Highlights from the Historical Novel Society North American Conference (HNSNA) 2019, Oxon Hill, Maryland

I’ve been blogging about historical fiction for the last six years, and, in 2020, my own debut historical novel, Brontë’s Mistress, will be published by Atria Books (more on this here). So this June I was delighted to attend the biannual North American conference run by the Historical Novel Society (HNS) and to connect with other lovers and writers of historical fiction there.

This year (the first year I’ve attended) the conference was held in the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, just outside Washington DC. We enjoyed keynotes from Dolen Perkins-Valdez and Jeff Shaara, period-specific panels and talks on everything from the roaring 20s to the Romanovs to French revolutionaries, and insights from agents and editors with a focus on #HistFic. In true historical fashion, attendees also donned their best period costumes for drinks, a banquet and a ball, while some tested their skills in swordsmanship.

In this post I wanted to share some of my personal highlights from the conference (if I can decipher the handwriting in my notebook!).

“Extraordinary women in extraordinary times"

This is how Rachel Kahan, Executive Editor at William Morrow, summed up the current landscape in historical fiction in the opening State of the State of the HF Industry roundtable. This phrase struck me and set the stage for many of the talks I enjoyed over the weekend. As a writer who focuses on real women who have been overlooked in the historical record, I love this descriptor!

“People are interested in how art is made”

Carrie Callaghan and Laura Morelli led a coffee discussion about historical fiction based on the lives of artists and the challenges of ekphrastic writing (i.e. describing a piece of visual art through words). Two ideas stayed with me from this session. First, writers and artists both experience an absorption in their work while creating. Writing about this feeling and process can be fascinating. Second, it can be difficult for a writer to balance featuring their artist character doing menial work with the tensions that come from interpersonal conflict. Any time you can combine the two will serve you well.

“Where the archive is silent"

Writer and keynote speaker Dolen Perkins-Valdez was the most eloquent speaker of the conference. Almost everything she said was tweetable/quotable. I loved how she described the work of the historical novelist as speaking “where the archive is silent”, as it mirrors my own writing experience, where I strive to be true to the historical record but get most excited where there’s a mystery I can speculate on. I also thought the writing exercise she suggested was genius. She urged us to write the same scene set in 1750, 1850 and 1950 without conducting any new research to demonstrate how much we already know and feel about different periods without being weighed down by the burden of history.

“The paranormal circumvents societal propriety”

Gaslamps, Ghosts & Tropes, a discussion between Nicole Evelina, Clarissa Harwood, Leanna Renee Hieber and Kris Waldherr, on Gothic novels, was my favourite panel of the conference. Hieber’s argument that paranormal activity (whether ‘real’ or imagined) allows characters in historical periods with stricter social etiquettes to step outside their normal boundaries was particularly resonant.

“You need to feel that anyone could win”

The second keynote speaker, Jeff Shaara, specialises, like his late father, the Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Shaara, in depicting famous conflicts, from the Revolutionary War to the American Civil War to the World Wars, from multiple character perspectives. I loved his advice that for a novel like this to be successful the reader has to feel that the outcome of the battle is anything but certain, even if they know the winner in reality.

“There are practical reasons to write dual time periods”

Another great panel was led by Kate Quinn and Beatriz Williams on the topic of historical novels that alternate between at least two periods (one of which may be contemporary). I’ve reviewed novels in the past (e.g. Meredith Jaeger’s The Dressmaker’s Dowry) which have struggled to pull off this structure but I’m fascinated by its current popularity. Quinn and Williams mentioned some practical reasons why writers might want to consider this structure: novels like this can be shelved in several areas of the bookstore and/or appear in multiple sections of Amazon, a dual narrative can help you sell a novel featuring a ‘less popular’ period of history and the inclusion of a modern perspective can make historical fiction less intimidating for infrequent readers of the genre. Fascinating stuff!

Meeting all the people

The biggest highlight of the conference was meeting fellow writers with a passion for depicting the past. I spoke to so many people! It was most exciting to spend time with Elizabeth Blackwell, as we share the same literary agent, and ‘Twitter friends’ who I was finally able to meet in person.

