Have you ever gone to bed with a nagging feeling you haven’t done something? Yes, well, me too – lying there reading my historical novel, and something’s kicking me in the back of the head trying to tell me something….Then I sit bolt upright and realise that I haven’t done my post for the blog! argh! Then I jump up and find my monitor isn’t working–life is such fun with technology – no wonder i like to live in the past.
Alex Beecroft asked me a couple of weeks back: What about a post about those things that make a historical a really good one, in your eyes. What are you looking for when you review gay historical fiction?
OK – Now – remember that reviewing is a very subjective thing to do. What I like I don’t expect you to like – I have definite things that push my good buttons and my bad buttons but I’ll try and explain the process of my assessing a book. I’ll just say right now, that all the reviewers at Speak Its Name are given entirely free rein—I know they’ll back that up. I have been known to edit a review (very very rarely) but it’s generally “make the quote shorter” or “lets be less negative” I won’t interfere with a grade or an opinion, because that’s all a review is. It might be written by Joe Bloggs of Nowhere Land (hello, Erastes) or Miss Everyone Knows Me from The London Times but it’s still just an opinion.
When I start a book I generally like to know WHEN it’s set. I know other reviewers have this concern too. It’s not a difficult thing to establish – if the author doesn’t want to be really cliched and put “London, 1812″ at the head of the book, then he or she can easily make it clear in the blurb “Joe Brown is heading off to fight Napoleon under the command….” etc etc – something
like that. It doesn’t have to be exact, but just a hint so I know what CENTURY we are in. I’ve read more than a few books which haven’t given many hints in that respect and I’ve been reading away, thinking I’m in the Regency because we have carriages and balls, and suddenly – PING – there’s a train and my brain leaps into the TARDIS to adjust to life in the Victorian era.
Does this matter? Well yes, to me it does. I read in my imagination, and if I am imagining that the story is set in the Regency, then the clothes and the manners and the hairstyles are all forming itself in my mind–shunt me forwards 30 or so years and suddenly everyone looks very different for a start. It hurts my brain. And if you can’t be specific, and it’s just “generic medieval with a king no-one’s heard of” then mark it as a fantasy. K thnx bai.
So that’s the first thing that might upset me.
Next, there’s something that I call “a safe pair of hands.”
What I mean by this is–I am not a historian. And even if I was I wouldn’t know everything about every era. So generally, 
if I’m reading a story about 1800’s Australia, or 1920’s Ireland, or Tudor England, my default mode is that I’m a little on edge. This is because I want to like the book, and I trust the author not to jolt me with glaring anachronisms. If there are small mistakes I won’t catch them–and if the book is good enough–such as Dash and Dingo was, I can forgive the odd gaffe. We all make mistakes–hell we are human. But if the book unravels as I’m reading it, and there’s glaring nonsense heaped on “omg she didn’t” then I know I’m NOT in a safe pair of hands.
Take the Age of Sail books. I know nuffin’ about boats. As I’ve said to people in the past, the reason I don’t write ‘em is that there’s too much to get wrong, and too many ship geeks who will mock me if my knots are wrong and my ship is scudding along at 140 miles an hour. I can get away with having my Space Opera boys pressing buttons and not caring how the FTL drive works, but I couldn’t get away with that in historical fiction. If my super studly captain was standing on the poop deck with one leg up on the railing looking stud muffingly gorgeous and not giving a rats arse about which direction the wind was in, he wouldn’t last long – and if I was reading it, I’d be getting very cross with myself.
So I trust Alex Beecroft and Lee Rowan because they DO know what they are doing. I don’t have to care that I don’t know what a bowline is, they do, and that’s all that matters.
As I say, mistakes happen, but I think that most readers who want a historical book will be able to tell the difference between an author who has worked their butt off to get the details right, even if there are a few small boo boos here and there – and an author who hasn’t bothered. Some authors think that the other research they need to do is to watch historical films. And it shows.
