What makes a historical novel historical?
Let’s get the simple answers out of the way first: A historical novel needs a historical setting, of course. When does “now” end and “history” begin? The general rule of thumb in the publishing industry seems to peg that moment at fifty years before the present day. In practice that dividing line doesn’t matter much. Emma Cline’s novel The Girls, set in 1969, wasn’t marketed as historical fiction, for example. If you are writing a novel set in the 1960s and want to call it historical fiction, then go for it. If that label doesn’t make sense to you, then don’t use it.
Now, on to the more interesting questions: How do you make a novel feel historical? How do you achieve the magic trick of transporting the reader to a different time? Let’s look at a chapter from Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait to see how she achieves it. (If you want to get an overview of the book, first read my previous posts on O’Farrell’s verb choices and her use of omniscient narration.)
To start, O’Farrell relies on her chapter title, “The Duchess Lucrezia on Her Wedding Day,” and time stamp, “Palazzo, Florence, 1560,” to deliver the basic facts about our setting. We’re in Lucrezia’s chamber, which is crowded with servants preparing her for the wedding. O’Farrell focuses first on a familiar detail, one we know: the wedding bouquet.
Lilies stand tall in a vase on the mantel, their stems offering up blooms as if for scrutiny. The air moving in and out of her is heavy with their scent. When she’d woken, just after dawn, the buds had been closed but now the full complexity of their petals and stamens is open for all to see. The sweet, cloying smell of them fills her chest, leaves it, fills it again. A rust-red shadow of pollen encircles the base of the vase.
We could say a lot about the symbolism of these flowers—the way this almost cloistered girl of fifteen is being prepared for scrutiny now that she is deemed sexually mature, the rust-red pollen reminding us of the menstrual blood Lucrezia’s nurse managed to hide for many months, thus delaying the wedding. But what I want you to notice in the passage is how deeply O’Farrell takes us inside Lucrezia’s mind and body, lingering on the “sweet, cloying smell” she is breathing in and out.
This bodily connection continues as O’Farrell drops more details into the scene: “Someone else lifts Lucrezia’s arm and places bracelets on it, pushes earrings through her lobes, fastens her betrothal ruby about her neck. Lucrezia is the only motionless being. She sits at the centre of this activity, a reed caught in the eddy of a stream.” The jewelry provides us something to visualize but, like the flowers, is there to deliver the deeper point that Lucrezia is passive, trapped, without agency.
We’ve heard a lot about the wedding dress already: that Lucrezia’s mother Eleanora had chosen the blue silk and gold brocade; that it was made for Lucrezia’s dead sister Maria, who was to have married the duke; that Lucrezia had initially refused to wear it, perhaps as a way of refusing the marriage, but that Eleanora had insisted on both dress and marriage.
Once again, O’Farrell brings those details to bear on Lucrezia’s body, taking us inside her skin so we can experience the profound disassociation she feels in this dress:
The gown rustles and slides around her, speaking a glossolalia all of its own, the silk moving against the rougher nap of the underskirts, the bone supports of the bodice straining and squealing against their coverings, the cuffs scuffing and chafing the skin of her wrists, the stiffened collar hooking and nibbling at her nape, the hip supports creaking like the rigging of a ship. It is a symphony, an orchestra of fabrics, and Lucrezia would like to cover her ears, to stop them with her palms, but she cannot.
Lucrezia’s comfort, her taste, her wishes are all completely irrelevant. It’s that larger cultural and historical framework O’Farrell needs us to see in order for us to understand this world and her protagonist. Lucrezia did not get to say yes to the dress (or to the groom, for that matter). She has been preparing for her wedding surrounded by servants, who are hurrying to follow orders, not by loving friends and relatives.
Returning to our scene, Lucrezia is led out into the piazza, where she is met by a huge wave of sound that momentarily staggers her—a crowd staring and shouting and calling her name. She is hoisted into a high, open carriage alongside her parents, which will take them to Santa Maria Novella, where she will be married. Let’s look at one more passage to see how O’Farrell weaves in historical details.
The horses, at the touch of the whip, jolt forward and Lucrezia is shunted back to the opposite seat.
“Do you see,” Eleonora says, “these people, Lucrezia? How they love us.”
Lucrezia looks at her mother, who holds a handkerchief aloft; its lace edges flutter prettily in the warm air; Eleonora smiles out of the carriage. Cosimo sits with a straight spine, his head high; he doesn’t smile but every now and again inclines his chin in a regal nod. Lucrezia sees a metallic glint at the neck of his camicia and realises that even today he is wearing chainmail beneath his clothes: she has heard he never leaves the palazzo without it, so sure is he that an attempt will be made on his life. She turns her head one way, then the other, fearing an assassin might burst from the crowd. But the faces of the Florentines lining the street are blurred by motion, daubs of paint dissolving in water.
“They do, Mamma,” Lucrezia says.
The carriage swings left then right, the horses straining against their harnesses, and Lucrezia is thrown one way, then the other. She holds up the lilies so their petals won’t bruise. Her parents, she sees, are buttressed against each other and barely move. They continue to gaze out into the crowds, Eleonora waving with a vague smile.
This crowd scene makes for a grand visual—we can see these three figures perched aloft above the roaring crowd, their silks and jewels gleaming in the sunlight. But O’Farrell isn’t satisfied with just that evocative setting detail. Instead she turns this set piece into a lesson on how tenuous Cosimo’s grip on power really is and how Eleanora is modeling for Lucrezia how to smoothly deny the truth, showing nothing but a glossy surface for the world to see.
In the last paragraph of the passage we return once more to the symbolism of the flowers. Lucrezia’s parents are buttressed against one another while she is left alone to protect herself as best she might.
One last note on this passage: notice the two italicized Italian words? O’Farrell doesn’t lean much on language to establish historical feel. She, of course, avoids anachronisms, but she doesn’t attempt to capture sixteenth-century speech or lard her pages with Italian words or phrases. When she does use Italian words, they are simple nouns that can be deciphered from context. I assume that O’Farrell’s choice to use italics for non-English words is a deliberate one, since many writers are now choosing not to, and I think that underscores that she is not relying on the feel of her language to pull readers into the setting. She’s doing that instead through her intense, deep point-of-view narration, our bodily identification with Lucrezia.
What lesson can we take away from O’Farrell’s choices? I think the primary one is a reminder that every detail you choose to include in a work of historical fiction should earn its place. For every detail you consider including, ask yourself these two questions: Am I including this detail just for stage dressing? Or can I harness it to a deeper thematic or metaphorical meaning that will help readers understand the way my particular setting shapes the choices and psychology of my characters?