Daisy Goodwin's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"
Fact and Fiction
I have just published a historical novel called The Fortune Hunter in which the three main characters Elizabeth the empress of Austria, Bay Middleton and Charlotte Baird are all 'real' people. The story I tell about them is based loosely on actual events and I have peopled it liberally with historical characters like Queen Victoria, and Earl Spencer. But this is a novel not a text book, and I have taken considerable liberties with chronology - for instance I have condensed five years of hunting in the home counties to three months and I have sent Queen Victoria to a fictional exhibition ( although it was of a society of which she was the Patron), not to mention putting considerable flesh on the relationship between Sisi and Bay.
Do these liberties , or perhaps I should say lèse majesté, matter? Is the responsibility of a historical novelist to fact or to fiction?
As a historian by training I am scrupulous when it comes to things like language - I can't bear it in a novel set in the nineteenth century when people use anachronistic language like 'OK' , and I get ridiculously annoyed when writers confuse their baronets and barons. And I would refuse to read on if someone undid a zip before 1920.
And yet as a novelist I have happily invented a physical relationship between my two principal characters for which there is no hard evidence. Unless a cache of letters one day turns up in the Hapsburg archives there is nothing to suggest beyond contemporary supposition and rumour that anything compromising actually occurred between the Empress and her Pilot. But my reading of the Empress's character suggests that she was a woman who felt entitled to behave exactly as she wanted ( I think anyone who has been Empress since the age of 16 is likely to practise much self denial) and as recent events have shown rumours about royal women and cavalry captains have an uncanny way of turning out to be true.
Does a historical novelist bear more responsibility to the facts than, say, a Hollywood screenwriter. Am I more or less to blame for turning a rumour into a reality than
the writer of Braveheart for turning wishful thinking into a screenplay? Has Hilary Mantel done the public a disservice by turning Thomas Cromwell who was clearly a cruel man, into a vastly sympathetic character? It's a conundrum, imagine if in five hundred years time someone wrote a novel making Goebbels into a flawed but likeable hero? Mantel's research is impeccable and yet her portrayal of Cromwell is intensely subjective but I suspect it is the one that will now overlay all writing about him.
The paradox of writing about the past is that the most extraordinary things - the scenes or facts that people assume you have made up, are always real. Sisi really did cover her face in a layer of raw veal every night topped with a leather mask, and yet readers have assumed I have made this up. In my last book I drew upon contemporary accounts of Consuelo Vanderbilt's wedding for my description of her diamond studded gold suspenders, but was told that this was an invention too far.
My solution is an apologetic Author's Note which points where I have turned fact into fiction. I do, I admit, still feel guilty about sending the Prince of Wales to India in my last book in 1894 instead of 1895. But in my defines I think that all the liberties I have taken have made for a better story. Mea Culpa, and yet I am not really sorry.
Do these liberties , or perhaps I should say lèse majesté, matter? Is the responsibility of a historical novelist to fact or to fiction?
As a historian by training I am scrupulous when it comes to things like language - I can't bear it in a novel set in the nineteenth century when people use anachronistic language like 'OK' , and I get ridiculously annoyed when writers confuse their baronets and barons. And I would refuse to read on if someone undid a zip before 1920.
And yet as a novelist I have happily invented a physical relationship between my two principal characters for which there is no hard evidence. Unless a cache of letters one day turns up in the Hapsburg archives there is nothing to suggest beyond contemporary supposition and rumour that anything compromising actually occurred between the Empress and her Pilot. But my reading of the Empress's character suggests that she was a woman who felt entitled to behave exactly as she wanted ( I think anyone who has been Empress since the age of 16 is likely to practise much self denial) and as recent events have shown rumours about royal women and cavalry captains have an uncanny way of turning out to be true.
Does a historical novelist bear more responsibility to the facts than, say, a Hollywood screenwriter. Am I more or less to blame for turning a rumour into a reality than
the writer of Braveheart for turning wishful thinking into a screenplay? Has Hilary Mantel done the public a disservice by turning Thomas Cromwell who was clearly a cruel man, into a vastly sympathetic character? It's a conundrum, imagine if in five hundred years time someone wrote a novel making Goebbels into a flawed but likeable hero? Mantel's research is impeccable and yet her portrayal of Cromwell is intensely subjective but I suspect it is the one that will now overlay all writing about him.
The paradox of writing about the past is that the most extraordinary things - the scenes or facts that people assume you have made up, are always real. Sisi really did cover her face in a layer of raw veal every night topped with a leather mask, and yet readers have assumed I have made this up. In my last book I drew upon contemporary accounts of Consuelo Vanderbilt's wedding for my description of her diamond studded gold suspenders, but was told that this was an invention too far.
My solution is an apologetic Author's Note which points where I have turned fact into fiction. I do, I admit, still feel guilty about sending the Prince of Wales to India in my last book in 1894 instead of 1895. But in my defines I think that all the liberties I have taken have made for a better story. Mea Culpa, and yet I am not really sorry.
