This 1913 title lays claim to being the first Austen fan fiction. Brinton wrote no other novels and this one attempts to continue the stories of many characters from Austen novels all in one book, with Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park as the most well represented, though the other four also populate her story.
There are instances of real wit and cleverness, but ultimately the work is uneven, too stuffed with character names, and perhaps a little too fully Victorian in tone to really succeed as a sequel to Austen’s work. Brinton seems on a mission to get everyone married and the number of couples she has to get paired up before the end of the novel lend a rushed quality to it that makes it less than satisfying. For this reader, the main interest of Brinton’s work is as an artifact of Jane Austen fandom. Brinton claims to have used Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of his aunt as well as Austen’s own letters as inspiration for her continuation and she does marry Kitty to a clergyman. However, some of the characters, Mary Crawford for example, seem to stray widely from their roots in Austen.
Overall, the book is enjoyable as a window into Austen’s appeal almost 100 years after her death and to her growing fandom. The very fact that Brinton felt the desire to write a continuation of Austen’s novels and the joy she found in reading Austen as remarked in her introduction to the work, are glimpses of reader reception in the pre-WWI period. My favorite depiction by Brinton is Georgiana Darcy, who comes off favorably and reasonably in Old Friends and New Fancies. If you are interested in the history of Austen reception or just want to see the first fan fiction rendering of her characters, give this one a go.
Matthew Pearl’s debut novel, The Dante Club, was a huge bestseller and proof that literary doesn’t have to mean boring. This gem is perhaps less well known, but the storyline is just as fascinating. The premise is that as the copyright loophole which allowed for pirating the works of foreign writers residing in other nations was about to close because of The International Copyright Act of 1891, a small group of book pirates and adventurers are on one last mission in the South Seas to steal a novel being written by a dying Robert Louis Stevenson. As usual, Pearl combines fact and fiction in a cocktail which will entertain and edify readers, while also giving them a healthy dose of swashbuckling adventure. His prose is tight and the characters are just mysterious enough without crossing into the ridiculous category. Give this one a go if you like fan fiction based on classics.
Pearl may be challenging, but he is never boring. Who knew that copyright could be so exciting?
According to James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance, part of the difficulty in dealing with the history of a subordinate group is that there is a public transcript of events and a hidden transcript, which the dominant group neither knows about nor may access. Further, the hidden transcript is not necessarily a part of the written record, or if it is written, it may exist in sources outside the norm, such as rumors, gossip, songs, rituals, euphemisms, or jokes. Actions may also be a part of the hidden transcript. A quotation from page 14 bears exact reproduction:
“Tactical prudence ensures that subordinate groups rarely blurt out their hidden transcripts directly. But, taking advantage of the anonymity of a crowd or of an ambiguous accident, they manage in a thousand artful ways to imply that they are grudging conscripts to the performance.”
The performance he refers to is the dominant group’s version of reality. Add to this the now accepted view that history is written by the victors and the astute writer of historical fiction will see room for characters who neither assent nor conform inwardly to the dominant group’s conception of reality. They may even occasionally find ways to express their non-assent, although their expressions may be covert. It would be ridiculous to assume that marginalized groups were satisfied with the status quo and never sought to upend it, even if their resistance was in small acts. In her 1989 article, “The Return of the Repressed in Women’s Narrative,” Susan Stanford Friedman argues that women’s writing may be read as a form of disguised record of the forbidden. That women’s public writing had to disguise what they wanted to say more than their private writing. Women were protesting or “writing against the grain” from the beginning, and if they were writing against the grain, what else might they have done? In “History to the Defeated: Women Writers and the Historical Novel in the Thirties,” Diana Wallace points out that one of the many factors contributing to a boom in female authored and centered historical fiction during the 1930s was the renewed interest and demand for information about the lives of women in history. In addition, a surfeit of women who graduated from University after studying History, but who were denied entrance to other occupations, took up writing historical fiction. All of this brings to mind Catherine Morland, who observes somewhat dryly, in Northanger Abbey
“I read it [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. “
Exactly–a great deal of it IS invention, by the victors. Indeed, if women (and others) are not part of the public transcript, with the exception of outliers, what might the hidden transcript reveal about them, if only we had it complete?
