the ask@AAR: Another side in the endless kerfuffle about accuracy in historical romance.
This week on Twitter, a famous historical romance author made the point that there are good reasons authors of historical romance break with convention. She argued authors do so not because they’re lazy or stupid but because they are deliberately making choices they feel better serve the stories they tell. I think she’s right. Authors write what they believe will best tell their specific story. Perhaps that’s why I’m not fussed when titles are wrong or language is off or characters behave in ways that seem at best unlikely. I read romance for plot, character, and believable HEAs . As long as a book has those, I enjoy it.
But I know many of you see this issue differently. And that’s fine. What I’m wondering though is are the examples of historical inaccuracy that work for you? And if so why? And, please, if you can, give specific examples.
If you follow the lovely Caroline Linden on Facebook, she has a self-described rant about historical accuracy that’s worth reading.
https://www.facebook.com/AuthorCarolineLinden/.
Thanks for the link. I agree with some of the rant points (we all have our own personal tolerance for inaccuracy in an historical, for example) and disagree with others.
The comment about preferring a good, but inaccurate, historical romance over an historically accurate but boring story baffles me a bit.
Is it really that difficult for an author to come up with a GOOD story that also is largely ACCURATE for the time period in which it takes place?
A story, say, that takes place in Regency England and where the author does not use words like “repurposed” and “morphed” and where the H/h don’t magically all have 21st-century values and ideas?
Hah, yes, that was my reaction too – I’d rather have a story that is both!
Well, I think readers have the right to like what they like AND I think those who commented already follow Linden because they like her, so none of the comments surprised me.
It is interesting that authors are so angry about this. It doesn’t appear to be depressing sales so why are they so riled up?
I think some of it is possibly because there are a lot of people out there (or so it may seem) who think they KNOW the history of whatever it is so very well, that they class everything that doesn’t fall within that knowledge as just plain wrong – when it often isn’t. HR authors do sometimes have to tread a line between being completely accurate and being plausible; there are plenty of things that really are stranger than fiction out there, and they do sometimes have to make compromises between what actually WAS and how to present it in a way that the audience will understand or believe – STRANGE BUT TRUE as she terms it in her post.
Most of the issues I have with accuracy in historicals stem from her IMPOSSIBLE OR ILLEGAL section.
I agree with the author that it’s not easy to achieve accuracy with topics we’re not familiar with. But this applies to every subject and sub-genre, not just HR. If an American author writes a contemporary romance set in Pakistan, but does a shoddy job of depicting Pakistani culture, I’m sure most people wouldn’t give her a pass because Pakistan is a foreign country to her and there was a lot about its culture that she didn’t know.
I prefer a book that is set in a definite place and time, rather than a fairy-tale world. It annoys me that the “historical” part of “historical romance” is so often ignored, and people who want it are ridiculed.
I just want to find a book I can read without throwing it against the wall. One where I can trust the author not to break my suspension of disbelief, to lead me through a fun story with an authentic setting. That’s all.
People like me, the ones who want a bit of history with their romance, are leaving the genre because they can’t find anything they want to read. So the genre is diminishing. The Bridgerton phenomenon aside, historical romances no longer make the top best seller lists. A shame.
I find that I read for the two different HR descriptions. The Historical and the Romance. For my Historical reads I prefer…OK, pretty much demand… accuracy. Those authors would be Stella Riley (Marigold Chain, A Splendid Defiance), Roberta Gellis (Masques of Gold), and Madeline Hunter (By Arrangement), And then there are my Romance reads – the fluffier books. I’ll give leeway to fluffy great stories that might have a flaw or two. However my druthers are for stories like Three Weeks With Lady X, What I Did For a Duke, most of Loretta Chase, and One Night is Never Enough that – for me- have no glaring errors. I’ll suspend disbelief on lesser works if chaperones aren’t present or she slips out of the house at 2 AM and gets back in undetected or they get from London to Scotland in a day. But I can’t stand anachronisms – there was a one sentence “Whatever.” lately that annoyed the hell out of me. And I can’t abide cutesy anachronistic names. “Cat” I won’t even pick up a book with Cat there. The woman at the time was Kitty. Have I learned over the past few years that a Duke was addressed as “Your Grace” and that a Viscount’s younger sons aren’t Lords? (they aren’t,right? – just checking..). But for a good story I’ll push on yet note that the author/editor/publisher wasn’t fully invested. How hard could that be??
Regarding a viscount’s sons, according to K. J. Charles in her article Enter Title Here, none of them are Lords. The correct form of address is The Hon.
Thanks for that link! I’ve bookmarked it.
That is my go-to place for checking stuff like that, and she’s one of the few HR authors around right now who writes cracking good romance, interesting plots and gets the historical background right. At the moment there is NOBODY who can touch her on all three of those things in HR.
I prefer historical accuracy. This preference stems in part from the fact that Regency romances descend in part from Jane Austen, who wrote contemporaries that authors now mimic. If you want to walk in the Austen footsteps, either strive for accuracy, as Georgette Heyer and Robert Neill did, or go full fantasy as the numerous fan-fiction takeoffs of Austen have (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, for example).
As I’ve said before, I wish we had a category for Fantasy Regency Romance or Fantasy Historical Romance. That’s how I categorize Eloisa James. There are all those dukes, for a start. To be fair, I find that she is pretty well researched in other ways. I put the Bridgerton books into this more-fantasy-less-accuracy category, which is both a way for me to get past the research fails and a way to categorize books permeated with modern ideas set in historic times. Maybe there is a better term to use than fantasy, given that “fantasy” is also a genre of its own, but I have not come up with one. The writer of Regencies who thinks reading Regencies is enough research may be writing novels that sell as Regencies but appear to me to be fan fiction.