Does this matter? To some, no. But we review gay historical fiction, and there are three parts to that, and each part is just as
Gratutious Jack Sparrow Picture
important as the next. It could be the most marvellous prose in the world, but if it’s littered with crappy, sloppy research, the sort of thing I could find out with two seconds of Googling, then the marks start getting eroded.
I like a STORY, too. When the genre first started, there was a glut of PWPs (Plot what plot, or Porn without Plot) especially in the short story ebook section of the publishers’ output and there were a good many “wallpaper” short stories – stories containing “men in fancy dress” who met up and had sex and little more. As enjoyable as some of them are, as the genre grows and more people are clambering on board and doing a good job–this kind of story no longer does it for me. Even with a short story, I want motivation, characterisation and plot. And don’t tell me that’s not possible. Read anything by Parhelion or ZA Maxfield. Similarly (and more so, actually) this applies to novel-length fiction. Readers are more discerning. They might let an author get away with a PWP for a short story–but gone are the days when they’ll forgive 150 pages of sex in a 200 page novel. And I never did, not unless the plot was stormingly good, anyway.
So that’s the general overview.
Next I’m looking at the writing. As a general preference, I prefer my writing to be a LITTLE in keeping with the era. Doesn’t matter if it’s not, but if there’s a flavour of the Victorian or the Regency then I’m impressed. This can work in an opposite way too–as there have been times when I’ve read books such as “An Asian Minor, the true story of Ganymede” by Felice Picaro which has a young narrator who could be any modern young man talking and that works brilliantly. If you are going to bend the genre, bend it good. No pun intended.
Finally, I’ll consider the gay aspect. If the research has been done adequately this won’t be an option, but it might be an era that no-one really knows how gay men might have been treated and so a certain amount of extemporising has been done. That’s fine. We know that some parts of the ancient world had a more enlightened approach to male love than latter days, but I’ll still want to see the correct traditions in this case. To be penetrated — even until relatively late in history– considered to be taking the female part–and I’ve not seen that many authors take that on board.
"Another Country"
I know that some readers prefer to see the sad parts of male love and the illegal aspects toned down but I think that to do that, to gloss over the fact that men have had to hide for hundreds and hundreds of years, have lived in fear of their lives would be to disrepect what they had to go through. We can still give our men–even the men on those dangerous ships–a happy for now, even if they can’t sink into each others’ arms as the ship sails into the sunset. So I will always take the OKHomo on board. I’ve literally read books where not only the friends of the couple know they are doing it like bunnies, but the parents, the ton, and no doubt the King, Uncle Tom Cobley and so do his cousins and his sisters and his aunts…. er. No. Anti-gay legislation wasn’t called The Blackmailers Charter for nothing.
Am I tough to please? Possibly. Do I make too much of a fuss about anachronisms heaped on top of each other like the skulls of a cannibal nation? No, I don’t think so. If the facts are wrong, I think it’s fair to point them out to the readers. I’ve read reviews on other sites (not this one!) of the same books I’ve marked unfavourably which say stuff like “beautifully researched” and I bash my head on the desk in despair. Readers will assume that the author has done the work necessary to produce a historical–and who can blame them?–and I don’t think it’s unfair to disabuse them of that.
So there you have it. What am I looking for in a good gay historical? Gay. Historical. Writing. Simple as that! 
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“I know that some readers prefer to see the sad parts of male love and the illegal aspects toned down but I think that to do that, to gloss over the fact that men have had to hide for hundreds and hundreds of years”
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Actually we still hide today especially in the US military.
But anyway, I have been thinking on this point and I think I have spotted the compromise.
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See in my view there are two extremes here….
*Everybody is gay! You know, OK Homo.
Now this is an extreme because this makes every character we meet gay. Creating that problem where you wonder why everyone is hiding being gay or whispering amongst themselves or has any issues concerning their sexuality at all if every damn character in the world is gay.
*Everybody is against us! Now this sounds more like reality because every character besides the main characters are homophobic assholes out to get our heroes. You see this in a lot of serious Historicals or is it Host-oricals due to the constant hostile environment the characters find themselves in.
