I
once read an admittedly trashy historical romance which included, in a short
preface, the following scholarly author’s note:
“I
have changed the date of the last Jacobite uprising from 1745 to 1741 for the
convenience of my story.”
Years
later, I am still trying to recover from the stupefaction I felt on reading
this, and particularly with the author’s bland assumption that this would be
perfectly all right with the rest of us.
I like to imagine applying this world view to other announcements in
other circumstances:
“I
have lowered the net six inches for the convenience of my tennis game.”
“I
have altered the amount on the line “taxes owed” for the convenience of my
checking account.”
As
a writer of historical fiction myself, and one who was, at the time, working on
a novel also set in Scotland in the eighteenth century, I have a fair amount of
sympathy for the difficulty of knowing how much to invent and how much must be
absolutely historically accurate.
You don’t want history to be a straight jacket on the imagination, and
you don’t want to fall so much in love with research that it gets in the way of the story.
But there are some basic rules in writing historical fiction that can’t
be broken with impunity, and one of them is that you don't change the basic major historical events with which a lot of people are already
familiar.
If this lady couldn’t make the 1745
date work, she needed to rework her story. Doing anything else is just lazy – cheating, really, just
like the rule-breaking in my two examples. In doing so, she showed that she had no respect for history
and no respect for me (or her other readers). After all, people like to think they learn a little
something from historical fiction and don’t want to embarrass themselves when
they visit Culloden field by announcing that Bonny Prince Charley was there in
1741, when actually he was still fooling around in France. The tour guide will laugh at them. An author’s likely to lose readers that
way.
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