Abstract
In 1961 the historian Helen Cam noted the contemporaneous vogue for historical fiction, quoting approvingly John Raymond’s comment that, ‘We must all agree … that there is no time like the present for the historical novel in all its variety and richness.’1 Yet by 1969 Ursula Brumm was stating that, ‘In our time, which is postrealistic in that realism has been superseded by other literary conventions, the historical novel has almost disappeared.’2 And in The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf in 1971, Avrom Fleishman argued that Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Between the Acts (1941) ‘bring the tradition of the English historical novel to a self-conscious close.’3 Why is it that, while Cam sees a thriving literary field, Brumm and Fleishman see a dead tradition?
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Notes
Helen Cam, Historical Novels (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 3.
Ursula Brumm, ‘Thoughts on History and the Novel’, Comparative Literature Studies, 6 (1969), 327.
Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 233.
Gyorgy Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell [1936/7] (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 338.
Bryher, This January Tale (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. viii.
See Jan Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), Chapter 5;
Chris Hopkins, English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History (London: Continuum, 2006); The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology ed. by Bonnie K. Scott (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 372–92.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p. 5.
Alison Light, ‘“Young Bess”: Historical Novels and Growing Up’, Feminist Review, 33 (1989), 61;
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique [1963] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).
Elizabeth Maslen, ‘Naomi Mitchison’s Historical Fiction’ in Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History ed. by Maroula Joannou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 138–50.
Anya Seton, Katherine [1954] (London: Hodder, 1961), p. 9.
Margaret Irwin, Young Bess [1944] (London: Allison and Busby, 1988), p. 4.
Margaret Irwin, Elizabeth and the Prince of Spain [1953] (London: Allison and Busby, 1999), p. 191.
Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 75.
Jean Plaidy, Murder Most Royal [1949] (London: Pan, 1966)
Norah Lofts, The Concubine (New York: Doubleday, 1963), p. 224.
Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck [1935] (London: Pan, 1959), p. 113.
Heyer, Arabella [1949] (London: Arrow, 1999), p. 28.
Jane A. Hodge, The Private World of Georgette Heyer (London: Pan, 1985), p. 158.
Heyer, The Grand Sophy [1950] (London: Arrow, 1991), p. 245.
Heyer, Sylvester [1957] (London: Mandarin, 1992), p. 47–9.
A. S. Byatt, ‘An Honourable Escape: Georgette Heyer’ in Passions of the Mind [1969] (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 261.
Heyer, A Civil Contract [1961] (London: Arrow, 2005).
See Maud Ellmann, ‘The Art of Bi-Location: Sylvia Townsend Warner’ in The History of Women’s Writing, 1920–1945 vol. 8 ed. by M. Joannou (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 78–93.
Arnold Rattenbury, ‘Plain Heart, Light Tether’, ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner 1893–1978: A Celebration’, ed. Claire Harman, PN Review 23(1981), 8:3, 47.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Flint Anchor [1954] (London: Virago, 1997), p. 1.
See Terry Castle’s influential reading of Warner’s Summer Will Show in The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 66–91.
Warner, The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, ed. Claire Harman (London: Virago, 1994), pp. 205–6.
For a rare comparison see J. P. Nesbitt, ‘Rum Histories: Decolonising the Narratives of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Flint Anchor’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 26: 2 (2007), 309–30.
Peter Widdowson describes Wide Sargasso Sea as ‘perhaps the best-known and prototypical re-visionary novel’ in ‘Writing back: contemporary re-visionary fiction’, Textual Practice 20: 3 (2006), 497.
K. Bluemel, ‘Introduction’, in Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain ed. by Kristin Bluemel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 1–18.
Maureen Duffy, ‘On the Road to Manderley’, Time, 97(1971), 12 April, 65.
See for instance Joanna Russ, ‘Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic’, Journal of Popular Culture, 6 (1973), 666–91;
T. Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance (London: Routledge, 1982).
Victoria Holt, Mistress of Mellyn [1960] (London: Fontana, 1963).
See Patsy Stoneman, Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (London: Prentice Hall, 1996), on Jane Eyre as an archetypal text which is repeatedly transmitted and transformed.
Jean Rhys, Letters 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), p. 262, p. 157, emphasis added.
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea [1966] (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 5, p. 11. The setting of Jane Eyre is vague–a reference to Scott’s Marmion (1808) as a new publication suggests the early nineteenth century but later references to riots suggest the Chartist unrest in 1839 and 1840.
Gayatri C. Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’ in Feminisms ed. by R. R. Warhol and D. P. Herndl (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 901.
Caroline Zilboorg, The Masks of Mary Renault: A Literary Biography (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001), p. 86.
David Sweetman, Mary Renault: A Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 145.
Carolyn Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (London: Victor Gollancz, 1979), p. 75.
Ruth Hoberman, Gendering Classicism: The Ancient World in Twentieth-Century Women’s Historical Fiction (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 74.
Mary Renault, The Alexander Trilogy (London: Penguin, 1984).
Renault, ‘Notes on The King Must Die’, in A fterwords: Novelists on Their Novels ed. by T. McCormack (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 83.
Renault, The King Must Die [1958] (London: Four Square, 1961);
Renault, The Bull from the Sea [1962] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
Barbara Caine, English Feminism from 1780–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 257.
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Wallace, D. (2017). Historical Fictions. In: Hanson, C., Watkins, S. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945–1975. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47736-1_15
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