Beyond Marquee Names: Giving Voice to the Voiceless

Guest blogger, Mary Sharratt

Recorded history is wrong. It’s wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it.

These are the words of the late, great historical novelist, Mary Lee Settle, author of the classic Beulah Land Quintet, published in the 1950’s when both academic history and most historical fiction were narrowly focused on the elite. So many people have been written out of history: not only the vast majority of women, but also people of the peasant and labouring classes, and people of non-European ancestry. My goal as a writer, from my first novel onward, has been rewriting the voiceless back into history.

My new novel, Daughters of Witching Hill, concerns the true story of Elizabeth Southerns, aka Old Demdike, the most notorious of the 1612 Pendle Witches of Lancashire, England. An impoverished widow, she served her community as a cunning woman, or healer, for decades before her arrest on witchcraft charges at the age of eighty. By retelling the Pendle Witch tragedy from her point of view, I longed to serve her memory and give her what her own world denied her—her own voice.

One of my inspirations is author Sarah Dunant, a champion of more inclusive, non-elitist historical fiction. Dunant has become an international bestseller by writing about people on the margins of history. Her most recent novel, Sacred Hearts, explores the secret world of Benedictine nuns in 1570 Ferrara, Italy.

Speaking at the Bluecoat School in Liverpool in May 2010, Dunant described how she first fell in love with historical fiction when she was a twelve-year-old in postwar Britain, which she remembers as “a grey, colourless, bleak place” where nobody wanted to talk about the war. On the brink of adolescence, she found a wonderful escape in Jean Plaidy’s novels of the crowned heads of Europe. These books not only opened up another world that was colourful and glamorous but they inspired Dunant’s lifelong love affair with history. She went on to study history at Cambridge. “The history I learned,” she recalls, “was the history of great battles, great empires, great men.”

But what inspired Dunant to become an historical novelist were the sweeping developments in academic history that occurred after she left Cambridge in 1972. This new history embraced people who did not belong to the elite. She cites Joan Kelly-Gadol’s 1977 essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” as one of the turning points in the development of how we look at history.

“Modern historians,” Dunant explains, “know that there is a multiplicity of history—there is more than one history, one fact. The history I’m using has been hard won over the past twenty to thirty years.” And this history allowed her to write novels about a past that simply wasn’t regarded as history even thirty years ago. For Sacred Hearts, she has drawn on two generations of young historians who examined court records of nuns who got into trouble.

Similarly, I could not have written Daughters of the Witching Hill without the drawing on groundbreaking social histories, such as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic; landmark works on Reformation Studies, like Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars and Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England; as well as recent studies on historical cunning folk.

So will this new history open the door to a Renaissance in historical fiction? Will more and more authors draw on this wider window into ordinary people’s lives instead of rehashing the same old tired tales of Tudor royalty? Dunant believes that historical novelists possess every potential to be on the cutting edge of bringing this new history in an accessible form to a modern audience.

Sadly, although the world of academic history has moved on light years since the 1950s, historical fiction often appears to be stuck in a rut. An increasingly conservative publishing world urges new and established authors alike to play it safe by writing about “marquee names,” such as Anne Boleyn and Marie Antoinette, instead of drawing on a social history of the less privileged. Must we all write like latter day Jean Plaidys in order to meet our publishers’ sales expectations?

“This is the backwash of celebrity culture,” Dunant says, “and our greed for sensation and scandal. People read about Anne Boleyn when they tire of reading about Paris Hilton. We’ve gone back to kings and queens, a celebrity history, because we’ve squeezed Paris Hilton dry.”

Yet a 2009 market research poll conducted by blogger Julianne Douglas on Writing the Renaissance indicates that only 11% of the people she surveyed buy historical fiction based on the appeal of “marquee names” alone. Readers want so much more out of their fiction: fascinating characters and storylines, arresting and richly realised settings. Above all, I believe that people are drawn to historical fiction to learn things about the past they don’t already know. Perhaps we are indeed ready for a Renaissance in historical fiction.

Mary Sharratt’s acclaimed new novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. To learn more about Mary and the true history of the Pendle Witches, visit her website: www.marysharratt.com .