Another way of looking for characters who were forward thinking is to model them on famous outliers. One of my favorite historical outliers is Aaron Burr. I know you may think him a villain, but that is because he has been used as a scapegoat for the founders’ shortcomings for WAY too long. In her very excellent biography of Burr, Fallen Founder, Nancy Isenberg argues successfully that Burr was a man of his time with regard to politics, but ahead of his time with regard to women’s rights–an avowed reader and respecter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who educated his daughter to the same standard others of his time would have educated a son. She also argues that his roles in the 1800 election and the 1804 duel with Hamilton have largely been misconstrued both by the popular press and by the other founders, who were willing to paint Burr as a traitor in order to further their own political ambitions–Hamilton and Jefferson seem to be the most culpable, Madison less so. She further asserts that Burr’s lack of care over his own legacy in contrast to the other founders’ near obsession with theirs, contributed mightily to the oversimplification of Burr’s role in the early Republic. In the forward to the 1836 edition of his memoirs, written and published posthumously by Matthew Davis, the author admits freely to destroying a large quantity of Burr’s correspondence, because it would have been “injurious” to the reputations of some families. Burr was quite the ladies’ man, and morality was thought of differently in the late eighteenth century than it was in the Victorian era, which Davis was butting up against. It is a shame, really, that so much was lost. He also admits to not telling everything Burr told him about some of the other founders–some of which may have been biased, but may also have given us a fuller picture of the founders and taken some of the veil of villainy away from Burr. Alas, we’ll never know for sure–but this gap, like so many others in history and the outlier sensibilities of Burr could be exploited, and have been, to write some pretty wonderful historical fiction.
You cannot make a Burr, a Christine de Pizan, or an Eleanor of Aquitaine the average character in your book, but you can definitely make them the focus of the book. Look for where there is something missing–and use your historically informed imagination to fill in the gap.
What happens when a woman makes one spectacularly bad choice? In Yvonne Carmichael’s case it leads to several other spectacularly bad choices and she ends up accused and on trial at the Old Bailey. I have read several other reviews of this book and many people seem to think Yvonne is unbalanced or unbelievable, but I certainly did not see her that way. She tells the story to us in stages, only revealing part of the truth, just like real people do. How many times have you played down something you did that you thought was wrong, or embellished something you did to make yourself sound like a better person? It isn’t exactly lying, but it isn’t exactly telling the truth, at least not the whole truth. That is what Yvonne, the main character does in Apple Tree Yard, does. And the final truth, when it comes, is stunning. It is not often that I am surprised.
Yvonne is fifty-two and she is on the downward slide in her career. She and her husband are cordial, but not intimate. She meets a mysterious man who works for the government. He has a few honesty issues, too. She does something she never expected to do, begin an affair. I do not want to spoil the book by giving away the story, but I think that Louis Doughty captures the ennui of middle age quite fantastically. One of my favorite quotations is when Yvonne writes about her work on her PhD. She and her husband, Guy, are both scientists. She says, ”Guy completed his PhD in three years and mine took seven. Funny that.” Later this is explained, “This was something he never understood: yes, he would give me time to work when I demanded it, but my time was considered to belong to our family unit unless I signaled that I wanted out. His time was considered to belong to himself and his work unless I demanded that he opt in.” This is probably the most succinct explanation of the dilemma of working women of a certain age I have ever seen. Younger women have men who view family life totally differently, but for the generation between the 1970s and now, those women who are currently middle aged, this is the reality. It is nice to have that acknowledged and written out loud. Yvonne isn’t unbalanced or unrealistic. She is realistic to a fault. She makes an error in judgment that has repercussions she could never have imagined, and that is what makes a great story that I could hardly stand to put down. That and wonderful writing.
UPDATE: There is a 4-part Hulu series based on the book that is quite good.
Both of these thrillers are worth reading–even if they aren’t totally surprising, they do contain plenty of suspense, some misdirection, and the writing is just so good.
Invisible Girl is a tale told from multiple points of view which features a central mystery about a series of sexual assaults and how all the characters are related to them. There’s the mom, Cate with her psychologist husband and her two normalish kids who maybe seems a little rudderless. There’s the titular invisible girl, Saffyre, love the name and the spelling, who is damaged goods, but the reader isn’t sure how. She had been a patient of Cate’s husband, Roan, but now appears to be stalking him. Then there’s Owen. He’s an odd duck, a teacher at a local college, who lives with his aunt (and he’s over 30); accused of sexual harassment early on and somehow involved in the mystery, but you’ll have to read it to find out how. The best thing about this novel is that it doesn’t give in to the stereotypes–the characters are neither perfect nor completely worthless–they are somewhere in between. The events of the novel are not a lesson in anything, they are a portrayal of a story that might happen anywhere–anywhere human beings live. There’s no big twist, but there is some doubt leftover at the end, which most thriller readers will appreciate. Mystery not quite solved…
If you enjoy a gripping read with nuanced characters, this is a fantastic choice. Stayed up late to finish it!
Discussion Questions:
How does Cate’s character grow over the course of the novel?
What do you think is the motivation propelling Saffyre to follow Roan?
