Imagination and history can be a confluence of literary beauty

Frank Coughlan

Edith Somerville, who is the subject of Martina Devlin's new novel. Edith. Photo: Getty Images

May 24 2022 02:30 AM

Literary fiction and historical facts have an uneasy relationship that dates way back. Historians, who take their discipline exceedingly seriously, can often be sniffy at how authors weave an imagined past into the fabric of something nominally authentic.

It distorts the truth, they claim, and tends to elevate heroic myth over more complex reality. Not that academic historiography is a totally dependable guide either.

If fiction writers add colour and drama to fill in their canvas, historians can just as easily be accused of distorting reality by what they choose to include and what to leave out.

Even the most vigilant can’t avoid bias. Truth, when it comes to history as most everything else, is an elusive and complex concept.

Walter Scott, the great 18th-century novelist who nearly singlehandedly gave the world the image of a tartan Scotland, argued that while historians tend to get the facts right, they mostly get everything else wrong.

Good historical novels, on the other hand, often tap into something essential and fundamental that unlocks the past in the way footnoted history either undervalues or overlooks.

It is essential, of course, to distinguish between period novels, which piggyback on a particular time and place but are really about something else, and the seriously historical where the characters and plot are solely dependent on the political and social milieu of the day.

No better example than Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy.

I have just summoned the courage to read The Mirror and the Light, the third and final instalment.

This breeze block of a tome is a daunting undertaking, but doubts immediately dismiss themselves when Mantel opens with the execution of Anne Boleyn on the opening page. I am instantly hooked. This is great writing marinated in impeccably researched history.

Mantel gave a wonderful Reith Lecture on historical fiction and how there has to be a contract between the author and reader on what liberties can or should be taken.

Before tackling Mantel, I had just read Martina Devlin’s new historical novel, Edith (The Lilliput Press). This pitch-perfect read drops in on the life of Edith Somerville, the co-author of the famous Irish R. M. novels, during those fraught years of revolution in West Cork.

Everything Mantel says about sound historical fiction is honoured here. From the drawing room of Drishane House, Castletownshend, home to a locally respected Anglo-Irish family down on its luck, unfolds a story that is elegantly composed and brightly paced. I have studied this precise period and this very place in some historical detail as recently as last year but I got a new sense of it from this carefully calibrated fictional world.

The research, embroidered unseen into the plot, is faultless and the writing assured and at ease with itself. Another example of history and imagination meeting at that sweet spot, one effortlessly complementing the other. Mantel would agree.

Imagination and history can be a confluence of literary beauty

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