Let's get this out of the way from the get-go: I am probably not the best person to answer the question "why read historical fiction?" Many, many of you reading this have no doubt read more widely in the genre than I have. My only real claim to it at all is that the first book written for adults I ever read was a paperback copy of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime that I scrounged from a meager library next to the perpetually empty vending machines at a fishing camp in Alpena, Michigan, on one of many long summer afternoons when I was on my own while my grandparents were sleeping off lunch. I've read others, of course, but not many and not at all avidly.
But as a writer who rarely lets considerations like a total lack of expertise stop me from cranking out the copy, I'm going to give it a shot, and you're invited to come along on this journey of discovery (though I suspect, "this casual after-dinner stroll of discovery" or even "this post-anesthesia stumble toward discovery" will be more accurate.
Recently, while making a list of historical fiction for this website, I wondered why one should read historical fiction set in the Roaring '20s when one could just as easily read something set and written during the same period? After all, some canonized greats were at the peak of their powers then: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway...the list goes on, and you can make similar lists for periods spanning history. So, why read historical fiction when you could just as easily read primary sources?
Writing styles have changed
By most accounts, Henry James was a brilliant prose stylist. I wouldn't know. I have never been able to get past the first few pages of anything he wrote; likewise, Marcel Proust and Edith Wharton. Why? For me, reading their work with its formal diction and at times overwrought sentence structures reminds me of the time my grandmother accidentally shattered a large bottle of Chanel No. 5 on the bathroom floor. At first, it was not unpleasant, but by the next morning, despite repeated mopping, the aggressively floral scent had permeated every inch of her tidy little bungalow so that even my bowl of Super Sugar Bombs tasted like Chanel.
One pleasure of reading historical fiction rather than primary sources is that it is written for our modern stylistic sensibilities and vocabularies. Do writers sometimes slip up and put modern usages into ancient characters' mouths? Yes, occasionally, but for me, I would rather have that momentary cringe than feel like I'm having my head stuffed with potpourri.
Historical fiction can highlight the difference between the past and the present
And that's part of the fun of the genre. Look at it this way: taking a bath in 1826 was very different from what it is in 2026. But a writer living in 1826 wouldn't necessarily mention that someone had to haul up buckets and buckets of water from a deep well and heat it over a wood-burning stove before anyone could dip a toe in the tub. Why? Because everyone knew that. Part of most historical fiction is showing the differences between then and now, both to entertain and to educate.
Sometimes, revisionist history is better (especially if it's fictional).
You might have noticed that the authors I listed above are somewhat...um...homogeneous. They're all white, mostly male, and, for the most part, they had comfortably middle-class upbringings. You can dig down into the lesser lights of the era's literary scene and won't find much difference. Yes, Zora Neale Hurston published throughout the decade, but nowhere near the literary mainstream. Langston Hughes was somewhat more widely known but still largely ignored by white critics and the public at large.
My point is that yes, you can read primary sources from any given period, but generally speaking, you are going to find a very narrow viewpoint when it comes to class, gender, and race. The further back you go, the narrower that viewpoint gets. Go back to the 1820s and you don't even have the Hurstons and Hugheses to challenge the color barrier. A hundred years earlier, the women all but disappear. If you slide even further back to before Gutenberg, the only sources you'll find are written by monks and the very occasional noble.
Historical fiction cannot set the historical record straight. Countless contributions, large and small, to historical events by women, people of color, and working-class people of all genders and ethnicities have been permanently lost. But historical fiction can offer more realistic perspectives than you might find in primary sources. It can write people back into history.
A little spice can be nice
Don't get me wrong, there is no shortage of heinously cringe-worthy writing about sex nowadays, but at least you know you're reading about sex. For centuries, if writers dared to write about it at all, censors, social norms, and their own modesty forced them to wrap it in so many layers of metaphor and euphemism that it might as well have been a recipe for tuna hot dish. Granted, anyone who has ever read a sex scene perpetrated by Norman Mailer, John Updike or Haruki Murakami will be forgiven for demanding more metaphor and less of whatever it is those gents think they're getting at. That said, I welcome the fact that authors can now acknowledge that sex is something that happens and has always happened fairly frequently and quite naturally between people without all the veils and winks.
Inceptionism
Historical fiction doesn't just tell us about the past. It also tells us about the people doing the telling. Readers of historical fiction not only dive into an imagined past, but they also see that past through the lens of the time period in which it was written. Once you really get into historical fiction, you start noticing differences in the way just a few years, relatively speaking, can shift the way writers portray a historical period.
Take the Arthurian legends. We first see Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (1136 A.D.), which is historical fiction masquerading as historical fact. Within the century, Chrétien de Troyes' long poems introduce the Holy Grail and Lancelot and move the legends squarely into the realm of the medieval romance. Troyes' poems, and more importantly, his audience, fully embraced the works' fictionality. Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, written two centuries later, owes much to de Troyes, yet it is its own creative masterpiece written from the sensibility of its time and place. Those three authors' work serves as the source code for all later authors like Tennyson, E.A. Robinson, T.H. White, among many others. Each retelling betrays the sensibilities of its own time, and that can be a fascinating part of reading historical fiction.
The fiction/nonfiction divide is problematic
Most of us were taught that calling something fiction means a story is "made up" and that nonfiction means the story is "true." But we all know that it's just not that clear-cut. The act of translating anything into words fictionalizes it. The act of connecting a series of historical events into a narrative fictionalizes them. The very fact that a writer is looking back in time at the course of events gives them a beginning, middle, and end they did not have as they unfolded in real time.
The art of the historian has changed a lot over time, and the transformation in the last fifty years has been tremendous. For academic historians, the sweeping epic narratives mostly sourced from prior historians have been abandoned in favor of minute examinations of surviving documentation of everyday life (diaries, shipping manifests, and other ephemera)--not the correspondence of royals and other "great personages." Yet even with this new focus on the quotidian side of history, it still requires a great deal of interpretation. Data tells the story, but a storyteller must make it legible to the reader.
My point is that a well-researched historical novel undertakes a very similar project to that of a historian--to make the unreachable past legible to us. Yes, novelists have a slew of creative tools not available to historians, but both projects are works of imagination. One writer embraces that fact, and the other does their best to minimize it.
So, why read historical fiction?
Because the past is made of much the same stuff as dreams, and it is just as maddeningly difficult to reproduce accurately in the waking world. Whether we try to reconstruct the past as fact or as fiction, it must pass through filters and roadblocks. Yes, something objectively happened on March 15, 44 B.C.E. but it goes without saying that Caesar's and Brutus' history of the day will be radically different. What story would a fly on the wall tell us? One might guess the fly would be more objective to a point, but even that would depend on how flies feel about the corpse they buzz around. I think the point I'm trying to make is that a well-researched and well-written work of historical fiction is no less valid a depiction of the past than any other kind of history, and because it can use all the tools of the storyteller's trade, it can often give us a more satisfactory experience than the more "factual" work of historians.
A Hodgepodge of Historical Fiction
Here's a grab bag of historical fiction from our collection; some are underrated gems, others are about lesser-known historical events or eras. All of them are worth a look.
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