◉ Novel Study
Let’s get the simple answers out of the way first: A historical novel needs a historical setting, of course. When does “now” end and “history” begin? The general rule of thumb in the publishing industry seems to peg that moment at roughly fifty years before the present day. In practice the dividing line doesn’t matter much. Emma Cline’s 2016 novel The Girls, set in 1969, wasn’t marketed as historical fiction, for example. If you are writing a novel set in the middle of the twentieth century and want to call it historical fiction, then go for it. If that label doesn’t make sense to you, then don’t use it.
Now, on to the more interesting questions: How do you make a novel feel historical? How do you achieve the magic trick of transporting the reader to a different time? Let’s look at a chapter from Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait to see how she achieves it.
To start, O’Farrell relies on her chapter title, “The Duchess Lucrezia on Her Wedding Day,” and time stamp, “Palazzo, Florence, 1560,” to deliver the basic facts about our setting. We’re in Lucrezia’s chamber, which is crowded with servants preparing her for the wedding. O’Farrell focuses first on a familiar detail, one modern readers recognize: the wedding bouquet.
Lilies stand tall in a vase on the mantel, their stems offering up blooms as if for scrutiny. The air moving in and out of her is heavy with their scent. When she’d woken, just after dawn, the buds had been closed but now the full complexity of their petals and stamens is open for all to see. The sweet, cloying smell of them fills her chest, leaves it, fills it again. A rust-red shadow of pollen encircles the base of the vase.
We could say a lot about the symbolism of these flowers—the way this almost cloistered girl of fifteen is being prepared for scrutiny now that she is deemed sexually mature, the rust-red pollen reminding us of the menstrual blood Lucrezia’s nurse managed to hide for many months, thus delaying the wedding. But what I want you to notice in the passage is how deeply O’Farrell takes us inside Lucrezia’s mind and body, lingering on the “sweet, cloying smell” she is breathing in and out.
This bodily connection continues as O’Farrell drops more details into the scene: “Someone else lifts Lucrezia’s arm and places bracelets on it, pushes earrings through her lobes, fastens her betrothal ruby about her neck. Lucrezia is the only motionless being. She sits at the centre of this activity, a reed caught in the eddy of a stream.” The jewelry provides us something to visualize but, like the flowers, this snippet of scene also conveys that Lucrezia is passive, trapped, without agency.
We’ve heard a lot about the wedding dress already: that Lucrezia’s mother Eleonora had chosen the blue silk and gold brocade; that it was made for Lucrezia’s dead sister, Maria, who was to have married the duke; that Lucrezia had initially refused to wear it, perhaps as a way of refusing the marriage, but that Eleonora had insisted on both dress and marriage.
Once again, O’Farrell brings those details to bear on Lucrezia’s body, taking us inside her skin so we can experience the profound dissociation she feels in this dress:
The gown rustles and slides around her, speaking a glossolalia all of its own, the silk moving against the rougher nap of the underskirts, the bone supports of the bodice straining and squealing against their coverings, the cuffs scuffing and chafing the skin of her wrists, the stiffened collar hooking and nibbling at her nape, the hip supports creaking like the rigging of a ship. It is a symphony, an orchestra of fabrics, and Lucrezia would like to cover her ears, to stop them with her palms, but she cannot.
Lucrezia’s comfort, her taste, her wishes are all completely irrelevant. O’Farrell needs us to see the cultural and historical framework symbolized by the wedding dress so we can understand this world and her protagonist. Lucrezia did not get to say yes to the dress (or to the groom, for that matter). She has been preparing for her wedding surrounded by servants, who are hurrying to follow orders, not by loving friends and relatives.
Returning to our scene, Lucrezia is led out into the piazza, where she is met by a huge wave of sound that momentarily staggers her—a crowd staring and shouting and calling her name. She is hoisted into a high, open carriage alongside her parents, which will take them to Santa Maria Novella, where she will be married. Let’s look at one more passage to see how O’Farrell weaves in historical details.
“Do you see,” Eleonora says, “these people, Lucrezia? How they love us.”
Lucrezia looks at her mother, who holds a handkerchief aloft; its lace edges flutter prettily in the warm air; Eleonora smiles out of the carriage. Cosimo sits with a straight spine, his head high; he doesn’t smile but every now and again inclines his chin in a regal nod. Lucrezia sees a metallic glint at the neck of his camicia and realises that even today he is wearing chainmail beneath his clothes: she has heard he never leaves the palazzo without it, so sure is he that an attempt will be made on his life. She turns her head one way, then the other, fearing an assassin might burst from the crowd. But the faces of the Florentines lining the street are blurred by motion, daubs of paint dissolving in water.
“They do, Mamma,” Lucrezia says.
This crowd scene makes for a grand visual—we can see these three figures perched aloft above the roaring crowd, their silks and jewels gleaming in the sunlight. But O’Farrell isn’t satisfied with just that evocative setting detail. Instead she turns this set piece into a lesson: Cosimo’s grip on power is, in fact, tenuous and Eleonora is modeling for Lucrezia how to smoothly deny the truth, showing nothing but a glossy surface for the world to see.
One last note on this passage: notice the two italicized Italian words? O’Farrell doesn’t lean much on language to establish historical feel. She avoids anachronisms, but she doesn’t attempt to capture sixteenth-century speech or lard her pages with Italian words or phrases. When she does use Italian words, they are simple nouns whose meanings can be deciphered from context. I assume that O’Farrell’s choice to use italics for non-English words is a deliberate one, since many writers are now choosing not to, and I think it underscores that she is not relying on the feel of her language to pull readers into the setting. She’s doing that instead through her intense, deep point-of-view narration, our bodily identification with Lucrezia.
Takeaways
Make sure that historical details are not just set dressing but rather connect to deeper thematic or metaphorical meanings that illuminate your characters.
Use sensory and bodily details to immerse readers deeply in a historical character’s perspective and constraints.
Limit use of period language and non-English words to occasional touchstones decipherable from context.
Buy The Marriage Portrait on Bookshop.org. Affiliate link — I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you.
Keep exploring
This is one novel’s breakdown from Novel Study — my series reverse-engineering how bestselling books actually work, opening to ending. The full method, with all the charts, is collected in the books.
This post is collected in Novel Study, Book 1 of the series.
Get new craft breakdowns like these right in your inbox, plus sentence studies, craft tips, and book reviews.