There Is Historical Fiction and there is Historical fiction

[Wifetheif]

I recently read the highly popular and well-reviewed historical fiction novel "The Sealwoaman's Gift" by Sally Magnusun. It is based on the very real experiences of a minister, his wife, and three children who were part of a group of two hundred people captured in Iceland by Barbary pirates in the 1600s and brought back to North Africa as slaves. Their oldest son at age 13 is promptly scooped up by the local sultan. The minister, his wife, daughter, and newborn son are purchased by a local wealthy Moor. The minister husband, too old for work, is immediately sent to Stockholm (Sweden ruled Iceland at the time) to raise funds to ransom his family and the others. When he gets to Sweden he is told because of a recent war that Sweden lost, the treasury is empty. The minister returns to Iceland and starts raising money on his own. It will take him ten years to build up sufficient funds. In the meantime, the wheels come off the novel. What most logically happened was this: the Moor had a very pretty red-haired white woman at his disposal who literally could not say no. No doubt he started banging her as soon as the husband's ship was over the horizon. Our author though goes for the implausibility stakes award. Giving our heroine absurd freedom, she is allowed to walk all over Algiers. ALONE! During one of these excursions, she comes across the captain of the pirate ship that captured her and her neighbors. The captain rapes our heroine. Our heroine goes whining to her Moor owner who exacts revenge by having the captain killed. Our heroine is so grateful, she sleeps with her owner after THREE YEARS have passed! WTF! Magnuson insists on romance and tenderness when historically there was none. Our heroine is property, valuable property at that. What capitalist in history isn't going to make use of his assets? There is NO WAY he would wait three years to consummate the relationship. Especially not in the patriarchal society in which he lived. The whole point of Barbary pirates raiding places like Ireland, Britain, Iceland, and France was to obtain valuable white women to sell for high prices as concubines. It's not like she is real estate! Eventually, he husband ransoms her and she returns to Iceland sans children.
This impossibility took me completely out of the novel. Have you ever read some historical fiction and encountered so much blatant fiction it took you out of the novel or story?
I suppose a novel about a woman who endures PTSD for a decade would not be especially interesting but making the slave owner the "good guy" requires leaps of logic that are quite frankly offensive. Can you cite other examples of fictional historical fiction?

 

[XerXesXu]

I recently read the highly popular and well-reviewed historical fiction novel "The Sealwoaman's Gift" by Sally Magnusun. It is based on the very real experiences of a minister, his wife, and three children who were part of a group of two hundred people captured in Iceland by Barbary pirates in the 1600s and brought back to North Africa as slaves. Their oldest son at age 13 is promptly scooped up by the local sultan. The minister, his wife, daughter, and newborn son are purchased by a local wealthy Moor. The minister husband, too old for work, is immediately sent to Stockholm (Sweden ruled Iceland at the time) to raise funds to ransom his family and the others. When he gets to Sweden he is told because of a recent war that Sweden lost, the treasury is empty. The minister returns to Iceland and starts raising money on his own. It will take him ten years to build up sufficient funds. In the meantime, the wheels come off the novel. What most logically happened was this: the Moor had a very pretty red-haired white woman at his disposal who literally could not say no. No doubt he started banging her as soon as the husband's ship was over the horizon. Our author though goes for the implausibility stakes award. Giving our heroine absurd freedom, she is allowed to walk all over Algiers. ALONE! During one of these excursions, she comes across the captain of the pirate ship that captured her and her neighbors. The captain rapes our heroine. Our heroine goes whining to her Moor owner who exacts revenge by having the captain killed. Our heroine is so grateful, she sleeps with her owner after THREE YEARS have passed! WTF! Magnuson insists on romance and tenderness when historically there was none. Our heroine is property, valuable property at that. What capitalist in history isn't going to make use of his assets? There is NO WAY he would wait three years to consummate the relationship. Especially not in the patriarchal society in which he lived. The whole point of Barbary pirates raiding places like Ireland, Britain, Iceland, and France was to obtain valuable white women to sell for high prices as concubines. It's not like she is real estate! Eventually, he husband ransoms her and she returns to Iceland sans children.
This impossibility took me completely out of the novel. Have you ever read some historical fiction and encountered so much blatant fiction it took you out of the novel or story?
I suppose a novel about a woman who endures PTSD for a decade would not be especially interesting but making the slave owner the "good guy" requires leaps of logic that are quite frankly offensive. Can you cite other examples of fictional historical fiction?

Is it a 'bodice-ripper'? Vast plot holes and complete implausibility is required and tolerated in that genre.

