Kate Pullinger, whose The Mistress of Nothing will soon be released in the US, wrote a great post last week about historians who dismiss historical fiction (in this case, Antony Beevor and Niall Ferguson):

According to reports, Niall Ferguson says he never reads historical fiction because it ‘contaminates historical understanding’; Beevor says he thinks that historical novelists ought to mark in bold type ‘the bits they made up’.Nice to see two such hardy fellows claiming their unparalleled access to the truth.

Pullinger then quotes from a talk about history and historiography¹ delivered by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 2006 and printed in the NYRB., in which Schlesinger argues that “All historians are prisoners of their own experience and servitors to their own prepossessions. We are all entrapped in the egocentric predicament. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personality and the preoccupations of our age.” Beevor and Ferguson, no matter how pristine they consider their own historical understandings, are just as time-blind as everybody else — if not more so, because they’re so submerged in their own cultural context that it’s become invisible to them. (This is the same problem I have with Stanley Fish’s frequent tirades in the NY Times about bias in the classroom: the underlying assumption that choosing not to discuss one’s political beliefs in the classroom means that bias is eradicated. Right.) I’ll put the bits I make up in bold when Beevor agrees to do the same thing.

Pullinger concludes: “this is why fiction can sometimes be the only way to tell the truth.” In essence, she’s making a point pretty similar to that of Sarah Dunant’s recent piece in the London Times, which presents historical fiction as a means of “penetrating ‘otherness.’”

I agree with Dunant, and I loved Pullinger’s post, but I’d drop the “the” before “truth” in her last sentence. The point of Schlesinger’s essay, as Pullinger points out, is that there is no historical “truth.” It doesn’t exist, and even if it did, in some rarefied ideal form, we wouldn’t have access to it. But here’s the thing: for historical fiction, it doesn’t matter that there’s no one truth.

Schlesinger says that “the historian is committed to a doomed enterprise—the quest for an unattainable objectivity.” Writers of historical fiction aren’t. When I write historical fiction, I’m trying to make art. I want the art I make to be truthful, but I don’t pretend that I’m identifying or recording the truth about history.² (I don’t mean to suggest that Pullinger or Dunant would claim this either, though I assume that Beevor and Ferguson think they would.)

I don’t think most readers care if historical fiction represents “the truth,” either. Some do, of course, and I think most readers respond negatively to the obvious importation of contemporary attitudes or speech patterns or modes of thinking into historical settings. But the word that kept coming up in our Wiscon panel discussion about historical fiction wasn’t truth but “authenticity” — the feeling of truth, in other words. The bits we make up as historical fiction writers are there to add to that feeling of truth, whether they’re accurate or not, and the feeling of truth and recognition is crucial to the success of any kind of art. Human understanding — that’s what we’re after.

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1. “Historiography” is one of my favorite things and one of my favorite words.

2. “Even things that are true can be proved.” (To keep company with the “stark postmodernist sentiments” Schlesinger quotes from John Lothrop Motley’s 1868 lecture.)

Via Elizabeth Chadwick on Twitter, I found this lovely set of photos of an experiment in Greek hairstyles done by students at Fairfield University. A small group of women with hair of the appropriate length and thickness were given braids like those on the Erechtheion marble caryatids who support the South Porch of the Acropolis. The shot-by-shot demonstration of the braiding is pretty remarkable.

Alcestis lived earlier than the era of the Acropolis, but I always imagined her wearing fairly similar braids.

Regarding more modern research, here’s a neat blog post by Richard Oram of the Harry Ransom Center (where I worked as an intern for two years) about “decline letters,” including a few examples by Edmund Wilson and G. B. Shaw. I actually found one from Wilson in a collection while doing other research for a patron and made Rich a copy; in fact, I made a bunch of copies for the staff, because it’s such a great little document. I had my copy tacked up over my inbox for the duration of my job there.

And finally: a hilarious takedown of Twilight’s prose style. Such as it is.

Malinda Lo and Maggie Stiefvater both posted entertaining and useful accounts of their own takes on New Year’s resolutions. I’m not much of a resolution-maker either, but lists of goals? Oh dear. I’ve been using Basecamp to manage my to-do lists since last summer,  and it now contains 11 separate lists, some of terrifying length. I also have a Moleskine planner that I consider my second brain. This is what happens when you’re working on a dissertation and a novel simultaneously.