Did you find Owen sympathetic? Is he a reliable narrator of his own story? Why or why not?
Did you find any part of the story something that might actually happen? Which parts?
Which character did you find most relatable? Why?
What was it in the story that kept you in suspense?
The Plot is also a thriller, but of a more complex nature. It is kind of like if You and Medea had a love child, it would be this book. I don’t want to spoil it, so that is all I will say about the actual plot. The Plot is told from the point of view of our main character, a writer who has always dreamed of writing the Great American Novel. He had a decent first book, but his second was weak and he ends up teaching in a “low residency” MFA program in Vermont. When a student reveals his idea for a novel that he thinks can’t fail, Jake agrees and waits, painfully, for the book to debut. Fast forward a few years. Jake has descended even further down the food chain in publishing, working as a freelance editor and book coach (!), when something jogs his memory; he recalls that the book never came out and he hasn’t heard from the student. Jake discovers after a few Google searches that the student died just a couple of months after the end of the writing program and the book never went to press. He digs further and finds that no one seems to know anything about the manuscript. You know what happens next…
Jake becomes a best selling author, darling of the reviewers, the talk shows, Oprah even chooses his book for her book club. He is riding high when the first message comes: I know what you did.
Korelitz’s novel examines what it means to be a writer when “anyone can write a book” and “everyone has a unique voice and a story nobody else can tell.” One gets the idea she is winking at the reader all the way through the novel. It’s a thriller, and there is a puzzle, but the puzzle isn’t the thing. This is a novel for book lovers; there are so many Easter eggs for literature geeks, I am sure I missed several. My favorite was when Jake salves his conscience with thoughts straight from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic–if he doesn’t write the novel, the idea will leave him and go to another writer–he has to write it, of course he does! There are loads of places where the bibliophile will smile, smirk, and knowingly chuckle–this book is for you. Jake is so focused on himself and his writing, he misses what is right in front of him, which the astute reader surely will not.
My daughter and I recently went to the “Sherwood Forest Faire” near McDade, Texas. It was great fun! There were costumes, shows with everything from singing to falconry to jousting, and pineapple soft serve. Looking around at the various types of costumes, level of historical accuracy, and the relation between this and the enjoyment of the day made me think of writing historical fiction. Stay with me, I’ll get there.
There are two very distinct and frequently vocal sides to the “historical accuracy” argument when discussing the writing and reading of historical fiction. There is the side which proclaims that only by being PRECISELY historically accurate in EVERY detail can a writer do the historical period justice; on the opposite are those who say that NO MODERN AUDIENCE will read a truly historically accurate portrayal of times periods, which were to put it politely, racist and misogynistic in the extreme, so writers would not really try that hard, because readers don’t care. I would argue that readers prefer writers to be as historically accurate as possible, with a few caveats… I think it is possible to write historical fiction that is AUTHENTIC, as opposed to being pedantically accurate. Good historical fiction lies somewhere between David Liss and Bridgerton…
Often those who most vociferously argue for strict historical accuracy are worried about presentism–and they are not wrong. Presentism is when we try to cast modern views backward, or interpret the past through the lens of our modern sensibilities. It is important when writing History that we do not do this–judging the past by our current values simply does not work. If you reversed it and tried to judge the present by historical values, it would be equally impossible to do. However, this does not mean that we sacrifice the story in a historical fiction novel to the gods of either historical accuracy (always a dicey and subjective proposition) or political correctness. Neither of these approaches is going to work when writing historical fiction. This would be like making everyone who wants to wear a costume to Sherwood Forest Faire have to meet some historical accuracy test, or give up all the fart jokes because they are offensive. Some of the costumes were pretty accurate, some weren’t (I saw zippers), but the idea is to represent the period authentically and have fun. It’s fiction, not history. I mean I don’t REALLY want to be in the middle ages, but I want to have the experience of seeing, hearing, and feeling as if I were (sort of) there.
First, let’s look at historical accuracy. It is true that you want to render the time and place as accurately as you can. However, there are a few things that will probably not work for writers of historical fiction, no matter how accurate they are.:
Dialogue— it is a safe bet that your dialogue is not going to be completely accurate. If it were, depending on the time period, your book would most likely be unreadable by a modern audience, except for a few people who just happen to be even bigger history nerds than you.
The sheer difficulty of everyday life in most pre-modern eras. Lots of people died young, illness and uncleanliness were rife, and the majority of the population lived in abject poverty. These are not the ingredients for an entertaining novel. This is not to say that you won’t include a measure of reality, but the actual reality of the past would prove depressing for most readers. That isn’t why they read historical fiction. Occasionally an author will venture into this area, and many award winning books do, but it isn’t something most readers will want a steady diet of. And the stench…just imagine!
