The Journal of Historical Fictions
published by the Historical Fictions Research Network
Volume 6, Issue 2: “‘Impeccably Researched’: How the present information revolution is changing (my) Australian historical fiction” by Kim Swivel (Macquarie University), pp. 67-91, 2025.
DOI forthcoming
Abstract: Today, writers of historical fiction can research as they have never done before. A plethora of resources exist online, from the National Library of Australia’s Trove databases to countless articles by history enthusiasts and experts alike. At the same time, readers of historical fiction can check the facts of novels and often judge authors on their research. This new and developing shared research space between readers and writers is challenging the authority novelists have traditionally assumed over historical fact in their work. This is occurring even though readers do not usually understand the way authors play with facts to achieve the effect of authenticity, fill gaps in the historical record or fulfil readers’ expectations. However, historical fiction author and scholar Melissa Addey (2021) has questioned the emphasis placed on and expectation of factual accuracy altogether, asking if it unbalances our appreciation for the creative ‘playframes’ in which writers work with facts. Recent scholarship, such as Stephanie Russo’s The Anachronistic Turn: Historical Fiction, Drama, Film and Television (2024), has noted the trend towards a playfulness with the past, as well as a forgoing of the goals of accuracy and authenticity. But there is at present little consideration of how ready access to historical information in the Digital Age might impact the narrative decisions of fiction writers. Using an autoethnographic approach, with this methodology’s particular focus on the ethics of research and representation of Others, I consider how my own practice as a historical novelist has changed over the course of my thirteen historical novels published between 2007 and 2023 – a period that spans the development of the iPhone, Amazon’s Kindle and all of the online research tools that have become indispensable today.
Keywords: online research, novel-writing, autoethnography, Australian historical fiction
“‘Impeccably Researched’: How the present information revolution is changing (my) Australian historical fiction
The idea that internet access to information has changed the way historical novelists gather research materials at first seems an obvious one. As a historical novelist myself[1], there is a happy challenge in discovering too much information about whatever subject I am researching, and so the internet has certainly provided unlimited joy in this respect. Across the last two decades of our current global information revolution, which have seen the rise of Google and social media, my basic historical fiction research enquiries have remained the same: how am I going to synthesise the facts I have found into my fiction? Which details will best enrich the historical sense of place or character but also make sense to the modern reader? Which social or political perspectives on this history might be interesting or meaningful for audiences today? But the possibilities contained in these questions have expanded dramatically with internet research, with the instant on-rush of journal articles and blogs from experts and enthusiasts, and with public access to online databases, archives and digitised museum collections. As an editor and reader generally involved in the historical fiction community in Australia, I am yet to hear an author say, ‘I wish we could go back to the old paper-trail ways of pre-internet research.’ Indeed, what is not to love about fast and easy access to knowledge?
This article seeks to explore not only the benefits but the possible disadvantages and challenges that may be emerging for historical novelists because of the current proliferation of digital information. Further, as readers of fiction now largely share the same access to online research materials, I will consider how this shared research space is affecting the relationship between novelists and readers. Through the lens of my own historical fiction writing practice, I will also consider how changes in the relationship between novelists and readers, as a product of the information revolution, might be affecting creative practice for historical novelists more generally. There is not a great deal of scholarly literature that attempts to define how creative writers of any genre transform research into fiction, partly because authors are often reluctant to share their processes with academics, and partly because authors cannot easily be studied as a group (Hosier 2024, 789). Even for historical novelists (who are often more inclined to discuss their research with readers in a space of shared enthusiasm), writing processes, narrative choices and research methods are ‘intensely personal’ (Polack 2016: 1), making generalisation difficult. As well, some scholars can be disinclined to take self-explicatory ‘author talk’ on the making of texts seriously because analysis of one’s own work can be difficult for others to examine critically (Hesse 2010, 33-4). I will attempt, then, to examine my own research and writing processes via the social scientific method of autoethnography.