My rule of thumb for tolerating inaccuracies is simple. If I spot something I question and can confirm that it is an error with one or two quick searches, my respect for the author suffers. If I spot an error and can confirm the error after a lot of research, or if I cannot confirm there is an error, then the author is blameless.
What has been a lasting source of irritation for me has been the number of books with gaffes that got through an actual editing process for a publisher that was cashing in on the Regency craze or other historical fiction trend. (This, of course, is so last century, when there were still a lot of editing jobs at publishing houses and spell-check did not exist or was in its infancy.) Should the editor in New York City peering at a romance set in the American west know that Emily Dickinson’s poetry was published posthumously? I thought so, but as far as I could tell, agents and editors were all about the story and indifferent to the research. My preferences did not align with industry practices — and that, dear reader, may be the source of the conflict.
Stillreading: You’ve said exactly what I would have. I prefer accuracy and when timelines are moved about a bit for what were real events, then a quick note at the end will explain the author’s thinking and I will invariably accept it. The best example of this would be books by Bernard Cornwell who wrote the Sharpe series. He always gives a few pages of explanation to put things into context, explains technicalities that he has described in the text and has even put translation lists of words in, for example, old English that appear in his Last Kingdom series. His stories are wonderful and aren’t just for the boys!! What I really can’t forgive are mis-use of titles. I simply can’t understand why an author wants to have aristocratic title holders in a story and then make a complete balls-up of it. And, following from that, getting the rules of inheritance wrong in British-set stories is pretty silly. I’ve said in another discussion here that it’s like thinking that a US Army Major outranks a 4 Star General. Stories that are driven by inheritance rules fail completely when a writer thinks we can expect an illegitimate son to inherit a dukedom or that a younger son can inherit over an older brother who is alive but maybe not well. Can’t happen. I agree with Stillreading that there should be a category for books that ignore these things that allow readers to make their choices knowingly. I don’t want to read a story about John Doe who is called Sir Doe – it is so cringeworthy that the book will be DNF and winds up deleted or in the local charity shop although maybe I should write a note on the inside cover to warn the next reader!!
Exactly. Just yes.
Editors don’t check historical accuracy, or rather, they aren’t expected to. Which is a shame. They might put a note in to check something, but they don’t have to.
Years ago on the AAR boards I argued (archived at http://www.ccrsdodona.org/markmuse/reading/genrelabels.html) for clearer genre labels, including clear distinctions about how closely the story sticks to known history:
Hidden history
Altered history
Accepted history
Alternate history (and superseded history)
Mythic history
Alternate history + reality
Altered reality
Alternate reality
Fairy tale
Deliberately anachronistic history
Deliberate hodgepodge history
Fictional reality
I read most of the posts here as requests for hidden history or accepted history, or objections to alternate history stories not being labeled as such.
If a correct assessment of the level of historical accuracy was part of the genre label and blurb, most arguments about historical accuracy would go away.
This post will seem a bit off topic, but please bear with me. A large group of romance authors have come together to raise money for earthquake relief in Haiti, including Tessa Dare. Here is the description of her auction item: “You, and up to three friends (up to four total, check my math) can hop on zoom with me. I will arrange for a goat to crash our chat,. The goat will only stay a few minutes, but we humans can talk for an hour about writing, books, whatever. Ask my advice, or give me some of yours. We can have pets show-and-tell. Make some confessions—I’m really good at keeping secrets (with exceptions for, you know, crimes). Cocktails or wine welcome and encouraged!” Opening bid is $100. https://www.32auctions.com/RomanceforHaiti
Perhaps if people have things regarding historical accuracy they would like to discuss with her, they could bid for an hour of her time and help people, too. There are many other great items, including autographed books by some of our favorite authors, manuscript critiques (one by Sarah McLean), meetings with agents, etc. It would be great if we romance readers could support the authors in this effort. I can forgive a lot of historical inaccuracy if people are doing good things in the world.
Dare is clearly someone–and more power to her–who is committed to trying to make the world a better place.
I would rather just donate money than give her the time of day, frankly.
I don’t really care about the historical acuraracy and I say that as a history major who is planning my retirement around going to England and doing a Masters and PhD in English History in the 11th century in regards to Cnut and his fascinating family. Seriously, go look up the women, they kicked ass and basically ruled.
I care more about the story and the believablity, I can believe just about anything as long as they aren’t driving cars and talking on cell phones. It’s the same way I believe basically whatever Marvel tells me for those 2 hours, if I wanted reality I would have stayed at work and done more lawyering. It’s exhausting, I read to entertain myself.
My own ignorance of a great many history facts (I couldn’t tell you when many famous places were built, for example), added to my habit of not paying close attention to details means I’m likely not to notice or just not know about inaccuracies I encounter in historicals. Having a history major daughter who used to be my reading buddy meant I was “educated” on inaccuracies along the way. I did, for example, learn the proper forms of address, although she recently gave me a refresher course in some of the more tricky (for me) ones to remember ( such as Lord Peter Wimsey’s wife is Lady Peter..something I forget sometimes).
I want to get it right, so I read things like this discussion and try to educate myself, but I know I’m never going to be a historian and I’m likely in the future to read and enjoy books that are not strictly “accurate.” A casually dropped modern phrase probably won’t elicit more than an eye roll if otherwise I’m having fun with the story. The problem for me is I’m not often finding historical romances that I enjoy, so I’m not reading very many.
