste, they didn’t follow all of the expected formulas for the operas performed in the theaters in Vienna.

Haydn loved the rich musical life of the capital, which he only got to experience during Prince Nikolaus’s annual visits – but his cultural isolation for most of the year led to the development of a really interesting and original musical style on his part, and Eszterháza became famous for the glorious music performed there. His operas are gorgeous and idiosyncratic, and his music was part of what drew visitors to Eszterháza from all over Europe.

I wrote my M.A. thesis on Haydn’s opera Armida, and I spent three years researching a PhD on opera and politics in Vienna and Eszterháza between 1765-90. At the end of the three years, I only had half of a thesis written…but I did have a whole first draft of Masks and Shadows! So the research turned out to be useful after all. ;)

YSL: You describe your hero, Carlo Morelli, in the clearest possible terms: a musico with a “high, sweet tone of… voice”. Other characters see him as a “freak”, his voice “alien”, his face “disturbingly feminine”. While he’s also brilliant, compassionate, good-looking and rich, making him the romantic hero is still a radical - and possibly divisive - move. Can you tell us about this decision? And how have readers received Carlo as a hero?

SB: The first time that a draft of this novel was sent out on submission, back in 2005, it was taken to Acquisitions meetings multiple times only to be shot down by marketing departments who said they didn’t know how to market a romantic fantasy where the hero was a castrato. Luckily, times have changed, and by the next time it went on submission, in 2014, people were much more receptive to that idea. Whew! (And I love my publicist at Pyr Books!)

Part of my inspiration for this book actually came when I was reading about how divisive the idea of castrati romances were in eighteenth-century Europe. The castrati were famous for their sex lives as well as their voices, having tumultuous romantic affairs with both women and men, but when they actually fell seriously in love and wanted to get married, it became a much more provocative social issue. The question of whether castrati should be allowed to marry was a hotly debated issue that went to court again and again throughout the century - and which brought up a lot of the same arguments that would return in the late 20th- and early 21st-centuries over the issue of gay marriage.

The Catholic church took the stance that castrati could not be allowed to marry because they could not physically father children (the only “true purpose” for marriage); the Church of England initially said that they could legally marry, but then in a landmark case near the end of the century, they annulled a castrato’s marriage (against his will) because they said it could never have been a “real” marriage anyway.

Again and again, though, women and castrati did fall in love and want to marry, and as I read about those court cases, I started imagining my own characters…who of course are officially the most unsuitable match possible for each other…but who are perfect for each other anyway!

YSL: Joseph Haydn and Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy are significant characters in Masks and Shadows. That takes some nerve! How do you reconcile the authorial desire for maximum drama with your historian’s duty to real figures?

SB: It can be nerve-wracking! What really helped in this case was that I’d spent so many years reading about Haydn and reading his letters that I had a very vivid sense of him as a person – I felt very confident in imagining how he would have reacted to all the situations in my novel. And Prince Nikolaus cut such a dramatic figure in real life, it wasn’t necessary to add much for the sake of fiction!

Stephanie Burgis, author of Masks and Shadows

YSL: You treat servant characters with the same interest and dignity as the Empress of Austria, and at least two of your characters, Carlo and Anna, threaten the entrenched social hierarchy in complex – and potentially revolutionary – ways. At one point, even the conventional and dutiful heroine, Charlotte, utters something so offensively democratic that she’s forced to flee the room. What shaped your interest in social mobility and radical (for the time) political ideas?

SB: The late eighteenth century is a fascinating time because on the one hand, it was the era of the Enlightenment, when philosophers were openly debating the natural rights of all men, regardless of birth; but on the other hand, it was still a rigidly class-based and hierarchical society. I’ve always been fascinated by the glittering history of aristocratic Europe – while also being perfectly aware that if I had been alive myself in any of those earlier time periods, I would have been the one scrubbing the ballroom floors rather than dancing in glamorous outfits!

