More than one hundred fifty years ago, Henry James wrote an essay about the art of fiction that remains today an important guidepost for all fiction—including the historical novel. And though he had famously said that the historical novel, for him, was “condemned … to a fatal cheapness,” he knew better. “As the picture is reality, so the novel is history,” he wrote in “The Art of Fiction.” For history that is allowed to represent life was what he was after, as he explained, and the novelist represents life precisely with “the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things.” So if we think of history as the seen—which it often is not—we can say that the novelist does in fact guess what lies behind the known, the accepted, the factual, the documented. And in that, historical fiction is alive, vibrating with a past that is in the present, part of the world, part of character, part of us.
Venture Further: Consider a narrative you’re confident you understand well, be it personal, historical, or taken from one of today’s headlines. In poetry or prose, relate the narrative again from the point of view of someone with a different stake in the situation. What changes when the perspective shifts? Now write through this situation once more, giving one of the characters involved a secret that explains their actions—or upends what happens next. {read}