History & Film: TV, Film & the Historical Novel

Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet and Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy in the 1940 film adaptation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

It’s not too long ago that historical fiction was perceived to be a minority interest, or at least to be in the doldrums, whatever popularity it had being confined mainly to big name authors and blockbuster movies. If ever that were true in the past, today things are different. Historical fiction is very much alive and well, with more and more authors choosing to write in the genre; it has even made the Man Booker prizewinner list, with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, winning in 2009 and 2012 respectively, both books being acclaimed as two of the great achievements of modern literature. This year’s winner, The Luminaries, is likewise historical fiction.

How much of a role have film and television played in dispersing the old myth?

From the time they were first published two hundred years ago, Jane Austen’s novels were in steady demand, but in 1940, when Pride and Prejudice was first filmed (with Laurence Olivier playing Mr Darcy), sales of Austen’s books rose steeply, and this has been repeated with every new adaptation, either on film or television. Austen’s are not the only novels to have benefited in this way; such is the power of the small screen that other successful TV adaptations of classic novels such as The Forsyte Saga, Cranford, The Way We Live Now, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, as well as anything by Dickens, are guaranteed to produce a renewed interest in the novels themselves, by individual readers and reading groups alike.

Such novels are, of course, not historical in the sense that they were contemporary with the time they were written, nor did they feature real people who actually lived. Nevertheless, they were among the first books to be adapted for film and television, and the interest they arouse in periods distant from our own is still considerable. These might loosely be termed costume drama, to which we may now add the hugely popular and watchable series, Downton Abbey, despite the fact that it is written expressly for television. Currently starting its fourth season, this family saga, set in an era which saw the beginning of its end in the catastrophe of the First World War and the social changes it made to a world which would never be the same again, Downton is less concerned with portraying historical facts than in using them as a backdrop to the story. Yet publishers have found that bringing the Edwardian period to television, perhaps due to its relative nearness to our own age (the last British ‘Tommy,’ Harry Patch, a survivor from that war, died only a few years ago), has had an impact that has stimulated a much greater interest in other novels set during the same period. This has, in turn, resulted in a spate of new Edwardian novels (as well as nonfiction) which fit the Downton mould, creating a sort of self-perpetuating cycle.

But the appeal of that particular period is nothing to our current obsession with the Tudor dynasty and the impact television dramas about it have made. Here we have a ready-made, real-life, ongoing royal soap opera, with all its colour, drama, sensation and intrigue, in which interest never seems to diminish. Philippa Gregory’s books, largely concerned with this era, have always had a devoted following, but the huge success of the movie version of The Other Boleyn Girl, with Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn, and its subsequent televising, propelled the book on which it was based, and it successors, to the top of the bestseller lists and undoubtedly sparked more interest in other works set during this same period. Books on the Tudor period abound: authors include Alison Weir, C J Sansom’s excellent Shardlake series, and not least Hilary Mantel, with a television adaptation of Wolf Hall (with Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell) in the offing.

As a feminist as well as a historian, Philippa Gregory has successfully concentrated on the role of women in history, and especially on the ill-fated women in the life of Henry VIII – ill-fated whichever way you look at it: although not all of them were divorced or lost their heads, being married to Henry can have been no picnic. Gregory has lately gone back in time to the Plantagenets, the dynasty which preceded the Tudors. Adapted for television as The White Queen, it seems likely this series might possibly herald the arrival of a saturation point for all things Tudor. The original books follow the same formula as Gregory’s Tudor offerings: the narrative and action is successfully seen through the eyes of women who lived through and were perhaps influential on the events of the times. These women include Elizabeth Woodville, the commoner who became the wife of the Yorkist Edward IV; Margaret Beaufort, formidable and even perhaps slightly unhinged in pursuit of the throne of England for her son, Henry Tudor, an ambition she achieved when he eventually became Henry VII; Anne Neville, the daughter of the great Earl of Warwick (powerful enough to earn himself the name of Kingmaker) who married Richard III; and finally Elizabeth of York, whose marriage to Henry VII brought together the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York, thus forming the house of Tudor.

