How do you establish setting in historical fiction?

Historical fiction and speculative fiction both require authors to introduce readers to unfamiliar worlds alongside their characters. A skilled author can make this orientation feel both seamless and dynamic; examining their strategies can teach writers in any genre how to improve setting and world-building. Let’s take a look at the opening of Lauren Groff’s historical novel Matrix to see how one author meets the challenge.

Here is the first paragraph:

The first sentence is short and active, placing us immediately in a present-tense scene. The second sentence supplies more context, leaning on the unusual sentence structure to give interest to details that are fairly ordinary. The sentence—which is a fragment, without an anchoring verb—drapes lightly over the scaffold of the prior sentence. The “she” now has a name, an age, and an origin. The “ride” is now both out of a forest and into a rainy March day.

After this short first paragraph, we get a long paragraph full of setting details, including the key information that we are in the year 1158 and that Marie’s destination is an abbey, which she is seeing now for the first time. Our narrator is focused on Marie but not entirely subsumed in her point of view—there are shades of distance. Take these sentences:

Marie has no experience yet with summer in this place, but the narrator establishes in these sentences that we are not entirely limited to Marie’s experience. Readers are watching Marie; we are not ourselves Marie. Groff even dramatizes this relationship between protagonist and reader a few lines later: “The wind hushes. The trees cease stirring. Marie feels that the whole countryside is watching her move through it.” Groff positions readers as voyeurs and Marie as a subject worthy of and equal to being observed. (I’ll discuss Groff’s narration style more thoroughly in my next post on the novel.)

Groff also stitches in tiny details that convey the twelfth-century setting: Marie’s Angevin face, sealskin cloak, and green headcloth; her warhorse and the falcon shivering in its wicker enclosure. At the same time, Groff is careful to also weave in details that are more familiar: seeds unfurling in the cold ground, Marie’s height and ungainly build, the wind and trees.

We also start to get some hints about who Marie is as a person—clever and passionate—and why she is on this journey. We are told, “She has yet to cry for having been thrown to the dogs.” Notice how much meaning is packed into that short sentence: We get not just Marie’s characterization of what has happened to her, but also a hint that she feels deeply and yet is strong and stubborn enough not to let those feelings loose.

Next, we move back in time to the scene that launched this lonely ride:

Note how even the queen’s dialogue is filtered through Marie’s point of view. In other words, we get the feel of the queen’s language, especially in phrases like “Oh what delightful news, what relief” but there are no quotation marks, and the passage feels like someone—Marie—reporting what they remember of the queen’s words. Yet our omniscient narrator is still with us here as well, telling us, for example, that Marie’s half sister, “a bastardess sibling of the crown just like Marie,” will one day become a Welsh princess—not a fact that Marie herself could know at this point in the narrative. We understand that perhaps if Marie were more like her half sister—this “simpering creature” who understands “the uses of popularity in the court”—she also might have been a princess. Instead, she is destined for the abbey, despite her protest to Queen Eleanor that she “had no godly vocation whatsoever in any way.” Here our narrator steps in again, with an oblique glimpse into Marie’s future, the future we are following her into: “Her faith had twisted very early in her childhood; it would slowly grow ever more bent into its geometry until it was its own angular, majestic thing.” Marie will not be a princess but, our narrator hints, she will achieve her own kind of majesty. That is the story we are promised.

By the end of this backstory excursion, we understand that Marie lost her mother early, at age twelve, and then spent two years running the family estate in France herself before having to flee to England; that she has fallen in love with Queen Eleanor, wife of her half brother; that she is not technically alone on her journey, for which she has a royal escort, but feels herself alone because the servant, companion, and lover who has been with her from childhood has refused to go with her to the abbey to, in her words, “be buried alive forever with a bunch of dead-eyed nuns.”

We then return to the present, to Marie riding closer to “the buildings clenched pale atop the hill,” past “fourteen fresh black graves” of nuns who have recently died of a terrible sickness, and finally to the abbey itself, where, numb with cold and her long ride, she falls in the mud before the abbess and subprioress. As Marie enters the abbey, Groff continues the pattern of interspersing unfamiliar words and details (medlarfruit, windowpanes made of horn, the order of prayers) with familiar ones (the feeling of hunger, the motivations of jealousy), guiding us with a sure hand into the world of this twelfth-century abbey.

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