Historical Historical Fiction

Rose's post about Jane Eyre-- which everyone should read if you haven't already!-- got me thinking about historical "feel" as conveyed through fiction. Reading period novels provides an excellent sense of the "feel" of a particular time period, even if that feel isn't always exactly what we thought it would be.

But what about historical novels written by non-contemporary authors? I'm talking about the Sir Walter Scotts, the Alexandre Dumas, the Georgette Heyers. When reading contemporary authors-- our contemporaries, that is-- we tend to automatically factor in a modern bias. We allow for the discrepancy between the modern author and the time period the author is attempting to convey. We automatically take this into account when reading Philippa Gregory or Anya Seton or even Kathleen Winsor. But what about authors who aren't our contemporaries writing about time periods that weren't contemporary to them?

Thackeray's Vanity Fair, for example, was a historical novel when he wrote it (written in the 1840's about the earlier part of the century)-- but we don't really think of it as such. I don't know about you, but I grew up on The Three Musketeers and Ivanhoe. My image of the seventeenth century was shaped by Dumas, my vision of the Middle Ages by Sir Walter Scott. But Sir Walter Scott was a man of the Scottish Enlightenment, writing a romanticized version of a period far from contemporary to him, while Alexandre Dumas was a product of the third Republic and the second Empire, dictating tales of a swashbuckling past to his horde of sub-scribes. Their conceptions of the past are, I would argue, as suspect as, well, yours or mine-- but do we regard them as critically?

I heard this view expressed most forcefully in regard to the late, great Georgette Heyer, who is credited with single handedly developing the Regency romance genre. Heyer's research skills were legendary and her world is taken as gospel by legions of Regency fans today. But how Regency was Heyer's Regency world? While preparing for the class we taught on the rise and development of the Regency romance genre at Yale a couple of years ago, Cara Elliott and I dug into some of the literary criticism on Heyer, which pointed out-- rightly-- that her Regencies often sound suspiciously like her "contemporary" (1930s and 40s) mystery novels. If there's sometimes a Wodehouse feel to Heyer's Regency World, it's there for a reason; Wodehouse and Heyer were writing contemporaneously, reflecting the same influences. Her research is impressive, but her characters' mores and outlooks are as rooted in the early twentieth century as the early nineteenth.

I'm not sure it is possible to achieve an unmediated view of the past. But I do think it is important, when forming our views of what "is" medieval or what "is" Regency to be aware of the bases on which we're building these beliefs.

Where do your ideas of historical "feel" come from?