How To Write Historically Correct Books Without Offending Modern Sensibilities
In this post, we look at how to write historically correct books without offending modern sensibilities.
In an earlier blog, we chatted about how attitudes of the past haven’t aged well in the eyes of modern readers. The misogyny, racism whether overt or unconscious, the overt antisemitism, body-shaming, thoughtless and insulting stereotypes, the suspicious ‘other’, and slavery, appeared more often than we’d like to imagine. What is worse is that much of this appears in the books of beloved and famous authors, and not as their characters’ opinions, but the in the opinions of the authors themselves.
One argument is that these books reflect the past, and in a sense they do. So, what does an author today do if they want to write a historical book that is true to its time, but doesn’t want to promote these attitudes?
How To Write Historically Correct Books Without Offending Modern Sensibilities
What’s a modern author to do?
Here are 5 options.
- You could write the entire book as if you were taking dictation from the ghosts of the past. You will still be faced with the following choices:
- From which side of history are you writing?
- Will you write sympathetically of both sides, or demonise one while deifying the other?
- Will you write characters only from the viewpoint of one side without a thought of the sensibilities of the modern reader. Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell is a classic tale of a beautiful, entitled girl navigating the American Civil War. While it wasn’t directly about slavery, the book’s main characters were wealthy, white slave owners. They, along with the third person narrator have little to no understanding or compassion of the lives of the people they own. Even Rhett Butler who seemed to be the least racist of them all, had no problem taking part in what was at the very least a beating, and at worse a lynching of a black man. It turns out that Mitchell herself had many of the same attitudes as her characters. While there are large political passages in the book, there is a blindness towards the slaves that is shocking. Today, writing a novel with that insensitivity may garner more bad reviews than good ones, and a lack of sales.
- Offensive words, attitudes and actions, that are period correct could be used by characters, but it might be advisable to limit to the antagonists. Most readers will want to see that person, or persons get their comeuppance in some way. Other characters, the hero for example, should reflect more of the modern reader’s attitudes. Or at least, if your hero is a wealthy, white slave owner, make him a conflicted one. A good example of a hero who doesn’t reflect the poor attitudes of his time, is Ashton Pelham Martin from The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye.
- If you are writing a historical romance and some of the events of the era will, you feel, overpower the romance, you could either briefly hint at it or ignore it altogether. This is not the same as ignoring the horrors of slavery in Gone With The Wind. Why? Because slavery was one of the most important aspects, if not the most important reason for the war that is the foundation of the book’s plot. The war profoundly affected every character in the book. If a similar event is behind the plot of your book, ignoring it may leave knowledgeable readers with the same feeling as Gone With The Wind now does. (Two books that cover explosive times, and have large as well as small casts that, to my mind, are better than Gone With The Wind are The Far Pavilions, and Zemindar by by Valerie Fitzgerald.)
One way to ‘ignore’ the explosive time, is to ensure that your characters are in a location where they hear very little about the event and the event doesn’t impact them.
You don’t have to write a moral treatise on the event, but it does matter that you handle it with sensitivity. Acknowledging it matters. Acknowledging it with care matters even more. It will take careful plotting and balanced research.
- Keep your story small. By that I mean don’t have a sprawling cast of characters. A small tight number involved in a time-limited story – a week, or a month for example, and a plot that revolves around them, not the outside world, for example will help you avoid the ‘Curse of Gone With The Wind’.
As a historical novelist, writing a small, time-limited story, you still need to do enough research to know what was happening in that week in your books location. If, for example, you wrote a book set on Oahu Island, Hawaii in the week of December 7, 1941 and you didn’t mention the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, you may find it hard to get a publisher. And I wouldn’t count on many glowing reviews either. If you’re writing a sprawling epic with many characters, and you’re writing about a time period or a location you know nothing about, things are different. Then you do need to do deep research into the people, the politics, the society, the religion, and the beliefs and attitudes of that era to write convincingly and not leave anything important out.
- Write stories set in eras further back that a reader’s great grandmother can personally remember, like the court of Henry VIII. Everyone expects poor attitudes and bad behaviour from Henry VIII.
There are cultural universals, as well as the personal choices made by all humans because and in spite of their upbringings that you can play within throughout the scope of your novel. Having said all that, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that you can’t please everyone all the time.
The Last Word
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by Elaine Dodge. Author of The Harcourts of Canada series and The Device Hunter, Elaine trained as a graphic designer, then worked in design, advertising, and broadcast television. She now creates content, mostly in written form, including ghost writing business books, for clients across the globe, but would much rather be drafting her books and short stories.
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1 thought on “How To Write Historically Correct Books Without Offending Modern Sensibilities”
Thank you for this interesting post. However, I am not sure that I agree with you about avoiding sensitive historical attitudes or putting a modern slant on them. In Gone with the Wind the modern reader is all too aware of the characters blindness to injustices such as slavery, and this helps highlight just how much attitudes have changed. Having characters that embody the attitudes of the day does not necessary mean the author condones such, but it can be used as a technique to highlight historical prejudices. The danger of being overly sensitive to modern attitudes is that it whitewashes history and gives a bland account of what really happened and why it happened. After all, most historical events and injustices are the consequence of people’s attitudes at that time. Would Conrad’s Heart of Darkness be a classic without his hard-hitting critique of colonial Africa? Would The Crucible be effective if the satanistic religiosity was all whitewashed out of it?
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