Jean Plaidy was my bread and butter. I started out on Victoria Victorious and worked my way backwards through the Queens of England. They weren’t remote historical characters to me; they were friends, neighbors, near relations. I knew their most intimate secrets—or assumed I did. As a pre-teen, the border line between research and imagination was still unclear to me and I took everything I read as the expression of an absolute and objective truth.Looking back, most of the books I devoured as a pre-teen were less historical fiction and more fictionalized history: Jean Plaidy, Norah Lofts, Anne-Marie Selinko, Anya Seton. All purported to convey the facts of the life of a specific historical character, embroidered with dialogue and physical detail, staying close to the facts while speculating as to the intangibles: motivations, emotions.
Then there were the books I’ll call historical fiction, ones in which my favorite historical characters put in cameos and where actual historical events played pivotal roles, but the focus remained on the lives and loves of imaginary figures inserted into the historical narrative.
Into this category fell Karleen Koen’s Through A Glass Darkly, set against the Hanoverian ascension, but focused on the personal travails of the fictional granddaughter of a fictional ducal house that sounds a great deal like—but is not—that of Marlborough. The same was true of another of my favorites, Mary Lide’s Ann of Cambray, in which the fictional heroine finds herself swept up in the civil war between Matilda and Stephen. The hero and heroine are entangled with real events and real people, but are themselves constructs of the imagination.The lines are relatively clear in fictionalized history. One can tinker with the intangibles (Selinko turns Desiree Clary’s marriage to Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte into a passionate love match, rather than a lackluster political arrangement), but not the basic facts.
What does the writer of historical fiction owe the historical record?
Once we’ve taken that step of inserting our own creations into the historical narrative—placing them in conversations with real people (mocking cravats with Beau Brummell, plotting rebellion with Bonnie Prince Charlie), giving them a role in historical affairs—we’ve already tinkered with truth. It doesn’t matter if our borrowed personages are voicing phrases they are on record as having spoken—they couldn’t have uttered those words to our characters, because our characters are emanations of our imaginations. In short, they didn’t exist. Once we’ve already pushed at the elastic boundaries of history to include our fictional creations, how much farther can we reasonably push?
It makes an interesting academic question, but it proved a very practical problem for me in the writing of my latest book, The Orchid Affair. Orchid Affair is set around a conspiracy that came to fruition—and fizzled—in spring of 1804, as various royalist groups conspired to abduct Bonaparte (there was some disagreement as to whether “abduct”, was, in fact, a euphemism for “assassinate”) and replace him with a member of the royal family.
There’s an excellent novel to be written about the conspiracy as it occurred—and as it unraveled. It’s a fascinating and complex story of daring plans and larger-than-life egos. My book is about a fictional governess-turned-spy inserted into the household of a fictional assistant to the Prefect of Paris. The book opens with the interrogation of Jean-Pierre Querelle, a member of the conspiracy, who was actually interrogated in the manner and on the date specified. (In my version, he’s interrogated by my hero. This was not, in fact, the case, because my hero didn’t exist.) In the original draft of the novel, I tried to stay close to the actual actors and all the crosses and double-crosses involved.
There was a problem with this. Rather than history serving as a backdrop to my story, my hero and heroine were being overwhelmed by the technical details of the story. While I did still pin my plot to the main episodes of the actual event (i.e. various interrogations, the capture of the primary conspirator), I ruthlessly omitted many of the intermediate steps and characters, substituting my own characters’ invented actions instead, while trying to remain true to the spirit of the actual events.
This was my compromise: I didn’t have any real historical actors do anything that they hadn’t actually done, but I did omit a great deal of what they did do, both for simplicity's sake (for some reason, French plots always seem to involve multiple people with the same last name) and to provide my own characters room to grow. One of these days, I’d love to tell the story of the Cadoudal Affair in full—but The Orchid Affair wasn’t the place.
Writers, how do you deal with juggling your characters and historical fact? Readers, how much pushing of the historical boundaries are you comfortable with?
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