Historical fiction, the form Walter Scott is credited with inventing, is currently experiencing something of a renaissance. It has always been popular, of course, but it rarely enjoys high critical esteem. Now, however, thanks to Hilary Mantel’s controversial portraits of Thomas Cromwell (in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies), James Robertson’s multi-faceted studies of Scotland’s past (in The Fanatic and And the Land Lay Still), and Richard Flanagan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize, the genre has recovered serious ground, shrugging off the dubious associations of bag-wig, bodice, and the dressing-up box.
The post Before Wolf Hall: How Sir Walter Scott invented historical fiction appeared first on OUPblog.
Historians should be banned from watching movies or TV set in their area of expertise. We usually bore and irritate friends and family with pedantic interjections about minor factual errors and chronological mix-ups. With Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and the sumptuous BBC series based on them, this pleasure is denied us. The series is as ferociously well researched as it is superbly acted and directed. Cranmer probably didn’t have a beard in 1533, but, honestly, that’s about the best I can do.
The post Wolf Hall: count up the bodies appeared first on OUPblog.
The Reformation was a seismic event in history, whose consequences are still working themselves out in Europe and across the world. The protests against the marketing of indulgences staged by the German monk Martin Luther in 1517 belonged to a long-standing pattern of calls for internal reform and renewal in the Christian Church. But they rapidly took a radical and unexpected turn, engulfing first Germany and then Europe as a whole in furious arguments about how God’s will was to be discerned, and how humans were to be ‘saved’. However, these debates did not remain confined to a narrow sphere of theology. They came to reshape politics and international relations; social, cultural, and artistic developments; relations between the sexes; and the patterns and performances of everyday life.
Below we take a look at some of the key events that shaped the Reformation. In The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation Peter Marshall and a team of experts tell the story of how a multitude of rival groups and individuals, with or without the support of political power, strove after visions of ‘reform’.
Featured image credit: Fishing for Souls, Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne, 1614. Rijksmeseum, Amsterdam. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post A timeline of the Reformation appeared first on OUPblog.
I’m in the middle of reading The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 on my Kindle and I just have to say part of the fun of these letters is names. No, not funny names but names I have come across in other settings. Like The Duke of Suffolk and the Howard family, both players in Wolf Hall. Walpole is writing in the late 1730s and early 1740s so Suffolk and the Howards are descendants from Henry VIII’s time. And then imagine my delight as I am reading along and Walpole mentions Lord Grantham! I thought Lord Grantham was made up for Downton Abbey! Guess not. Grantham doesn’t get mentioned very often but when he does I can’t help but giggle. Lord Sackville, an ancestor of Vita Sackville-West, appears too.
Walpole also has much criticism for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an aristocrat and writer famous for her letters. Walpole finds her shabby, uncouth and not so witty as her reputation led him to believe. He meets her while staying in Italy and is somewhat distressed that his mother likes her quite a lot so he ends up seeing more of her than he’d like. I wonder though if he disparages her because he feels a bit threatened?
Walpole’s father is Sir Robert Walpole often considered the first Prime Minister of Great Britain. Horace, who enters parliament in 1741, includes lots of information in his letters on the wheelings and dealings of government and what turns out to be the end of his father’s career as Prime Minister. The politics are not quite so brutal as during Henry VIII’s time which is a relief. If you jump across the pond though and watch some fictional politics on the new Netflix TV show House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, it’s remarkably similar if slower moving due to the lack of cell phones and television.
It is all rather amusing how these things echo across history and through fiction and nonfiction. And it is rather delightful that they have happened to serendipitously converge in my reading (and TV viewing) at the moment. I love when this happens!
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Larissa MacFarquhar writes pieces for
The New Yorker that anyone seriously engaged with literature must read. This is the case again with her October 15 profile of Hilary Mantel, author of
Wolf Hall, which begins with these reflections on the writing of historical fiction. I share the opening, urging you to find the magazine and read the essential whole.
What sort of person writes fiction about the past? It is helpful to be acquainted with violence, because the past is violent. It is necessary to know that the people who live there are not the same people now. It is necessary to understand that the dead are real, and have power over the living. It is helpful to have encountered the dead firsthand, in the form of ghosts.
The writer's relationship with a historical character is in some was less intimate than with a fictional one: the historical character is elusive and far away, so there is more distance between them. But there is also more equality between them, and more longing; when he dies, real mourning is possible.
Historical fiction is a hybrid form, halfway between fiction and nonfiction. It is a pioneer country, without fixed laws.....
On another topic altogether, I'll be posting some of the questions and answers from yesterday's Push to Publish YA panel on this blog later today. (I promise.)
By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK
It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favourite books. This 
year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors). For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books. Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists. If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).