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I think there is a compromise though and you can find it in diary entries and evidence abounds of clubs and groups and special areas of cities even today.
The “gay ghetto” that still can permeate the “ideal” of gay culture. San Francisco, New York, London, you know. Move to the Emerald City and play Dorothy!
Gay men and women have always done this. Found a support group, found a bar or club, made friends and hide in plain sight.
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I think if anything I wish I could find less Historicals going for the “hard to buy into” solitary gay against the world and more normal smart gays find ways to meet other gays on the sly and thus protect themselves from the bad guys.
Sure it sounds like something illegal because it was illegal. Gay was against the law right?
Even thieves had their gangs.
PS… I think my big point is you cannot absolutely research something that was not talked about in polite society for so long. Even today I would not be likely to tell you everything or provide details that might be helpful to you but might incriminate a friend.
You have to place gay in context of the criminal elements that it was considered by society and look at what criminals did and what most gay people do even today to adapt locally or move to more survivable places etc.
Oh I agree – (and in general I speak about the 17th-19th centuries, as that’s my era) – and it was the lower classes who first formed a “society” of homosexual men – I’d really like to explore this, as it hasn’t actually been done yet-everyone is much happier with the cleaner end of society!!
It is not realistic is all.
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Remember our discussion on E.M. Forster? I dislike Maurice but love the real life history of Edward Carpenter and George Merrill.
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Idealized visions of some “solitary gay man” struggling against the ravages of a homophobic world are the POV of closet cases living in fear. Homosexual men wanting to participate in life tend to find their own place and make their own “families” when their real relatives and real home towns won’t do.
Just like “real life” Edward Carpenter and George Merrill. I think George Merrill, being from a more earthy working class and all, probably contributed a lot to Edward Carpenter’s espoused social views.
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I keep saying Stonewall was started by Drag Queens and prostitutes and druggies and drunks not the intellectual elite.
I guess my perspective as an uneducated reader is different for a(an? I’m never sure) historical story. I don’t really give a damn what kind of knot they used on ships or how fast they went. I don’t now, don’t care. As long as they get where they are going and the mast doesn’t fall over due to a poor knot tying episode. Tell me it’s google-quatrain knot and that works for me. Sure, I don’t want them wearing sneakers and cracking open a can of Bud Light, but all that stuff is window dressing and sure it’s lovely but really, for me, in the long run does it MATTER to the story that no one REALLY ate roasted pheasant in 1692? Unless it’s something so outlandish as to make even the novice historical reader go WTF? to me personally it’s just not a big deal.
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BUT, to someone like yourself that would be annoying because you KNOW. I can appreciate that and if I was reviewing a book to say “great research” would be ridiculous. I have no clue and no desire to go researching to find out about the toilet habits of the Victorians (interesting though I’m sure it is). I’m sure there are also people out there, knot experts, who find every book, no matter the genre that includes a big ship and tries desperately to find errors.
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As an author of historicals, you and I seem to be coming at things from the exact opposite sides yet in the end, we both want the same thing, great stories, set in interesting places and times with strong characters. Maybe just our perspective on the window dressing is a bit different.
There is a fine line between sharing the research and infodumping. Alex Beecroft does it perfectly – so do many others – Dan Brown and Nick Heddle do not. I don’t think it’s necessary to have a sentence such as: “He walked over the [name of maker] rug, sat down on the [name of maker] chair, picked up his exquisitely tooled moroccan leather book, written by Mr Johnson the man who blah blahblahblah and gazed out of the mullioned framed windows onto the park which had been recently redone by Capability Brown the man who blah blah blah blah.”
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But believe me, there are books out there with facts as wrong as Regency sneakers. As you say, it’s window dressing – and the more subtle it is, the better it is. If you are reading a book and you feel that it was written in the time, rather than ABOUT the time, then that’s all to the good.
“Readers will assume that the author has done the work necessary to produce a historical–and who can blame them?”