Buying all the books

Warning: there’s a side effect of going to a conference like this. I now have SO MANY new novels on my #TBR (to be read) list. Here’s a peek into what titles have made it onto my bedside table already:

On a Cold Dark Sea, Elizabeth Blackwell

A Light of Her Own, Carrie Callaghan

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, Hazel Gaynor

A Lady of Good Family, Jeanne Mackin

Wench, Dolen Perkins-Valdez

The Lost History of Dreams, Kris Waldherr

Were you at the HNS conference? What did you think? Or do you have any questions about attending a writing conference in the future? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

P.S. Want an inside peek at my writing and non-writing life? You can now follow finola_austin on Instagram!

5 Nineteenth-Century Women I Learned about at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.

A few weeks ago the Secret Victorianist was back in Washington D.C. (read about my first trip, in 2015, here). And so I took the opportunity to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016.

Inside the museum

The museum’s historical galleries, where I spent the afternoon, take visitors through an extraordinary trip through time. You start on the subterranean levels of the building, which are dedicated to the origins of the slave trade and the unprecedented forced mass migration of Africans to the Americas, and make your way up towards the brighter and more spacious upper galleries, through displays which chart the United States’ history of racial oppression, from independence to civil war, to the civil rights movements of the mid-twentieth century to reflections on social justice today.

I was most impressed by how the curators had personalised and humanised narratives that stretch over centuries through the inclusion of quotes, personal stories, anecdotes and reflections. Visitors even have the chance to add their own voices to the collection—sharing their viewpoint on race and racism in America. And so today, on the blog, I wanted to highlight a few of the black nineteenth-century women I learned about and their contributions to American political, legal and social history:

Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813-1897)
Harriet Ann Jacobs was the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl—an 1861 novel published under the pseudonym Linda Brent. The novel, based on Jacobs’s own experiences being born into slavery in North Carolina, shone a light on the sexual abuses suffered by many enslaved women.

A quote from Harriet: “When they told me my newborn babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”

Harriet Ann Jacobs

Harriet Tubman (~1822-1913)
Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland and escaped in her 20s via the Underground Railroad. She returned at least nine times to guide others to freedom, which earned her the nickname ‘Moses’ among abolitionists (since she was leading her people to the promised land). She worked for the Union Army during the Civil War and was the first woman to lead an armed expedition in the conflict.

A quote from Harriet: “I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

Harriet Tubman

Susie Taylor (1848-1912)
Susie Taylor was the first African American army nurse working for the Union during the Civil War (a role she took on without pay). After the conflict she dedicated her life to teaching former slaves in Georgia and wrote a memoir—Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers—about her experiences.

A quote from Susie: “I had about forty children to teach, beside a number of adults who came to me nights, all of them so eager…to read above everything else.”

Susie Taylor

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931)
Born into slavery in Mississippi, Ida B. Wells went on to become a famous black activist. She was one of the founders of the he National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and is best known for her documentation of lynchings. She used journalism to highlight the systematic violence suffered by many African Americans and went on speaking tours in Europe to campaign for justice and equality.

A quote from Ida: “Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.”

Ida B. Wells

Sarah Breedlove (known as Madam C. J. Walker) (1867-1919)
America’s first self-made woman millionaire was a black woman born in Louisiana to parents who had been slaves. She was the first of their children born after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. In the early twentieth century she established the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company—a company dedicated to African American haircare. Fuelled by the business’ success, she became a prominent speaker, activist and philanthropist.

A quote from Sarah: “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations...I have built my own factory on my own ground.”

Madam C.J. Walker

Do you know of any other museums you think the Secret Victorianist should visit next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: Lincoln in the Bardo, George Sanders (2017)

One of the most lauded historical novels of the last 5 years, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Man Booker winning Lincoln in the Bardo. I’d heard the word ‘experimental’ and so anticipated something clever and well-researched, replete with facts, footnotes and intertextual references.

