Historical Musings #78: Real people or fictional?

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Welcome to my monthly post on all things historical fiction! This month, I’m going to look at two different kinds of historical novel – those that insert fictional characters into historical settings and those that focus on real historical figures. The second type of book is sometimes referred to as a ‘biographical novel’ and ranges from Robert Graves’ I, Claudius to Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen. I read and enjoy all sorts of historical fiction, but I know some people like their novels to be completely fictional while others prefer to read about real kings, queens, artists, musicians, politicians etc, so I’m interested to hear your thoughts!

I’m happy to read either of these kinds of book and they both seem to be equally popular, although I’m aware that a lot of readers don’t like reading fiction about real historical figures and would rather read non-fiction about them instead. Personally, I often seem to struggle to digest information through non-fiction, which is why I prefer to get to know historical figures in fictional form first and then use that as a starting point to find out more. I think if I’d just read a non-fiction biography of Thomas Cromwell, I would have forgotten half of what I’d read by the time I finished the book, whereas his story as told in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has stayed with me. I know, though, that Wolf Hall only gives me one author’s interpretation of Cromwell’s character and that to get a full picture I would need to explore as many versions as possible, both fictional and factual. We also need to consider an author’s personal prejudices, their target audience or the information and sources available to them at the time of writing. Just look at Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III!

There are some obvious advantages to an author in writing about fictional characters – more freedom to invent personalities, dialogue and storylines without having to worry about readers saying, “but that never happened” or “she would never have said something like that”. However, these fictional stories still need to be believable and plausible within the context of the historical period in which the characters are living. And while some authors populate their entire book with imaginary characters only, others include a mixture of real and fictional. In some books, the interactions between the two feel natural and convincing (in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, for example, her fictional characters mix seamlessly with Mary, Queen of Scots, Ivan the Terrible and John Dee, to name just a few), while others don’t feel quite right to me (I didn’t like seeing Prince Philip appear in Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code, a book I otherwise loved).

In general, I’m much more comfortable reading about historical figures from previous centuries rather than people who have only recently died or are even still alive, as Prince Philip was at the time the Kate Quinn book was published. I’m also not very keen on books that put real people into completely imaginary situations, for example the current trend for using historical figures such as the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens or Josephine Tey as detectives in mystery novels. I know a lot of people love these, but they don’t really appeal to me.

What is your opinion on this? If you’re reading a novel set in the past, do you prefer to read about real or fictional characters – or both?

Weyward by Emilia Hart

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Witchcraft is a subject I always find interesting to read about, so I was curious to see how Emilia Hart would approach it in Weyward, her debut novel published in the UK earlier this month. It’s a book set in three different time periods, something which doesn’t always work for me, but in this case the three storylines are so closely linked I found the structure very effective.

In Shakespeare’s First Folio, the three witches in Macbeth are referred to as the ‘weyward sisters’, a term which evolved into ‘weird sisters’ in later versions – and just like Macbeth, Emilia Hart’s novel features three ‘weyward’ women.

In 2019, we meet Kate, a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship. Finally making the decision to leave, she flees London for Crows Beck, a village in Cumbria where she has inherited a cottage from her great-aunt, Violet. Settling into the house, known as Weyward Cottage, Kate begins to uncover some family secrets that help her to understand the great-aunt she barely knew. A second thread of the novel is set in 1942 and introduces us to Violet as a girl of sixteen living at Orton Hall with her father. She longs to know more about her mother, who died when she was a small child, but her father refuses to talk about her, except to say that Violet resembles her – and not in a good way. As Violet’s story unfolds, we find out how she came to leave Orton Hall and build a new life at Weyward Cottage.

The third of the weyward women in the novel is Altha Weyward who lives in Crows Beck in the early 17th century. Altha, who has a knowledge of healing and herbs passed down to her by her mother, is on trial for witchcraft, having been accused of killing a local man. As Altha waits to hear whether she will be found guilty, we learn more about her life in the village and the truth behind the man’s death.

The three women are linked not just by a family connection, but also through a shared love of nature. In fact, it’s more than just a love – it’s an affinity so strong that they are able to draw power from the natural environment and find comfort in surrounding themselves with plants and animals even at the most difficult of times. I could have done without so many detailed descriptions of insects and spiders, but on the other hand the affection these women have for even the least pleasant of creatures is what makes them unusual and different. None of them conform to society’s expectations and for Violet and Altha at least, this can lead to suspicion and distrust.

