‘History is Not History When It Is Happening’

Alice Jolly reflects on writing a historical novel about fascism in the 1930s, during a new wave of it in the 21st Century – and how the ordinary and everyday is key to bringing heavy realities to life

It is easy to lampoon historical fiction. All those wimples and whalebone corsets. All those stories that bear little relationship to historical fact. Television adaptations generally do nothing to elevate the form. Why bother to make the imaginative leap necessary to step into the past when historical characters are presented as the same as us except wearing fancy dress?

But historical fiction is a broad church and, at its best, it can do a great deal more than simply entertain.

Mainstream history rarely tells us what we actually want to know about the past; what it felt like to be there. It may give us facts, but it stops short of situating us imaginatively in the past.