More than Cosplaying the Past: Andrea Barrett on Learning to Write Fresh Historical Fiction

Q: What surrounds the Earth?
A: The Atmosphere; composed of air, vapor, and other gases.
Q: How far from the Earth does the atmosphere extend?
A: About 45 miles.
Q: What can you say of the Air?
A: It is thinner or less dense the further it is from the Earth.
Q: When water dries up where does it go?
A: It rises into the air.
Q: How can water rise into the air?
A: It is turned to vapor, and then it is lighter than the air.
Q: When vapors rise and become condensed, what are they called?
A: Clouds.

–­from “Lesson XIX” of James Monteith’s Manual of Geography, Combined with History and Astronomy (revised edition, 1868)

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A brown book, foxed and broken-­spined, the leather back of the binding almost gone. Maybe a teacher used it; maybe some students passed it around. The rear cover notes that it’s one of the National Geographical Series and that “These books have been used with great success in Schools of every State in the Union, and their circulation is constantly increasing.”

Look at any page of this book long enough—­say, the little woodcut on page thirty-nine, featuring a tall ship, a mighty whale, men exploded from their narrow boat and suspended above the waves, captioned WHALE FISHING IN THE NORTHERN SEAS—­WHALERS OF MASSACHUSETTS—­PERILS OF WHALING—ICEBERGS—­and a whole world opens up. Characters appear. Lives suggest themselves.

How that happens, both to me and to other writers, is what I mean to talk about here. Not a history of one writer (me), but some thoughts about how and why any writer (including me) might make fiction from such scraps of history as that worn brown book.

I often write fiction set in times and places other than my own: fiction rooted in facts, the facts shaped by story and character. Partly that’s because I have a scholar’s interest in science and history without the corresponding intellectual stamina and skill; as a young woman, I went briefly to graduate school first in zoology and then in history but was quickly appalled by the actual work required and dismayed by my dislike of the methods.

Partly it’s a matter of temperament; I don’t like writing about myself, and although beautiful books have been made by writers drawing exclusively on autobiographical material, a first novel touching on family stories taught me that this wasn’t my path. Where, then, was I to look for material?

Last spring I watched a phoebe try to build a nest on a half-­inch ledge over my front door. All my husband and I noticed at first was a smear of mud on top of the ledge and scraps of wet vegetation littering the porch. Twice I threw the bits away.

Finally we realized that a bird (a phoebe, we learned from her call) was ferrying over those strands of moss and lichen and trying to glue them with spit and mud on a spot far too small to support them. When my husband nailed a scrap of shingle to the ledge, a compact mud nest lined with threads of grass, moss, hair, fur, and feathers appeared the next day. Three nestlings soon followed.

No part of this sight, or of what I read to understand what was happening, would have seemed like promising material for fiction when I was young. Then it did: the biggest change in my writing life.

Over the course of my first few novels, I learned to reach outward, into the enormous richness of the world, and also backward, into the past beneath our present. Happily, the materials of history, art, science, medicine, and the natural world—­the things that most intrigue me—­are endless, as are the stacks of books and drifts of paper piled in used bookstores, libraries, attics, archives, everywhere.

Monteith’s Manual of Geography, for one, which was given to me by a dear friend. Or the book, so delightfully titled The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers, that slipped from a bookstore shelf as I reached for something else, and later lit the way for a novel.

Still, even as I reached deeper into the past and began, with Ship Fever, to write stories set wholly in times and places I hadn’t inhabited, I didn’t think of myself as writing “historical fiction.”

That label meant, for me, the huge volumes I’d read as a girl, galloping through wild and melodramatic plots while convinced that I was also learning some history. During the summer when I was thirteen, I needed that diversion especially badly. Confined by my own bad behavior and a new family situation to a shady room in an unfamiliar house, waiting to start high school in a new town, I had nothing to do but read.

The room looked out onto a marsh, delineated from the yard by a white retaining wall. Beyond the wall was the world I couldn’t enter. The pale celadon bookshelves framing the windows offered the world I could.

