100 Must-read Historical Novels

Nick Rennison

• Publisher: A&C Black Academic and Professional
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781408136065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Édition

Historical fiction is a hugely popular genre of fiction providing fictional accounts or dramatizations of historical figures or events.

This latest guide in the highly successful Bloomsbury Must-Reads series depicts 100 of the finest novels published in this sector, with a further 500 recommendations. A wide range of classic works and key authors are covered: Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Attwood, Sarah Waters, Victor Hugo and Robert Louis Stevenson to name a few. If you want to expand your reading in this area, or gain a deeper understanding of the genre - this is the best place to start!

Inside you'll find:

- An extended Introduction to historical fiction
- 100 titles highlighted A-Z by novel with 500 Read-on recommendations
- Read-on-a-theme categories
- Award winners and book club recommendations

A–Z OF ENTRIES

PETER ACKROYD (b. 1949) UK

DAN LENO AND THE LIMEHOUSE GOLEM (1994)

All of Peter Ackroyd’s work – as novelist, biographer, historian and critic – is linked by two preoccupations. One is his fascination with London, the city of his birth. The other is his belief in the intimate connections between past and present. In Hawksmoor, first published in 1985 and still his most original novel, a contemporary detective (the namesake of the eighteenth century architect) moves towards a mystical encounter with forces from the past as he investigates a series of murders in London churches. In Chatterton three different narratives, one from the eighteenth century, one from the Victorian era and one from the present day, intertwine and interact. Both these books are, in a sense, historical novels but much of their power derives from the tension between a contemporary London story and ones from the city’s history. Ackroyd has also written fiction which is set exclusively in the past. Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, for example, evokes the world of late-Victorian music-hall and focuses, like Hawksmoor, on a series of killings. Real individuals like Karl Marx and the novelist George Gissing interact with the author’s inventions; fable and murder mystery mix with Gothic comedy; different narrative voices combine and contend in a way characteristic of Ackroyd’s fiction. The novel opens with the hanging of Elizabeth Cree for the poisoning of her husband, John. From there it moves backwards in time to reconstruct Elizabeth’s life from poverty-blighted childhood in Lambeth through a career in the music hall (where she works with the famous Dan Leno) to her eventual execution. In parallel with Elizabeth’s story, the novel follows a sequence of brutal murders which are attributed to a bogeyman named the Limehouse Golem. As various threads of the narrative intertwine, possible connections between the story of Elizabeth and that of the Golem are gradually glimpsed. Throughout this unsettling story of Victorian London, Ackroyd’s exceptional skill both in evoking the past and manipulating the expectations of his readers is much in evidence.

Read on

Chatterton; Hawksmoor; The Lambs of London
John Boyne, Crippen; Peter Carey, Jack Maggs

MARGARET ATWOOD (b. 1939) CANADA

ALIAS GRACE (1996)

Poet and short story-writer as well as novelist, Margaret Atwood is one of the most gifted of contemporary writers and her fiction has ranged from the dazzling dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale to the sexual power games of Life Before Man. Alias Grace, one of her finest works of fiction, is an exploration of women’s sexuality and social roles wrapped up in a gripping story of a nineteenth-century housemaid who may or may not have been a murderess. It takes a notorious case from Canada’s past and re-imagines it. When the novel begins, the year is 1851 and, in Kingston penitentiary, Ontario, Grace Marks is serving a prison sentence for her involvement in the murders, some years earlier, of her employer and his housekeeper. She has always claimed to have no memories of these murders. Some people believe her to be innocent and they have asked a young doctor with a growing reputation in psychological medicine, Simon Jordan, to interview her. Through the medium of the (fictional) Jordan, we hear the story of Grace’s life from the arrival of her family in Canada as enforced exiles from poverty-stricken Ireland to the events leading up to the murder. The doctor endeavours to use his knowledge of the burgeoning science of psychology to unlock the mystery of Grace’s personality but the uneducated servant-girl proves more than a match for him. Atwood has written that, ‘the true character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma’ and the same can be said of the fictional version of Grace that the novelist has created. Alias Grace is a novel that raises more questions than it answers but that becomes one of its many strengths. Refusing to accept simplistic explanations of what might have happened and what Grace’s motivations might have been, Atwood creates a complex and ambivalent portrait of a young woman trapped by poverty and the expectations of the society in which she lives.

Read on

The Blind Assassin

Toni Morrison, Beloved; Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

BERYL BAINBRIDGE (b. 1934) UK

MASTER GEORGIE(1998)

Beryl Bainbridge began her career as a novelist with books in which she drew upon her own upbringing in Liverpool and her personal experience to create blackly comic narratives that placed the mundane and the unsettling side by side on the page. In the last twenty years she has turned more frequently to the past for her subjects and she has written books which provide her own off-beat and oblique views of iconic events and individuals in English history, from the sinking of the Titanic to the Crimean War, from Captain Scott to Dr Johnson. As a historical novelist, Bainbridge is a miniaturist and she shies away from the epic and the grandiose. This is clear from Master Georgie, the novel set in the Crimean War. The most famous events and people of the war play little part in Bainbridge’s story. The Charge of the Light Brigade merits one brief reference so throwaway it is easily missed. The Lady with the Lamp is conspicuous by her absence. Instead the emphasis is on one small group of Liverpudlians. George Hardy is a prosperous surgeon from the city and an enthusiast for the new art of photography. Volunteering to take his medical skills to the Crimea, he is accompanied there by an eccentric entourage of friends and family, including Myrtle, his adoring adoptive sister, Dr Potter, his increasingly troubled brother-in-law, and an ex-street urchin named Pompey Jones who has a mysterious hold over Master Georgie. Structured around the notion of six photographic plates and told in the voices of several of the characters, the novel chronicles the party’s disintegration in the face of the death and disease they find in the war zone and the gradual emergence of hidden truths about their personal and erotic entanglements.

Read on

Every Man for Himself; Young Adolf

J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country; » Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring

JOHN BANVILLE (b. 1945) IRELAND

DOCTOR COPERNICUS (1976)

As a young writer John Banville published a collection of short stories and two novels which were well received in his native Ireland and, in his early thirties, he embarked on an ambitious sequence of books focused on scientific geniuses of the past – a sequence sometimes known as ‘The Revolutions Trilogy’. Doctor Copernicus (1976) brings to life the Polish/German priest whose theories undermined medieval ideas about man’s position in the universe. It was followed by Kepler (1981) and The Newton Letter (1982), a story largely set in contemporary Ireland but with a central character obsessed by writing a biography of Isaac Newton. All the books show Banville’s ability to weave together a compelling narrative with intellectual speculation and playfulness. His Copernicus is a man haunted by doubts about the value of his new heliocentric ideas and neurotically unwilling to commit them to the finality of publication. We are used to the idea of writers, painters and composers suffering for their art in fiction but Banville offers the much less common sight of the anguished scientist. His Copernicus is a passive and introverted figure whose only real moments of joy come though intellectual insight when it feels ‘as if the channels of his brain had been sluiced with an icy drench of water’. However, Banville succeeds in bringing this rather cold and unsympathetic man to life. His vacillation and his agonised uncertainty about the ability he, or anyone else, possesses to understand God’s universe are made real. His doubt becomes moving and poignant. In recent years, Banville’s fiction has attracted ever greater plaudits, culminating in the award of the Man Booker prize for his 2005 novel The Sea, but there is a case to be made that his best work can still be found in the historical fiction he published much earlier in his career.

Read on

Kepler

Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World; Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

PAT BARKER (b. 1943) UK

REGENERATION (1990)

Pat Barker had written a number of novels which turned an...