Monet, Shakespeare and Historical Fiction

Can you REALLY learn from Historical Fiction?

I have recently read many articles which challenge the value of historical fiction, claiming that people can not in fact learn anything about history from reading Historical fiction or that what they learn is wrong and I want to take the opportunity to respond to that accusation.

Certainly, I cannot argue that Historical Fiction is fiction not fact and I am guessing many people are confused by the different forms of historical fiction and the varying accuracy of the stories being presented. I recently considered putting in a short story for a competition and submission into an anthology but the premise ‘what if’ was one that challenged me. The premise required me to choose a historical event and write what if it didn’t happen, or happened differently. Sure, I often wonder using ‘what if’s’ and it is intriguing to consider how things might have been different if Anne Boleyn had born a boy not a girl, or if as a messenger for the German army Hitler had inhaled chlorine gas and died on the WWI battlefield. But to write about that and create an alternate reality would in my mind be speculative fiction, not Historical fiction. I am not judging that. I LOVE speculative fiction. I just don’t write it at this point.

For me, writing historical fiction is like painting a landscape. I tend more to Monet than Picasso. Monet’s work was not a mirror image of what he saw, rather a vibrant and colourful reinterpretation, one of varying shades of light and dark which both diffuse and enhance the scene. Like Monet, I see the past as worth recording, but I see it in shades rather than black and white. I work as a History teacher and am a student of History so every day I walk the fine line between reconstructing the past from evidence and reproducing it in ways that my students will understand and be inspired by. Perhaps this is even more important living in Australia, far from the remnants and reminders of the past I am trying to recall. I don’t often throw my student's dry sources (though it is important they encounter these too). In the same way, when I am teaching Shakespeare in English I never throw them straight into the original text of King Lear. This is because students lack context. Until I can show them the shape of the world it is a rare student who can understand the contents of it. They baulk at the language. Reading traditional texts, or critical reconstructions of them is like reading Shakespeare in a modern age. Much like encountering a foreign language. I am not saying that it lacks value and cannot be enormously interesting. I love reading ancient sources, I love reading scholarly articles about the past and I adore Shakespeare but I have enough contextual understanding to do so.

Historical fiction opens the reader to the past in a manner and language they can understand and in a way that opens them to a desire to learn more. Wilbur Smith’s ‘River God’ had me so in love with Egypt that I went to University to learn more. Ken Follett’s ‘Pillars of the Earth’ drew my interest to the early wars of Norman England. Sharon Penman’s ‘Sun in Splendour’ and ‘Here be Dragons’ drew me into a love of early medieval history and the fraught history of the Plantagenets and the War of the Roses. They were my springboard into my own learning and more often than not they were deeply insightful and incredibly accurate to the historical accounts I have read. My bookshelves are stacked with doorways to the past that have opened my mind and encouraged my love and interest in history in a way no teacher or university lecturer ever has- no textbook either!

Now, I know that in the HF world there are many writers more interested in writing the story and adding the setting as a backdrop than perhaps there should be. But in my encounters with writers in the genre, I have found the vast majority love history and immerse themselves very deeply in the research. Many have read more historical accounts than the average university professor or honours student. Sure, like me they connect the dots and fill the gaps and draw out different aspects, untold perspectives and unwritten narratives to create a more expansive, deeply personal world and in doing so they make up stuff. It is after all FICTION. But there are very few writers that are willing to deliberately write inaccurately and if they do you can usually find that in the afterword, which, I must say I never fail to read as these can be just as interesting as the story itself. Why is keeping accuracy important? Because every time a writer shifts too far from the facts they open themselves to criticism and Goodreads is littered with critiques where people seek and announce inaccuracies and no writer wants that to happen.

Did I end up writing that ‘what if’ story? No. Was I tempted to imagine a world without Hitler? Yes. But History on its own merits is so full of depth and rich in 'story' that I really don’t need to change it. My ‘what-if’s’ go more along the line of ‘What if there was a reason that person in history acted that way?’ or ‘What if there is actually a lot more to that story?’ And that, in my mind, is what writing Historical Fiction is about. Not changing history, not even telling it. But exploring the why and imagining or reinterpreting the stories that explain it or justify it. And if I get the chance to share my knowledge and teach my reader something of a world that has passed by then I can only be of benefit.