 

[Wifetheif]

Is it a 'bodice-ripper'. Vast plot holes and complete implausibility is required and tolerated in that genre.

It was not promoted as a bodice ripper or even a woman's novel. I've read bodice rippers by Beatrice Small involving English women being captured by Barbary Pirates that had more plausible love stories and stayed closer to real history.

 

[KeithD]

I'll put this somewhere on my "worry list." It's a verrrry long list.

 

[JaxRhapsody]

I'm not even going to try and read that.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

It was not promoted as a bodice ripper or even a woman's novel. I've read bodice rippers by Beatrice Small involving English women being captured by Barbary Pirates that had more plausible love stories and stayed closer to real history.

I've heard the same complaints elsewhere about the same book, which I'd never have heard of otherwise.
There's loads of historical books in Tudor or even Victorian times where people of different classes freely mix and become friends, with nothing more than observations about their different lives - no! In most cases speaking out to your betters would be unthinkable!

Though the one that comes to mind was intented as non-fiction: Patricia Cornwell's book on Jack the Ripper, deciding it was Sickert because he'd had an inguinal hernia so must have a complex about his genitals. Except there's many types of hernia and evidence that's not what he had, not least the hospital he was in not treating those parts of his body. The whole book is a terrible example of cherry-picking data.

 

[onehitwanda]

I'm not even going to try and read that.View attachment 2266979

Those eyebrows...

 

[PrincessArianrhod]

I'm not even going to try and read that.

Imagine if everybody made a post that helpful.

It is a matter of some amusement to me that a single paragraph can now be described as a wall of text. My first story submission was sent back by Laurel citing overlong paragraphs as the reason. They were traditional length, phrased according to scene and relevance, but there we are; attention spans are not what they used to be.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Imagine if everybody made a post that helpful.

It is a matter of some amusement to me that a single paragraph can now be described as a wall of text. My first story submission was sent back by Laurel citing overlong paragraphs as the reason. They were traditional length, phrased according to scene and relevance, but there we are; attention spans are not what they used to be.

It's not that, it's smaller screens on digital devices, needing "white space". There are plenty of contemporary printed page books with "old style" paragraph lengths.

 

[PrincessArianrhod]

There are plenty of contemporary printed page books with "old style" paragraph lengths.

Finding solace in the printed word.

My thanks for the attitude adjustment, though.

 

[SimonDoom]

It sounds like the plot difficulties have less to do with inaccurate history than with implausible character psychology and behavior, which is something that could happen equally in a contemporary story.

This sort of thing isn't as much a problem for me, although it depends on how it's handled. I can handle a high degree of implausibility if I feel like the author has spent a little time trying to make the story work.

 

[Altissimus]

It is a matter of some amusement to me that a single paragraph can now be described as a wall of text.

It's 400+ words. That's longer than a page in a typical printed book - almost two pages.

I opened the thread, saw the original post, would've clicked 'back' right there but some folk I like had already responded, so with a sense of resignation I skimmed the first line, got halfway through skimming the second line and skipped to the end.

If you want someone to read what you write, you have to make it accessible. That's a fundamental law of what we do here, isn't it?

 

[PrincessArianrhod]

If you want someone to read what you write, you have to make it accessible. That's a fundamental law of what we do here, isn't it?

Abashed, I stood and felt the weight of my chastisement.

 

[Voboy]

History wasn't always like you think it was.

Generally, people in different social classes mixed very freely in most cultures until the modern era. There was no other option, really. Pronouncements like, "That would NEVER happen!!!!" are not usually accurate.

People who lived hundreds of years ago were just people, living their lives and getting by. They usually couldn't afford to walk on eggshells all the time. They told each other jokes, flirted with their bosses, and interacted with all sorts of different people. They wanted most of the same things we want, and they probably got those things in much the same ways.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Yes, some errors in historical fiction can set my teeth on edge, but I think it would be a mistake to make too much of it. The literary value of the book notwithstanding (haven’t read it), I think it’s iffy to expect modern attitudes to be mirrored in fictional depictions of wildly-different times and cultures.

Slavery was - and remains today, sadly - abhorrent, yet I cannot think of any society in history rising above the meanest level of sophistication without it having appeared. It was pretty much a given everywhere and while it might have been unpleasant for those in question, nobody 400 years ago would have seen its very existence as shocking. (To use a very trivial analogy, one doesn’t today rail against the existence of speed traps; it’s a moan about ‘Why me’?)