As far as I know, there’s not a single upper-crust ancestor in my family history, whereas there were a lot of poor farmers, tailors, etc. The wealthiest ancestors I know of were my Jewish-Ukrainian ancestors, who had to flee the Ukraine in the early 20th century in the wake of a vicious set of pogroms. By the time they’d reached America, all of their money had been spent on their escape – and my great-grandfather (the child of the family) ended up becoming a founding member of the United Auto Workers union. So I grew up hearing stories of the battles they fought for reasonable working hours, etc. – and when I started researching those glittering 18th-century upper-class lifestyles, it was natural for me to be just as interested in the servants who made it all possible!
 
YSL: While we’re talking about Anna, a maid who becomes an opera singer: is hers a story lifted from history? It sounds like a fairy tale but I desperately want it to be true!

SB: I’m afraid her story wasn’t lifted from history! But it was a plausible story in that particular situation. Opera singers often came from families of professional musicians, but that wasn’t always the case, and many of them did have interesting and unusual origin stories.

YSL: I love that, in a time of heavily powdered hair, the revelation of someone’s hair colour becomes an intimate detail. The clothing, too, is remarkable – the skirts are immense and stiffly starched (Charlotte taps her finger against hers, at one point). Was it tricky plotting action scenes while respecting the limits of women’s fashion?

SB: It really was! Aristocratic women’s skirts were so wide at this point that they presented real challenges for choreography especially at the climax of the novel. They were, of course, gorgeous in a very stylized way – but I had a lot of fun writing the scene where Anna (the maid-turned-opera singer) has her first experience of wearing a noblewoman’s outfit as the costume for one of her operatic roles. She grew up as a servant, so of course she saw all the (massive) advantages that came with aristocratic birth – but then, her clothes at least allowed her the freedom to move (so that she could get her work done)! Clearly, any sensible person would choose the safer and far more privileged life of a noblewoman over that of an overworked and underpaid maidservant, but it’s still a fun moment to bring out that trade-off.

YSL: Your Kat, Incorrigible trilogy (for children), features such warm, delightful sibling relationships. But in Masks and Shadows, the idea of family becomes deeply sinister: parents use their children as political tokens, husbands are either impotent or despotic, and sisters find themselves locked in childhood roles that can only damage them as adults. The novel’s one mutually caring couple exists outside the legal definition of family. How did this reversal come about?

SB: Honestly, most of those relationships in Masks and Shadows are taken directly from the historical record. Prince Nikolaus really did relegate his wife to the shadows in their own palace (even though he refused to allow her to move away from it) while he ruled with his young mistress by his side; his mistress really was married, and her husband was paid off by Nikolaus. (We know very little about the real mistress and her husband – whenever Haydn referred to the mistress in his letters, he did it in code, because discretion was extremely important for a loyal servant - but historians have picked out those details.) My aristocratic heroine, Charlotte, is a fictional character – but aristocratic young women were generally married off for dynastic reasons, and since they were raised by an army of servants and only tended to see their parents for short, controlled visits, it’s not surprising that they often didn’t have very close, loving relationships.

Of course, Charlotte’s family goes beyond that norm, which is part of how she and her sister Sophie developed their particular relationship dynamics – Charlotte was her sister’s protector during their early years, which helped save both of them at the time, but which hasn’t led to an entirely healthy relationship as adults.

On a more metaphorical level, this book is very much about the roles that people were (and are) expected to perform in real life just as much as in opera – and it was important to me to show Charlotte being pushed into finally questioning those roles and the rules she’s grown up with. (Her epiphanies are also quite plausible within that time period – there were a number of really interesting 18th-century noblewomen who notoriously flouted their families to run off with “unsuitable” matches of one type or another!)

YSL: Could you leave us with a quotation that encapsulates the flavor of Masks and Shadows?

SB: Of course! I like this one from Carlo’s point-of-view, at the end of his first scene as he rides through the front gates of Eszterháza:

“The most notorious alchemist in Europe and a probable Prussian spy rode in the carriage with him.

“This might well be an interesting visit, after all.” 

 YSL: Of course, Carlo's visit is much more than merely "interesting"...

Thank you so much, Steph, for talking with us about the intricacies and pleasures of writing historical fiction. And congratulations on the achievement that is Masks and Shadows!