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Yep, I am one of those readers who prefers a bit of gloss and the happy ending. To each their own. I can tell you, though, that I have never made that assumption about a piece of historical fiction in my reading life, not since I passed the age of about twelve. Because it’s fiction.
Oh I don’t mind gloss and a happy ending, but I prefer the author to have tried, and some simply don’t bother. They read a wallpaper romance with Ken Doll Regency man and think that that’s good enough. I suppose I don’t see what’s so wrong about getting the facts right. No-one complains when mystery writers use the correct poisons or the right ballistics, after all. I don’t feel I’m being preached at when I read murder mysteries, and I enjoy learning about things I didn’t know. Just because something is romance, historical romance, doesn’t mean that it should automatically be allowed to warp the facts. “Oh I know cocoa powder doesn’t have the same effect as belladonna” said Agatha Christie, “but it’s fiction, so why does it matter?”
LOL!
I think I’d hesitate to take a cup of cocoa from Agatha Cristie. She had a reputation for rigorous research, and the flavor of chocolate can cover a lot…
Erastes
As I said many times, I wish historicals wouldn’t focus so much on the worst of the particular eras that the author is writing about. In particular, I wish these stories didn’t emphasize that all the gay men were eventually headed to the gallows or jail.
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My other concern is that a lot of historical writers seem to take delight in giving readers the horrible details of the effects of all the diseases prevalent in those times – scurvy, dengue fever, etc. etc. I KNOW they existed but do we have to read all the DETAILS? When I read a book I’m trying to escape into another world and maybe be entertained, but many historicals make me want to throw the book against the wall because the stories are so depressing and gory. Maybe I’m not the typical reader of historical romances (I’m sure I’m not)
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I know that true historical writers have to be accurate in terms of the historical information in their books and I do appreciate that, but I and most readers are not purists. When we read a historical romance we hope it’s accurate because we read these books to get a sense of other eras, but I don’t need a history lesson.
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As Teddypig said, there’s got to be a happy medium. I KNOW that the times were different then, but could we get away from always clubbing the readers over the head about how horrible they were for gay men? On the other hand, we don’t need OK Homo in the books because even where I live, in a fairly liberal city like Toronto which has the largest gay population next to San Francisco, there are gay bashings.
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Whenever I review a historical book I stress that I’m not an expert of the particular era in which the book is set, and that my perspective is strictly whether the story worked or not, from a reader’s point of view. I say the same thing about sci fi books which are set in imaginary worlds. I think historical writers do an incredible job – I just wish they didn’t emphasize the negatives in their books.
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Let’s remember that historical romances are supposed to be fiction NOT a history lesson for readers.
It goes without saying, or should, that everyone will not like the same style of historical romance, any more that everyone likes the same style of historical mystery. Readers prefer different periods, different countries, different forms of writing ranging from gritty to highly mannered to surrealistic. And yes, there will be people who prefer wallpaper historicals to the strictly accurate ones. Some science fiction fans can’t abide tons of hard science, either. And some wouldn’t leave home without it. Different strokes, and all that.
I have to say that I consider history to be vital to stories, whether you’re writing historicals, writing contemporaries, or writing something set in a completely different world. Though often brushed aside as unimportant and little more than the background against which the story is set, when researched properly or, in the case of fantasy or science fiction, both researched and created, history can provide not only background but also:
1) cultural details that add verisimilitude (news and gossip common at the time, the names of popular books and dances, various styles, and so on);
2) characterization (the beliefs and attitudes of the people in the story, as well as the effect that historical events have on their lives)
3) complications for the plot (for example, your gay lovers need to be together, but they can’t display their affection openly because homosexuality is illegal and punishable by death);
4) and even the plot itself (wars, exploration, discovery and/or settlement of a new land, etc.).
History, please note, does not have to be dull. Yet I see this argument over and over in the historical romance genre. “I don’t want to read a textbook! I don’t want to feel like I’m in HISTORY class!”