And what about political correctness? Like the reality of everyday life in historical eras, a little goes a long way. You may have some characters in your story who are ahead of their times, but everyone can’t be. That isn’t historical fiction, that is just wish-fulfillment. There is a balance, though, which a good writer can find. There are lots of unknowns in history, so there is wiggle room–we cannot always assume that everything relevant about the past has survived to the present. There is a lot of missing data. If you look hard enough, you can find the gaps and the outliers–and here is where a good story that will appeal to modern readers lives.
Ben MacIntyre has written several books about World War II and Cold War spies. They are all excellent and Agent Sonya does not disappoint. MacIntyre has a talent for finding intriguing stories about real people in extraordinary situations. Sonya, real name Ursula Kuczynski, worked for the Soviets beginning in the 1920s in China and continuing through three pregnancies, two marriages, and several nations until she was unmasked, not coincidentally by another woman, one of the few in MI-5 at the time. Sonya was able to convince her male interrogator that she had stopped spying when she came to England in 1940, and without evidence, he did not arrest her. However, she knew she was on the MI-5 watchlist and it was only a matter of time. When Klaus Fuchs was arrested, she fled to East Germany to avoid a similar fate.
During her tenure as a Communist agent, Sonya ran multiple operations successfully and obtained reams of intelligence, including cutting edge communications technology and nuclear secrets–she ran Fuchs for a time. Her story is compelling and hair-raising at the same time. James Bond could not have maintained his cover any where near as long and Sonya had a few harrowing escapes no less fantastic than the fictional Mr. Bond. Though Agent Sonya is a narrative history, MacIntyre successfully inserts an argument about Sonya’s success being at least partly due to her gender. Overlooked multiple times, because of the assumptions regarding what men and women did, Sonya used stereotypes to her advantage to hide in plain sight, much like Virginia Hall (A Woman of No Importance). The fact that she carried on spying while giving birth and raising children is nothing short of inspiring, regardless of which side she was on.
There is also a veiled warning here, if one is needed, regarding the Russian talent for human intelligence. While it is true that Communism as an ideology was more widespread and international during the decades leading up to WWII, the fact that Sonya hand selected the entire contingent of agents used by the OSS, America’s WWII spy agency, for Operation Hammer, one of the last Allied insertions before the end of the war in Europe, is stunning. Every agent the Americans sent on that mission was in reality working for the Red Army, with instructions to report back to the Soviets what they learned about American operations. It would be naive to think that Soviet efforts at intelligence gathering have slowed, and recent computer hacks are proof that they are still able to infiltrate and have the will to do so. It would be naive to think they could not use unwitting actors as useful fools. The United States arrived late to the espionage party and has not proved particularly adept.
And what about the feisty female? In a previous post, I discussed the idea that the feisty female is not off limits for historical fiction. Though some writers and critics would have us believe that to be historically accurate, female characters should be shrinking violets–in tune with the expectations of their “times.” I disagree; Agent Sonya is evidence that fictional women do not have to conform any more than real women do.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker, this is an unusual “crime” novel. Young Roderick Macrae is in jail for three brutal murders and has written a memoir at the behest of his attorney, who hopes to use some of the information as mitigating factors in Roderick’s trial. Interspersed with the fictional memoir are additional statements by other characters in the story and medical and court reports. If you are looking for a book that grapples with moral ambiguity, look no further. I do not want to ruin the book, so I am not going to reveal the ending, but here is a case that pits the little guy against the powers that be, the downtrodden against the system, and the hopeless against those who hold all the advantages. Or is it? The reader will have to decide for himself. This book will leave you scratching your head, so if you prefer the end tied up neatly with a bow on top, don’t start reading His Bloody Project. This ending leaves the reader full of questions that remain unanswered within the pages of the book, but that is part of its brilliance.
I am afraid I will have to join the minority who did not like this one. The Washington Post reviewer calls it “plodding” and I would have to agree. One reviewer on Goodreads says it seems like the author read The Grapes of Wrath and decided it needed an update. I would have to agree with that as well. The characters are one dimensional, the prose is pedestrian, and there just isn’t enough story to maintain interest. Misery can’t be the only thing sustaining the story arc. I understand that writing about the Great Depression was a risk, because there was a lot of misery, but a load of terrible things happening doesn’t make a story. The main character doesn’t grow, the daughter runs hot and cold, and the dialogue was particularly lackluster. I haven’t even mentioned the historical inaccuracies–if you are going to write about Texas, you should probably do some research about it. Movies from the 1930s are easy to find and watching them might have helped with some of the dialogue. This is the third book by Kristin Hannah I have read and I have come to the conclusion I am not her ideal reader. Color me disappointed.
