historical AUs—send all recs!

[jlh]

So there's been an avalanche of fail recently, regarding historical AUs, both RPF and "FPF." I've been thinking about writing a post, a kind of "how to write one and avoid horrible fail!" But to do that, I need your recs!

Please rec historical AUs that you really love, that you feel avoided these kinds of fails but still managed to deal with the historical issues. Many of us have written the equivalent of a costume drama—like, putting the characters in a Regency Romance—that completely avoids the issues of the time. That's totally fine! But those AUs are not the ones I wanted to look at for this project.

I'd love to have AUs from a wide range of fandoms, and various time periods! Feel free to pimp this out to your own flist, and if you have suggestions for things I should think about to include in the eventual post please let me know! (Or, if you'd like to read it over—I think I'll definitely need some "betas" on this one, and I can't force sistermagpie and ali_wildgoose to do all of it!)

Thanks!!

Comments

[melodiousb]

I guess I just have a problem with historical fiction in general, which is probably closely related to the fact that most of the books I read were written pre-1930. I don't think of myself as a historian, but I did major in history in college, and my focus ended up being popular fiction from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century, which has left me with a really clear idea of how people wrote about life in those eras, if not what life was actually like. So when I read historical fiction, I'm not comparing it to other historical fiction, or even what I know of the period, but to books I've read that were written during that period. But I still want to believe that historical fiction is doable. There's always going to be stuff that's going to interfere with my suspension of disbelief, but sometimes it's not really a problem, and I'd like to figure out exactly where that line is.

Ironically--since most historical AUs and vast numbers of historical novels are romances--I think the romance is often where--for me, anyway--the historical context breaks down. By prioritizing a romance that would be unlikely to happen in one's setting, or wouldn't have been written about if it did, one sort of demotes the historical setting. And that's another thing that really bugged me about Restraint, the Supernatural regency AU--the Jensen Ackles character was sort of aware that he was interested in men, but had no intention of ever doing anything about, and I felt like that was a perfectly valid choice for someone in that position at that time, but the author clearly doesn't feel that way, and so the story is largely about breaking down that barrier and--I felt--denying that character the right to make his own choices. Which, to be fair, is an issue in a lot of romances, historical or otherwise.

Possibly the reason your historical AUs--and I have only read a few of them--haven't sent me straight to the back button is that you do think about the story you want to tell, and at what point a romance is going to derail it. And that Doctor Who story I linked to, which mostly worked for me, is gen.

[jlh]

That's a really interesting way to think about it! I was a history and literature concentrator in college myself, so I spent undergrad thinking a lot about the intersection of the two. It reminds me of the presentation assignment I give my students at the end of the term, where I ask them to find a non-text primary source from 1945-1989 and talk about how it represents something from its era. Of course a lot of the students want to do a film or a TV show, and I have to stress that they only do movies/tv shows in period, not anything like Happy Days or Mona Lisa Smile because they're too knowing. Within the period a creator always makes assumptions about their audience that they aren't even aware of, but which we can see looking back on them.

Which I think also means that I don't think about novels in-period as being the standard for a historical novel, mostly because in-period novels are full of outdated ideas and Things We Don't Talk About. If someone wrote a regency romance right now that was just like Austen, it would be a very problematic book, because it wouldn't have an awareness of the problems of empire and the gender issues and all of that. So I actually, I think, expect more from really good historical fiction than I expect from an in-period book.

It's interesting what you say about denying the character a right to make their own choices. It's true that many romances are about presenting a character that is resistant to romance with someone to fall in love with. I don't really have a problem with that trope because I've seen it happen more than once in real life, where some confirmed singleton randomly met a person and was like, "oh! You!" and off they went. It's true that most fanfic being romance can sometimes be problematic, but taken on its own terms, romance is what romance is doing, if that makes sense. That is, in the same way that action is what action is doing, or music is what a musical is doing.

Have you read Tipping the Velvet or Fingersmith? They're historical novels written by Sarah Waters, set in Victorian England and featuring lesbian romances. I find them to be quite good. To be sure, the women are not particularly respectable—they're usually working-class and sometimes criminals or stage performers—but I think she does a good job of saying, okay, I want a lesbian romance in Victorian England, so what kind of women should they be?

As for not written about, there are all these Douglas Sirk 1950s melodramas—All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession—where it seems like people are freaking out over small things—a middle-aged woman dating a younger man, for example. Todd Haynes made Far From Heaven which is a period piece that looks like a Sirk film, and covers the same kind of ground that a Sirk film would, but instead it's about a woman whose husband leaves her for another man, and she falls in love with her black gardener. Which is the kind of thing people would actually have freaked out about in a Sirk movie, only the irony was that Sirk could never actually make a movie about the things that people freaked out about in the 1950s. So while I find Sirk's movies to have a good deal of self-awareness and cultural critique, I think Haynes's film is a very successful historical fiction because it makes evident what could not be in a 1950s film—it is both recreating the period and commenting on the period, something we really can't do in-period because we can never be that distant from what's around us.

Thanks, what you've said has made me think a lot!!

[melodiousb]

Definitely knowing when a book set in the past was written makes a lot of difference. There are books from the 1910s that I love which would make me fairly angry if they were published today, and a historical novel that doesn't look past its setting is kind of pointless, if not impossible. Reading so much fiction from earlier eras mainly affects my reading of historical novels and AUs in that tone is something I judge for historical accuracy. But that's still only one element--something I notice, rather than something that will make me put a book down. Most of the historical novels I read are mysteries, and a lot of them really stand out as having been written in the '90s, but I weigh that against the awesome characters and clever plots and love them anyway. I even find it sort of endearing.

I've seen a few of Sirk's films, but not the Haynes one, and I never thought of them of them as being coded in that way. That's really interesting.

I read about half of Tipping the Velvet once, but I was reading it in a bookstore, or maybe at someone's house, and didn't get to read the rest. I recall liking it a lot. One historical novel I absolutely love is Dinesen's The Angelic Avengers, which was written in the '40s and set about a century earlier. It deals with white slavery, the sexual harassment of female employees, etc. while operating very much in a 19th century gothic mode.

On the subject of romance and agency: of course overcoming one character's resistance to romance is a hugely common trope. I just felt that in that particular situation, avoiding romance was a more-than-usually-valid choice.

You've made me think a lot, too! I really look forward to seeing what you end up posting.