A relatively new field, autoethnography combines autobiography (personal account) with ethnography (cultural experience) to discover new knowledge by self-reflexive enquiry and analysis of the researcher’s processes and findings (Ellis et al 2011, np). This method asks the scholarly researcher to examine their own work critically, to challenge their expertise (Lapadat 2017, 596), and to consider their power positionality and ethical responsibilities to the human participants or ‘informants’ of their research, particularly in areas of representation and appropriation of Others’ experiences (Dauphinee 2010, 799-818). At the same time, autoethnography requires researchers to understand themselves as research participants, whose revelations of the personal, of difficulties, internal dissonances and multiple truths, have value and meaning (Turner 2013, 213-27). This qualitative methodology is not designed to produce definitive conclusions, but to deepen understanding of problems or ideas, to challenge dominant discourses (Denzin 2003, 268), and to open the scholar’s research processes and vulnerabilities to scrutiny of the academy, and to invite further questions. Reflection upon one’s own creation of fiction, especially as it relates to the representation of Others is, of course, common to much creative writing scholarship. However, the fundamental question autoethnography asks of researchers, that we continually examine how we engage with the informants or human subjects of our research so that they are represented ethically (Lapadat 2017, 594), can be particularly challenging for historical novelists, whose human subjects often cannot be consulted beyond the traces of the lives they have left behind after death. Autoethnography, as a distinct field of enquiry, does not yet appear to have considered how historical novelists research their fiction, or how historical fiction scholars and practitioners might use this methodology to question their research expertise, and the relationships that exist between historical novelists and the human subjects of their texts, and between authors and readers.[2]
I am, therefore, autoethnographically examining my research and writing processes as historical novelist to show how the information revolution is changing my position as an ‘expert’ researcher in my field. What ethical problems of positionality, representation and appropriation of Others’ histories are created by my access to seemingly unlimited online research? How do I decide which or whose historical facts to include in my fiction when I have access to so much more of them? And if readers have the same access to information, how does their increased knowledge of history, or at least their assumed increase in knowledge, affect how and what historical fiction I research and write? Perhaps of broadest, critical importance here is the question: how might the internet revolution be changing conceptions and representations of the Other in historical fiction, if access to information about the past is making it seem less ‘other’, less alien, exotic or unknowable?
There is much research, of course, on how the world’s previous information revolutions – writing itself developing in the Bronze Age Middle East, and then the invention of the printing press in mid-fifteenth century Germany – transformed the communication of ideas and stories. Arguably, the past two decades of revolution in digital communications technology represent a similarly profound shift. The current revolution has not only transformed our day-to-day lives but our understanding of what constitutes a story, who can author stories, and the forms by which they are told, from electronic books to marketing memes (Weedon 2018, 47). It would be naïve to imagine that historical fiction, simply because it is concerned with communicating stories of the past, is not being in some sense transformed as well. The reason my own historical fiction is useful to this enquiry is that I began writing it twenty years ago, with the manuscript of my first novel, Black Diamonds, having been researched and written in 2004; it was published in May 2007, a few weeks before the first iPhone was released, and a few months before the first Amazon Kindle e-reader appeared. Since then, my novel-writing has spanned thirteen published works that are either historical fictions or involve a significant historical element. They are all set predominantly in Australia, most of them in the early-to-mid twentieth century; this country and period are of particular interest to me because I am Australian and because I am curious about what my late grandparents, my oldest personal links to lived history, experienced of Australia. Jerome de Groot (2009) has suggested that historical novelists might tend to stay within the bounds of their national histories because of difficulties accessing information outside it, or because of language barriers or lack of confidence (95), but perhaps genuine fascination with one’s own origins can be important, too – Australia is, after all, a big, diverse country, geographically, ethnographically and in its myriad historical perspectives. Twentieth-century Australian history is also a period of enormous transformation itself, which includes the creation of a national entity from a British colonial one, two world wars, multiple streams of multicultural immigration, state-imposed racism, fast-changing fashions, social attitudes and conceptions of what it means to be Australian. If I am an expert at all on this place and time in history, and in weaving senses of it through fiction, it is because I continually return to them. And I do this as a novelist creating stories that might, through entertaining plots and engaging characters, connect the general reader to history, not as a scholar speaking largely to the academy about knowledge of history. But while my motivations for writing my specific kind of historical fiction have not changed, my approach to researching these novels, and the forms and quantity of research I can access, as well as the speed with which I can access them, have undoubtedly transformed with our present information revolution.
