Quote of the Day (Hilary Mantel, on ‘A Silence Full of Words’)

“You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.”—British novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Hilary Mantel (1952-2022), Wolf Hall (2009)

Quote of the Day (Alice McDermott, on a ‘Contrarian’ Approach to Writing Historical Fiction)

“I think many of us who write fiction are contrarians at heart. You know, the world says, ‘This is the this is the way the world is’ and we say, ‘Oh, no. No, we're going to make up our own world, even if it feels like the real world. We're going to correct it. We're going to tell it better. We're going to tell the story of history in a more interesting way.”—American novelist Alice McDermott, in conversation with David Rubenstein on “America’s Book Club,” C-SPAN, original air date Apr 19, 2026

The image accompanying this post was taken by Slowking4, showing Alice McDermott reading at the 2018 Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 19, 2018.

Quote of the Day (Heidi Julavits, on Historical Fiction)

“I believe it is a mistake to look to historical literary fiction if readers want to learn about history, because numerical and factual accuracy has always possessed a limited ability to tell the truth. On the flip side, this historical novelist would be foolhardy to overlook the reader’s inherent distrust of her undertaking, and should wisely limit the number of occasions for doubt. My prickly resistance to this ‘fact,’ however, is that it obscures the real challenge faced by the historical novelist. The real challenge of writing a historical literary novel is not to make your novel seem to be taking place in 1934; the challenge is to make it seem as if the story could have happened last year, or 10 years from now. Perhaps the historical literary novel would be better served by a new name: the mythic novel. This more permissive genre would seamlessly combine backward-glancing and utter fabrication, resulting in a timeless fictional truth."—American novelist, editor, and academic Heidi Julavits, “The Literary Life: Fiction 21c: History as an Occasion for Literature,” Poets and Writers, January/February 2002

The image accompanying this post, of Heidi Julavits at the 2015 Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, was taken Oct. 17, 2015, by Larry D. Moore.

Quote of the Day (Pat Barker, on a Story’s Voice, ‘The Breath on the Mirror’)

“I feel that the project doesn’t start until you’ve got the voice. I call it ‘the breath on the mirror.’ If there’s no breath on the mirror, it’s dead. And once the characters are talking to each other, even if there’s no story and I don’t know what it’s about, I stop worrying because once they’re talking to each other and disagreeing with each other about various things, you know you are going to have a story very quickly.” —Booker Prize-winning English novelist Pat Barker, “The WD Interview: Pat Barker,” Writer’s Digest, January/February 2025

If you haven’t read Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy, Regeneration (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road), you really owe it to yourself to see what wonders she can bring to historical fiction.

I have not yet read a later trilogy of hers, The Women of Troy, but I have to think that it must be very good, too. And a key part of her success has to be how she brings her characters to life in dialogue, as she describes above.

(The image accompanying this post, of Pat Barker at the Durham Book Festival in 2012, was taken October 27, 2012, by summonedbyfells.)

Quote of the Day (Zadie Smith, on the ‘Tiresomely Gigantic Influence’ of Charles Dickens)

“Hanging over all this anxiety [about writing a historical novel set in Victorian England] was the long shadow of Dickens. To be my age, bookish, and born in England was to grow up under that tiresomely gigantic influence. Dickens was everywhere. He was in school and on the shelves at home and in the library. He invented Christmas. He was in politics, influencing changes in labor law, educational law, even copyright law. He was the original working-class hero—radiant symbol of our supposed meritocracy—as well as a crown jewel of the English Heritage tourist industry….He was also everywhere I wanted to be: in the theatre, in Italy, in America. Televised versions of his books were on rotation—there is a case to be made that Dickens is the reason that we have prestige-TV miniseries in the first place —and he was in the goddam Muppets and all over Hollywood, in conscious adaptation and unconscious theft. I personally read far too much of him as a child, and though I grew up to have all the usual doubts and caveats about him—too sentimental, too theatrical, too moralistic, too controlling — I was also never able to get out from under his embarrassing influence, as often as I’ve often wanted to….There didn’t seem to be a nineteenth-century pot he didn’t have his finger in.”— English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Zadie Smith, “On Killing Dickens,” The New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2023

The comic upshot of Zadie Smith’s anxiety over the influence of Charles Dickens was that she ended up making him a character—and a not-insignificant one—in her upcoming book The Fraud.

Yet, even as Smith fretted about viewing the Victorian Era through the lens of the astonishingly prolific author, she seemed never to have considered how Dickens wrote about times other than his own.

In other words, Dickens got around to writing historical fiction almost two centuries before she did.

Well, that first attempt is largely forgotten these days—and maybe Dickens would have been glad about that. Barnaby Rudge was, according to the late great editor Robert Gottlieb, in a 2012 piece for Publishers Weekly, “a tired and tiresome historical novel that the young Dickens kept putting off writing until contractual obligations forced him to finish it.”

But not too many people know anything about the subject of this 1841 novel: a 1780 outbreak of anti-Catholic sentiment in England that became known as the Gordon Riots. If his book sends interested readers out for literature about this incident, maybe all wasn’t lost for his labor.