I won’t bore you with my to-do lists, but I am going to steal Malinda Lo’s concept and write up a list of reading resolutions — books I really want to read in 2010. Some of these are on my TBR list at GoodReads, and some aren’t. And while I’m sure I’ll be reading lots of academic nonfiction in the next year, this list is about fiction, since fiction tends to languish on the shelf when I’m busy with academic work. I’m aiming for ten books, and like Malinda, I’ll blog about each one here after I’ve read it.

1. The Sealed Letter, Emma Donoghue
2. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (T. just reread this and convinced me to add it; I’m woefully lacking in exposure to Russian novels)
3. The Known World, Edward P. Jones
4. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
5. Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson (planning to read this with the Endicott Mythic Fiction group on GoodReads)
6. The Ambassadors, Henry James
7. The Golden Bowl, Henry James
8. The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
9. The Children’s Book, A. S. Byatt
10. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins

Lots of historical fiction and literary thrillers, in preparation for writing Killingly, but also books I just plan to enjoy (the James, in particular, and the A. S. Byatt). One of my quasi-resolutions for the last year was to read more for pleasure, even when I felt like I didn’t have time — I tend to forget, when I’m really stressed, how much brighter life seems when I’m in the middle of a good book.

Any suggestions for books to add to this list?

A brief break from Alcestis today to talk about novel #2, the one that’s still a twinkle in my eye, as it were. I haven’t said much about it  here because I haven’t begun writing it yet — I’m keeping busy with the dissertation. I’ve researched and outlined it, and much as I wish I could be delving right into it, I’m also enjoying the process of collecting little bits of information related to 1890s America and to specific elements of the book — a sort of mental collage. (I’m also using Scrivener for the first time, since I’ve finally got a Mac laptop again. Not sure how well I’ll like it for actual writing, but it is great fun to make up loads of note cards.)

Yesterday, for example, I read a rather grim but also fascinating article in the Times, complete with not-actually-grisly slideshow, about the Windsor Hotel Fire in 1899. (See also this contemporary letter to the editor about the possible causes of the fire. I love that the Times finally took down the pay wall for old articles.) The bit that stuck with me was the mention of bricks from the collapsed building being reused:

Tens of thousands of those survive anonymously, reused on other building projects for rear or inner walls.

The notion of anonymously surviving bricks is sort of poetic — like buildings in England that still have bits of Tintern Abbey’s roof in them, or like the vanished slabs of marble from the sides of the Pyramids. Or, to use the comparison in the article itself, like the metal recovered from Ground Zero and recently used to build a new Navy ship — though that re-use is martial in a way the others aren’t. The main building at Mt. Holyoke burned down only a year before the events of my novel, but I don’t remember reading about whether or not any materials had been salvaged and used in the new dormitory buildings constructed afterward.

Today, via Holly Tucker on twitter, I found this article about “bachelor girls,” a subset of “New Women” who achieved financial independence but often had trouble finding suitable living situations as young unmarried ladies.

The more domesticated form of New Woman idealized at women’s colleges in the 1890s was the All Around Girl, described in another Times article from 1895, here:

There is no virtue of womanliness or of a strong, healthy nature that this typical American girl does not possess … . She realizes that upon her, individually as well as collectively, rests the duty of upholding all womanhood, and she is true to the trust.

No pressure or anything, ladies.

The all around girl was somewhat like a bachelor girl in her self-sufficiency, but societally safe — she was supposed to be independent, gregarious, charming, and intelligent, but not too serious about her studies, and all her talents were valued because they’d make her an excellent wife and mother.

There’s one all around girl in the novel-I-have-yet-to-write. Those of you who have read Alcestis will perhaps not be surprised to hear that she’s not one of the main characters. One of the main characters is based on a real girl; the other one’s my own, and like Alcestis, she tries to build a new life out of old bricks.

I’m just back from a conference and still stuck in the post-travel blahs — I was in Richmond at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and managed to get my flights screwed up by thunderstorms in both directions, sigh — but I wanted to share a few things:

Via my friend Elizabeth Scott (whose lovely Something, Maybe is now in bookstores!), a fascinating link about the cover design process for a new book about Columbine.

A New York Times article about a 40-foot clonal amoeba colony in a cow pasture near Houston.

