Introduction

Abstract

Perspective in historical fiction is taken here to mean a view of the past adjusted to present interests. It is always difficult to be fair to both. Present interests are never quite those of the past and are liable to distort the view. An historical novelist is constantly involved in compromise. One way of looking at the hybrid nature of the genre is to see it as a mixture, of verifiable history, and of fiction — which need be true only to the reader’s experience of life; but all other realistic fiction claims to be true at least to the social history of the present or the recent past. My argument is that the best contemporary authors of historical fiction in Britain have been honest and creative in their compromises between the conflicting claims of past and present, achieving a useful perspective on various periods of history. The results are especially heartening because the last thirty years have seen widespread, radical questioning of both narrative history and realistic fiction. Given that this species of literature has always been unsure of itself, even at the time when novelists and historians wrote with greatest confidence, this current vitality is not only pleasing in itself: it is evidence of a division which now exists, at least in Britain, between avantgarde critical theory and the most original creative practice.