Given how history is taught in America, though, I can’t entirely blame many historical romance fans. Americans are not well-taught when it comes to history. Most elementary, junior high and high school history classes are repetitive, focusing on propaganda and favorable views of the winners. I could have set a watch by history classes when I was in school–the great explorers through September, culminating in Columbus discovering America before October 12; Colonial America from mid-October to November; an essay test before Thanksgiving focusing on the American colonies (and, invariably, at least one or two essays about Pilgrims or Puritans–which aren’t synonymous) . Then the American revolution through December, The War of 1812, Fifty-Four-Forty-or-Fight, and Manifest Destiny in the first half of January, while the second half focused on the build up to the American Civil War (which, in school, always broke out around Lincoln’s Birthday).
And so on. All very predictable. And all very dull. Not at all the kind of thing you’d like to read for fun. If that is most people’s view of history, and I suspect that it is, then I cannot blame them for wanting to avoid it.
But–and this is a huge “but”–I DON’T believe that a historical author has to choose between buying into existing myths (such as “witches were burned in Salem” that I’ve seen in a hundred historic paranormals so far), making things up outright, or being dull. Accurate history can be woven into a story to enrich the story, to make the characters and the world more vividly alive, rather than dragging it down.
And I also think that if we are going to write historical novels, it’s better for the book, for the public and for ourselves if we strive to be accurate as well as entertaining. There is more than enough ignorance and confusion out there already. It bothers me enormously when I see books where, for example, a Regency male/male couple is getting married and everyone in society, including the Chancellor of England, is invited to the wedding. Or where nineteenth century people start talking about the spectrum of sexuality a lá Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Or, in a medieval tale, everyone and his brother knows that the hero, a knight and a nobleman, is homosexual, and everyone is perfectly fine with this–except for the villain, of course.
Why does it bother me? Because stories (books, movies and TV shows) impress people far more than lessons do. And painting a picture of the past as an innocent, politically correct paradise where racial prejudice, sexism, ableism, classism and homophobia have no place not only falsifies history and minimizes what people endured, it makes it impossible for readers to understand why women, blacks, Native Americans, LGBTQ people and the disabled (and others who have been despised and rejected) ever needed to demand their rights in the first place. Indeed, it gives some readers the impression that the rights such minorities want so badly are nothing more than demands for special privileges.
Short stories and novels are very small places to start educating people, even in a palatable way. But I think it’s important for writers to do so. Our obligation is not to present a view of the world that readers find comfortable and agreeable, but to tell the truth as we see it, and in the best way possible for the story.
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NOTE: I quoted a few passages from my article here.
As a reader and a reviewer of gay historical fiction I hope that the writer of a historical novel will attempt to be as accurate about the society he is writing about as the writer of a contemporary novel would be. If a contemporary writer described New York as a large farming community where everyone dressed in Pilgrim outfits and human sacrifice was practiced on every Thursday in June, we would go “what the hell is this author on?!” We know it isn’t like that.
It’s just the same with historicals. Describe Georgian London as a lovely clean metropolis where gay men were married in church and nobody was ill or unsightly in any way and there weren’t any poor people or press gangs, then you’re not really talking about Georgian London at all. When you get enough distance away from what (as far as we know from historical research) it was really like, you’re not writing historical fiction at all – you’re writing fantasy.
Historical romance needs to be historical – it’s there in the name. And history is interesting. I’d have hoped that people who read historical romance did so because they were interested in what life was really like in other eras. I know that’s why I read it. I want to see how people lived and loved, what they thought and what they valued in times other than our own. Fiction shouldn’t be a little box of mirrors in which we only see our own modern prejudices and attitudes repeated over and over again. It ought to offer us something new – something we hadn’t thought about before.
And it does seem like an insult to our ancestors not to try and tell the truth, in so far as we are able, about what life was like in their day. History is part of what makes us us, and a refusal to face it and try to understand it seems strange to me.
I like this point that “history is interesting”. Well, quite! When I read something historical I’m interested in finding out about life in that period and culture. What are the daily challenges that people face then? How do they think about their lives and the world around them? It shouldn’t just be a quant setting with odd/pretty clothes.