In other news, I’ve started doing more in-depth research for my new novel idea. There’s nothing quite so giddiness-inspiring as walking around the library collecting an armful of books for a new research topic.

Not long before I began my new HRC job, I discovered (thanks to my father’s internet sleuthing) that the HRC held a query letter from my grandmother to the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company. She wrote to them in the mid-1950s to ask if they’d want to publish a novel based on her life — a kind of “female Tom Sawyer story,” as she put it. They didn’t. Twenty-five years later she wrote the memoir manuscript I’m currently adapting; twenty-five years after that, I got the HRC internship.

On our first day of orientation, I had just enough time to glance at the letter and to laugh a little at how Louise-ish it is, how her style hadn’t really changed much in twenty-five years. The rejection letters are filed in a different set of manuscript boxes and are uncataloged. There’s a binder in the reading room, I think, that lists their contents. I’m planning to look for their response to Louise soon, though if it was a form letter, it may not have been saved, I suppose.

This morning the NY Times Book Review ran a story (by a UT professor) about the rejection letters and reader reports in the Knopf collection. Now I just want to sit down and look through all of them.

A whiplash-inducing reading experience: reading A Long Day’s Journey Into Night after a semester of reading Shakespeare. I haven’t bounced that hard off a text in a while.

I did finish the play, mostly because my grandmother mentions it several times in the course of her memoir. Her family life was nothing like the Tyrones’ in an emotional sense, but the superficial details of situation are similar: a mother with beautiful red-brown hair, a father who keeps throwing money into failed land purchases. She has a habit of making comparisons to works she must have read long ago — she also compares her mother to Isabel Archer at another point, and the only similarity there is that Isabel and her mother were both beautiful and stoic. I’m still tempted to use it as an excuse to re-read Portrait of a Lady, though.

Today, I am scanning. More specifically, I’m scanning the approximately three-hundred-page manuscript of my grandmother Louise’s memoir — or however much of that manuscript I can manage today before I go entirely nutty with boredom. This manuscript is the basis of my next writing project. I’d read a bit of it before and remembered it as being poorly written, so I’d only been hoping to get material for a novel from it — but, despite being a structural mess, it’s got chunks of snappy prose, sharp digs of wit, and a fascinating historical sweep. (The most obvious bit of historical interest: she lived with her family in a tent during the worst of the Depression.) My new plan is to edit her text and buttress it with some of my own writing, either fictional or non-, about Louise and my family. My father, especially, is excited about this plan — we spent an afternoon this week going through all the old photos Louise kept to accompany her manuscript (yes, I am very lucky, research-wise). I never knew Louise, since she died while my mother was pregnant with me, but I’m getting to know fragments of her now.

The best part, so far, has been the letter she included with the photos, instructing future family members on how the thing might be published; she admits to some roughness, but believes it might be edited into shape, and suggests that “perhaps the best way to handle it is through an agent. Libraries will always have ‘The Literary Market Place’ or something like it, giving names of agents and the whole procedure to follow, sending a m.s. 4th class special and all that.”

My publishing-savvy grandmother; I think we would’ve gotten along well.

In other news, the National Books Critics Circle blog has been interviewing authors who responded to the NY Times best 25 survey and asking them why they chose the works they did. So far, nobody’s explained a vote for Blood Meridian by admitting to a passionate love for conjunctions. “And” — it’s just so sexy!

Also, Sarah Monette is talking about Ursula Le Guin’s review of Hav, and discussing the similarities between Le Guin’s view of sf and her own concept of “hard fantasy.” These lines of Le Guin’s, which I’m stealing from Monette’s citation, interested me:

Hav is in fact science fiction, of a perfectly recognisable type and superb quality. The “sciences” or areas of expertise involved are social – ethnology, sociology, political science, and above all, history. … Serious science fiction is a mode of realism, not of fantasy; and Hav is a splendid example of the uses of an alternate geography.

I’m picky about the disciplines I label “sciences”; that happens when you’re the child of geologist parents. I consider history not a science, even in the broader sense in which Le Guin uses the term, but a liberal art, and therefore I’m a little more likely to agree with Monette’s label for this sort of work, since I think of the thought experiments I do as fantastic rather than science fictional. But, to contradict myself, I still find sf terms helpful when talking about all sorts of fiction — I thought of my second novel as a kind of first contact book, except with Greek gods rather than aliens.