By definition, historical fiction is a mix of the real and the realistic. In what proportions? Each writer must arrive at the blend that best serves her purposes. Here’s my approach in writing the Julia Kydd novels.
The 1920s are one of the best known and most important eras in American cultural history. But what makes the decade famous also makes it a minefield of stereotypes and clichés: flappers, gangsters, speakeasies, jazz, bootleggers. Those stereotypes offer such handy, readymade notions that we all know, for instance, how flappers dressed and behaved. Yet their vivid details (long strands of pearls, rolled stockings, martinis, bobbed hair) paint such a memorable picture that it’s hard to imagine what lies beneath the clichéd veneer.
Much of Passing Fancies is set in Harlem on the brink of its famous Renaissance. This setting evokes its own set of powerful familiars: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Cab Calloway, Strivers’ Row, the Cotton Club. Again, that familiarity is both a blessing and curse. The more thoroughly we know the historical specifics of an era, the more immutable it become in our minds, leaving little of the wiggle room where storytelling does its best work.
This is why many writers prefer to create overtly fictional versions of real places, people, and things—to open up the imaginative space needed to tell their story. Dorothy Sayers, for example, set her landmark novel Gaudy Night in a fictional women’s college at Oxford, similar to but explicitly not the college she attended twenty years before. She sidestepped obligations to factual accuracy—does the library face north or south? Was the dean a classics scholar or a linguist?—to focus attention on her broader story of that formative era in women’s education.
I too create realistic fictional characters and settings and mingle them as “moving pieces” within the fixed structure of the historical record. For example, several key scenes in Passing Fancies occur in Carlotta’s, a Harlem nightclub that somewhat resembles the famous Cotton Club. But Carlotta’s is a fictional riff on it, a composite of real and imagined particulars. Like Sayers, I deliberately blur or confound some details to nudge readers’ focus away from the literal “real” and into the deeper, fictive “real.”
Passing Fancies does not attempt to do the important work of true history. Fortunately, there are many excellent histories, biographies, and memoirs shedding light on the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance, and Passing Fancies includes a short bibliography of some of the works I found most illuminating.
Instead, my goal is to capture the zeitgeist of a historical moment. I want readers to feel the era’s imprint on my characters’ assumptions, fears, hopes, worries, dreams. In Passing Fancies, I hope readers might witness the aspirations, achievements, and frustrations of Harlem writers of the twenties—at least as perceived by a sophisticated-yet-naïve young white woman struggling to understand them.
Novelists and historians begin in the same archive, but they use it in different ways for different purposes.
Photo: Somerville College, Oxford, inspiration for the fictional setting of Dorothy Sayers’s 1935 novel, Gaudy Night.