In 2004, when I was researching that first novel, Black Diamonds, most of the sources I used came from physical books. The story is set in the New South Wales coal-mining town of Lithgow during the years 1914-1920, involving a young married couple who experience the traumas of World War One at home and on the Western Front, and so I read every important book about this period I could find, from C.W. Bean’s twelve-volume The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (1921-1942) to Gavin Souter’s critical questioning of the colonial relationship between Britain and Australia in Lion and Kangaroo: The Initiation of Australia 1901-1919 (1976). For details of daily life, I read a plethora of social histories, biographies and memoirs, from professional and amateur writers, on a range of subjects: women, soldiers, coal miners. I also visited the town of Lithgow physically, to conduct observational, empirical research, walking through the landscapes and surviving early twentieth-century streetscapes. I would visit regional museums, too, where I could touch everyday objects used in the period. Firing a .303 rifle or feeling the weight of an old wooden washboard helped me to gain a sense of the lived realities of my characters. The research process was slow and limited by availability and proximity of sources. Because of these limitations, there was an almost unconscious acceptance that I could never get the past exactly right; and because my reading had shown me that history itself was not one immutable, unchallengeable narrative, I was aware that my interpretation of facts could never represent a complete or perfect truth. Today, I have digital access to scholarly articles and chapters about ‘fictional truth’ and the ‘speculative’ nature of fictionalising history to explain what I was doing (Rantala et al 2023, 1-7), but back in 2004 I would not have known where to find such literature, and most of it had not yet been written. I simply knew, as a practical fact, that the trickeries of fiction would need to be employed to convince the reader of the truths in the story and its world. For example, when I could not determine the precise location of Lithgow Post Office necessary for a particular scene, I deliberately blurred the geography so that the building could sit vaguely between the two possibilities that had been identified with the help of a local historian. The correct information might have been out there somewhere, but I would probably still be searching for it if I had to use old methods of trawling through physical files in the NSW State Archives Collection or manually searching microfiche films of newspaper columns for clues. There seemed little point in continuing to worry over these kinds of inconsequential details, because it seemed unlikely the general reading public would know or complain if I had made such a small error or fabrication. While novelists have always been contacted by readers keen to correct all manner of mistakes, perceived or real, such contact was not as frequent: in the mid-2000s, in my experience as author and editor, novelists were usually contacted by readers via their publisher or agent, and by email or letter, rather than in online spaces such as Goodreads (created in 2006), social media or author webpages, where communication is direct, instantaneous, often public, and achievable by any reader with an internet-connected device. And in terms of ethical considerations of authenticity and accuracy, of attempting to represent the lived experience of past Others (which is the research endeavour most relevant to this autoethnographic enquiry), perhaps there was a general understanding that precision was difficult, especially for novelists (like me) who were not professional historians, and especially concerning little-studied or written-about places – like Lithgow.