I think we all have deal-breakers for historical romances. I can tolerate some inaccuracies if the plot or characters or just general tone of the book are good, but some I can’t. If any of those are blatantly wrong, or if the writing isn’t good enough for me to overlook the inaccuracies, I’ll give up on it. A friend once tossed a historical – a medieval I believe – because one of the characters said, “grow where you’re planted.” That was her deal breaker. Mine came when I was reading a book in which a son born in wedlock would not inherit from his father because father was terrible and would not publicly recognize him. However, the next in line, having lost his legitimate sons, picked an illegitimate son, recognized him and so he would inherit. From everything I’ve read elsewhere that wouldn’t be the case and – since the writing wasn’t good enough for me to get over that – I won’t be reading any of that author’s books. So, basically, we all have our levels of tolerance.
I think you’ve hit on a key thing. If a book is perfect for you the reader, a few errors don’t usually make a big difference. If you were already thinking the read was meh, you are much more likely to lose patience with errors.
I know someone who came across a “Regency” romance where the hero and heroine honeymooned in Paris — even though it was set during the Napoleonic wars. Right, I’m sure British people could just traipse across the Channel during wartime and party in Paris without being stopped.
Even worse, the hero and heroine saw the… Eiffel Tower!!! Which was built in 1887! :O
I wonder if the author wrote a Victorian (or Edwardian) romance that was mislabeled as a “Regency” by the publisher. Or maybe the author was bonkers?
That did happen. I once picked up an older paperback (1980s?) labeled as a traditional Regency that had motorcars and gaslights — and even electric lights. (I noticed because a previous owner had underlined each anachronism in pencil.) It was clearly meant to be an Edwardian romance, and the author was screwed over by a publisher mistake.
Or maybe the authors were just that confused?
Fortunately, literature is infinitely flexible. Historical inaccuracies fall into two categories: those inaccurate details–like not addressing a duke as “your grace,” or having the English fight Napoleon after he had been defeated. In this day of easy information, those are disgraceful, lazy, and indefensible mistakes and cannot be credibly defended.
The other historical inaccuracies are “hazy history.” Historical romances depend on them. Why? Inaccurate historical attitudes in romances mimic and reinforce our own beliefs as “right” and do not distract from the plot. So, our heroines are independent girls (as they would have been called in the past) who flirt, kiss, and have sex before wedlock, with no consequences. And the hero rake, noted for his bedroom skills, but somehow–even though he is friends with a high-class madam–has managed to evade all sexually-transmitted diseases. He also has fresh breath and always smells “clean,” in a time before deoderant. (I grew up in a time when men didn’t use deodrant. You didn’t notice.) The heroine takes daily baths and never slaps or even uses a cross word to her maid. The hero and heroine are democratic in their values, even if their income depends on their inherited wealth and property. She admires his tan and muscles, marks of laborers, not aristocrats who did no physical work. Historical romance heroes and heroines are just like us.
But here’s the thing: I don’t want to read romance fiction where the characters believe and behave historically. Historical romances are fairy tales. That’s no insult. Mysteries and horror that wrap the problem up with a bow are also fairy tales, too. I don’t want an historically accurate hero who believes that whites and aristocrats are inherently superior, that women’s brains are smaller and inferior to men’s, therefore, need the rule of men, that Great Britain has the duty to “bring civilization to the uncivilized.” That sending sons away to school at 6 where they would be routinely beaten will make men of them. Etc., etc.
The price I pay, willingly, is sometimes sighing with irritation at the girl who has sex before marriage or anachronisms in speech. But I pay it, gladly because I love the fairy tale.
Yes!! This is me!!
I agree to a point.
Certainly no one one wants a white supremacist hero, a wife or child beater or a homophobe as their protagonist.
I don’t think it’s outside the pale however, to ask that authors actually use the correct form of address, get historical events and details accurately and don’t have the characters speak in modern slang.
There are people today who don’t have access to good dental care, don’t take care of themselves or have rotten opinions- and modern romance authors aren’t focusing on them. I don’t blame them. We all want a certain amount of fantasy and sugar coating which is why you find more billionaire heroes than heroes toiling at McDonalds or Footlocker.
But if an author of contemporary romances had the McDonald’s worker making a six figure salary, or the lawyer filing things improperly or a doctor unwittingly committing malpractice you know they would hear about it.
Why shouldn’t students or fans of history feel the same disappointment when there are major errors or shoddy research?
I post on a discussion board for writers, and one day someone floated an idea he had for a story. The main character was a man with a terminal illness, who hired a nurse to take care of him. But he also wanted the nurse to have sex with him, and the nurse agreed because he was paying her a lot and because she felt sorry for him.
No one responded that this relationship was fine because accuracy wasn’t relevant and there was no agreement regarding the rules of contemporary fiction. Instead we all pointed out that for medical professionals to have sex with their patients is a huge breach of ethics, and the nurse could lose her license (there was no indication that the writer was aware of this and the story was taking it into consideration).
To me, this is the same as noticing similar mistakes in historical romance.
So, clearly there’s a difference between errors that just a little bit of research might have fixed and errors where an author chooses to fudge because it enables her to tell the story the way she feels works best?
There are different kinds of errors, agreed. And if an author feels that describing how surgeons flip coins to decide which kidney to remove lets the story be told in the way the author believes is best, that’s her decision. But she shouldn’t be surprised or defensive when she gets called on it.