Louise Harwood is the bestselling author of four novels, all published by Pan Macmillan. Her fifth, Kiss Like You Mean It, will be published by Pan in March next year. She lives in North Oxfordshire, with her husband and two children.
I often seem to read a book five, ten, even twenty years after it was published, it’s an endless catch-up! Last year my favourite book was The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. This year I absolutely loved Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel (I’m therfore on course to read this year’s Booker Prize winning Wolf Hall in about 2020). But this year my absolute favourite novel was one first published in 1989, that finally reached my bedside a few months ago. It’s Restoration by Rose Tremain. It’s beautifully written, with a proper plot. It’s bawdy and funny, romantic, deeply sad, wonderfully perceptive, historically fascinating, with a central character – Robert Merivel – full of flaws but utterly endearing and I relished every page of it. It’s set in mid-seventeenth century England, and the great events of the century including the plague and the Great Fire of London are woven into the central story, which is the story of Merivel, who first finds himself at the court of Charles II, only to be cast out when he falls for the King’s mistress, there to begin his wonderful journey of self-discovery…
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Hillary Mantel won the 2009 Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall. Mantel was the favorite but she beat out J.M. Coetzee and A.S. Byatt. Wolf Hall is an historical novel about Henry VIII’s court from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell, who was Henry VIII’s executor. This is the first time since 2002, when a favorite won the Booker Prize when it went to Yan Martel for The Life of Pi.
Accepting the award, Ms. Mantel said, “I had to interest the historians, I had to amuse the jaded palate of the critical establishment and most of all I had to capture the imagination of the general reader.”
This was the first time Mantel was nominated for the Booker Prize and she is already working on a sequel to the award winning novel.
Well, that crept up on me. Just the other day I was saying to other ABBA bloggers that I ‘always’ post late the previous night so that it’s ready and cooked by morning. So this morning I wake up and think ‘doesn’t Nicola Morgan usually blog just before me...’ and I go through and look at the calendar, and I swear*.
However, although I’m ill-prepared, my bad timing did at least let me hear Hilary Mantel talking on Radio 4 this morning about Wolf Hall, the Man Booker favourite. So she’s saying (and I paraphrase, so I apologise an advance if I get this wrong) that she doesn’t write historical fiction, but contemporary fiction set in the past, and with a contemporary sensibility.
This made me wonder about a few things.
Is Hilary Mantel apologising for writing historical fiction, and if so, why? This year’s shortlist is
famously full of historical fiction (or contemporary fiction written in the past, yada yada), and there have been quite a few snotty comments about that very fact. What gives? I wasn’t even aware of an anti-historical-fiction thing till recently, and I’m confused. From what I could gather from this morning’s interview, it’s partly about the potential to play fast and loose with historical facts. I think I’ve also heard objections about the insertion of fictional figures into historical events.
We can do exactly the same in contemporary fiction, though, so I’m not clear where the difference lies. (I’m not being sarcastic. I would genuinely like to know where critics of historical fiction are coming from, because I’m interested.) For every Hollywood movie that explores the United States’ famous discovery of the Enigma machine, there’s a book that gets it right. Surely the only thing to do is roll one’s eyes and move on, rather than disparage an entire genre?
I was also curious about Hilary Mantel’s remark that she was writing contemporary fiction in a historical setting. Now, in ‘real life’ (see those inverted commas?) I’m very wary of imposing modern mores on our ancestors. The past is another country where they do things differently, and all that.
But does it have to be that way in fiction? It drives me nuts when I find characters in historical novels who talk like the Guardian’s comment pages. But then I’ll discover someone like Uhtred Ragnarsson, in Bernard Cornwell’s Alfred series, who has some fairly modern attitudes to women despite being a violent creature of his times. And that doesn’t annoy me, it intrigues me and makes me like him.
I’ve chickened out of this dilemma in my fantasy historical ‘Firebrand’ (Strident 2010, plug plug). I haven’t chickened out deliberately; it’s just the convenient way the story worked out. My hero can look back on his life from centuries ahead, and I know (mostly) when he’s being an unreliable narrator because of the change in his perspective – which is not the same as historical inaccuracy. But how would he have been if I’d let him live a normal human lifespan, and see his adventures solely from the perspective of his own times? Frankly I don’t know. I didn’t write that character.
I’m not making any assertions here. I really am curious, and I’d love to know how writers of children’s ‘straight’ historical fiction do it. And I apologise, again, in advance, if I’ve misrepresented what Hilary Mantel said this morning.
Anyway, back to that photo at the top. I need to go shopping. The kids were so caught up in Strictly Come Dancing on Friday night, we forgot to watch the last episode of The Tudors. So I owe my husband a DVD set. Because that’s one series that’s notoriously flexible with the facts.
But you know what? We love it.
*(something a children’s author never oughter.)
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Love.