Today, however, publicly accessible online databases such as Trove, the National Library of Australia’s ever-expanding repository of government gazettes, newspapers, magazines, photos and more, have revolutionised historical research for novelists – and for historians (Kiem 2015, 26). Of course, such records were always accessible within the institutions that maintain them, and the onus on the novelist to check the veracity of all source material remains, but the difference and delight now is that information sought is often quickly found. The creative processes of crafting story, character and action need not necessarily be broken for lengthy and sometimes expensive research trips, or for the laborious and often distracting work of reading whole documents or books to capture small but culturally illuminating details of the lived realities of the past. Within moments, on my laptop, I can find the price of coal, the shoe styles of the day, domestic political tensions, real-time racism and sexism, and even what kind of sweets people enjoyed, anywhere in colonised Australia back to the early nineteenth-century. The Australian War Memorial, too, has a growing collection of digitised records, as well as a podcast, online military history magazine, and a catalogue of books and articles exploring historical diversity among Australia’s troops, including the service of First Nations and other non-white Australians – information that was not so easily discoverable twenty years ago. Trove was not launched until 2009, and the online records of the War Memorial that I could access were limited to embarkation lists, honour rolls of the dead and brief outlines of military events. Across the world, novelists can now conduct research via these kinds of databases. Google Books and Google Scholar appeared at the end of 2004, just as I completed my first manuscript, and while these globally accessible literature search engines were not useful for researching internationally obscure Australian mining towns then, over the ensuing years, these functions have become indispensable. Today, I can ask Google Scholar to search the terms ‘Lithgow, history, mining’ and pages of reliable peer-reviewed articles appear on everything from the region’s geological history to the origins of the trade union movement there, and the cultural inheritances of mining communities. Naturally, these gluts of information can be exciting fonts of discovery for historical novelists, but what they also mean for these writers, or at least for me, is that there is a great deal more culturally interesting or significant detail and analysis to sort through before historical facts can be turned into fiction.
The pitfall here is not so much that novelists might fall prey to online misinformation; although this has no doubt occurred, it can also reasonably be assumed that most serious historical novelists, engaged as they have always been with assessing what facts are most compelling or believable, have worked out by now that information obtained from non-expert websites must be crosschecked against a peer-reviewed or otherwise trusted source. The challenge, rather, involves how novelists choose between multiple interpretations of facts, when an internet search throws out dozens of articles and digitised book chapters on any one topic. For example, my present doctoral research and creative work involve the depiction of Jews in my family history, and on the subject of Jewish otherness alone there are many differing scholarly arguments, even as the facts themselves largely remain the same. Which position should I choose for my novel? Whose perspective should I take? The writing of history itself is complicated in this way; as Hayden White’s (1973) enduring theory states, history is a chronicle (or compilation) of facts arranged into a story that is emplotted and argued according to the ideological (or ethical) intentions of its author (5). As well, an author’s ideological intention is influenced by the time and place from which they write, and their relative power in relation to the people whose history they are telling. Obviously, Anglophone historical fiction has moved a long way, ideologically, from its beginnings as a popular genre with Walter Scott’s hyper-masculinist Ivanhoe (1819), in which women, Jews and other foreigners are auxiliary characters in a story about twelfth-century England and its rivalries among knights and nobles. Contemporary women historical novelists, for example, regardless of whether they are writing literary or popular forms of the genre, tend to take a female-focused view of the facts, foregrounding women’s experiences and female figures from the past (Wallace 2005, 1–24). An Australian First Nations historical novel, such as 2020 Miles Franklin Award winner The Yield by Tara June Winch (2019) or the romantic saga Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss (2021), will tend to have a post-colonial or decolonial, Indigenous focus, often bringing previously unrecorded cultural history to non-Indigenous readers. A queer historical novel, such as Australian author Nigel Featherstone’s literary romance, Bodies of Men (2019), situates gay experience in the context of World War Two and hyper-masculinist twentieth-century Australian culture. The historical perspectives of Australian novelists are excitingly and increasingly diverse. History being told about Australia is also increasingly diverse and intersectional. When I did not have access to such diversity of information and analysis, my ideological interests tended to concentrate on challenging the dominant narratives of twentieth-century white Australia, of world-war Anzackery[3]and Great Depression battlers, by exploring lived realities of more ‘ordinary’ white Australians – like me and those people of my own history. What has most significantly changed here is that a ‘quick’ search of the internet does not show me predominantly mainstream historical narratives anymore, but ones that mostly challenge those narratives, and from multiple cultural and ideological angles. The essays and chapters I am reading might well be twenty years old, or more, but I did not have such immediate access to them before, and not all at once. This means that now, when I am embarking on research for any new historical fiction, I find myself routinely querying which ideological tack I might take and, in the ethical sense of avoiding cultural missteps or appropriation and inadvertent misrepresentation of Others, which histories are mine to explore through fiction.