Also, sometimes it’s not clear when an author makes the deliberate choice to be inaccurate, sometimes wildly so, and when an author just doesn’t know the difference, usually because that author hasn’t done the research.
Totally agree. And your analogy about coin flipping cracked me up. AND it makes a good point. It’s not that hard to get the basics right.
I think there’s a disconnect. What Dare and others are upset about is when readers bitch about having an overly feminist heroine (for the times) or a gay couple or an unwed couple who live together without hassle or leads that have 21st century views on social and political issues. What we are often bitching about are errors.
I think one distinction between the two types you mention is this :
A good enough story can make me buy a down-with-the-patriarchy heroine. Such a character may be unusual for her time period, but this isn’t impossible.
There is no story that can make me believe that a duke and a footman are normally addressed in the same way, even if the author needs the same form of address to tell the story in the way she feels works best. Because this is impossible.
That’s a good point – yours not Dare’s. The sort of inaccuracies we’ve mostly been talking about here piss me off no end – mostly, it’s laziness and ignorance because it’s really easy these days to look up the correct form of address for a Duke (for instance. But I have never denied the existence of people of colour or of different sexual orientation in ‘historical’ England or said that including such characters in a book is historically inaccurate, because I know it isn’t, and I think most people with the slightest bit of knowledge about English history will also know that.
My view is that TD and her cronies need to learn the difference between those of us protesting about historical inaccuracy/impossibility (incorrect forms of address, getting inheritance laws wrong, young women not bothered about out-of-wedlock pregnancy) and those who insist black or queer people didn’t exist ‘back then’. I am not one of the latter group although I’m certainly one of the former and I don’t take kindly to, in effect, being called a bigot because I look for a degree of historical accuracy in historical romance.
Well, I think there’s a fair amount of gatekeeping especially on Twitter that doesn’t allow for nuance.
Twitter….Nuance…….*SNORT*
Gentleman Jack was a fascinating, engaging story about a queer woman set in the 1830s, and if you haven’t seen it, or read Anne Lister’s memoirs, I can absolutely recommend it.
and it also proves that stories about people who were “different” in some way don’t have to be either tragic or depressing.
Yes absolutely. I have enjoyed plenty of books knowing the heroes and heroines were the last people likely to have held such inclusive opinions at the time.
I do not enjoy it at all when there are glaring errors in simple facts of history, technology, or knowledge of the peerage. If you can answer the question or check the fact with a quick Google search, there is no reason to have the main plot hinge around something that was illegal, impossible etc.
If you want your characters to use street slang, be like Joanna Bourne and look up period accurate slang. There are plenty of free books on it online at Project Gutenberg.
Methods of contraception have been around almost since humans have existed. I can overlook a 19th century Miss being able to get her hands on whatever is available more than I can her saying “Oh the heck with it all, who cares if I get pregnant?” Because then I just think she’s a careless idiot.
If your story idea is so fanciful it requires changing history and technology- then it isn’t historical romance. There’s a genre for it, maybe Steampunk or a million other categories. I enjoy those genres as well.
Yes, this.
I think even the stickliest stickler for accuracy in historical romance understands that the romance part of the label allows for certain license – as have been said, personal hygene, six-foot tall, ripped heroes who never seem to do much exercise other than riding and a bit of fencing and non-toxic attitudes. I like that element of fantasy/wish-fulfilment – it’s why we read romance in any sub-genre,
I just don’t think authors should get a pass for ignorance or not caring about the things they CAN portray correctly – and saying “they’re just telling the story they want to tell” is crap. As has been said elsewhere on this thread, I would bet the farm on the fact that if the things they were getting wrong were about margnialised communities and not a society populated almost exclusively by rich, white British people – nobody would be making excuses like that for them.
As a writer of historical romance, here are the reasons I try to make my stories historically accurate :
This reminds me of how hilarious/annoying it is that some many people on TV who are in lower wage professions live in gorgeous homes.
Also, malpractice is a fluid thing–patients often sue for reasons that the professions thinks are nuts!
I read the original tweet and other than the fact the author is being incredibly self serving despite the disclaimer (because she writes exactly the kind of generic un-researched books people complain about) “oh but it’s not about me” the arguments she makes are just IMHO embarrassing.
“Authors are smart! We write whole books!” Um, OK. I know a lot of people who are “smart” and wrote “whole books” from engineering to fine art. Doesn’t mean they have the knowledge or desire to write accurate historical romance.
What on earth does “smart” have to do with it? Accuracy depends on work, research and thoroughness not to mention the time put into it. Clearly it’s easier and much faster to not bother with “the details” and just write what you want to. No one said authors are too dumb to do research, just that they often don’t bother.
I’ve often said the right story can make me overlook inconsistencies and even improbabilities if it’s entertaining enough. I also use my “sliding scale” of historical accuracy depending on how strictly accurate the author is purporting their work to be.
I personally find this whole condescending attitude towards romance readers (again, IMHO one of the most well read groups of people I’ve ever encountered) really obnoxious and embarrassing for the author.
First of all its saying that people don’t know what they want when they say they want accuracy and second that they are so ignorant they don’t know that authors are “creative” and make choices to entertain.
I would have more respect for her if (like some authors who find criticism of their work unfair because some people don’t like who or what they choose to write about) she simply said “these books aren’t for you”.
This whole “Ha ha you guys are the dumb ones because you don’t get how smart we authors are by not writing accurate stuff” attitude IMHO just makes the tweeter look arrogant and foolish.
