‘She Be Faking It’: Authenticity and Anachronism

Abstract

Historical fiction is haunted by the demand for, and the impossibility of, authenticity in its representations of the past. The concept of authenticity covers a lot of semantic territory, encompassing not only the criterion of factual accuracy — that is, of telling it like it is (or was) — but also the questions of who is doing the telling, and how and why. Any modern representation of the experiences of those who lived in the past must necessarily be a ventriloquistic performance, given in terms designed to be understood by a modern audience. The dead are not here to speak for themselves, or to comment on or correct the words of others, a fact that can only add to the responsibility of the historical writer even as it makes that responsibility harder to fulfil. The ethical obligations and constraints are especially acute where authors are writing for an audience, such as children, unlikely to have an extensive background knowledge against which to measure any account of the past. How do these duties, both to the subjects and the readers of historical texts, intersect with the possibly competing aims of entertaining and engaging those readers?