Instead Lincoln in the Bardo was one of the most powerful fictionalisations of grief I’ve encountered—private grief for a dead child and public grief for a country at war with itself. This is a novel that defies the conventions of the form. We are used to entering the mind and world of one protagonist or at least one character at a time, but here we are treated to a cacophony of voices—some real, others imagined, some ‘living’, others dead.

The central story concerns Abraham Lincoln and his struggle to come to terms with his son Willie’s death in 1862, but the novel soon becomes a tapestry of other stories—of a man who died before consummating his marriage to a younger wife, of a couple who were killed while intoxicated, trampled by a horse and carriage, of the black inhabitants of the cemetery’s mass grave.

George Saunders (1958-)

In the opening pages the novel reads like a play. I flicked to find out which character each block of text was attributed to, trusting that my investment would pay off. And it did. Soon I could identify many of the speakers from dialogue cues alone and could follow the logic as the ghosts interrupted each other. Saunders’s imaginative approach to the afterlife, his mixture of the uncanny and the familiar, is unique in itself, as he paints a world we come to understand more than the souls who haunt and describe it.

Perhaps because of this, the scenes in the cemetery were more effective for me than the other narratives—letters, snatches of memoir, history books. And the macro story—of war and of America’s political climate—less compelling that the human drama of filial death and parental despair. But overall Lincoln in the Bardo is a triumph.

In her Reith Lectures, Hilary Mantel said that when embarking historical fiction, writers must ask themselves one question: “Can these bones live?” Saunders brings historical characters to life from beyond the grave in a way we’ve never seen before.

Which novel would you like to see the Secret Victorianist review next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: March, Geraldine Brooks (2005)

Jo said sadly, "We haven't got Father, and shall not have him for a long time." She didn't say "perhaps never," but each silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was.

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-9) was remarkable on its publication for centring on the domestic cares and the trials and tribulations of a group of female characters—sisters Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy and their mother, Marmee. Becoming a ‘little woman’ meant facing hardships, taming your feelings and embracing self-sacrifice. The result is a beloved classic that is still read regularly by young girls and has been seen as one of the first representations of ‘all American’ femininity.

Geraldine Brooks takes this well-loved work and examines the opposite side of the coin. If Alcott tells us this is what it means to be a woman at home, what does it mean to be a man at war, and, specifically, what did it mean to be a man on the side of the North in the Civil War?

Geraldine Brooks (1955- )

In March (Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize), she takes the character of the girls’ absent father and constructs a parallel narrative to Little Women, forcing readers to confront the brutal realities of conflict, reassess the March household (in particular the parents’ marriage) and question the absolutism on many narratives concerning the North and its abolition of slavery.

One of my main criticisms of Valerie Martin’s 2003 Property, which I reviewed in this same series on my blog, was its idealised view of Northerners when it came to questions of race. Brooks doesn’t fall into the same trap. Mr March himself is liberal (you might think unbelievably so until you realise he was based on extensive research into Louisa May Alcott’s father Bronson, a vegan educator and reformer). But he is an idealist at sea in a pragmatic world, where Northerners are more than happy to take over plantations to make their fortunes, mistreating former slaves, whose lives are just as hard and more endangered now that they are no longer slaves, but ‘contraband’.

And, while in Property we are never given access to black characters’ views directly, Brooks gives us Grace, a former slave with whom March has had a sexual relationship. It is she who has the final say on March’s on-going involvement in the war:

“We have had a enough of white people ordering our existence! There are men of my own race more versed in how to fetch and carry than you will ever be. And there are Negro preachers aplenty who know the true language of our souls. A free people must learn to manage its own destiny.”

Grace is of course in a better position than many former slaves. She is well spoken and educated, due to being the illegitimate daughter of a plantation owner. But March’s life is actually saved by another black female character—Zannah. Zannah is mute (her tongue was cut out while a group of men raped her) and was totally illiterate until March’s arrival to teach on the plantation.

Her inability to communicate provides a stark contrast to Mr March. Unlike Zannah, he has the tools of language at his disposal, but he is still unable to tell the truth in his letters—instead sending Marmee and the girls a highly edited, and at times falsified, account of his time away from them.

