The Best and Worst Tropes in Historical Fiction

As part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series I’ve been reading a fair few novels set in the nineteenth century but written in the twenty-first. And in the process I’ve formed a lot of opinions about the tropes I love and those I don’t love as much when it comes to the historical novel.

Today it’s time to share my highly subjective list:


1. The protagonist ahead of her time 
This one’s a no from me. This character is prone to crying, “why can’t women vote?” She abandons her corset, making sure the reader knows she sees it as a sign of oppression. And she feels the wrongs of the world around her very keenly—is concerned about child labour, slavery, the plight of the poor.

Of course there were suffragettes and abolitionists in the nineteenth-century—many of whom would make wonderful characters in a novel. What I object to, and what makes this character so insufferable, is that she’s always on the right side of history and that her views are always too neatly aligned with contemporary norms. Writers, take note—give us nuance and characters that challenge as well as mirror our current values.


2. The dual narrative
This one’s controversial but I’ve rarely read a novel that switches between a modern and historical storyline where both halves are equally engaging and exciting. All too often the contemporary protagonist serves only to model the desired reader response to the imbed narrative, or as a near constant reminder that the older story is in the past, distancing us emotionally from the novel.

I read historical fiction to be immersed in a time period that’s not my own. If you really want to give some modern context consider a framing device instead.


3. Faceless servants
Servants, with some notable exceptions, get little page time in Victorian novels but that doesn’t mean that twenty-first-century novels need to follow this form. There’s so much drama to be had from the close proximity that servants and masters lived in—it’s a waste to write yet another faceless or stereotyped maid.


4. The marriage plot (with sex)
Now onto the tropes I love. One of the reasons we still read Austen, Gaskell and the Brontes is because of the perennial appeal of the marriage plot. And guess what? In neo-Victorian novels we don’t just have haughty heroes, dramatic proposals, unexpected elopements. We have all that plus sex scenes.

Historical fiction gives us the chance to learn the stories that were never told before—of nineteenth-century lesbian lovers, of the porn industry in the early days of photography. And, since works from the period are out of copyright, we can essentially enjoy steamy fan fiction in published form.


5. Literary cameos
Most writers of historical fiction are in dialogue with writers from the period they’re depicting and sometimes these literary icons turn up in character form.

This one’s a winning formula for me. Who doesn’t want to go back in time and meet Jane Austen? Or get to know Stephen Crane?


6. Genre mash ups
The novel was still young in the nineteenth-century. But today there is a host of developed genres with popular followings and tropes of their own. So bring on the historical novels with fantasy and sci-fi elements—clockwork octopuses, magical circus tents and all.


Do you agree with my list? I’d love to know what tropes you love (and hate to see) in historical novels. Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: Hotel de Dream, Edmund White (2007)

Edmund White sets himself a difficult challenge in his 2007 Hotel de Dream: A New York novel — can he dream up and recreate nineteenth-century American literary icon Stephen Crane’s debated lost novel, the tale of a male prostitute, a supposed companion piece to his Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)?

Evidence for the novel comes from a testimonial from James Gibbons Huneker (a literary critic and Crane’s friend). He describes witnessing a chance encounter between Crane and a ‘painted’ kid and how the author interviewed him for information, before beginning a novel including ‘the best passage of prose [he] ever wrote’.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

It’s a lofty claim to live up to. In White’s text the fabled novel is entitled ‘The Painted Boy’ and tells the story of Elliott, a syphilic newsboy who earns his living from providing special favours to his customers, and Theodore Koch, a married middle-aged banker, who destroys his life for his love of the boy.

It’s a master class in literary mimicry, taking on an admired forebear’s style, but White also interweaves the narrative with a frame story, a slow moving look at Crane’s final weeks and days with his ‘wife’ Cora in England and then Germany as he dies of tuberculosis aged only 28 and dictates this controversial novel to her.

Edmund White (1940 - )

While Crane and Cora are rendered well, with depth and originality, White seems more invested in Elliott’s story (the portion of the novel which is, after all, actually set in New York). Once ‘The Painted Boy’ picks up in pace, Hotel de Dream is a faster and more satisfying read, while our interest is held in early pages more by the cameos of other literary greats, like an (unflattering appearance) of Henry James.

Both stories revolve around love, death, poverty and public image but exploring the homosexual underworld of 1890s New York is especially fascinating. Elliott moves among fellow sex workers and transsexuals, is loved by middle class men and a mafia boss, is abused by his father, his brothers, his friends. In Theodore White is careful to create not a victim of repressed sexuality but a slave to the eclipsing power of an overwhelming love. It is the specificity of the tale and the recognisable humanity of its telling that makes it relatable.

Do you have any suggestions for what the Secret Victorianist should read next as part of my Neo-VictorianVoices series? Let me know — here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Maggie and Family: A Litany of Violence

Stephen Crane’s 1893 novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets shocked with its realistic portrayal of nineteenth-century New York tenements and the life of a girl, Maggie, who suffers a difficult childhood, loses her virtue and is ultimately murdered.

