Throughout most of my life, the study of history was never of much interest to me. At age nine I was fascinated by We Were There with Richard the Lionhearted [sic] in the Crusades, because the book's narrative is related by a young boy who was part of the campaign and includes fascinating details such as the Muslim leader Saladin's kind gift of ice to his enemy, the ailing Richard I. Yet I had no context for this information and failed to understand what these armies were fighting over.
In school I was bored by what was then known as "social studies," which largely involved memorizing uncompelling, disconnected bits of information—causes for various wars, major accomplishments of U.S. presidents. The history of countries other than the U.S. was barely mentioned.
My parents took me to see Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, about the last days of Sir Thomas More, as a treat for my twelfth birthday. I had never heard of More. Listening to a lot of meaningless (to me) rhetoric batted back and forth onstage, one thing seemed clear: his refusal to act against his conscience was not going to end well. I remember hoping that his enemies would hurry up and execute him so that my parents and I could go out for dinner.
As a college student studying philosophy and literature, my awareness of the past came mostly through novels and plays. In graduate school I specialized in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art history, but this field was still mostly about the history of styles and aspects of iconography. I knew, for example, that the Netherlands was still engaged in the Eighty Years War with Spain, but my ignorance of the particulars was not held against me.
What I cared about was the way aspects of everyday life were reflected in works of art. Happily for me, there was a new emphasis in the 1970s on social history that centered on the middle-class (and the peasantry, insofar as their lives were documented). Dutch 17th-century painting, so inherently middle-class in most of its themes (domestic scenes, church interiors, city views, portraits of the mercantile class) was ideal for this form of inquiry.
My choice of a dissertation subject—the life and work of one of the few women painters of the era—did not pan out (a graduate student at another university had already chosen it). Yet it seems to have percolated under the surface of my thoughts until, many years later, I wrote my first biography. It's significant that that book and my four other biographies are about 20th-century women. The immediacy of the decades I had lived through, or had heard or read about, was so much more alluring than the distant past.
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Until recently, I had thought of historical fiction as novels necessarily set in some distant era, such as 18th-century France, Tudor England, or ancient Rome. Leafing through a few of these books, I was left with impression that they were larded with potted history—pages recounting the succession of kings or emperors, battles won or lost, and so forth—and stuffed with details only a specialist would care about. Lacking my own grounding in the worlds of these books, I found my attention drifting.
And then . . . I discovered historical fiction set in the already-familiar 20th century. Because the larger landscape is known territory, I find it much easier to connect intellectually and emotionally with the characters in these books.
I had already immersed myself in modern Irish history to write my biography of the author Edna O'Brien. Having an urgent personal reason to read history—something entirely new to me—fired up my interest. Curiosity about other contemporary Irish writers led to my discovery of the extraordinary novelists Joseph O'Connor and Christine Dwyer Hickey, as well as one of Iris Murdoch's novels that is set in Dublin in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising.
O'Connor is the author of Star of the Sea (about a motley group of people escaping the Great Famine of the mid-19th century on a ship bound for the New World), Shadowplay (set in the theatre world of Victorian London, with characters that include the actress Ellen Terry and Bram Stoker, quietly gathering material for Dracula), and Ghost Light (in which an elderly woman in seedy 1950s London recalls her time at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, when she had an affair with the playwright John Synge).
Hickey's Dublin Trilogy consists of three separate novels (The Dancer, The Gambler, and The Gatemaker) that follow the declining fortunes of a (fictional) family from 1918 to the mid-20th century. This engrossing narrative probes the way alcoholism and gambling ate away at the self-worth of the men and forced wives and children to live lives of desperation. Her style is contemporary in its directness and gritty realism, yet it reminded me of Dickens' compelling narrative sweep and memorable characters from different walks of life; Hickey's beguiling way of giving inanimate objects a quirky human quality also recalls an aspect of the great 19th-century novelist.
The Red and the Green (1965) is Murdoch's only historical novel. Anglo-Irish on both sides of her family, she was reared in England. Her biographer, Peter J. Conradi, has described the intensive research she conducted for this book, including an attempt to add Irish to her many foreign languages.
The Rising occurs in the final pages, when two cousins on opposite sides—an Irish officer in the British Army and a fervent Irish nationalist—are swept up in the conflict. As in all successful historical novels, the sense of place and the language and attitudes of the characters all seem convincingly authentic. There is a rather bizarre, farcical scene involving a woman and several male characters who slip in and out of her room under cover of darkness, but Conradi remarks that such goings-on were actually common in Murdoch's own romantic life.
A detail that puzzled me was Murdoch's description of the General Post Office (GPO)—which the nationalists had commandeered for their brave but unsuccessful attempt at severing Ireland from the U.K.—as being on Sackville Street. The GPO is actually on O'Connell Street, where I saw it on a trip to Dublin. Well, silly me. It was not until 1924, after the establishment of the Irish Free State, that the street was renamed after Daniel O'Connell ("The Liberator"), a revered 19th-century political figure. Such are the benefits of historical knowledge . . .
(c) Cathy Curtis 2026