She forgets that people like Cassie Edwards have written entire books when she makes arguments like that. Books that sold well! Dozens of books! All of them poorly written and researched and plagiarism-filled!
That “look at how clever I am” attitude is one of the many reasons I stopped reading her books. Another big reason – they’re not very good any more.
You said it. And get a load of this quote from her Tweet on this subject:
That’s rich coming from an author who happily took a truncated, out of context screenshot of one of my comments at AAR about my take on diversity in HR and eloquently wrote, “What the hell is this racist shit!?” for the whole world to see. Apparently, my dislike of thoughtless versus thoughtful inclusion of diversity in books is an exception to her “any reason for not liking a book is a valid reason” claim.
Also, you’ll note her Tweet has some boo hoo emojis with tears dripping down their cheeks. It sounds to me like Dare can throw a verbal punch, like in the example above, but can’t take one. There’s a word for that; it’s called bullying, and then playing the victim.
Well, to be fair to Ms. Dare, she was caught up in a frenzy on Twitter that, for several weeks, was all about stamping out pernicious racism. She strikes me as someone who genuinely wants a better world.
As someone who works at a non-profit every day, I am very cynical about people using Twitter and Twitter frenzies thinking they are “changing the world” or doing something really great.
It takes very little effort to throw some outrage up on Twitter, particularly if it’s bent is to take down something, be it a website, a person or a work of some kind with no repercussions to the poster. And it usually goes along with a big helping of self congratulations and patting one’s self on the back.
Here’s my take: want to help stamp out racism? Do something. Volunteer if you can, give a couple bucks when you can and try to be a positive force in the universe. Don’t spend your time sifting through romance message boards for a random opinion to spew outrage on thinking doing so is going to make some huge positive impact on society.
There are tons of non-profits just doing anything they can to raise awareness and possibly supporters with almost no budgets. Tweet about their local programs or fundraisers. Be a force of good.
Ruby Dixon recently gave a great shoutout on Facebook to a new author and her work (who is not a friend of hers) which helped catapult the author onto Kindle best seller lists and all over Book Tok.
If you have a platform, use it for good. Lead by example.
Did you see this? I thought he was utterly on the money about what we might have asked these students to do.
I’m not a subscriber so it won’t let me in. I’ll see if I can find it somewhere else.
By John McWhorter The University of Wisconsin has apparently done Black people a favor. It lifted away a rock. It was a big one, 42 tons, and at least some Black students thought of it as a symbol of bigotry. Because, you see, 96 years ago, when the rock was placed where it was until just now, someone in a local newspaper called it — brace yourself — a “niggerhead.” That didn’t settle in as a permanent nasty local moniker for the rock. It was just something some cigar-chomping scribbler wrote in 1925. But still, the Wisconsin Black Student Union, making one of the kinds of demands such groups started pushing with especial fervor last year, insisted that the rock be taken away, with the backing of the school’s Indigenous student organization. News reports say the rock had troubled students over the decades; some saw it as a “racist monument,” as one put it, whose absence now allows them to “begin healing.” The students are fashioning their take on the rock as a kind of sophistication or higher awareness. But what they are really demanding is that we all dumb ourselves down. The idea, it would seem, is that there is no difference between the past and the present, that what some writer said one day during the Coolidge administration would be hurtful to a student walking past the rock while texting last month, that this rock is representative of racism in the same way that a Confederate statue is representative of Southern racism. So apparently the passage of time is an illusion? That’s sophisticated indeed as a literary conceit, but what’s deep in Faulkner becomes mere performance when it’s wielded to have a rock lifted away because of what one person called it almost a century ago. And a crude performance at that. The students essentially demanded that an irrational, prescientific kind of fear — that a person can be meaningfully injured by the dead — be accepted as insight. They imply that the rock’s denotation of racism is akin to a Confederate statue’s denotation of the same, neglecting the glaringly obvious matter of degree here — as in, imagine pulling down a statue upon finding that the person memorialized had uttered a single racist thing once in his or her life. We are to pretend these students are engaged in something called critique. Interesting, though, that the root of that word, “krei,” originally referred to making distinctions, as did the root of the word science as in knowledge. These students are implying instead that on race matters, the advanced way is to resist distinguishing. The philosopher George Santayana analyzed criticism as “dividing the immortal from the mortal part of the soul,” as in isolating for posterity that which is true, essential. These students’ critique suggests, among other things, that something that hurts you makes you weaker. Is that really what we want to classify as truth — essence? How can the same people who would lustily insist that Black people are strong get behind having a rock removed from their sight because of something some boob wrote about it some 100 years ago? If the presence of that rock actually makes some people desperately uncomfortable, they need counseling. And as such, we can be quite sure that these students were acting. Few can miss that there is a performative aspect in the claim that college campuses, perhaps the most diligently antiracism spaces on the planet, are seething with bigotry. The Wisconsin rock episode was a textbook demonstration of the difference between sincere activism and playacting, out of a desire to join the civil rights struggle in a time when the problems are so much more abstract than they once were. The true fault here lies with the school’s administration, whose deer tails popped up as they bolted into the forest, out of a fear of going against the commandments of what we today call antiracism, which apparently includes treating Black people as simpletons and thinking of it as reckoning. True wokeness would have been to awaken to the tricky but urgent civic responsibility of, when necessary, calling out Black people on nonsense. Yes, even Black people can be wrong. As the Black professor Randall Kennedy of Harvard Law puts it in his upcoming “Say It Loud!”: “Blacks, too, have flaws, sometimes glaringly so. These weaknesses may be the consequence of racist mistreatment. But they are weaknesses nonetheless.” To pretend this is never the case where racism is concerned is not to reckon but to dehumanize. I know —… Read more »
FWIW: The author is Black and relatively liberal.
