One of the highest praises for an historical novel is that it reproduces a past world in a believable way.
How do you get people to speak in a language that seems ‘realistic’ and at the same time convey a sense of place, period, character and so on? How do you recapture and describe experiences which are not common in our daily lives now? What processes, beliefs, customs and habits informed people’s thoughts? How do you resist making each character merely a representative type? How do you allow for individuality, difference, uniqueness and the chances and accidents of ‘real’ life? And how much ‘background’ do you describe? Too much, and you risk merely throwing up ‘gobbets’ of history; too little and you are simply writing about modern people in old –fashioned costumes. These are among the fascinating questions confronting the historical novelist. These pages set out to explore some of those issues.
Personal thoughts on writing historical fiction
One of the greatest difficulties in writing a historical novel, it seems to me, is the most fundamental one – getting the language right. This is particularly difficult in trying to reconstruct distant periods. The whole thing is an exercise in anachronism. How are you going to recapture a defunct language and the ambient references of a long-vanished, alien world?..
Anglo-Norman Historians
What we most often mean by ‘history’ is historiography, written histories. But the historical narratives of the Anglo-Norman period are often unreliable, partisan and fraught with interpretive hazards. To historians of that period, the differences between history and fable, sacred legend and other forms of imaginative writing are not strongly established. They are all concerned with telling memorable stories – and this, too, is the main concern of the historical novelist…
Apologies for history? Fact and Fiction
The modern practice of apologising for history has its supporters and detractors. The issue shows how history is still at work in the present. The passions aroused and the partisan approaches taken indicate that in some respects we are no more sophisticated than our medieval forbears…
The Thirteenth Life
Through the lives and events depicted in Deaths, Disasters and Destinies another life story has been told, woven into this history, inseparable and integral. All the people depicted here, in one way or another, appear in the great tapestry of the reign of Henry 1st…
Eadmer’s Farewell
The monk Eadmer’s Life of Saint Anselm, an extraordinary piece of writing, translated from the Latin in which Eadmer wrote, is rich source material for the period covered in the books on this website, 1086 -1135, that is to say the first half century of Norman rule…