Tony Grist (poliphilo) wrote,
Tony Grist
poliphilo

An Insoluble Problem?

A problem with historical fiction is that your fictional characters can only ever operate at the margins of the great historical events they get caught up in. Marat must die but it will always be Charlotte Corday who kills him and not the fictional heroine you've placed in the house next door, while this same heroine's plan to rescue Marie Antoinette from the scaffold is always going to fail- and leave not a trace behind.  In Stevenson's Kidnapped and Catriona David Balfour is heavily implicated in the murder of Colin Campbell and the judicial murder of James Stewart that follows but for all the running around he does remains without agency. He bangs up against real people, takes them to task and outwits them- and all to no effect. He huffs and he puffs and nothing happens. He can't help but be a shadow, a figment, an airy nothing.

One way round the problem is to fictionalise an actual historical personage, the way Hilary Mantell does in her Cromwell books, turning that piggy-eyed butcher into someone a modern reader can feel for. Another is to do as A.S. Byatt does in Possession and The Children's Book and rub out a historical person  and insert your fictional creation in their place. So out goes E. Nesbit and in comes the fictional Olive Wellwood who lives something very like Nesbit's life, filling her place in the historical record, without exactly needing to be her.  Neither strategy pleases me greatly. I find them disrespectful...
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