Thanks for posting this it was a very interesting read. I’ve read his other work before but hadn’t seen this.
My takeaway from this, (just from reading his piece and what he implied) is that this was another example of a group wanting to use their power.
He implied that there wasn’t anything inherently bad or racist in what was taken down, and some awful person years ago tried to attach an offensive name to it so I will assume he is correct.
As we discussed on the Agora, there are groups that are using whatever leverage they can find in person or via the internet as a means of exercising their power, particular when they may have felt powerless in other areas.
I can’t really say if that particular stone was negatively affecting the group that wanted it removed (the author doesn’t think so) but I do think the effort and expense that went into doing so probably could have been spent on something that was a boon or help to people.
I also get really annoyed that people will allow one person or a few people to ruin something.
If someone decided to make “Kindle” somehow a word synonymous with being misogynist (like a joke about the “OK” finger symbol became a white supremacist thing) do I have to throw away my Kindle? Or can we just say “No YOU get lost” to the people doing it? You don’t get to have that power.
That entire thread smacks of Dare not being able to take criticism well or being defensive about people who have critiqued her for writing wallpaper historicals. A well-known fact to anyone who’s followed her career but it’s more obvious here than it’s ever been. The but it’s fiction! And worldbuilding! excuses work when you’re writing an alternate or steampunk version of the period, not when you’re trying to accurately portray a time period. She doesn’t seem to know what either term means, which doesn’t surprise me at all. Anyone writing a straight historical novel would be called out for inaccuracy in the press, and romance is no different.
Also Dare’s worlds never involve rich worldbuilding. Inventive characters and decent writing, yes. But she does not create anything that any other historical writer hasn’t when it comes to creating a fictional universe set in a vaguely Regencyesque period.
Someone made a point a long time ago that good authors can mine history for rare but real exceptions to what we think was possible in a given time and place, and use those as seeds for stories. (For example, there really have been historical women who lived as men for decades.) I find these acceptable (especially if there are author notes), unlike the all-too-frequent lazy violations of reality.
My “Accuracy is in the Mind of the Beholder” was part of an AAR ATBF many years back:
https://allaboutromance.com/at-the-back-fence-158/
Yes Mark, I always think of George R.R. Martin who is an expert at “mining history” for insane but true stories.
Some of the most outrageous incidents in his “Game Of Thrones” series (A Saga of Ice and Fire) were taken right from English or Scottish history and made readers and audiences gasp. Truth really is stranger than fiction many times.
I also love your term “lazy violations of reality”.
I agree with pretty much everything written in the comments below so far. Like many, if I wanted to read a so-called “historical” romance littered with blatant disregard with history, I would pick up a fairy tale, alternate history, or some other genre. For me, the whole dang point of reading HR is to enjoy a believable, historically accurate story that ends with an HEA.
Having said that, I do understand why there sometimes needs to be a veneer that historical fiction can’t get away with. Most romance readers would not want to traipse through pages of dysentery and rotting teeth, just as most readers don’t need to see characters going to the bathroom. There are certain conventions in place for a reason.
As for my personal tolerances in HR, I can definitely deal with somewhat updated language as long as it doesn’t come across as too 21st century or slangy. I wouldn’t want to read an Elizabethan-set HR in unreadable Elizabethan/Shakespearean English, for example. Nor do I want to read a knight saying, “Hey, what’s up?” Authors need to use good judgment in this area. And, obviously, if the story takes place in a non English speaking culture, it has to be written or translated in English so I can actually read it.
In the area of grudging tolerance, I would add historical heroes who are over six feet tall and have washboard abs despite never exercising beyond an occasional horseback ride. Yes, there were men over six feet tall in history, so it’s within the realm of possibility. And yes, it’s part of the handsome prince charming fantasy for a lot of readers, so I get it. But I would prefer to see more of a variance in heights and body types. This is especially true when the characters come from ethnic groups where the people are- or would have been- shorter on average than the standard romance hero mold. Again, every group has its outliers in the height department, but when I keep reading about all these mythical six and a half foot tall Frenchmen and Sicilians, yeah…
Okay, now I want a story set in a far northern Inuit village where the hero is six-four with washboard abs… and because he has such a large surface-area-to-volume ratio and so little body fat, he does not survive the winter.
Ha hah! Exactly…
Your comment brings to mind a review of the classic children’s novel Julie of the Woods. Martha Stackhouse, an Inupiaq, analyzed the story’s inaccuracies and damaging stereotypes here. This short passage in particular caught my attention:
Now, I’m not going as far as to say that adult romance readers are absorbing images that could hurt their self-esteem by reading a litany of standardized six foot plus heroes. But I do think it’s odd that amidst all the calls for diversity, category HR heroes tend to have a kind of unquestioned Anglicized sameness about them- regardless of their ethnic origin- that can get tiresome. The broad shoulders, square jaws, extravagant heights, pillowy lips, you get the idea. Sure, if the hero is a Viking, his Nordic appearance makes sense. But a Southern Italian in the Jazz Age being 6’3″ with “pearl skin” and eyes the color of the ocean, as I read recently? Possible, but you might as well replace him with a Scandinavian or Englishman.
