Home » History » Tudor History » Living History Through Fiction.

Living History Through Fiction.

© Dr. Gillian Polack

Bringing history to life is one of the most exciting activities you can think of. And one of the easiest ways to access that exciting past is through historical fiction.

Authors such as Elizabeth Chadwick, Sharon Kay Penman, Sharan Newman, Wendy J. Dunn and Brian Wainwright interpret their particular views of history into tales of derring-do, politics, love or war.

Wendy J. Dunn's fascination with Anne Boleyn and her use of Wyatt's poetry acts as a bridge to the Tudor court for modern readers. In Dear Heart, How Like You This, she uses the language of Tudor poetry and the fascination of some quite extraordinary people as a bridge to tell her story. She focuses on the personal and the individual and brings a fresh approach to the very difficult tale that is Anne's life.

Brian Wainwright's new book Within the Fetterlock uses the political and a careful build up of what life felt like during the period to tell personal, private stories. It is a very different approach to Dunn, but equally effective. Both bring history home to the reader, and bring history to life in a vivid way.

In Wainwright's book the build up of events is compelling. You can see how the early part of the Wars of the Roses hurt people and tore families apart when you read the sad saga. He focuses on Constance of York and the difficulty of her path through the mire. Constance's life and her family and her troubles are riveting and exciting.

Each book is extraordinarily different - and each book is attracting devoted followers. Both use one character as the major bridge between the readers and the period about which they write: in Dunn's novel it is Thomas Wyatt, loyal and loving but powerless, and in Wainwright's it is Constance of York, from a great family but caught up in decisions made for her by her menfolk and by political circumstance.

It is this knife-edge between power and helplessness that catches the reader and draws the mind's eye into the past, because it is something that we all experience in our lives.

They explore matters that are very foreign to us through using the bridge of the personal and of universal feelings.

Both Dunn and Wainwright have investigated the past and made one segment of it their own - this segment is what they have transformed into a novel and given to us, as readers. History on a platter.