One of the hardest things about writing historical fiction is accurately portraying out of date attitudes. A character’s thoughts and feelings, and their emotional reactions, must be real to the times but still relatable to modern readers. Dialogue can be changed with little or no impact on a story (not using the “n” word, for example), but attitudes sometimes are critical for plot development. An author of historical fiction cannot expect readers to immediately understand cultural views that are not their own due to history or geography. Authors also cannot put in an aside that takes the reader out of the story (“By the way, this is how people believed back then.”)
For example, in my novel The Aloha Spirit, the main character, a staunch Catholic, is in an abusive marriage. Many early readers didn’t understand why she didn’t leave him. While such action is difficult today, In the 1930s Catholics did not divorce. I had to make her faith’s expectations clear from the very start of her marriage so that readers knew divorce was not an option for the character.
The River Remembers, another novel of mine, posed a terminology problem. One of the point of view characters is a slave. Currently, the preferred term is “enslaved”, but my characters would not have used that word. I solved this by using “slave” in dialogue and “enslaved” in the narration. In the same book, a white character uses the white man’s names for places near modern day Minneapolis while the Native American character used the native names. I described places, and events that occurred there, well enough that a reader could follow the name changes, but I also included a document in the glossary with both names.
My most recent novel, Innocents at Home, is set in Gilded Age New York. One of the characters becomes an actress. Modern readers know that actresses were not accepted in society. The truth is, though, that at the time of my story, actresses were beginning to be invited to dinner at the homes of society women, beginning to be accepted as something more than fallen women. To showcase this, I had my character’s mother vehemently oppose acting as an alternative for her daughter. Others, however, portrayed the more modern view.
However complicated the situation must be, an author must somehow address the gap between modern views and those of history. If this gap is ignored, readers won’t be able to relate to the story and won’t enjoy it as a result.
Linda Ulleseit writes award-winning heritage fiction set in the United States. She is a member of Historical Novel Society, Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and Women Writing the West as well as a founding member of Paper Lantern Writers. Get in touch with her on Instagram (lulleseit) and Facebook (Linda Ulleseit or Paper Lantern Readers.
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