The Woman's Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (review)

As a generic term, "Historical Fiction" is somewhat of a chameleon. It has a tendency to assume various guises, heralding a whole spectrum of associations. And though often subject to baffling levels of critical neglect, women writers across the twentieth century have, as Diana Wallace's vital study reveals, sought to displace assumptions of historical fiction as middlebrow diversion confined to the frivolous conventions of domestic romance by pushing back the stylistic boundaries to enhance it as a medium for political critique. So multifarious has this intervention by women writers been, in fact, that the task today of retrospectively mapping the historical novel's journey from one end of the last century to the other demands a formidable range of interpretative strategies.

This is the challenge Wallace invites and relishes in her highly self-reflexive new book, leading us from Georgette Heyer's swashbuckling fantasies to Jeanette Winterson's parodistic metafiction, all the while addressing us in a manner that is at once generous and convivial, but without simply being uncritically affirmative toward the marginalized authors she redeems. Aware that many readers are likely to encounter several faces for the first time, Wallace adopts a style that remains conceptually dexterous yet approachable in its capacious exposition of material between periods—an exposition in which countless women writers hitherto marginalized by neglect are retrieved as we shift nimbly between survey and textual analysis. Throughout, indeed, one detects an undertone of genuine personal investment in the revisionary impulse of the project in its entirety, with Wallace tracing twin "uses of history" between her selected practitioners: principally, how the thematization of "escape" is articulated through immediate forms of polemical engagement (2). This in turn is a catalyst for an assessment of how the women's historical novel has both complicated and enhanced our "understanding," to borrow her estimation of Daphne du Maurier, "of the ways in which the past is constructed as a space to which the reader can escape" (88). Wallace is suitably dissatisfied with the parochialism of Lukács's paradigm for historical realism, and turns instead to Umberto Eco's typology which divides historical fiction into "the male adventure story . . . and the female-centered romance" (22), though querying here the complacency with which these two key generic formats have traditionally been bifurcated along gendered lines. Later in the book, it is this same rhetorical doubleness which becomes a subversive resource: as Wallace shows, by inheriting Heyer's satirical reformulation of perspective and persona through the vocabulary of masquerade, many women novelists have capitalized upon the ambiguities of narrative voice to scrutinize the cultural mediation of embodiment. "Given the need to be 'circumspect' when writing about men," asserts Wallace, "the historical novel offers women the opportunity of carrying out a double ventriloquism—a male voice from the past—with impunity" (23). And while tracing such affinities across successive decades, neither does Wallace prevaricate over the always problematic question of selection and omission. A corpus for a study of this scope will necessarily be representative, and the crucial task it faces is in tracing formal trends across an epoch of such momentous sociopolitical change without compromising the particularity of each writer's aesthetic concerns.

Wallace succeeds in retaining this imperative, proceeding chronologically by decade after discovering in Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783) a striking antecedent to many of the preoccupations to which women writers returned in the interwar years.¹ Lee's multiperspectival work emblematizes this study's insight into the "handling of narrative point of view." For in The Recess the "use of a view from below or the side of conventional histories is one of Lee's most important bequests to her successors, and can be seen not only in the 'Gothic' romances of Victoria Holt but also in Naomi Mitchison's histories of the conquered" (18). By prefacing each decade with a detailed survey of uniting thematic concerns, which are thereon transposed into closer narratological readings...