Historical Novels: Going Where Scholars Dare Not Tread

“We’ve been lost to each other for so long. [….] The word passed into the keeping of men who had no way of knowing.” When Dina, the main character in Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, explains why she is just a footnote in the biblical story of Jacob’s children, she puts into words the unfortunate truth that although men’s stories may be told at great length, sometimes there’s no more than a sentence in an old text to alert us to a woman’s existence, and sometimes not even that. That realization is why I became a historical novelist.  

Men have had bards and historians to make sure their stories were passed down over the centuries, but as Dina says, they had no way of knowing ours. It’s as if men did all that was worth preserving as history, while women stayed home and stirred gruel, darned socks, and died giving birth to their umpteenth child. Men did important things. Women sewed the clothes they wore while they did them. 

There are excellent historical novels, such as Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders, describing the complex lives of women who stayed home, but research shows that women have been on battlefields of every sort imaginable, on boats and on land, in boardrooms and throne rooms, from storms at sea to perils in the sky. There were female Viking warriors, female Asian pirates and samurai, female European explorers, female African generals, even a female pope. They ran everything from kitchens to kingdoms, and all their lives, however humble or grand, deserve more attention. 

So, how will their stories be told? Scholars can only do so much, bound by sources they can cite. But when the evidence is lost? That’s where the historical novelist comes in. 

To reclaim women’s history, the work of novelists goes hand in hand with the efforts of historians and biographers. Biographers might hesitate even to put a piece of buttered toast into the mouth of their subjects unless there was proof it was on the breakfast table. A novelist researches typical breakfast fare, compares that to what is known about the person, and then goes right ahead. I imagine there may be biographers who cringe at the imaginative use we make of their work, but scholarship isn’t enough. After all, their subjects did eat breakfast, even if we can’t prove whether it was a crumpet or a cold boiled potato. 

There are several reasons to write historical fiction. Some books are meant only to entertain. You could swap kilts for togas and change Fiona’s name to Livia and still have essentially the same book. But historical fiction is a teaching opportunity for most of us. We read everything we can about the people, history, and culture of the subjects we write about, and if that scholarship doesn’t exist, a novel is a lost cause. When I hear about a fascinating woman, I look for a reliable biography as a starting point, and having one is why I was able to write my latest novel, Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel. Without it, Aloha was just a fun person to know about.  

When I was researching my novel The Mapmaker’s Daughter, about the last generations of Jews in Iberia, I ran across a biography of Isaac Abravanel, a Jewish poet, scholar, philosopher, and statesman whose biographer quotes him as saying that he could not have accomplished all he did if he did not have such a remarkable wife. That’s certainly far more than most wives got, but it would have been nice if he had mentioned her name. 

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She had a life. She too must have been a leader in her own way in a tragic and turbulent time. Do we ignore her because there is no historical record? I wasn’t willing to do that. I tracked down someone familiar with the Abravanel family’s genealogy, and when he didn’t know her name, I gave her a typical Sephardic one for her time. I researched everything I could about the lives of Jewish women in that period, and then I invented a life that captured their experiences. Is it Isaac’s wife’s real story? In broad brush I think so. Spirits whisper to me to tell their stories, and I’m not sure I make up anything. Maybe it’s close to some other person’s real story, or maybe it’sa composite drawn from the wishes of many women who don’t want to be forgotten.   

In one of the texts I used for my Humanities courses, there was an offhand mention of Vivaldi’s work with an orchestra of female orphan musicians in Venice. Female orphan musicians—I’d never seen those three words in one sentence before. The research I did into the remarkable institution of the Pietà became my novel The Four Seasons. In Finding Emilie a throwaway line in another textbook led me to the story of a brilliant mathematician and physicist whose scandalous life and remarkable achievements in Newtonian physics make her one of the most dazzling figures of her age. My guess is you may not have heard of either the Pietà or Emilie du Châtelet. Again, these books were possible because of scholarship, but it took a novel to tell the rest of the story. 

For those who ask abo ut my books, “Is it a true story,” I reply that I created something far truer than limiting what I wrote to facts. We’ve always been around, we’ve always been interesting, and it’s time everyone knew about more of us.