In honor of Women’s History Month, I’m sharing this new essay from the recently updated Dangerous Books for Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels, Explained. Some of it is for free subscribers, but only paid subscribers can read the whole thing here ;-)
To my everlasting shame, I once said that romance novels did not need to be historically accurate. I was a newbie author on a panel at a romance conference and I shared my earnest belief that readers were here for the love story and sexy times; they were not here for my hot take on the Corn Laws. As long as no one rolled up to a Regency ball in an automobile, all was good. It might not be totally wrong, but it is not right and definitely not the full picture.
In Romancelandia, historical accuracy is highly prized, but its definition is subject to fierce debate. Readers will write outraged letters to authors critiquing their history when that author actually has a PhD in history. My fellow authors and I would joke about writing in fear of “The Regency Police” which was our term for the sort of reader who will slam an author in reviews for writing “wallpaper historicals” or getting small details about corsets and carriages wrong, which therefore ruined the entire book for them.
This is not an essay about innovations in carriage design or when whalebone went out of fashion. To be clear, when I am talking about historical accuracy in this essay, I’m interested in big picture representation, the thoughts and yearnings of characters, and their behavior. It matters, because historical accuracy can be used as a tool of patriarchal oppression and white supremacy, but it can also break us free from all that.
What I have come to understand is that what we claim to be “historically accurate” is a statement about value and who matters. It has profound implications for the stories we choose to read, write and celebrate. It especially matters with our popular fiction because this is where, for better or for worse, many people learn about history.
When discussing the romance genre, it is also impossible to understand what we mean by “historical accuracy” without also understanding what we mean by “escape”.
Everything I needed to know about history I learned from historical romance
In Janice Radway’s infamous book, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, she interviews a group of romance readers she calls The Smithton Women about their romance reading habits and preferences. One theme that emerges repeatedly is the idea of romance as an escape, usually from a woman’s daily cares and worries. But another frequently and strongly cited reason for reading romance is “to learn about faraway times and places.” In other words: education.
Radway understands this as a justification for reading romance, because a person (usually a woman) is spending time on herself for her own pleasure rather than in service to the needs of her family and/or employer. This is apparently a terrible thing for a woman to do and so there must be a good reason for her to do so (which is such a troubling sentiment). Being able to say “well it’s educational, it’s about history” goes a long way to shutting down snark from people you can’t ignore, like members of your own family.
In the case of The Smithton Women, they were reading Harlequins and the classic 1970’s bodice rippers. Whether these representations of “faraway times and places” and the characters who inhabit them are accurate, honest, or appropriately sensitive is an important conversation to have. Another important conversation to have is which authors are best positioned to write those types of stories. (I will not be doing a deep dive into those texts here). Even historical fiction readers I meet today tell me one primary reason they read the genre is to learn about history. What I want to focus on with this essay is the fact that people turn to popular historical romance and historical fiction to learn about their own history.
The Smithton Women mention learning about faraway times and places, but by the nature of the book, it is history told from a woman’s point of a view.
The type of history we get from historical romance and popular historical fiction is the kind I think many of us hunger for—the one about people who look like us, with experiences that are relevant to ours. It is the history that does not center on the accomplishments of white men, or a token queen, but talks about the lives, drama, accomplishments and relationships of everyone else. Because historical fiction is written in a way to be easy and engaging to read, the dynamics between people come alive, leap off the page, and make the history effortless to learn and understand. The history in fiction isn’t a list of facts, it is a world we become immersed in as we read. It is often the history of women or other marginalized groups—the “hidden histories” to use a popular marketing term.
It is also the history that is deliberately not taught in schools. This is by design.
In her book Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy[i], Elizabeth Gillespie McRae describes a deliberate effort made by white women in the early half of the 20th century to maintain segregation in society in ways that did not run afoul of federal law. They had a variety of techniques, but most involved taking over school boards, summer camps and essay contests to promote “racial distance.” They especially got involved in what was being taught in schools; one particular strategy they employed with textbook content was to ensure that Black people were only ever portrayed as anonymous laborers, if they were even mentioned at all.
Gillespie McRae writes: “There was almost complete erasure of black history and black Americans from Mississippi’s textbooks. This erasure certainly had damaging effects on black students, but they had their families, their churches, and their schools to tell them stories that challenged such hegemony. White southerners raised on a segregated history and living in a segregated society only had stories that upheld a natural order of white over black.”
If Black history is missing from the curriculum, it’s not an accidental oversight. To a lesser extent, women’s history is largely absent from most curriculum as well, save for the celebrations of a few token women in women’s history month. One thing we lose with this erasure is a sense of power, pride, accomplishment and respect. Black people were never just laborers; they were poets, activists, scientists, inventors, bankers, teachers. Women were never just wives and mothers; they went to school, earned a living, banded together to change the world’s expectations for what women could accomplish. What we lose from this erasure is enormous: a common understanding of our history and humanity.
This effort to whitewash history and erase the accomplishments of women and other marginalized groups isn’t all in the past, either. Recently, the state of Texas recently fought to pass a law[ii] that no longer requires schools to teach “historical documents related to the civil accomplishments of marginalized populations including women’s suffrage and equal rights, the civil rights movement, the Chicano movement, the American labor movement and Native American rights.” To cut the women’s suffrage movement—in which women of varying backgrounds and classes banded together for a sustained and non-violent revolution to enfranchise half the population—is to cut out some of the most effective political organizing in history. It is no wonder that a story of female solidarity overthrowing the social order is not to today’s youth.
In short: the history taught in schools is a way to engineer the present. Trying to erase a legacy of accomplishment, activism or even mere existence is a way to diminish real people today.
Enter historical fiction. Thus far, it is not within the purview of any school board (though too many groups are banning books in libraries). Publishers are making bank with “hidden histories” that celebrate precisely these stories. We are all The Smithton Women, who want not just an escape, but an opportunity to learn.
“But it’s just a novel!” one might cry in frustration. It is not just a romance novel. It is an alternative point of view of history. It is vividly portrayed characters, often based on or inspired by real people. It’s not just their work and accomplishments but their full lives. Suddenly, we, the readers, have a new understanding of ourselves in the context of history and of each other and it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain or enforce a sense of inferiority, invisibility or distance with each other.