Difficulties, discontinuities and differences: Reading women’s historical fiction

Abstract

Women’s historical fiction seems to provoke very intense reactions — either positive or negative. General readers are often passionate about it, as numerous websites and the existence of the Historical Novel Society attest,1 and writers like Georgette Heyer, Jean Plaidy, Philippa Gregory and Sarah Waters have been and are bestsellers. But professional readers — reviewers, historians, academics — have been rather more ambivalent until very recently. Despite what often seems like our current obsession with history, historical fiction in general still occupies a surprisingly marginal place in the literary canon and the academic curriculum. An important turning point in the respectability of the genre seems to have been 2009 when the Man Booker Prize was won by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009), from a shortlist in which five out of six novels were historical. Yet in the same year, the historian David Starkey lambasted what he called ‘the quasi-history of historical novels, written by women, about women and for an overwhelmingly female readership’ as mostly ‘tosh’.2 In this chapter I want to explore some of the difficulties we face in reading historical fiction, especially women’s historical fiction, from three angles: first, my own experience as a reader of historical fiction; second, critical accounts of the genre; and, third, some of the problems I have encountered in teaching historical fiction.