Historical Fiction, Bibliographies and Debts Owed

I thought I’d just to take a minute to very briefly weigh in on the debate kicked off by Hilary Mantel at the Oxford Literary Festival on historical fiction. Strictly I don’t think of myself as a writer of historical fiction but more in the realms of literary non-fiction, but still – real folk, real places, real times presented in the form of a novel still applies to me I think….

Mantel was talking about historical fiction (where bibliogaphies of texts consulted are often, but far from always, included at the end of the book) –

According to The Guardian Mantel, ’rounded on her “cringing” contemporaries in historical fiction who “try to burnish their credentials by affixing a bibliography”. “You have the authority of the imagination, you have legitimacy. Take it. Do not spend your life in apologetic cringing because you think you are some inferior form of historian. The trades are different but complementary,” she said.’

Now, I have been known to add a list of non-fiction, academic works at the end of my own work and to note books consulted for information in footnotes (along with newspapers, verbal interviews, exchanges of emails etc). I am not sure what other historical fiction writers would say but for me it is about acknowledging the debt to academic scholars whose work has been inspiring and/or informative. It is not a case of ‘burnishing credentials’ or lack of belief in my own writing but accepting that it comes from a number of sources – reading old newspapers, magazines and documents, my imagination sometimes and academic studies.

In fact I would consider it rude not to acknowledge this sort of inspiration – my new book City of Devils (details to follow soon) is set in Shanghai in the 1930s. It is literary non-fiction; the story of men and women in Shanghai and their lives. I discovered those stories by reading newspapers from the time, official documents and police records. But I wouldn’t have raised an authorial eyebrow in interest when reading those documents had it not been for the academic work of the great Sinologist Frederic Wakeman on Shanghai. Simple as that and should be acknowledged…

without Wakeman there would be no City of Devils coming out this September – and I’m going to acknowledge that!