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Historical Fictions

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The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945–1975

Part of the book series: History of British Women’s Writing ((HBWW))

Abstract

In 1961 the historian Helen Cam noted the contemporaneous vogue for historical fiction, quoting approvingly John Raymond’s comment that, ‘We must all agree … that there is no time like the present for the historical novel in all its variety and richness.’1 Yet by 1969 Ursula Brumm was stating that, ‘In our time, which is postrealistic in that realism has been superseded by other literary conventions, the historical novel has almost disappeared.’2 And in The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf in 1971, Avrom Fleishman argued that Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Between the Acts (1941) ‘bring the tradition of the English historical novel to a self-conscious close.’3 Why is it that, while Cam sees a thriving literary field, Brumm and Fleishman see a dead tradition?

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Notes

  1. Helen Cam, Historical Novels (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 3.

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  2. Ursula Brumm, ‘Thoughts on History and the Novel’, Comparative Literature Studies, 6 (1969), 327.

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  3. Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 233.

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  4. Gyorgy Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell [1936/7] (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 338.

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  6. See Jan Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), Chapter 5;

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Authors
  1. Diana Wallace
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southampton, UK

    Clare Hanson (Professor of Twentieth Century Literature) (Professor of Twentieth Century Literature)

  2. School of Cultural Studies and Humanities, Leeds Beckett University, UK

    Susan Watkins (Professor of Women’s Writing) (Professor of Women’s Writing)

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Wallace, D. (2017). Historical Fictions. In: Hanson, C., Watkins, S. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945–1975. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47736-1_15

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