On that note, it was a huge fight for Coppola to get Al Pacino cast in The Godfather because the studio heads said he was “too short, dark, and ethnic-looking.” They couldn’t exactly justify their rejection when Coppola told them, “So, you’re telling me that a guy who’s 100% Sicilian, whose people actually come from Corleone, is too short, dark, and ethnic-looking to play an ethnic Sicilian whose people come from Corleone. You’re going to have to explain that to me.” So, HR authors take note! We could use some Sicilian heroes who look more like young Al Pacino than Erik the Red. Just saying…
Nan that made me think of when Winona Ryder dropped out of Godfather III and F.F. Coppola put his daughter Sofia in the role of Michael’s daughter Mary.
She caught a lot of flack at the time but I loved that she said then (accurately) that she actually looked more like what a child of Al Pacino and Diane Keaton would look like. I remember her saying something along the lines of “I have like, a nose”. As her contemporary at the time (and fellow Italian) I thought she was great and loved seeing her come into her own as a director.
That should read Julie of the Wolves. Typos will get ya every time…
Interesting question. While I’ll forgive some things (changed timelines, meetings that could have happened but weren’t documented, some questionable behavior given the times, etc.), I do think if you are writing historical fiction, whether romance, mystery, or other literature, you must adhere to what was true to the times and places you are writing about. If you choose to ignore what was true for those times and places, then why write historical fiction? It could just as easily be written as an alternative history or fantasy where you do your own world building.
One of the reasons I read historical fiction is to learn about history. It helps bring history to life. Its disappointing to discover that an author couldn’t be bothered to do their research, or that they ignored their research because it didn’t fit their idea of the story. They take the reader out of the story when they do this and the trust between the reader and the author is broken. Once trust is broken, the author loses the reader, perhaps forever.
Put me down on the historical accuracy side, please.
I don’t really understand why people want to read/write what are essentially contemporary novels with long dresses, but obviously do. However, there are a number of things that throw me right out of the story.
I hate when people use contemporary slang. I boggle at a Regency gentleman saying “Well, that was a fun afternoon!”
I am irritated when people simply ignore historical attitudes towards sexual behavior. A Regency heroine who does not consider the consequences of out-of-wedlock pregnancy is an idiot. Why authors pay no attention to this is a mystery since it can be such a powerful motivation for the characters.
Class distinctions are another thing that should not be ignored. If the lady’s maid is her best friend, you better come up with a convincing way for this to be possible.
Incidentally, authors might want to read early Agatha Christie books. Servants are generally presented as not very bright dependents who might well be a different species.
I could rant on for ages, but I’ll shut up now.
I’ve said before that one of the myriad reasons I gradually moved from reading almost exclusively HR to almost all exclusively CR was the distressing tendency for HR stories to be little more than “contemporaries in corsets.” It’s not even the complete shambles some authors make of names/titles or geography or styles/fashion, it’s the utterly anachronistic social attitudes their characters hold (especially to such things as virginity, having a child out of wedlock, and marrying out of one’s social class). Of course, I say this as someone who reads mass quantities of dark mafia romances, where smoking hot mafia bosses marry the daughters of rival bosses after they kidnap them, or scads of m/m hockey romances, where the NHL is full of tolerant pride-flag waving straight athletes who totally support their gay & bi teammates. I suppose each of selects the anachronisms or skewed realities we can accept.
Well, while that is true and her words caused AAR (and me) endless hurt and damage, the point she is making here is valid.
Authors have the right to tell their stories however they wish. I feel as though the real issue here is that there is no agreement on what the rules are for historical romance. She is saying that for many authors, they’ve done their research and the fact that they’re not factually accurate is not relevant.
Maybe the answer is the equivalent of trigger warnings:
This book may take liberties with history and the social norms of the time in which it was set.
Maybe the answer is the equivalent of trigger warnings:
Seriously, this is brilliant. I want a trigger warning. Maybe remove the word “may”, though, and just say “takes”.
Of course, it does raise the question: why do all the research if you’re just going to toss it out the window when it doesn’t conform to the story you want to write? It seems you could just spend your valuable research time instead writing the love story of Lady Skylar of Dewpoint, the Queen’s laundress, and Lord Dylan, Duke of Bethnal Green, and their eight illegitimate children who are fully accepted by everyone in their amazingly tolerant and far-sighted village where no one ever blames a menstruating woman for the cow’s milk curdling.
Authors have the right to write anything they want. But if they write something that doesn’t work for readers (whether it’s because of racism, historical inaccuracy or any other reason), readers likewise have the right to say so, even if the authors get defensive about it.
I also feel that even if there isn’t 100% agreement on rules for any subgenre of romance, there are norms for the place and time when the story is set. If I write a romantic suspense taking place in Tel Aviv, I wouldn’t call the national intelligence agency the FBI, even if that stands for Federal Bureau of Israel in my story.
So an author could call that agency by its correct name, Mossad. Or she could give it any name, because there are no rules for writing romantic suspense, and she doesn’t consider accuracy to be relevant. But I know which approach works better for me as a reader (and which I find more respectful).
I read a couple of her books in the past due to the hype at the time and honestly never understood the popularity. I’d like to say I am following your example, but I just never read or followed her to begin with.
Actually, I adore her first book, Goddess of the Hunt. I think you would too!
I will say–and this is the issue for me–that since that kerfuffle, we have been dropped by most major publishers. I’m not saying that we’ve been cancelled but the publicists no longer reach out to us for interviews, etc…
I know you and I disagree on this, so we’ll just have to continue to do that :) I will however, just remind you of a comment you made elsewhere about not liking to read medical romances because the authors so often get the details wrong. Well, it’s the same for me with historicals.
