Fable & The Verbivore

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Episode 186: Historical Fiction Favorites

Bethany Stedman

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Ep 186: Historical Fiction Favorites Fable & The Verbivore

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This week on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re talking about some of our favorite historical fiction books.

We open by talking about our reading habits and interests. Both of us tend to read less historical fiction than contemporary and fantasy, and when we do we gravitate towards historical romance or historical mystery. But we also found that in prepping for this conversation there were several historical fiction books that we’ve strongly connected with and that have stuck with us over time.

We start by looking at 3 different types of stories that we feel fall within historical fiction and some examples of those types:

  1. Stories where the time and place is integral to the story.

    • Examples include: Beloved, Kindred

  2. Stories where the time and place helps set the tone and vibe, but the story could realistically be set during another time and still work.

    • Examples include: Mexican Gothic, Daisy and the Six, The Night Circus, The Beautiful Ones

  3. Retellings, re-imaginings, or alternate histories where the story steps back into history and takes a new lens or angle to something we already feel we know.

    • Examples include: Circe, The Illiad, The Odyssey, Clyclemnestra

We touch on Shakespeare’s historical plays like Henry V and acknowledge the uncomfortable truth of how selective and filtered through our own (and our societies) lenses the histories we tell ourselves are - both what we consider to be historical fact and fiction. We also discuss the scope of stories - from wide-ranging epics to seemingly small narratives as with the story Sister Heart by Sally Morgan. They all have their place and can touch us in different ways, but we feel that sometimes these smaller scale personal stories have the ability to connect deepest with us.

Towards the end, we bring up how author Ruta Sepetys (The Fountains of Silence) talks about how a small true historical moment she discovered during her research led to another and another until she had a story. So next week, we’ll be talking about the research process - especially when writing historical fiction.

We hope you enjoy this episode. Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

The Verbivore references a YouTube video that talks about challenging the view of history as “great men doing great things”, by sitting with the awkward truth that the victor goes the ability to tell the story. That video is “Author Learnig Center - Tips for Researching and Writing Historical Fiction”.

The Verbivore references a YouTube video where historical fiction writer Ruta Sepetys talks about her book Fountains of Silence. That video is titled “Bradford Literature Festival - Hidden Histories with Ruta Sepetys”.

In this episode, we touch on the following previous podcast episodes:

Here are a few articles and videos we referenced for this conversation:

Books and Films Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)