Why Historical Fiction Has Taken the Publishing World by Storm
We haven’t developed warp engines that fly at the speed of light, but in dizzying ways we’ve already drawn level to the fabled technology of Star Trek. Our phones hold the library of human knowledge at the touch of a button. Our homes are on voice command. We change the temperature, the lighting, start our cars and pour a cup of coffee with an offhand remark. We are implanting chips into human brains for any multitude of reasons—epilepsy, deafness, because we can. We’ve heard the tantalizing promises of growing organs for transplants and a cure for cancer just at our fingertips. We are so unfathomably rich that after we’ve filled our homes with unnecessary possessions, we rent storage lockers to keep even more!
(The Art of Mixing Fact and Fiction in Historical Novels.)
And if we step into a bookstore (if only we did that more often!) we are not immediately met with table upon table of science fiction, or science nonfiction, glorying in our recent progress and accomplishments. Shouldn’t the shelves be filled with novels that dive deep into molecular biology, chemical engineering, and quantum physics? When we step inside a bookstore, we find instead table upon table of backward glancing women in dresses no one has worn for decades, or centuries. The shelves are lined with stories plucked from the past, promising to take us on a journey not forward in time, but backward. And we go. Willingly, gratefully. We buy and borrow and bury ourselves in the past.
Why?
Do any of us want to live in a time when they gave you a stiff brandy and held you down to saw off your leg? Are we longing for feudal laws, girdles, or chamber pots? We certainly don’t miss the lice or fleas or measles.
Why do I keep a shining, black typewriter from the 1930s on proud display beside my antique collection of Shakespeare’s plays, complete with vellum protected illustrations? Or my prized piece of furniture—an oak card catalog with the alphabetical, hand-written labels still lovingly adorning each drawer.
When we turn our eyes backward to the past, what are we looking for?
It is tempting to say simplicity.
Most people give that answer. A simpler life—void of the complications and demands of modern living. No 401ks, 10-99s. No trying to set the clock on your receiver or pair your thermostat to your phone. A walk through the garden. A maid to set the table (as if we would have been the very few to afford that) or a peaceful ride on a horse beside the white cliffs of Dover.
Never mind that I live with horses and they have a maddening habit of going sick or lame if you look at them wrong. Or the moon is full, or Mars is out of alignment, or a crow lands somewhere in Amsterdam. Never mind scullery maids worked unbearable hours at mind-numbing and body-taxing tasks. Yes, we would have worn the white shirt with lace cuffs and a flowing skirt (that hopefully didn’t catch fire or get caught in the loom) but we could do that now and we certainly don’t. We dream of sitting at a writing desk and answering correspondence. Never mind when someone you loved fell sick, you didn’t know for weeks, nor could you reach them in time to say good-bye. The romance of a quill is hardly worth that.
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But still the answer remains. Simplicity. Simplicity must not be confused with ease. Life was harder in most ways. But simpler? Yes, it was simpler.
Quieter.
More focused.
Primers written for young children a hundred years ago now tax the abilities of modern high schoolers, who have grown up with access to every book ever written. But they haven’t been reading them. They’ve been fed a steady diet of video games, YouTube, cartoons that burst with color and sound and move at lightning speed between camera shots and scenes. Our attention spans, they say, are less than a goldfish now. Though I am suspicious about how they verified the boredom of a goldfish.
Sink deeper into the word simplicity and you find something profound lurking behind it, in the dim shadows.
Quiet.
A falling hush. A stop to the stock tickers, email alerts, voicemails, news feeds.
Wordsworth felt it over 200 years ago standing on the Westminster Bridge. The world is too much with us. Even he lamented over the maddening speed and commotion of modern life as he shielded his frustrated eyes from the smoggy glare of midday sun.
Did you feel it?
Just now?
The tug to imagine the poet on the bridge as the muddy Thames slipped beneath him? The desire to read the rest of the poem? The strange sense of nostalgia for something that never belonged to you?
That is precisely why historical fiction is sweeping through the publishing industry like fire. In a world of disconnected lives and a growing pandemic of loneliness, these novels pull us backward, away from sound and fury, to meet ourselves, as we may have been. Would we have picked wildflowers instead of interviewing applicants? Would we have composed a song instead of rushing to a board meeting? Would we, perhaps, have sat by the fireplace and talked the evening hours away instead of a nightly Netflix binge?
Historical fiction is an exercise in quiet, in self discovery, in self assessment. As we meet potential versions of ourselves in the past, we diagnose where we are at present. We sit quietly in the pages, learning how to navigate a time and place we will never visit—but still.
Still.
We are still. And we are learning. And somehow imbibing a bit of the courage and resourcefulness of the past into our own lives. Perhaps we know those backward glancing women on the book covers are looking at us. Inviting us into the quiet hardships of their world. They will confide, confess, divulge, trust. It will be a relationship we rarely find in this age—giving us permission to step away from the exhausting complexities that plague us and walk with them toward the future we now own.
Check out Audrey Blake’s The Woman With No Name here:
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