Historical Fiction Novels
Forget about time machines and science fiction: should you wish to travel through time, open historical fiction novels – you’ll get a great read, and you’ll brush up on your history, too.
Like horror stories and romantic tales, historical fiction novels stem from 18th-century Gothic novels, most of which were loosely set within the Middle Ages. It was not until the early 19th century, however, that stories with a strong emphasis on carefully reconstructed or imaginatively re-created history appeared. Sir Walter Scott introduced the genre to Britain with Waverley (1814), a novel set throughout the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and Rob Roy (1817), a tale inspired by the exploits of the Scottish outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor. Scott’s most well-liked novel, Ivanhoe (1819) is really a vivid portrait of life during the reign of Richard I.
The first great historical fiction novels were for young readers followed in 1847, when Captain Marryat published The Children of the New Forest, the story off our youngsters orphaned by the English Civil War. Children also enjoyed Charles Kingsley’s Elizabethan saga Westward Hol (1855) and Hereward the Wake (1866), a story about an 11th-century outlaw, although neither was written specifically for young individuals. Other favourites included R D Blackmore’s Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor (1869), R L Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886) and G A Henty’s tales. Mark Twain’s The Prince and also the Pauper (1882), a fantasy about the future King Edward VI of England, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) are early American examples from the genre.
