Reviving Historical Fiction in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life

Abstract

This article reads Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013) as part of a trend in contemporary British fiction that represents the past realistically without dismissing the lessons of postmodernism. Encompassing the two world wars through the lives of Ursula Todd and her family, Life After Life pursues the traditional aim of historical fiction to create “a living empathy, a live connection between then and now” (De Groot 2010, 27) but this is achieved in an uncommon way: through a combination of distance and a form of immersion. In order to explore this unresolved tension between a claim to exactness and accuracy coupled with self-consciousness, this article initially discusses the chosen perspective on the war, here seen from the margins as the focus is on the women of the Todd family, then examines the unusual combination of narrative strategies at work to reconstruct the past: first, the use of the forking-path narrative technique and second, the emphasis on affect and the senses that together contribute to renewing the historical novel.