---
Stephanie Burgis grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, but now lives in Wales with her husband and two sons, surrounded by mountains, castles and coffee shops. She has published over thirty short stories for adults and teens, as well as an MG Regency fantasy trilogy, known in the U.S. as the Kat, Incorrigible series and in the U.K. as The Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson. Her first two historical fantasy novels for adults, Masks and Shadows and Congress of Secrets, will be published by Pyr Books in 2016, and her next MG fantasy series will be published by Bloomsbury Books, beginning with The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart in 2017.

Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries/Agency novels, published in the UK by Walker Books and in North America by Candlewick Press. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

In Conversation with Alma Alexander, by Gillian Polack

Today I have a guest. Alma Alexander is a US fantasy writer. She has a deep and abiding love of history. I thought it might be interesting to have a conversation with her instead of the regular kind of post.

Alma Alexander, from her author page

Gillian: I've been working on how writers use history in their fiction recently. In your new novel, Empress, you use your historical knowledge in quite a particular way. Maybe we could start off our discussion with what you do and how you do it.

Alma: There is alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction. While the first two are obviously fantasy, you might argue that "straight" historical fiction, the kind that literally takes an event or an era that actually TRANSPIRED in our real-life timeline, is the "true" one out of that pack of otherwise gilded lies.

But is it?

Isn't history always told from the point of view of the victors, isn't it always remembered from what has been told, isn't there a dark and dusty back room where the untold stories go to molder into ashes in silence and solitude? And if you tell THOSE stories - even if you're telling an otherwise absolutely "straight" historical narrative...aren't you already wading into fantasy?

So let's split this into "living memory" and "ancient tales".

With things that might have happened in living memory, you're telling a story which will be remembered by people who were there. Or by their children to whom the stories were told. There are histories that people hide from outsiders simply because the pain is still – will ALWAYS be - too close, too real, too much to share. Should a story be banned, then?

What if it is too important to hide?

I hit a wall similar to this with Embers of Heaven, a novel that takes place some 400 years after its predecessor, Secrets of Jin-shei. That first book was based on an Imperial China, but Embers... took place during the equivalent what we knew as the Cultural Revolution. And one of the characters in my fantasy tale was at the heart of that 'real-world' revolution. I treated that book of living memory history gently. I took the characters whose story I was telling and I focused on them. Without coming out with things that rationalized or justified anything that was ever done by anyone during that time, I had to find a way to tell the story. Tell it straight. Find a way to simply be the messenger, and to let the recent history take care of itself.

And then there's a book like Empress, a story based on a glittering moment in the Byzantine Empire. There was a real love story to end all love stories out there - Emperor Justinian, and his love and soulmate, the Empress Theodora. I grew up with these stories, I cut my teeth on tales of Theodora.

But I didn't want the "historical" Theodora. I wanted the woman underneath the history. And I did not want to tell the straight "historical" story because Justinian was a bookish little clerk who wasn't romantic or manly, nothing like the emperor I called Maxentius. He was all mine. My creation. Someone I wrought so lovingly – flaws and all - that I fell a little in love with him myself. Heh.

My version of the Empress Callidora was likewise grown in the story oyster from the piece of grit that was the historical Theodora. Some of the things Theodora did my girl did too. Other things she did without much input by me. She always knew her own mind.

The world my Maxentius and my Callidora inhabit is NOT the historical Byzantium. It is a place called Visant, which shares some of the same historical touchstones. But my absolute joy in writing these fat historical fantasies is that I can take those touchstones and make them mean something else in my world. I can write the stories I want to write, even those dusty abandoned ones from the forgotten back rooms.

This is what historical fantasy does - it frees me to look at history from above, a high-flying goddess on golden wings, and create a world that is both utterly real and historically grounded, and something rich and strange that I alone had the weaving of.

Gillian: For me, as someone who looks into how writers use history, it seems that you're putting up three categories so that you can argue about inner truth. We can talk about the categories of alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction, however, they're not at the heart of what you're arguing. This is an excellent opening to the sort of fiction you write. Describing people in terms of their relationship to historical counterparts shows the depth of emotion you bring to your fiction and to the history behind it. For me, however, fiction can't actually show us the person behind the story. What it can do (brilliantly) is lead us into different stories from different approaches. It can expand our understanding about the world around us and give us more narratives about history. Most of the time, story is story, and the path you follow to create your characters was purely your path: history in fiction is always a construction by the writer, for the writer and the reader. It's always shaped by our narratives.

