Reflecting Opinions in Historical Fiction

What do you do when the prevalent opinions at the time and place your historical novel/short is set story do not accord with what is acceptable today?  Some years ago, I wrote – and placed – a short story about a World War Two evacuee in which one of the characters said, “The only good German is a dead German”.  This is not my opinion but this character (a schoolgirl) was repeating a saying  common at that time.  I wonder if that story, with that comment in it, would have been published in 2023.  

Many of the opinions and ways of doing things are what we are now supposed to challenge.  People at the time you are writing about may have a very different world-view; they might be xenophobes, regard women as infernal gossips and believe in witchcraft.  Unless you are writing about the immediate past, all those are likely to apply.  In the Bible, the apostle Paul returns Onesimus to his slave-master, Philemon, admittedly with a plea that he be treated ‘as a dear brother’, but Paul was still sending him back.  Theologians have attempted to explain this away but there is no evidence that Paul questioned the institution of slavery. 

This is a problem for the poor historical novelist/short story writer.  

Georgette Heyer, writing between 1935 and 1972, reflected in her Regency novels every prejudice and petty snobbery of this era, and her novels were all the better for it.  But Georgette Heyer was writing about fairly minor issues, and it is clear, when you read her excellent novels, that this was then (not now). 

Some writing tutors will advise you to make your characters the exceptions, the ones who did not support slavery, for instance, but this device can distort understanding of history.  As a writer of historical fiction, you have a responsibility because many of your readers may accept your version of events as the truth without further investigation.  Attempts to alter history to make it politically correct are dishonest and don’t help anybody.  A female knight is blatantly ridiculous to me, but not to a child.

Dick Whittington, who, although from a poor background, became Lord Mayor London. Bess of Hardwick, also born poor, and female, who became one of the richest people in England through a series of strategic marriages.  It is more authentic – and interesting – to write about how people coped – or not – in the ways people did things at their time in history, rather than superimposing our worldview over theirs.

Rosemary Johnson has had many short stories published, in print and online, amongst other places, Cafe Lit, Scribble, Friday Flash Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Fiction on the Web and Paragraph Planet.  She has also contributed to Together magazine and Christian Writer.  Her historical novel, Wodka or Tea with Milk, which is set during the Solidarity years in Poland, is… deep breath… due to be published in the next few weeks.  In real life, she is a retired IT lecturer, living in Suffolk with her husband.