And individual expectations centuries ago were much different than today’s norm. As a girl, you would have had little illusion about what awaited you after menarche. Whatever fantasies you might have secretly had, the bottom line was that you were inevitably going to spend your life under control of some man you had little say in selecting, doing what he ordered you to and, oh yes, coping with the societal, religious and legal obligations to share his bed whenever it pleased his fancy. Oh, there were options, but chief among them were prostitution or life locked in a nunnery and ick to both. No doubt being captured by slavers was deeply unpleasant on a host of levels, but life outside that was in any case, per Hobbes, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Indeed, despite the loathsome nature of the institution, being a female slave in a decent Algiers household might actually have been a step up in terms of lifestyle. That’s not by any means defending slavery, just an objective comparison of that to life as a ‘free’ wife in a marginal, utterly patriarchal, backwater European society. Small and large-scale slave raids by Vikings, Arabs and others were common across post-Roman Europe for a millennium, enslaving hundreds of thousands of women and men. Focusing on the female captives, no doubt they were upset, desperately homesick and very frightened, but I doubt whole swaths of them suffered lifelong intense traumas. One adapted, just as one would when tossed into an arranged marriage back home at 14 or 15, quite possibly to a total stranger.

It’s also unreasonable, I fear, to paint all Algerian men with dark colours. There were undoubtedly decent, generous, kind men around, all that despite their being slave owners. A three year ‘free pass’ does seem unlikely, but this is fiction, utilizing the unlikely to make a story interesting. Moreover, I may be wrong, but slaves being allowed to move freely strikes me as not utterly implausible. The owner’s sense of honour (or whatever) would hardly be seen at as much risk as if it were a free female relative by herself. Distasteful to our minds now, but that was then and there.

Bottom line? It’s fiction and fiction rarely centres on drab, ordinary reality. If it isn’t to your tastes, either suspend your sense of disbelief or toss the book and find one which is.

 

[yowser]

History wasn't always like you think it was.

Generally, people in different social classes mixed very freely in most cultures until the modern era. There was no other option, really. Pronouncements like, "That would NEVER happen!!!!" are not usually accurate.

People who lived hundreds of years ago were just people, living their lives and getting by. They usually couldn't afford to walk on eggshells all the time. They told each other jokes, flirted with their bosses, and interacted with all sorts of different people. They wanted most of the same things we want, and they probably got those things in much the same ways.

I think most anthropologists and historians would maintain that hierarchy is a vital part of MOST cultures and times. The times and places I am most familiar with (Roman empire, 17th C England, India) have all had extremely inflexible hierarchies, and classes did not interact casually.

An interesting read is David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything : a new history of humanity in which he points out a few non-hierarchical societies and exceptions to the general course of cultures. You are absolutely correct that individuals throughout time have universal experiences (fears, hopes, desires) but all of these played out in usually complex social structures, where habits, dress, speech all had strong social class markers and elements.

 

[Voboy]

I think most anthropologists and historians would maintain that hierarchy is a vital part of MOST cultures and times. The times and places I am most familiar with (Roman empire, 17th C England, India) have all had extremely inflexible hierarchies, and classes did not interact casually.

An interesting read is David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything : a new history of humanity in which he points out a few non-hierarchical societies and exceptions to the general course of cultures. You are absolutely correct that individuals throughout time have universal experiences (fears, hopes, desires) but all of these played out in usually complex social structures, where habits, dress, speech all had strong social class markers and elements.

I'm not really talking about hierarchy.

Read Montaigne, or Bruno, or Valla, or go back a lot farther and check out Cicero or Lucretius. All those men lived in incredibly hierarchical times with deeply rigid class systems, and yet their work makes it clear that there was still teasing, punnery, and ribaldry between the social classes all the time. There's little reason to suppose that wasn't the case in Northern Europe as well; hell, what we know of Anglo-Saxon and Norse life makes it obvious that they were highly irreverent too, despite being at least as hierarchical as we are now.

This is clear even in the sagas. Notice how Odin's nominal underlings and slaves speak to him: it's not reverential at all. The people who worshipped Odin would have been mirroring that behavior as well, most likely.

 

[yowser]

I understand your point. There is likely a wide range over time and place. But I still think that class consciousness does affect a good deal of interactions in a variety of contexts. An extreme example are the dalits in India. Sharing food - out of the question for any individual higher in the varna system, and almost any verbal communication is going to be heavily freighted.

For the purposes of the original discussion, understanding the cultural contexts is key in representing fictional characters, and there many pitfalls and ways to get it wrong unless you are quite familiar with the historical setting.

 

[MillieDynamite]

So, I read the novel explaining the novel and thought, WTF who gives a flying crap. Historical Novels are still fiction and aren't required to be believable. Their only requirement is to lift the unbelievable into believability. For some readers, it happens, for you, it didn't. You're like the readers here who want you to rewrite the work, so they like it. Get over it that you didn't enjoy the novel.