My family weren’t readers, but the house’s previous owners must have been, as they left behind an array of books, mostly novels, many Book-­of-­the-­Month Club or Literary Guild editions. Mostly—­how curious this seems, in retrospect—­historical fiction. It’s possible I read all of them.

Leon Uris’s Mila 18 (1961), for example, which for decades would be almost all I’d know about the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Uris’ Exodus (1958), about the founding of Israel (ditto). Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), about Michelangelo, and his Lust for Life (1934), about van Gogh. I read Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931), about life in a Chinese village; Anya Seton’s Katherine (1954), about John of Gaunt’s lover, who was also Geoffrey Chaucer’s sister-in-­law—­and more, so many more.

A lot was trash, some wasn’t—­Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–­22), depicting medieval Norwegian life, was there as well—­but I’m not sure I could tell the difference then. I’m quite sure I didn’t sense the political attitudes, cultural prejudices, and judgments about characters I was unconsciously absorbing. Later, I’d have to unlearn a great deal.

But that early immersion must have given me a sense that fiction set in the past was possible, even if it didn’t give me models of what I’d most need decades later. Maybe it helped teach me what I didn’t want to write? In the early 1990s, when I first started writing fiction set in the past, I couldn’t find many examples of what, for lack of a better name, I’ll call “literary historical fiction.”

Mostly I found heaps of books like those I’d found on the pale-­green shelves—­fat action-­filled novels about the First and Second World Wars, the American Civil War, the French Revolution, other wars—­mingled with costume dramas and historical romances. None suggested what I longed to write.

Friends eventually steered me toward some helpful inspirations. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), of course. A clutch of British books: Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986), Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring (1988) and The Gate of Angels (1990), Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991), and A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990).

French writer Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) dazzled me, as did Australian David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978) and Remembering Babylon (1993). Canadian Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987) led me to From Ink Lake: Canadian Stories (1990): stories chosen by Ondaatje, many set in the past, by Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and others then unfamiliar to me. Further work by each of those writers would in turn guide me, especially the great beacon of Alice Munro’s Open Secrets (1994).

So I set off on my own little path, which after thirty years has braided with many others to become a rich tapestry. Wonderful fictions set in the past abound, now; work quite different, written with different intentions, than the books from the celadon shelves.

One tiny sample from my own shelves: Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire (2003), Edward P. Jones’ The Known World (2003), Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009), Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011), Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters (2013), Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer (2014), Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), Lauren Groff’s Matrix (2021), and Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose (2022). You could make a different, equally sparkling list in a minute.

Just in 2023 you could spin between the visions of Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, set in nineteenth-­century England and Jamaica, Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend, set in the pre–­Civil War American South, Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, set in Malaysia during the 1920s, and Alice McDermott’s Absolution, set in Saigon during the Vietnam War—­a banquet hard to imagine a few decades ago.

In her essay in The New Yorker titled “On Killing Charles Dickens,” Smith, an outstanding critic as well as a novelist, claimed to have long disliked historical fiction and wrote that for some years she’d “retained a prejudice against the form, dating back to student days, when we were inclined to think of historical novels as aesthetically and politically conservative by definition.”

Later, converted by several brilliant examples (including the same Memoirs of Hadrian I’d found so staggering), she realized that historical fiction offered rich possibilities for new perspectives and could do more than “cosplay its era.”

Why wouldn’t we suspect that, if every generation needs to rewrite history, we also need to reimagine our historical fiction? Forgotten voices, documents lost or destroyed or ignored, entire fields of experience scanted, peoples and cultures misrepresented or not represented at all—­so much to write about, so much to explore!

And so many ways to do it. A fresh way of rendering the past offers as much news as the most contemporary portrait—and can be equally radical in its intentions, form, and language, jolting one to think about all the forms of narrative delving into the materials of the past.

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Excerpted from Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction. Copyright (c) 2025 by Andrea Barrett. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.