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I love something with a good feel for what the period was really like. And I love to see period details, something that makes the story unique to that time and place. I read a Regency romance a few weeks ago where the hero and heroine had sex in the tent of a bathing machine. I loved that, because it was something different and it was very particular to the period. Bathing machines were only around for a specific period – it would be pretty tricky to get one into a contemporary story! So it was a nice use of a period detail.
“Fiction shouldn’t be a little box of mirrors in which we only see our own modern prejudices and attitudes repeated over and over again. It ought to offer us something new – something we hadn’t thought about before.”
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I agree with everything you say but my problem is maybe more subtle for the most part. I see Gay Sociological Anachronisms even in some of the best Historical writing so who cares about getting the shoes they wore right. It’s like people still filter politically correct modern thoughts onto other eras.
We could get into Pre-”Kinsey Report” and even pre-”Gay” mindsets as a whole subject but it’s very true and I don’t see people define it well. The whole sex and even emotional love between men (best friends or relatives) was considered “accepted and commonplace” not Gay in a lot of cultures including our own but also different in regards to it’s sexual social context than what was thought of as something illegal like THE ACT OF SODOMY.
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It’s sort of the same issues I had with Lambda stating that The Violet Quill were “pioneers” of Gay Lit in 1980 based on how they “commented on” the Gay Community that seems to have suddenly appeared in the 70s from no where.
Pioneers in 1980? How?
What about The Boys In The Band from 1968? Pre-Stonewall Gay Community commentary there even! It showed even before Stonewall the Gay Community was present and had most of the same nasty issues it faces today.
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It’s a forest through the trees deal. I do think cultures and societies change and people think differently about things like homosexuality etc from one time period to another.
BUT… I have a problem with believing those self serving aspects of our thinking changes that much or that quickly.
I’m no expert but that’s what I think about when these topics come up.
I agree with you both that human nature probably doesn’t change very much, if at all, and that social constructs, such as what it means to be gay, change enormously. It is much harder to get to grips with the mindsets that John Boswell talks about in his books, where passionate friendship is an ideal and may or may not be sexually expressed, but the act of sodomy is still condemned.
And even if you think you have managed to get your head around pre-Kinsey notions about sexuality, you then still have to get them across to readers who won’t have read the background research. And you have to get it across in a way that isn’t info-dumpish or preachy. It’s very tricky. I’m quite glad I’m mostly focused on the 18th century, where modern notions about your sexuality being something that you /are/ rather than something that you /do/ are already starting to appear.
But I suppose I hope for some indication that an effort has been made in that direction,even if it’s only a small effort, because you’re right, I think the mindset of the characters is more important to whether I perceive the story to be anachronistic or not than the shoes are. The best stories are those where you get the feeling that the author has paid attention to both, I think.
History matters.
Alas, I do go for the date-stamp cliche–because sometimes I’ll show an incident in the characters’ past and then fast-forward, and some time periods are extremely variable – 1801, England at war, 1803, temporary peace, 1808, war, 1816, the war’s over. I think it’s easier for the reader who may not be acquainted with the details of the period, and lets them get on with the story.
History *matters.* The stuff we’re taught in school–much of it inaccurate to the point of propaganda–isn’t much more than military and economic history. The real thing is far more interesting. And trying to get it right does matter, because history does repeat itself, and we are not the first generation to do or think much of anything. All the furor about defining marriage, for instance, or outlawing abortion… there were same-sex commitment ceremonies ages ago, to name just one example.
People forget that the first purpose of storytelling was TEACHING. “Here is how The People (nearly every group calls itself that) Learned to Grow Food. Here is how we found fire.” This is how human beings transmitted vital knowledge before we even had writing, much less CD-RW. “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” for example, is a lesson on not jerking people’s chains for no reason, because when you really need help, they won’t respond (something, I think, that our modern news media needs to consider.)
It’s easy to say that nobody should require accuracy in historical fiction because it’s FICTION… but the human brain is hardwired to file stories, factual or fictitious, under “useful information.” There are many people–honest to God–who believe that writers are not ALLOWED to put something in a story if it isn’t true. I’m not making that up, I actually overheard it. (Same story with “news” stations, unfortunately.)