But Maggie is also a fascinating example of naturalism in American literature. With his journalistic eye, Crane records in detail the appalling conditions for New York’s poor and then uses his powers as a storyteller to argue for the causal connection between Maggie’s sorry upbringing and her moral and physical downfall.

Most famously propounded by the French novelist Emile Zola (1840-1902), naturalism is concerned with determinism—the idea that humans are governed by natural laws—and so intergenerational inheritance is a key theme that Crane, Zola and other writers, like Thomas Hardy, often dwell on.

In the case of Maggie, her inheritance is violence. When she first speaks in the novella it is to upbraid her brother for fighting (“Ah, Jimmie, youse bin fightin’ agin”) and her complaint is founded on the idea that the run of violence will continue:

“Youse allus fightin’, Jimmie, an’ yeh knows it puts mudder out when yehs come home half dead, an’ it’s like we’ll all get a poundin’.”

Maggie is a victim but also has the potential to be dangerous herself. She is described as a ‘tigress’ as a child. Fighting—for survival, but also as a way of life—is the favoured collective pastime in these slums, where gender is initially no indicator of who will beat and who will be beaten:

“Eh, Gawd, child, what is it dis time? Is yer fader beatin’ yer mudder, or yer mudder beatin’ yer fader?”

Yet as the story continues, and Maggie matures, being a woman marks her out as a particular target. Her love for Pete ruins her and, just before her death, the man who presumably kills her is shown noticing her feminine features and height, indicative of her physical vulnerability:

His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl’s upturned face.

What’s more Maggie’s family and neighbours can’t conceive of an afterlife where this run of violence will not continue:

“She’s gone where her sins will be judged,” cried the other women, like a choir at a funeral.

All that lies in store for Maggie is punishment, for crimes she was born, and raised, to commit.

Are there any other works set in nineteenth-century New York you’d like the Secret Victorianist to discuss? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Misconceptions about Victorian Literature

In a previous post I took on the view that Victorian fiction is by default long and unwieldy by recommending some shorter works you might want to give a go. Today it’s time to debunk a few more myths about nineteenth-century writing which I've come across whenever I tell people what I like to read.

1. There’s no sex: Yes, yes – we all know those Victorians. They fainted at a glimpse of ankle, right, and covered up table legs. They were all so prudish it’s a miracle they had any children at all, regardless of the massive population increase in the UK in the period, and the example of the very fertile monarch herself. Victorian literature is crammed with sex, even if the novels are (thankfully) not quite Fifty Shades of Grey. Try George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893) for discussion of prostitution and bawdry, Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) deals with rape and John Sutherland even detects a reference to sodomy in Hardy’s earlier The Woodlanders (1886-7). Meanwhile, Ellen Wood’s bestselling sensation novel East Lynne (1861) centres on a heroine who commits adultery because she wants to, finds her lover attractive and is bored by her dependable husband, in a initial plotline which could easily be taken from a modern paperback (before a railway disaster, facial disfigurement and high levels of infant mortality situate it firmly in the 1860s!). If you want even more, you can always trust the French to turn things up a notch, but once you've glutted yourself on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1851), I’d suggest turning to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s A Doctor’s Wife (1863). Laurie Garrison argues surprisingly convincingly that while here the heroine Isabel doesn't commit adultery like her model Emma Bovary, her novel-reading obsession is code for an addiction to masturbation. Erotic rewrites of Victorian novels are hot property for publishers right now, but often the sexual content is already there in the originals.

The Secret Victorianist spots Wuthering Heights erotica on sale at a European airport

2. It’s only for girls: First up, this is sexist. And I very much doubt Dickens, Trollope, Tennyson, Browning and the rest of the century’s celebrated male writers would agree. My guess is when people say this they mean that the literature is all about marriage and relationships, even if these (whisper it) obviously affect men too. But don’t despair, those who’d rather die than wear pink, there are battles (try Walter Scott and Alfred, Lord Tennyson), trade union disputes (Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855)), aliens (H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898)) – all sorts of things girls couldn't possibly understand.

3. It’s very romantic: The reality is that reading nineteenth-century novels has seen my romantic notions disposed of as brutally as Marianne Dashwood’s. Marriage is a mercantile business and the century’s novelists are much more likely to go into the details of household economy (cf. particularly Braddon’s Hostages to Fortune (1875)), than rhapsodise over weddings. Marriage ceremonies are, despite their ubiquitous concurrence with end credits in television adaptations, usually dispensed with in their entirety – to take three famous examples, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). When they are detailed, it is also for their legal irregularity (Wilkie Collins’s ‘Miss or Mrs?’ (1872) and The Law and the Lady (1875).

4. It’s all about the rich people: It doesn't get much grittier than Arthur Morrison’s tale of London slum life A Child of the Jago (1896), or Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), set the other side of the Atlantic. Inner city life in all its squalor and violence is rendered hyper-realistically, with Morrison’s attention to dialect particularly impressive. Both works are the products of research and firsthand experience – unapologetically un-sanitised and not for the faint-hearted.

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