The male characters don’t come out of this book very well; from Kate’s violent, manipulative ex-partner and Violet’s cold, strict father to the men who hold Altha’s fate in their hands, they are very much the villains of the book. However, I did like Violet’s brother Graham and the little we learn of Kate’s father, so not all of the men are shown in a bad light. As for the three female protagonists, I liked all of them, although Violet was the one I felt the closest connection with. The three narratives are written in different styles using different combinations of first and third person and past and present tense, so I never felt confused as to whose story I was reading. Parts of Kate’s story towards the end were quite predictable, but otherwise all three storylines were gripping, staying with one character for just the right length of time before switching to the next, and with plenty of cliffhanger chapter endings to keep things moving forward.

I enjoyed Weyward, although there wasn’t as much focus on witchcraft as I expected – it’s more a book about the magic of nature and the obstacles faced by women over the centuries. It wasn’t always comfortable to read as all three of the main characters go through some very traumatic experiences, but I found it an interesting and unusual novel and will look out for more from Emilia Hart.

Thanks to HarperCollins UK/The Borough Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 6/50 read for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

The Walter Scott Prize Longlist 2023

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The longlist for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction was announced yesterday! Thanks to this prize, I have discovered lots of great books and authors and always look out for the longlists and shortlists; in fact, trying to read all of the shortlisted titles since the prize began in 2010 is a personal project of mine (you can see my progress here).

There are twelve books on this year’s longlist and here they are:

The Romantic by William Boyd (Viking)

These Days by Lucy Caldwell (Faber & Faber)

My Name is Yip by Paddy Crewe (Doubleday)

The Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan (Tuskar Rocks)

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris (Hutchinson Heinemann)

The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph (Dialogue Books)

The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry (Riverrun)

The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley by Sean Lusk (Doubleday)

The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane (Allen & Unwin)

Ancestry by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown)

I am Not Your Eve by Devika Ponnambalam (Blue Moose Books)

The Settlement by Jock Serong (Text Publishing)

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I’m delighted to see The Romantic on the longlist as it was one of my favourite books of 2022. I would love to see it win – I really thought it was wonderful! I’m not surprised to see Act of Oblivion here too, as Robert Harris has been nominated for (and in fact, won) this prize in the past. It’s not a book that I personally loved, but I’ll be quite happy if it makes the shortlist. The only other one I’ve read is The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley, an entertaining read but not one I was expecting to find on the longlist, so I’ll be interested to see whether it progresses any further.

These Days, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho and Ancestry are all books I’m aware of and would like to read (I have reserved These Days from the library), but I haven’t even heard of the other six! I obviously need to do some investigating.

The shortlist will be announced in April and a winner in mid-June at the Border Books Festival in Melrose, Scotland.

Have you read any of these books? Are you pleased to see them on the longlist?

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with ‘Heart’ in the title

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is a “Love/Valentine’s Day Freebie”.

To celebrate Valentine’s Day I have listed ten books I’ve read with the word ‘heart’ in the title. However, they are not all love stories – in fact, most of them aren’t!

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1. Second Hand Heart by Catherine Ryan Hyde – A moving novel exploring the theory of cellular memory – the idea that a transplanted organ retains the memories and characteristics of its previous owner.

2. The Heart of Midlothian by Sir Walter Scott – This classic novel is set in Edinburgh during the 1736 Porteous Riots. It’s not my favourite of the few novels I’ve read by Scott, but I did like the heroine, Jeanie Deans, who walks all the way to London to try to save her sister’s life.

3. The Obscure Logic of the Heart by Priya Basil – The story of a Sikh man and a Muslim woman who fall in love as students, this is the only real ‘romance’ on my list, but it’s also so much more than that, touching on politics, poverty, gun crime and the work of the UN.

4. The Metal Heart by Caroline Lea – In this book set during World War II, Caroline Lea weaves the story of two twin sisters around the building of a chapel in the Orkney Islands by Italian prisoners of war. An interesting blend of fact and fiction.

5. Bleeding Heart Square by Andrew Taylor – This standalone historical mystery is set in 1930s London. It’s both an entertaining novel and a fascinating portrayal of the rise of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.

6. The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne – The story of Ireland from the 1940s to the modern day as seen through the eyes of Cyril Avery, a gay man trying to come to terms with his sexuality, and written with John Boyne’s usual wit and humour.

7. With All My Heart by Margaret Campbell Barnes – A fictional account of the life of Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese princess who marries King Charles II. First published in 1951, it does feel dated now but is interesting as Catherine is not a popular subject for historical fiction.

