Historical fiction is one of the oldest forms of storytelling. Members of long-ago cultures, from Babylonia to ancient Greece and Rome, proudly recounted tales of their forebears' heroism and defeats. Many of these stories have passed down to us over the years. Early works we consider to be classics—Shakespeare's Hamlet, Goethe's Faust, even Homer's Odyssey—are fictionalized retellings of events that occurred long before the author's time. Today's novelists continue to revisit the same characters and themes, proving that the legacy of these ancient tales has endured.
In literary circles, Sir Walter Scott's Waverley is generally considered to be the first historical novel. Published anonymously in 1814, Waverley was the first novel in Scott's popular series about eighteenth-century Scottish history. What made it unique among its predecessors was Scott's attempt to accurately portray the background and qualities of ordinary people involved in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion against the British crown. With its subtitle “‘Tis Sixty Years Since,” Waverley established the original cutoff date for historical fiction. To modern readers, its prose seems old-fashioned and cumbersome, but its popularity inspired many devoted followers and imitators. Among other successful historical novels of the nineteenth century are Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850, about Puritan New England), Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1856, about the French Revolution), and Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869, about early nineteenth-century Russia). Considered classics today, they were the bestsellers of their era—critically acclaimed yet popular reading.
During the twentieth century, historical fiction saw both its highest and lowest points. Some of the most highly praised and enduring historical novels were written and published during this time. To name a few: the novels of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, which helped win her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, and Anya Seton's Katherine (1954), which even historians of the Middle Ages took seriously and recommended as an accurate portrayal of Chaucer's England. The genre also got wide recognition in the form of Westerns, the most prolific subgenre from the early twentieth century through the 1950s. Then historical romances exploded onto the market in the 1970s, with their lavish tales of wild passion and star-crossed lovers set against vividly rendered historical backdrops.
The extreme popularity of historical fiction, in its many guises, contributed to its overall perception as a lowbrow form of literature. All genre fiction has suffered critical disdain to some degree, and continues to do so. This should surprise no one. As usually happens when the market is flooded with novels in a certain genre, as was the case with historical fiction in the mid-twentieth century, the quality declines. In a 1950 article for Masses and Mainstream (“Reply to Critics”), author Howard Fast, a historical novelist himself, wrote: “This is an era of many historical novels, few of them good, and very few indeed which have more than a nodding acquaintance with fact.”
His comments weren't unique by any stretch. Over and over again, comments from authors and the media implied that historical fiction was a genre very rarely done well. Either these novels were bad history—costume dramas, in which modern-day characters were dressed up and paraded around in period garb—or bad fiction, where the author crammed in so much research that it overwhelmed the plot. Many well-known historical novelists first made their mark in the 1950s through the 1980s, such as Maurice Druon, Zoé Oldenbourg, John Jakes, Rosemary Sutcliff, and even Howard Fast himself. However, their works were admired as exceptions to the rule.
Things picked up in the mid- to late 1990s, when literary authors started looking back to the past for inspiration. All of a sudden, their historical novels began winning major literary prizes. Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace, about a housemaid tried for her employer's murder in 1843, garnered the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1996. However, many works of literary fiction, no matter the time period in which they were set, were typically not considered historical novels by the press, by their publishers, and even by the authors who wrote them, even though they seemed to follow all the rules.
There are many examples. “I rely on the work of great historians, but I'm not a historical novelist,” declared Charles Johnson in an interview (1998) with the Sacramento Bee, referring to Dreamer, his novel about the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Anita Diamant's The Red Tent (1997), in which a well-known biblical story is seen through the eyes of the character Dinah, was labeled by its publisher as contemporary women's fiction. Cold Mountain (also 1997), which beautifully evokes the pointless loss caused by the Civil War, was more frequently termed literary fiction. If another possible label fit, the book wore it. Historical fiction was everywhere, but nowhere: It had become the genre that dared not speak its name.
This has changed to some degree in the early twenty-first century. It has finally become fashionable again to talk about the historical novel in public. Publishers are actively promoting their books as “upmarket historical fiction”—novels, in other words, that one wouldn't be embarrassed to be caught reading on the subway. The success of films like Gladiator, Elizabeth, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and even Cold Mountain, the latter two of which were based on novels, demonstrates people's huge and growing interest in historical topics. Booklist has devoted several recent issues to historical fiction, and The Historical Novels Review, a book review magazine co-edited by the author of this guide, publishes 800 reviews of new historical novels each year. The genre is prolific, healthy, and going strong. Long may it continue.
This is a copyrighted excerpt from Johnson, Sarah, Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre, 2005 (Libraries Unlimited).
Sarah Johnson, is Reference Librarian and Assistant Professor at Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, Illinois. An avid reader and collector of historical fiction for over twenty years, Sarah is the author of Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre (Libraries Unlimited, 2005) and serves as the American book review editor for the Historical Novels Review; she also writes regular readers' advisory columns for NoveList. She will be the keynote speaker at the PLA historical fiction preconference in Boston on March 21, 2006.