Writing Historical Fiction: Thoughts from Two Practitioners

Alice Thompson: The appeal of historical fiction is manifold. It is the challenge of working on something distant in time and making it real. Writing historical fiction is also a gateway into the contemporary literature of that period just as much as its history. Nineteenth-century ghost stories such as The Turn of the Screw and The Moonstone were a huge influence on my novel, Pharos. The romantic historical mysteries of Daphne Du Maurier — especially Rebecca — haunted the style and themes of my most recent historical novel, The Falconer. It is the literature of the past, as well as the actual history of that time, that influenced my writing of Pharos and The Falconer.