Although assured of a ready-made audience, and though the books upon which it was based continue to achieve record sales, The White Queen has not garnered unqualified approval from all quarters, perhaps because it reveals the limitations of translating the written word to television. The Cousins’ War, or the Wars of the Roses as it has come to be known, the struggle between the Houses of York and Lancaster for the throne of England, lasted for over thirty confused and turbulent years. The battles were many, people changed sides, giving their allegiance first to one side and then the other, commanders and leaders died or were killed, giving place to others – all of which is a difficult and sometimes impossible series of events to convey with the conciseness, brevity and immediacy which television demands, especially to those not familiar with the historical facts. Much of the criticism The White Queen has received is due to what its detractors see as a confused storyline, historical inaccuracies and anachronistic dialogue, not to mention beautiful people with impossibly perfect teeth and a pristine wardrobe.

‘Although God cannot alter the past,’ wrote the Victorian, Samuel Butler, ‘historians can.’ He was, of course, writing as a satirist, but there has to be a certain amount of truth in the comment when applied to historical fiction. Of necessity conjecture must play a large part in creating any fictional representations based on what has been recorded or discovered, and although what actually happened in the past cannot be altered, perceptions can, by the spin put upon events, intentionally or otherwise. As writers of fiction are very much aware, the dry bones of history are rarely the stuff of compulsive reading. Both readers and viewers are much more likely to be more interested in the mindset of the characters, how they viewed life and how the events they might have lived through affected them, rather than the events themselves. In the last analysis, writing about the past deals with people but, especially if they are people who actually existed, their true personalities can only be a matter of speculation. Whether we look on this type of fiction as entertainment or education or both – and tampering with the known, recorded facts of history is dangerous – a certain amount of embellishment is inevitable, almost necessary in order to engage readers or viewers and to flesh out character and situation. Gregory herself has gone on record as saying that her books should be read as novels and not judged simply for historical accuracy.

Historical fiction, with television now in every home, reaches a far wider audience than just the reading public; it makes for easy watching, demanding little of the viewer except a willingness to enjoy the glamour of photogenic actors, rich and elaborate costumes and ‘scenery.’ Novels, on the other hand, whether historical or otherwise, demand an interaction between the writer and the reader; there is time for reflection and space for attempting to get into the mindset of characters who lived in an earlier age, giving a more authentic and nuanced view. The chances are that those of us who were weaned on Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, Jean Plaidy’s (aka Victoria Holt’s) novels about the crowned heads of Europe, and Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel novels set during the French Revolution, owe to these books much of our continued interest in history in general.

This is not to say that an absorbing TV series or a good movie won’t do the same thing. At its best it can be a rewarding and enriching experience. At its worst, it can give an over-romanticised, airbrushed and sanitised impression of the past, with the entertainment value deemed more important than inaccuracies and anachronisms.   This is fair enough: we don’t necessarily want to be educated when relaxing before a film, after all. But should entertainment be achieved at the expense of historical truth, when distortion of facts presented as reality may thereafter come to be conceived as established fact?

It has to be said that this approach is less apparent now than in the early days of historical films –  but then, although historical novels were with us long before historical drama on television or film, they were not always factually correct either.  Even Shakespeare put his own interpretation on events. And there has been a change in our expectations of the novel and the way we read it from the days when Sir Walter Scott, arguably the first true historical novelist, wrote Waverley. Which of us nowadays has the time or inclination to plough through long-winded descriptions and expositions? Much easier to put your feet up and watch TV!

Given the insatiable appetite for new material on film, it would seem likely that historical dramas will be with us for some time to come. And there is, after all, everything to be said for it when people who would not otherwise read historical fiction are inspired to do so by having watched and enjoyed a popular television programme. More than that, if they turn to the book which inspired it, they might find they can get equal pleasure from words alone.

About the contributor: MARJORIE ECCLES lives in Hertfordshire in the UK and has written over thirty books and many short stories. She is the author of the contemporary Gil Mayo series and is now writing twentieth century historical mysteries.  Short-listed for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Novel Award and winner of the Agatha Christie Styles Short Story, her latest book A Dangerous Deceit, was published in August 2013 by Severn House.

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Published in Historical Novels Review  |  Issue 67, February 2014