On the other hand, I don’t personally care for historicals that feature the Big Names of an era in major roles; there’s so much written about Henry VIII that I sometimes wish he and all his wives had been kidnapped by aliens. I’ve never had any interest in writing about Nelson and Hardy and/or Emma Hamilton.
All fiction is set in a sort of alternate universe, anyway–Patrick O’Brian swiped a lot of Cochrane’s real adventures and gave them to Jack Aubrey. But even so, there’s a difference between window-dressing and fact. Fiction should be plausible. You don’t necessarily need to know if the buttons on a man’s trousers in 1776 are wooden or pewter or mother-of-pearl, but you DO need to give him buttons rather than a zipper. You don’t have people ‘pushing his buttons’ because in a pre-electronic era, the only buttons he’s got are on his clothes.
I find it hard to appreciate the ‘wallpaper’ sci-fi, for that matter. See our heroes on the planet Renaissance, where everyone goes around painting walls and sculpting marble, and admiring one another’s classic physiques. No. Historical eras don’t just happen because someone thinks the outfits are kewl. They grow out of context. The Renaissance had wealth generated by commerce, and wealthy men interested in outdoing each other by patronizing the arts–and bribing God by putting money into fine art for churches, and artists for once had access to money to support their work. It’s all part of a larger context. This isn’t to say I dislike all sci-fi that has historical aspects–Lois McMaster Bujold did an amazing job of combining FTL and Regency-style matchmaking with her Barrayar series. But if it’s not done well, it can be pretty silly. Wallpaper is wallpaper, even if it’s pastede on the interior of a spaceship.
As far as writing the upper classes, I agree with Dorothy Sayers in that regard. Working hard for her living, she preferred to make her hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, independently wealthy so he (and she) did not have to spend every minute worrying about the next meal. I feel much the same way, and in historicals, there’s the added issue of social class. It’s damned hard to write a character who’s the master of his fate and the captain of his soul if he’s a serf tied to a few square acres of land, with the obligation to marry and beget replacement parts for his landlord. There are those with the talent to do it – Frost Fair is one example; Kate Sedley’s Roger the Chapman mysteries are another. (Sedley does a terrific job of including important historical characters without distracting from her pack-peddler hero.) But for escapist fiction, I enjoy a little wallow in the lap of luxury–in a book. Even if I had the cash to do that sort of thing for real (fat chance, with five pets), I was brought up not to waste money.
I am sometimes turned off by an enormous amount of detail, too. Just as people born after about 1970 are inclined to forget that there were no video recorders before their birth, people in 1770 didn’t expect the sort of sanitation or airbrushed physical perfection we do. Look at George Washington, the Indespensible Man. Would he stand a chance running for office today, with his ill-fitting false teeth? Head lice and bedbugs and fleas were a reality in 1800. Would a man going into battle be worrying about a flea in his sock? Probably not. It’s a balance, and everyone has a different idea of what the right balance is.
I do think that, because the Romance genre is more open to same-sex relationships (at least in small presses and e-books), we are seeing some absolutely splended HISTORICAL FICTION published under the Romance banner. That review of Transgressions in the Historical Novel Society magazine looks at the story with a different set of criteria–if anything, they seem to suggest you didn’t make it tough enough on the heroes.
To me, the bottom line is that nothing is *lost* in writing realistic history. The level of detail is a matter of personal taste, and the wallpaper reader isn’t going to be offended if, for example, the hero driving from London to Gretna Green has to take a couple of days and change horses–but the reader who knows you’d kill your horses trying to do it overnight *will* take well-deserved umbrage.
Personally, I find it harder to write contemporary stories. What’s cutting-edge today will be dated in a year. Once you get the history right, it doesn’t change much.
“Personally, I find it harder to write contemporary stories. What’s cutting-edge today will be dated in a year. Once you get the history right, it doesn’t change much.”