There are so many issues I could cite, from incorrect titles and forms of address, to authors who either deliberately or ignorantly make serious errors, incorporating plot elements that are simply impossible (not even implausible) just because it suits their story. The one I’ve most often come across is the idea that a title can be bequeathed in a will, or that a hero can be prevented from inheriting until he’s a certain age or married or whatever, or that because the man he grew up calling “dad” wasn’t his biological father he’s not entitled to inherit even though his mother and “father” were married at the time of his birth, and he’s therefore perfectly entitled to inherit. Something like that is only EVER done because the author either doesn’t know, can’t be bothered to find out, doesn’t care or all of the above.
On titles, I still ask the question of people who say it doesn’t bother them – what if the character was in the military? Would it be an issue if a corporal was addressed as “lieutenant”? Or if a general was addressed as “sergeant”? I bet it would. Well, calling a duke “My lord” is exactly the same, as is addressing Sir John Smith as “SIr Smith”.
This sort of laziness and arrogance pisses me off no end. I’m tired of authors using my country and heritage as their sandpit but not having the courtesy and respect to take the trouble to get things right. I bet if they were writing a story about a marginalised group, it would be a different story and they’d be fact checking everything and employing a team of sensitivity readers. But rich, white British people from the 19th centiry? Nah, nobody cares about giving any offence on that score, so they can screw it up as much as they like.
/rant.
I do so agree with you. I hate, hate, hate authors who write historicals and cannot be bothered to do their research. And I do like your examples.
Even worse: Authors who say they did extensively research something and they still make glaring errors. My “favourite” example: An author who had their protagonists travel in leisure from Ulm to Strasbourg via the Black Forest in one day in a chaise in early or maybe mid 19th century. That would not have been possible at the time. No proper roads existed for that route and the average speed on a good road would have been 10 km/hour. The distance is more than 200 kms, so it would have taken 20 hours without stopping at all. 5 minutes of “research” on Google would have told you that.
As for what I’ll forgive:
If the author acknowledges having taken some liberty with the historical time line (i.e. have an invention happening a little bit earlier or later, have a meeting taking place that might have happened but probably hasn’t). Historicals are after all still fiction, so within limits that is fine for me. Same goes for morals or behaviour, I’m o.k. with some changes there, as long as it might just have been feasible. But a young lady openly kissing a man and not bothered about the consquences in a regency setting or a male/male couple being affectionate with each other in public. I might still read and enjoy the story, but I read it as a fairy tale and not a historical.
After all if I prefer fantasy authors to do proper worldbuilding and stick to the rules they invented for their world, then I think it is only fair to ask authors who use our world and history to stick to the rules as well.
Yes, I’m with you on the exceptions. What does annoy me, however, is authors who take the trouble to write an extensive author’s note which basically says “okay, so I know this couldn’t possibly have happened, but hey, at least I’ve owned up to it – so it’s okay and you can forgive me!”
Um. No. If anything, the fact that you knew sometihng was impossible and then did it anyway is even worse.
I just dug up my copy of Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders, and in the introduction, the author mentions how she was part of an online discussion group for historical fiction. An unpublished writer posted a chapter of her work, set in England in 1066, for critique. In this chapter :
There are small, innocent mistakes. There are liberties like the ones Katja mentioned. And there are the howlers. It’s difficult to believe that writers who come up with the howlers know better but have a good reason for making a choice to be wildly inaccurate.
Nope – BA would have still been BOAC in 1066 :)
I wonder what it might be like if every month, there were new romances set in historical Sri Lanka where siblings addressed each other by their first names rather than the titles we use instead. And if authors then defended their lack of research into my culture by saying this was a deliberate choice that served the stories they were trying to tell.
EXACTLY. Thank you for the perfect analogy.
Given the uproar that arose following a book last year in which the hero had a tattoo of an Indian deity, and the one before that in which the hero talked about learning exotic sexual practices in India – both of which appeared on less than half a page in each book – I can imagine authors who did what you describe would be vilified.
That is an interesting point.
Oh there is a huge double standard, particularly by this tweeter.
On one hand the attitude is that if anyone is offended by anything, even if they misconstrue the meaning or intention of what is written, the author should immediately apologize and the passage should be stricken.
But if it’s an era, or place considered to be dominated or inhabited by primarily Western European people or culture it’s all fair game. Deliberate anachronisms, misrepresentations of religion, culture, society etc. just fill in the blank.
Now it’s even come to the point where there is a divide between people from another country with the same ethnicity and Americans of that ethnicity.
For example you have citizens of Japan disagreeing with Americans of Japanese ancestry or ethnicity about things like cultural appropriation and what is or is not OK for depictions or imitations of Japanese culture. So who gets to say what is acceptable and what isn’t? People in the U.S. if the controversy is here or people still fully absorbed in the original country and culture?
I’m fine with historical characters who don’t discipline their children by hitting or berating them (even if, back in the day, it was considered necessary to strike children).
I also think that while some authors of historical romance deliberately break with convention because this is the only way to tell the stories they want to tell, other authors really don’t know any better, or don’t do the research. Or they write the story in such a way that the inaccuracy is obvious and difficult to buy. Here at AAR, most of the romances we see are written to a certain level of quality, but I’ve occasionally trawled the depths of the self-published romances on Amazon, and I didn’t get the impression that these authors had done their research and knew that a baron’s wife was a baroness, but called her a “baronette” because this suited the story.
Sometimes authors deliberately choose to write their stories a certain way, and sometimes authors are just plain careless or unaware.