Realist historical fictions, with the rustling demands of their costumes and their period-appropriate speech, often depend on painstakingly described physical veracity, sensory believability, to steep a reader in the past. While not necessarily factual, such works say: This really occurred, and now you, too, may experience it. As the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt enthused in a review of “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel’s novel about the rise of Thomas Cromwell—perhaps the paradigmatic contemporary example of such fiction—great historical novels “provide a powerful hallucination of presence, the vivid sensation of lived life.”
But a handful of recent works of fiction have taken up history on radically different terms. Rather than presenting a single, definitive story—an ostensibly objective chronicle of events—these books offer a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices. They are not so much historical as archival: instead of giving us the imagined experience of an event, they offer the ambiguous traces that such events leave behind. These fictions do not focus on fact but on fact’s record, the media by which we have any historical knowledge at all. In so doing, such books call the reader’s attention to both the problems and the pleasures of history’s linguistic remains.
The book that made this distinction clear to me is a new novel by Danielle Dutton, called “Margaret the First.” Dutton’s Margaret is Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who lived from 1623 to 1673 and was one of the first British women to publish in print under her own name.
more here.