8. Written in My Own Heart’s Blood by Diana Gabaldon – The eighth book in Gabaldon’s Outlander series sees Claire and Jamie in America in the middle of the Revolutionary War. It’s not a favourite of mine – I loved the first four in the series, but have been gradually losing interest with each book after that.

9. The Oaken Heart by Margery Allingham – Better known for her Albert Campion detective novels, this is Allingham’s memoir of life in her small English village during the Second World War. Originally published in 1941, while the war was still taking place.

10. The Silvered Heart by Katherine Clements – Set in the 17th century, this novel is inspired by the real life highwaywoman, Katherine Ferrers, also known as ‘the Wicked Lady’. Not much is known about the historical woman, but Clements brings her story to life while also portraying England in the aftermath of Civil War.

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Have you read any of these books? Which other books with ‘heart’ in the title can you think of?

Death of an Author by E.C.R. Lorac – #ReadIndies

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E.C.R. Lorac’s Death of an Author, first published in 1935, begins with the novelist Michael Ashe persuading his publisher to arrange a dinner party so that he can meet another of their authors, the crime writer Vivian Lestrange. Despite being famously secretive and reclusive, Lestrange accepts the invitation – but to Ashe’s surprise, a young woman arrives at the party rather than the man he had expected. Vivian, of course, could be either a man’s name or a woman’s, and Lestrange seems amused by Ashe’s assumptions. She engages Ashe in a debate on gender equality and whether it’s possible to tell a man’s writing from a woman’s – and naturally, she comes out of the argument on top.

Three months later, the same young woman approaches the police to report a crime and introduces herself as Eleanor Clarke, secretary to the author Vivian Lestrange. She admits that Lestrange really is a man, although she has impersonated him at parties a few times for fun. Her reason for contacting the police is that Mr Lestrange has disappeared along with his housekeeper, Mrs Fife, and Eleanor is unable to gain entry to his house, her place of work. She is concerned about him and wants the police to investigate. Inspector Bond, however, is convinced that Eleanor herself is Vivian Lestrange and that some sort of deception is taking place. His Scotland Yard colleague, Inspector Warner, on the other hand, believes what Eleanor has told them and accepts that she and Lestrange are two separate people. But which of them is correct – and if Eleanor is telling the truth, what has happened to the real Vivian Lestrange?

This is the first book I’ve read by Lorac, although I’ve been intending to try one for a long time as I know she’s one of the most popular authors in the British Library Crime Classics series. It was maybe not the best one to start with (it has just been reprinted in January, and I would imagine the British Library have been publishing her stronger books first), but I found it enjoyable enough, with one or two reservations. It certainly has a fascinating plot, with the police trying to investigate a crime without being sure who the victim is or even whether a crime has been committed at all. It was interesting to watch the two detectives, Warner and Bond, working together to come up with different possible scenarios and trying to decide which was the most likely.

As an author who wrote under her initials (her real name was Edith Caroline Rivett) and other pseudonyms including Carol Carnac (Lorac is Carol backwards), the arguments Eleanor Clarke makes to defend women’s writing and to refute the assumption that only men could write a certain kind of book must have been close to Lorac’s own heart. And yet, the way the story develops after this seems to contradict some of the points that were being made at the beginning and I was left feeling slightly confused as to what Lorac was actually trying to say.

Although I couldn’t quite manage to love this one, it was still an entertaining read and I’m sure I’ll try more of Lorac’s books. I know some of you have read a lot of them, so I would like to hear which ones you would recommend!

I’m counting this towards #ReadIndies, a month celebrating books from independent publishers hosted by Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Lizzy’s Literary Life.

The Efficiency Expert by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Edgar Rice Burroughs is not an author I’ve ever considered reading; neither his Tarzan series nor his John Carter of Mars books have ever appealed and I hadn’t thought to look into what else he had written. The Efficiency Expert was suggested by one of my blog readers (thank you, Cheryl!) and it proved to be an excellent recommendation. The book was published in 1921 and seems to be one of only a few novels Burroughs wrote about ordinary people leading ordinary lives.

Jimmy Torrance is in his final year at university when he discovers that, having devoted his time to football, baseball and boxing instead of his studies, he is now in danger of failing his course. After working hard for the rest of the semester, he manages to get his diploma and ‘would have graduated at the head of his class had the list been turned upside down’. Unimpressed, his father orders him to come home before he can acquire any more debt, but Jimmy heads for Chicago instead, determined to get a good job and make his father proud of him.