I am one of those readers who loves Sci-fi or Fantasy Romance and I even love Historical Romance that can dip into Fantasy for all I care. I think Contemporary is much harder to get into because that’s the here and now so you have to define a much more understandable setup for the story to make it realistic to begin with.
I think at least part of it comes down to respect. Does the writer respect the reader enough to put in the time and work to research and get it right? Do they have respect for the time they are writing about, understanding that it’s as complex and difficult to navigate as our own time? And respect for the experiences of the real people who lived through those times. And often suffered though them.
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Let’s face it, life sucked hard for lots of people in the past, (heck, it still does today for many people) whether because they were homosexual, or female, or poor, or the wrong colour, wrong religion at the time etc. Even the privileged suffered in ways unthinkable to us now, since even rich people lost children and other family members to disease at a rate we can’t even imagine now. To gloss over how hard life was for most people shows a lack of integrity, I think.
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I don’t mean that all historical romance should be full of pain and misery, just that there should be some awareness shown of the realities of the world. Of course some people managed to carve out little pockets of happiness, but they’d have to pay a price for it.
That’s how I see it, JFM – I respect my readers and the hours of searching for a particular fact – when I’m sometimes tempted to say WHO CARES???? – are tempered by the fact that i know that someone will. My first editor for Standish wanted to dumb down much of the language and I put my foot down there, too – I don’t want to dumb down either, my readers are intelligent enough to work it out in context, or they already know – or they’ll be interested enough to look it up. That being said, I do try and explain things in context.
That’s certainly the direction I want to be going.
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I was thrilled to bits with the review i got in the Historical Novel society – not just because they said the book was good – but because they said (as Lee mentions) that i was a little soft on my homosexual men even though I thought I was putting them through hell.
I do think it’s important that there should be accuracy about the time period in historical romances. However I didn’t think that historical romances were supposed to be a history lesson. All I will say is, I think that there needs to be a line between historical accuracy and an info dump.
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My concern is that, as I said earlier, it seems to me that historical writers delight in giving the readers all the ghastly and gory details about disease and the ultimate fate of the protagonists. Maybe they enjoy this aspect of their books..
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I’m not going to repeat what I said earlier. While I can read pretty well anything, I would really like to enjoy historical romances a bit more. I’m from the school of “less is more”.
I do think reviewers of historical fiction should remember that there are many sources out there, not just one or even two. To state unequivocally that something is incorrect without going to more than one source, misleads the readers of the review.
Since many of us write about periods in history where the course of historic events might change monthly, or about non-English speaking cultures where there is a diversity among groups, it behooves the reviewer to be open to the possibility that the writer may have used other sources than those of the reviewer.
If an author is writing an historical romance, than the reviewer should remember that a *romance* has a HEA or HFN ending. Why be surprised if the protags achieve this?
I don’t think I’ve ever been surprised about the protags having a HEA – what I HAVE been surprised, horrified, sickened about is to suddenly find at the end– that I’m reading an Alternate Universe Fantasy book where the male couple get married in church. I have read two, if not three books which have this device.
It would also be a good idea if the author listed sources for historic material in an “Acknowledgements” or “Author’s Notes” section. I’ve seen a number of authors do this in their novels, and I don’t know why this isn’t more widespread…especially in a genre where many historicals are made out of whole cloth.
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When I review a historical, I always check at least five or six sources, usually more–and the credibility of the sources themselves. I have always done so.
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@ Jeanne Barrack says: “If an author is writing an historical romance, than the reviewer should remember that a *romance* has a HEA or HFN ending. Why be surprised if the protags achieve this?”
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I can think of quite a number of famous fictional romances which ended badly, so I don’t start with the assumption that a romance novel will end happily, either for now or ever after. I know that a number of publishing houses prefer that, but I don’t want to start a book knowing the ending.
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And I’m very tired of the “gay couple in historical past gets married by priest/minister/Archbishop of Canterbury.” It’s a fantasy. I understand this. But it annoys me, because this particular trope has a habit of cropping up in books that are highly praised for their historical accuracy.
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