Dickens’ other attempt at historical fiction was considerably more successful, at least commercially: A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens felt a powerful influence of his own as he labored over it: Thomas Carlyle’s epic history, The French Revolution. But, if Dickens was intimidated by that prospect, the finished product doesn’t betray that sense.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that for Ms. Smith. Just have at it…

Quote of the Day (Peter Ackroyd, on Poetry’s Shelley at Oxford)

“Bysshe was openly contemptuous of the regimen of the university, and attended no lectures. I was unsure, in fact, what studies he was meant to be pursuing. To him they did not matter in the slightest. There was one task that we were assigned by rote, that of translating each week an essay from the Spectator into Latin. This he accomplished with the greatest ease, and indeed he could write Latin with as much facility and fluency as he wrote English. He told me that the secret was to imagine himself a Roman orator in the first years of the Republic. This inspired him with such fervour that the words came naturally to him in their proper order. I did not doubt it. His imagination was like the voltaic battery from which lightning issued forth.”— Peter Ackroyd, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein: A Novel (2008)

Today’s 225^th anniversary of the birth of Percy Bysshe Shelley near Horsham, Sussex, England not only gives me the chance to comment on the short, stormy life of this Romantic poet but to extol the many virtues of The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. 

The main character of this marvelous historical novel and horror fiction is, as the title indicates, the obsessed creator of a monster who embodies the worst fears of science gone horribly wrong. 

But Peter Ackroyd, an astonishingly prolific and astute novelist, biographer and critic, pairs the scientist with a real-life character with a power every bit as compelling as the work he left beyond: the husband of Mary Shelley, who wrote the 1818 novel to which the novelist pays tribute. 

In more than one of his novels, Ackroyd engages in meta-fiction, or the self-referential practice of parodying or alluding to another work—and this marvelous work (which I wish would be adapted to film or television) is no exception. 

At one point, Dr. Frankenstein accompanies the Shelleys and their friends Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori to Switzerland, the site of the late-night 1816 fireside contest where the group related horror stories they had written. (Frankenstein was, of course, the product of that villa game.) 

Earlier, Ackroyd has the scientist reanimate the corpse of an acquaintance, a gentle young consumptive medical student named “Jack Keat”—an unmistakable reference to Shelley and Byron’s equally star-crossed friend John Keats. 

But the paragraph above is a nice microcosm not only of the themes of this novel and even of the life of Shelley, but also of what has compelled Ackroyd’s attention across a career devoted to limning the glories of the English language. 

Befriending the conventionally religious student Frankenstein at Oxford, the charismatic Shelley almost literally throws off sparks. The last sentence’s simile of “the voltaic battery” gives the atheistic Bysshe the dubious co-credit of inventing the monster by means of electrical experimentation.

His Oxford experience is very part and parcel of how Bysshe will flout convention not only within the confines of the university but in the world at large. His rebellion begins before the tract, The Necessity of Atheism, that results in his expulsion from the school. Even the practice of attending classes is anathema to him. 

Indeed, his brilliance is such that he’s beyond all that, in the same way that he will persuade Frankenstein that the scientist, as part of a larger movement toward “our principles of truth and freedom,” is beyond the bounds of convention. 

Translating effortlessly is the means by which Shelley suggests his immense literary talent. That trait illustrates a theme that Ackroyd analyzed in intriguing depth in his broad-based literary canvass Albion, about the wellsprings of the English language and imagination. 

In that work, he underscores translation as a crucial formative influence on the writings of Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and William Wordsworth. Translation enabled those writers as well as Shelley to range across and blend cultures. 

Not content with religious skepticism, Shelley became sharply critical of the old political order. In having him imagining himself as “a Roman orator in the first years of the Republic,” Ackroyd is alluding to Shelley’s well-known claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Shelley’s method was examining, like a medical student, the diseases of the body politic, as in this famous conclusion to his poem “England in 1819”: 

“Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;

A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—

Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”

I don't think even he could ever have realized how unintentionally frightening that word "Phantom" would become because of the literary monster created by his wife.

Finally, perhaps the crucial word of this paragraph, slipped in casually, is “secret.” It implies more than just the major running theme of Shelley’s reckless youth—secrets that, when brought to life, resulted in scandal (e.g., the discovery that he was the author of that notorious essay on atheism, or the clandestine affair conducted with the teenaged Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin that led to the suicide of the poet’s first wife). 

It also hints at the solitary pursuit that will bring Victor Frankenstein even more inner division and torment here than in Mary Shelley’s landmark horror novel: the quest for the ungodly “secret springs of life.”

One last point I can’t help but recall about Shelley, given a central preoccupation of this blog: In the mid-1930s, while having a short affair with a North Carolina nurse, F. Scott Fitzgerald provided her with “required reading.” 

Among the more than 20 items on this list, alongside Dreiser, Chekhov, Maupassant, Hammett, and Proust, was John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works—something that had transfixed him and his friends at Princeton, in the same way that Shelley had absorbed past masters effortlessly at Oxford.