This leaves Brooks with a plot problem. To be true to her source text, March must fall ill, prompting Marmee’s journey to Washington, and she can’t sustain this section in his first person. So, at the 200-page mark, we have a sudden shift of POV and continue the story from Marmee’s perspective.

The change is a little abrupt, and not just in tone. Marmee’s narrative doesn’t seem to be so much about developing her own character as hammering home that March’s perspective is unreliable—that a marriage can be made up of misunderstandings and resentment on both sides.  The result? The he said/she said at times feels a little overdone.

Brooks’s prose too at times tips over into the long-winded and dense, when the period could, I think, still be indicated with a lighter touch. Take for instance the following:

‘As I mentally composed these letters, it was inevitable that my mind would turn to the days when it was myself to whom such epistles had been directed. From there, my thoughts travelled in easy stages to the unravelling of my fortune, and to the exigencies of a current situation so threadbare that even my daughters are forced to toil for wages.’

But these quibbles over construction and execution are minor when compared with the overall genius of what Brooks has done, the scholarship of her research and the compelling nature of the story she has crafted from what was, in Alcott’s novel, an elision.

March doesn’t comfort like the familiar pages of Little Women. At times, it appals and horrifies. But the novels could be read as equally didactic. For Alcott, being a good woman in the nineteenth century was a story of self-improvement and self-sacrifice. For Brooks, being a good man in the nineteenth century seems to involve recognising injustice, but also recognising your own powerlessness to fight it everywhere and that pursuing your ideals could mean you’re doing an injustice to the little women waiting patiently at home.

Which novel should the Secret Victorianist read next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Nineteenth Centuryist in Washington D.C.

Rather appropriately for the President’s Day weekend, the Secret Victorianist spent the last few days in Washington D.C. It was my first visit to the US capital, and partially inspired by my recent review of Henry Adam’s Democracy, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the social and political milieu of the city in the 1800s. It was a culturally diverse weekend (from Renaissance art to 50 Shades of Grey, with lots in between), but I wanted to share some nineteenth-century highlights among the attractions I visited.

First up was the National Museum of American History, where three very different exhibitions which dealt with the period stood out. There was the original star-spangled banner – the huge flag which flew above Fort McHenry to mark its victory over the British in September 1814 and which inspired the poem by Francis Scott Key which would become the country’s national anthem.

O say can you see by the dawn's early light,

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? Etc.

The flag

What I found interesting here, aside from the impressively huge flag itself, was the story this told about the afterlife of objects and texts. Just as the flag has gone through changes – been invested with a meaning beyond its initial use, cut up to provide keepsakes, displayed in private homes and in public spaces, so too has Key’s poem been adapted and repurposed. Listening to older recordings of the anthem being sung and comparing to the conventions of anthem-singing today, for example, posed questions about cultural continuity and evolution. The exhibition isn’t just an important piece of US history – it’s a testament to the ongoing and ever-developing nature of history and an argument in itself for the value of reception studies.

Alexander Graham Bell

Meanwhile Hear my Voice was a (much emptier!) special exhibition featuring recordings and equipment from Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory in Washington D.C. in the 1880s. Indistinct and crackling as the recordings are, hearing voices from the nineteenth century, testing equipment and reciting ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, is a real thrill, and one which draws attention to the impressive nature of the kind of technologies we now take for granted.

'The Mutiny on the Amistad', Hale Woodruff

If learning about the star-spangled banner led to reflections on American patriotism today, a way of looking back at the nineteenth century through a different lens, was the Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College exhibition. This series of six murals by Woodruff, painted in the 1930s, was commissioned by the Alabama college and portrays significant events in African American history, including the foundation of Talladega College in 1867 and the slave uprising on the Amistad in 1839.

Seeing a nineteenth-century slave ship and courtroom rendered in Woodruff’s colourful, geometric murals is vivid and compelling, and with recent interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narratives with black heroes and heroines at their centre (think Twelve Years a Slave and Belle), it seems like a timely moment for these wonderful murals to be touring the country, post-restoration.

