I once picked up a historical fiction novel that imagined the life of a wife a certain man in ancient history. The man in question had fascinated me since early childhood and I've often wondered about his wife, whose name in lost to time. I was thrilled to see that someone had finally given her a story of her own and looked forward to seeing their love story and adventures together.
That wasn't what I got. Instead, I was treated to several chapters detailing her interactions with her sisters and details of the day-to-day household chores women did in 600 B.C. Her husband didn't show up until several chapters in. I suppose you could argue that I was seeing a more feminine side of history, but I felt like I was watching women do chores while the menfolk were off having adventures. There was no reason, absolutely none, to care about this historical woman except her connection to her husband. He needed to get on screen sooner.
Around the same time, I read a historical fiction novel about a famous abolitionist. I assumed the story would be set against the dawn of the Civil War and involve her interacting with a number of black characters yearning for freedom. Instead, the novel took place many years before the war and black people only appeared twice, never as named characters. There were a few discussions of race among white characters, but that was it. The vast majority of the story consisted of our heroine sweeping her kitchen floor, polishing the stove, and racing against time to get dinner on the table before her husband came home. Instead of the nation-wide drama of war, I watched the small-scale drama of her disagreeing with her husband, sister, and mother-in-law over topics that usually had nothing to do with slavery. I began to feel like I was reading about some other, far more nineteenth century ordinary woman with the same name as this abolitionist.
That feeling came back early this summer, when I read a novel about Annie Oakley. Annie was renowned as a sharpshooter. She could shoot a cigar from her husband's lips and split a playing card held sideways with a well-aimed bullet. But very little of that appeared in the story. After several hundreds of pages into the book, Annie had only fired a gun three times. I began to feel like I was reading about some other girl named Annie and not our Miss Oakley. I don't want to read about sharpshooters who don't shoot, abolitionist who don't abolish, and historical wives who don't spend page time with their famous husbands.
I've also seen historical fiction bogged down by accuracy. Writers want to show off their work and have their princesses staying in the right castle at the right time in the year of our Lord fifteen hundred and whatever, rather than putting her in the castle where all the action is. An intrepid reader may eventually care about accuracy if they do their own research, but most just want a good show. As a young reader, I was always saddened with a historical fiction book about women's suffrage turned into a young character whose life was consumed by school and friends while her mother was off winning rights, or a Salem Witch Trials book where the protagonist was tangential to the trials instead of being an accuser.
Remember to let your characters do the job readers hired them to do-shooting, abolishing, and voyaging with their husbands to discover new and ancient lands.