Stories are at the core of novels for me, not reality. However, I'm a historian (always and ever) and I always need a bridge from what I see and argue as a historian and the stories I tell as a fiction writer. This is why, in my fiction, I always have one character who sees the story. This is clearest in Langue[dot]doc 1305 and in Illuminations, where I have characters who argue the way historians argue. Artemisia and Rose are both concerned with what's happening in their lives (and, in Illuminations, in the manuscript Rose has found)  and their doubts mean that if there's a reader like me, who sees history as narratives we construct to understand our past and ourselves, that reader has something to hang onto. In my other novels, these characters are less obvious. I always give them a moment, however, and they look at what's happening and say "This can't be real" and often explain why. One of those moments for Ms Cellophane has been quoted by a few people: a character points out that they can't be in a horror novel, and gives reasons. Readers often ask me which character am I in my fiction. I'm none of them. That moment of clarity about narrative, however, that's me peeking in and saying "Boo!" to the reader.

Alma: I remember talking about the writing of battles with someone and what took shape is simply that you cannot WRITE A BATTLE if you've got a POV character in the middle of one. That's because the POV character in question is simply not in a position of knowing what the battle is doing. (S)he isn't IN the whole battle. The only concern of such a character is what is going on *right around them* in the heat of the moment. Their concern - their story - is their own survival. If a battle is won or lost - well, that is a larger question, and one that is decided cumulatively, and not by any single moment. But while a straightforward history might describe such a battle from the perspective of hindsight and of God, looking at it from a dizzy height and discerning tactics (if any) and the shape of the whole battle... if you're in the thick of it you don't see any of that. You're living the battle, not observing it. And it is so with a story, too.

A character can tell their own story - a story that might be nested inside a larger one, to be sure, as all personal stories in the end are because we all live in a shared larger world. But it is the individual story that we can see through the prism of any individual person's life, and it is through their eyes that the bigger story is seen, and shaped, and told.

I don't think enough is ever said about the very real fact that we are all, right now, LIVING IN HISTORY. It just hasn't become history yet, but with every passing moment it is closer to the past than it is to our present or to the future. Minute by minute our own stories drip off the ends of our lives and merge into that larger, shared, historical background that is the tapestry of human existence.

And writing a historical tale (they're all pretty much historical, except proudly futuristic science fiction) is essentially the distilled art of fiction. You're weaving a single golden thread in and out of a larger picture, and making that single thread meaningful within the context of a wider and more encompassing history...

Gillian: My inner historian argues that , using that approach, you can never write a battle. We see different things from the scrum to those we see from a nearby mountainside or from a chronicle written afterwards, but each of the things we see contains inherent bias. We bring ourselves to our writing and colour the scene with our thoughts. The difference between historical non-fiction and historical fiction include the boundaries (things like how far we may colour, what we may colour, which colours we have at our disposal) and whether or not the reader expects to be able to critically evaluate the text by retracing the research that went into it (scholarly apparatus).

As a reader, I expect to be drawn into the story if it's fiction and to be able to critically evaluate it if it's a historical study, but there is significant overlap and our humanity shows in every word we write.

Alma: You can write *A* battle, with any battle you choose to write. But could you write *THE* battle, something specific, something that pertains directly and in-tight-focus to a particular combatant within that battle? You correctly say that our humanity shows in every word we write - how could it be otherwise? We put so much of ourselves into everything we do, every story we tell, or at least we should, and it's the mark of the very best storytelling that the humanity of the writer has to shine through somehow (without being pedantic and preachy about anything, of course). And when fiction touches history it's so easy to slide into the accepted history pageant and forget (as always) the humanity of the under-history, the one never written, the one lived by the "losers" in any given conflict. And telling the untold story... isn't that what every writer dreams of doing...?

I try to do it, at least, with every tale that I tell. I like to think of fiction as a light, something that chases away the shadows from the dark places of the world, and I never forget the power and the privilege of being the hand that wields the torch...

Gillian: And on that note, I will leave Alma to her torch and me to my rather different light. I love it that there are so many choices for narratives and that we can all have valid views. It adds a richness to fiction, not knowing how far that we are going to agree or disagree as readers with the story that unrolls before us.