Tudor Place

Away from the history museum, I also visited the historic Tudor Place – a family mansion in Georgetown, which was home to Thomas Peter, and his wife Martha (granddaughter of Martha Washington), and four generations of their descendants (until 1983). The beautiful house, which dates from 1814, holds many objects from Mount Vernon, and visiting gives you an insight into the life of one family throughout the entire nineteenth, and most of the twentieth, centuries, against a backdrop of large scale political and social change and upheaval. The family watched the White House burn from their windows in 1814, hosted Union soldiers, despite their Southern sympathies during the Civil War, and, throughout all, lovingly preserved the character of the house.

On what was one of the coldest days of the year in D.C., I was lucky enough to have the first tour of the day entirely to myself, but would love to visit again in the summer to wander around the tranquil and extensive gardens. If you’re fed up with the throngs at the city’s headline tourist attractions, this is a gem.

National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

A final mention goes to the current display of works from the Corcoran Gallery at the National Gallery of Art, as the latter incorporates 6,000 works from the former into its collection. There’s so much here, but I particularly enjoyed Frederic Edwin Church’s Niagara (1857). Catch it with its fellow pieces from the Corcoran while you can.

Do you know of any other great nineteenth-century attractions in D.C.? Let me know for next time I visit – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

'Niagara', Frederic Edwin Church (1857)

The Nineteenth-Century House of Cards

“Who then is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right. There is only one thing in life that I must and will have before I die. I must know whether America is right or wrong.”

A novel concerned with the intricacies of the social milieu in 1870s Washington D.C. might not cross your mind as being the first place to look for an exploration of modern democracy and a cracking portrayal of political and personal intrigue. Yet there is so much in Henry Adams’ 1880 Democracy which resonates with modern concerns about the pursuit of power, the nature of governance and corruption of the political elite that it could easily be reimagined as a twenty-first century political drama.

Young New York widow Madeleine Lee heads to the heart of American democracy to discover ‘the gold of life’ she finds lacking in the philanthropy and philosophy with which she currently fills her days. Clever and attractive, with younger, less politically-minded sister in tow, what Madeleine finds there instead is Silas Ratcliffe, the Senator from Illinois, a man without moral scruples who has his eyes fixed firmly on the Presidency (and soon also Mrs Lee).

Silas Ratcliffe could give Frank Underwood a run for his money

Madeleine’s struggle throughout the book in determining the rights and wrongs of American democracy is brought to a crisis in the judgement she must make of Ratcliffe, as politician and as prospective husband: “If I throw him overboard, everything must go, for he is only a specimen.”

The novel is a wonderful satire on this incestuous and power-obsessed society, headed by the incompetent and ridiculed President and his much-hated First Lady, who Madeleine first sees as ‘two seemingly mechanical figures’, shaking the hands of their visitors as if they were only ‘automata, representatives of the society which streamed past them’. All seek only self-advancement – the men through office, the women through marriage.

Victoria Dare, who manages to snare herself an Irish lord, is one of the most conniving of political manipulators, while Madeleine herself is subject to rumours, gossip and harassment in the press, through her association with Ratcliffe. This society is one in which women too are powerful (although this power is dissipated upon marriage) – Madeleine, in a reversal of what you might expect from a novel of the period, regards ‘men as creatures made for women to dispose of’, thinking that they are ‘capable of being transferred like checks, or baggage-labels, from one woman to another, as desired’.

The men meanwhile are embroiled in manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres, in-party fighting, and large-scale bribery to replenish personal and campaign funds. Madeleine’s desire that Ratcliffe and his peers should act in the ‘interests of the people’ is naïve, extraneous to the realities of life in D.C., and, while she frames the choice she must make at the novel’s close in terms of wider principle, her friends and sister are looking out for her best interests likewise.

The morality of democracy, Adams suggests, comes back to the morality of the men who participate in it – and not just the power-hungry who find themselves in Washington. “The bitterest part of all this horrid story is that nine out of ten of our countrymen would say I had made a mistake” Madeleine opines. In other words, democracy is wrong.

Are there any other nineteenth-century American novels you would like the Secret Victorianist to blog about? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.