 

[JaxRhapsody]

Imagine if everybody made a post that helpful.

It is a matter of some amusement to me that a single paragraph can now be described as a wall of text. My first story submission was sent back by Laurel citing overlong paragraphs as the reason. They were traditional length, phrased according to scene and relevance, but there we are; attention spans are not what they used to be.

Because it was a wall of text the exact length of my phones screen, excluding the banner.

 

[TheRedChamber]

This impossibility took me completely out of the novel. Have you ever read some historical fiction and encountered so much blatant fiction it took you out of the novel or story?
I suppose a novel about a woman who endures PTSD for a decade would not be especially interesting but making the slave owner the "good guy" requires leaps of logic that are quite frankly offensive. Can you cite other examples of fictional historical fiction?

I'm currently writing a piece set in Tudor times (well...more accurately I'm currently writing absolutely nothing, but I won't bore you will my problems...). Historical fiction is tough - one of my characters so much as mentions having a bath and that's the afternoon gone researching the procurement of hot water and the ingredients of 16th-century soap. Then there's the struggle of deciding on how to approach the dialogue - where on the spectrum does your 18-year-old character fall between cod-(pre)-Shakespearean prose and 21st-century yoof slang (when talking to his sister...his priest...the King). And then you go back and read what you've written and you find your Finance Minister has somehow split the difference and sounds positively Dickensian.

Add on top of that the fact it's an erotic novel and you've suddenly got a whole other level of head-scratching with what people actually got up to. Modern historians love to tell you that people got up to a lot more than was written down, and that's almost certainly true, but they don't tell you how much they got up to relative to your standard Literotica stroker. I want my MC to start the story nieve, pious and traditional, but there's a danger that if I play that too heavily and too in-line with the standards of the time, readers just won't like him. A lot of readers might well be along for 21st century sex in 16th century costumes.

I enjoy researching but sometimes you just have to say it's a fantasy story and sticking over-obsessively to historical accuracy can be an albatross around your neck. That is to say, there are authors who have absolute expertise in their time period and that's a selling point, but that's probably not me with this story. The more accurate I try to be, the more room for inaccuracies there is. I have to find a middle ground where the reader isn't jerked out of the story by obvious anachronisms.
With the story you mention, it does sound like the author wanted to write a harem fantasy with most of the rough edges knocked off, or else accidentally slid into that one softening decision at a time. Having tried it myself, I can sympathize, though they obviously lost you as a reader.

BTW, I don't really want to pile into the paragraph issue, but it might be worth mentioning that part of the issue is that you have 20+ sentences in one paragraph. Being just short of 400 words might be okay in academic/traditional prose, but when you are writing machine gun sentences (WTF!) it does help to break it up way more.

 

[JGittes]

...

Add on top of that the fact it's an erotic novel and you've suddenly got a whole other level of head-scratching with what people actually got up to. Modern historians love to tell you that people got up to a lot more than was written down, and that's almost certainly true, but they don't tell you how much they got up to relative to your standard Literotica stroker. I want my MC to start the story nieve, pious and traditional, but there's a danger that if I play that too heavily and too in-line with the standards of the time, readers just won't like him. A lot of readers might well be along for 21st century sex in 16th century costumes.

...

Change the setting to a modern Renaissance Faire. It could make your research actually part of the plot. The daytime goings-on generally need to be family-friendly, but after-hours shenanigans are usually adults only.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Change the setting to a modern Renaissance Faire. It could make your research actually part of the plot. The daytime goings-on generally need to be family-friendly, but after-hours shenanigans are usually adults only.

And they should save money by setting the next Star Trek series in the queue for Space Mountain. (Though, could it actually be worse...)

I should say, my above screed wasn't complaining exactly. I love getting embedded in those kinds of details - at least some of them. I guess all I'm trying to say is that historical fiction is just harder and slower (often) if you're trying to do it with any kind of accuracy. That said, you can get by with a lot of Ren Faire type stuff by just setting it in a general 'swords and sandals' type fantasy world where no-one is expecting verisimilitude.

Still, I do like the idea of a humour piece which starts with the action nominally taking place in medieval times, only for the author to gently sneak in increasingly anachronistic elements and sexual terms and practices (finally reaching the level of smart watches, condoms and pop lyrics) until it's finally revealed to be taking place at a Renaissance Faire. Hmm, I'll have to think about that one.

 

[Voboy]

I guess all I'm trying to say is that historical fiction is just harder and slower (often) if you're trying to do it with any kind of accuracy.

Right.

But that's the fun.