Arriving in Chicago, Jimmy begins to look for work but soon finds that his college education counts for nothing without any experience. Forced to accept that nobody is going to employ him as an office boy, let alone the general manager’s position he had hoped for, he embarks on a series of increasingly embarrassing jobs including selling ladies’ hosiery in a department store and working as a waiter in a disreputable nightclub. Eventually, just as he reaches his lowest ebb, he is offered the position of ‘efficiency expert’ in a factory. Things seem to be looking up at last – but when he notices a discrepancy in the company’s accounts, he must decide whether to act and risk losing the only good job he’s ever had.

The first half of the book is entertaining and quite amusing as Jimmy stumbles from one disastrous job to another, while repeatedly encountering two young women who are mystified to find him serving at tables one day and driving a milk wagon the next. Jimmy is very naïve when he first arrives in Chicago, assuming that as a graduate he will be able to walk straight into any job, and his story will resonate with other young people who have had to work their way up from the bottom. I admired him for not asking his rich family and friends for help, which would have made things easier for him, but it’s this same sense of pride and integrity that results in him losing or leaving job after job.

Jimmy makes two new friends in Chicago – a pickpocket and safe-breaker known as the Lizard, and Little Eva, a prostitute he meets during his nightclub job – both of whom become better people due to their association with Jimmy. There’s a clear message here that decent people can be found in all walks of life and nobody is beyond redemption if they are only given a chance. The more privileged characters in the book (or some of them anyway) are not shown in such a good light! There’s a romantic element to the story too, with Jimmy having three possible love interests. The one he ends up with is neither the one I’d hoped for nor the one I’d expected, but at least that means the book isn’t completely predictable!

After Jimmy starts working as an efficiency expert, the story takes a different turn and the book becomes more of a thriller than the light comedy it had seemed at the beginning. It’s exciting for a while, but I thought it fell apart slightly at the end, with characters who had become inconvenient to the plot being too easily disposed of and loose ends tied up too neatly. Still, this book was fun to read and although I’m still not drawn to Tarzan or the science fiction novels, I’m pleased to have found an Edgar Rice Burroughs book that I did want to read and did enjoy.

If you have trouble finding a copy of this book, it’s available through Project Gutenberg.

The Murder Game by Tom Hindle

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I loved Tom Hindle’s first novel, A Fatal Crossing, a mystery set on a cruise ship in the 1930s, so I was excited about his new book, The Murder Game. I was expecting something similar – another historical mystery written in the style of the Golden Age – but was surprised to find that this one has a contemporary setting, although still with many of the tropes of a classic crime novel.

In The Murder Game, a group of people have assembled for a New Year’s Eve murder mystery evening at Hamlet Hall, a hotel in the small seaside town of Hamlet Wick. The arrangements are all in place – a fictional murder has been invented, roles have been assigned to each of the guests and actors have been brought in to play the supporting characters – but before the game can even begin, a real murder takes place at Hamlet Hall.

There’s no shortage of suspects; the victim was not a popular person and most of the others have a motive for the murder. PC Fay arrives on the scene and begins to investigate, hoping to solve the mystery herself to further her career, but her progress is slow and in the meantime tensions are increasing between the guests, actors and hotel staff. The atmosphere grows more hostile as they argue about a controversial project to renovate the local lighthouse – the site of a tragic accident several years earlier – and with no phone signal and everyone forbidden to leave the hotel, the residents of Hamlet Hall could find themselves in danger if the killer decides to strike again.

The Murder Game got off to a good start, but it didn’t really sustain my interest all the way through and I found it less enjoyable than A Fatal Crossing. I had loved the idea of a novel set during a murder mystery evening and was disappointed that the game never had time to begin before the real murder took place! The group of people gathered at the hotel for the evening are an unpleasant bunch, but that’s nothing unusual in this sort of novel – however, I felt that the story moved from one character’s perspective to another so often that I didn’t have a chance to get to know any of them very well.

The plot is quite complex and centres around two previous cases of people being killed under suspicious circumstances in Hamlet Wick. After we unravel the truth about those two deaths, which took place years before the novel begins, the events of the present day begin to make more sense – although I had already guessed who the culprit was, having picked up on one or two clues. I don’t often solve mysteries correctly, so it was nice to see that I had got it right for once! I couldn’t really see the point of the police officer character, though, as she seemed to have little impact on the story and we aren’t given much insight into her thought processes so can’t try to solve the murder along with her.

I found parts of the novel entertaining but my expectations were probably too high after enjoying A Fatal Crossing so much. I’ll still be looking out for a third novel from Tom Hindle and will be interested to see what setting he chooses next.

Thanks to Century for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.