Quote of the Day (Michael Shaara, With an Irish Soldier’s View of the Civil War)

“ ‘The truth is, Colonel, that there's no divine spark, bless you. There's many a man alive no more value than a dead dog. Believe me, when you've seen them hang each other...Equality? Christ in Heaven. What I'm fighting for is the right to prove I'm a better man than many. Where have you seen this divine spark in operation, Colonel? Where have you noted this magnificent equality? The Great White Joker in the Sky dooms us all to stupidity or poverty from birth. No two things on earth are equal or have an equal chance, not a leaf nor a tree. There's many a man worse than me, and some better, but I don't think race or country matters a damn. What matters is justice. 'Tis why I'm here. I'll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved. I'm Kilrain, and I God damn all gentlemen. I don't know who me father was and I don't give a damn. There's only one aristocracy, and that's right here’—he tapped his white skull with a thick finger –‘and YOU, Colonel laddie, are a member of it and don't even know it. You are damned good at everything I've seen you do, a lovely soldier, an honest man, and you got a good heart on you too, which is rare in clever men. Strange thing. I'm not a clever man meself, but I know it when I run across it. The strange and marvelous thing about you, Colonel darlin', is that you believe in mankind, even preachers, whereas when you've got my great experience of the world you will have learned that good men are rare, much rarer than you think.’”— Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974)

Forty years ago today, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to one of the classic works of historical fiction published in this country, on the turning point in the conflict that redefined America: The Killer Angels, on the Battle of Gettysburg.

The manuscript by Michael Shaara had been rejected by 15 different publishers before finally being accepted by a small house. Even after winning the Pulitzer, it would take nearly another two decades before it gained the mass readership it deserved, after  release of the epic film adapted from it, Gettysburg, in theaters and on TNT (whose head, Ted Turner, was a Civil War buff) and after such historians as James McPherson hailed it for its accuracy.

There are many reasons, historical and literary, to embrace this novel: for its insistence on slavery as the ultimate cause of the Civil War; for its penetration into the minds of commanders; for its realism about the awful price of war; for redeeming the reputation of a brave Confederate general, James Longstreet, unjustly maligned by Southern historians and postwar advocates of the “Lost Cause” for not vigorously pursuing an assault on the Federal lines that he had correctly warned Robert E. Lee would be suicidal; and for spotlighting the colonel addressed in this passage, Joshua Chamberlain of Maine, responsible for holding the critical Little Round Top against a furious Confederate assault.

But I especially like its depiction of the warmth between Chamberlain and the sergeant addressing him here, Buster Kilrain, a stand-in for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants (very much including, as this passage indicates, Irish ones) who fought for the Union. Shaara rendered him so vividly that tourists to Gettysburg  have left disappointed to discover that he was a fictional character. They shouldn't be: Kilrain lives as surely as another person with Ireland in the veins, Scarlett O'Hara. 

Kilrain doesn’t have the soaring ideals that animate Chamberlain, but his motive for fighting is noble enough: the determination to show that he is not only as good as any other man, but can even be better.

Aging, out of shape, Kilrain is walking cannon fodder, and his hand-to-mouth existence in his native land has left him utterly without illusions about human nature. But his experience with the unfair advantages of a landed gentry in Ireland (he comes from the west of that country, County Clare, from where my father and his ancestors hailed) have led him to realize that the other side in this fight will perpetuate a system of encrusted privilege very much like it, and he will fight it in favor of “justice” and an aristocracy based on natural decency in its stead. By the battle’s end, Kilrain will prove that he belongs to the elite group of “good men” that he believes is rare.

Evidently, I’m not the only reader and viewer enthralled by the story of Kilrain within the larger canvass of The Killer Angels. So is musician Steve Earle, according to this post by Chris Mackowski on the blog “Emerging Civil War.” Earle has gone as far, in “Dixieland,” as to sing from the point of view of Kilrain: “I damn all gentlemen/Whose only worth is their father’s name and the sweat of a workin’ man.”

(The image accompanying this post is from the stirring film Gettysburg, faithfully adapted from Shaara’s novel, with Jeff Daniels, on the left, playing Col. Chamberlain and the marvelous character actor Kevin Conway, on the right, embodying unillusioned, decent, heroic Kilrain.)

Quote of the Day (Caleb Carr, on Writing Historical Fiction)

“Gaining competence in those principles of character and language required for serious, accessible historical prose provides some of the essential tools to write compelling fiction.”—Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist, in “Word Craft: To Fiction, Through History,” The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2012

Quote of the Day (Thomas Flanagan, on Historical Fiction)

“The voices which only seem to be speaking to us, being in fact our own voices, have been instructed by all that we know about the past, all the contradictory things that we feel about it, all that we have imagined about it. Those voices make possible for us imaginary selves, imaginary opposites, imaginary others. Historical fiction licenses those imaginings in ways that history itself, history proper, does not.”—Thomas Flanagan, “History as Fiction, Fiction as History,” lecture at Berkeley, February 29, 1996, collected in There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History, edited by Christopher Cahill (2004)