In historical fiction, anything goes...

I call it the ‘Reeling In The Years’ effect: the feeling whilst reading a novel set in the past that this scene or set of attitudes owes more to the writer’s own value system than historical accuracy.

I’m currently reading The Group, a novel that was written in the 1960s about a set of Vassar alums negotiating life in the New York City of the 1930s. 

So, yes: I’m trying to follow author Mary McCarthy’s 1963 fictional account of a world that is some 30 years removed from the time she is writing in. (It took quite a while for me to realise that the world of the Great Depression and FDR was as relevant to her as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the closing years of the Thatcher era are to me, that is, quite relevant.)

It’s an entertaining read. I can see why it is cited as a precursor to Candace Bushnell’s Sex And The City as it deals with sex, relationships, money, class dynamics. 

But I recently came to a scene where a new mother is recovering after the birth of her son. Her husband has invited a few friends around to her hospital room, where he is toting a cocktail shaker and treating all and sundry to generously proportioned martinis. Meanwhile, Prissy is barred from taking a tipple as she is – much to the bemusement of the visitors, including her own mother – breastfeeding the new baby. 

The Group was adapted into a movie in 1966. 
Does this say ‘1930s drama’ to you? Me neither...

The scene is difficult to read. The new mother’s exhaustion and burgeoning identity as a mother coming into conflict with the demands of both her husband and the intransigent hospital staff feels authentic. But if the weaponisation of Prissy’s personal choices feels familiar, is the tussle over the science of breastfeeding something that would have been a live issue in the early 1930s? Or is it something that was entering the discourse when McCarthy was writing in the 1960s? As a reader, I can’t tell.

It’s been playing on my mind since last weekend. I found it as distracting as the dated haircuts and trowelled-on blue liquid eyeliner that actors wore in period dramas in the 1970s. 

BBC drama I, Claudius, 1976

And since spotting it, I can’t shake the feeling that the writer is looking over the shoulder of her characters and giving us readers a large wink, rather like the way in which the producers of RTÉ’s Reeling In The Years – and other similar nostalgia-filled clip shows – will include a second or two of a politician who would go on to become associated with great wealth joking about winning a few bob as he buys a lottery ticket in the depths of the 1980s recession. 

As any English literature undergraduate will tell you, writers of historical fiction can’t avoid addressing  the dilemmas and problems of their own day. That is one of the challenges of reading historical fiction: disentangling the writer’s own stance and perspective from the rest of the literary work. Or at least identifying it and deciding how much you wish to engage with it.

It’s always interesting to watch the interplay between the story, the writing and the political viewpoint of the writer as a novel unfurls. I suppose what gets my spidey senses tingling with The Group is that, at a remove of almost 60 years since the novel was written, I can’t get a handle on what I would have thought at the time, and I feel like I’m being nudged towards a conclusion by the author. 

If there’s one thing I can’t bear, it’s being told what to think (which is farcical when you consider that I haven’t an original thought in my head). 

Authors: I may well agree with you – but please apply your arguments will a little more subtlety than a 1970s make-up artist trying to re-create the look of Caligula’s court in Ancient Rome...

* The Group, by Mary McCarthy, published by Virago