Caught Telling Fiction

The gap between literary and historical fiction is mostly a marketing ploy—at least until a novelist meets a survivor of her story’s plot. For the Morning News, Jessica Francis Kane argues for the truth of novels.

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My first novel is labeled as and widely considered to be historical fiction, but I can honestly say I never thought of it that way, not in all the years it took me to write it.

Although it is based on a historical event, it was not until after the events of 9/11 that I began to think the accident at Bethnal Green might be something I could write a story about. I was thinking a great deal then about disasters, about communal loss, about how we attempt to publicly reckon and eventually commemorate tragedy. I was following in the press the demands for an independent investigation into 9/11, and as I wondered what would happen, I found myself pulling out my notes on Bethnal Green. It seemed to me there were parallels: A community had been deeply shocked and wanted an official investigation to tell it what had happened. Though the scale of the tragedies is different, in both instances a great deal of hope—for explanation, reform, even redemption—was placed in the inquiry and report-writing process. That is what interested me. The inspiration was always contemporary.

I find it hard to define exactly the difference between fiction and historical fiction. When is the cutoff date? Who decides? Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, published in 1951, is set during WWII but is not generally described as historical fiction. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, published in 2006, is based on political events in 1960s Nigeria, but is referred to as historical fiction. In the simplest terms, let me say that there seem to be books about which one is compelled to use the terms “epic,” “sweeping,” “grand”—dare I say, “historical.” Let’s put The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer in this category, and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Then there are books that are arguably “historically imagined” (a term I prefer) about which one would not necessarily use those words. Here I would put Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier and almost everything by Penelope Fitzgerald, including The Beginning of Spring (my favorite).

I always wanted my novel to be in the latter category.