Autoethnographic enquiry requires that I attempt to define my own positionality here, and so does critical race theory on writing fiction about Others (LeClerc 2024, 290). But, for me, this is an area of some complexity, too. In brief, I am white and, therefore, among the most powerful or privileged of Australians, but behind my whiteness is a cultural mix of working-class Irish and German heritage, of Catholicism, Judaism, atheism, socialism, poverty, petty criminality and intergenerational mental illness. I am a cisgendered, straight-passing bisexual woman. I am, what my Irish grandmother called, a ‘bitzer’ – bits of this and bits of that. This sort of mixed background and identity is doubtless not unusual in a secular, multicultural country like Australia, but while it might seem to present a kaleidoscope of intersectional story possibilities, it does not entirely or neatly define what history I can or should tell in my historical fiction. Further complicating my choice of ideological focus is the problem of erasure of the histories of minoritised Others. For example, it no longer seems justifiable morally or intellectually to ignore First Nations peoples’ experience of colonialism in writing historical fiction about Australia, because it is no longer acceptable to ignore or minimise this history as foundational to understanding what Australia is. How do I include this important history without either culturally appropriating it (Griffiths, 2018, np) or presenting it reductively or tokenistically (Heiss 2014, np)? The problem deepens again when I consider, for the sake of creating a cohesive story, that I can only focus in depth on two or three areas of history. My most recent historical fiction, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (2023), explores historical experience of queer, white-privileged women in Sydney just post- World War One, in the context of finding new understandings and expressions of love after the devastations inflicted by Imperialist patriarchal violence. It was not the time or place to include exploration of colonialism, or any other ideas that did not authentically touch the consciousness of the characters in the story. Even still, I felt compelled to include one fleeting mention, from another less-privileged character, that Australia had never been anything but a violent place for Aboriginal people after colonisation (Kelly 2023, 72). It continues to worry me that this inclusion is too superficial and brief (as many other possible problems of misrepresentation in my own work continue to worry me), but at the same time, in ethical acknowledgement of a basic truth, it must be there. My research tells me, across numerous sources available within moments online, that Australian First Nations peoples’ experience of colonial violence has been and continues to be violent; this is a fact that cannot be ignored or omitted from the narrative’s chronicle. Identifying my limitations as a writer and at the same time continuing to try to write as ethically as I can remain in tension, but this tension also endlessly drives curiosity, which brings new knowledge – and an addiction to Google.
There is an acute desire in me (and many other historical novelists) to ‘get it right’ in this ethical sense, but is it even possible to represent the Other ‘right’? I have written historical characters who are plucked from my family history, enriched by lived cultural connection, sometimes lived experience, and always backed up with solid research, but I have never considered that any of my efforts are better than earnest attempts at faithful representation – never right. Getting it ‘wrong’ seems easier to define. As First Nations Creative Writing scholar Jeanine Leane has said, those who purport to write fictionally about Aboriginal experience without knowing Aboriginal people, their history and stories have indulged in ‘self-serving cultural appropriation’ (2016, np). The same could be said for any novelist who presumes to write the past of Others without conducting thorough cultural research well beyond histories that are written about them by an oppressive or ignorant power. Tresa LeClerc (2018, np) has shown a self-reflexive process of consultation with the Other in writing her own fiction, demonstrating that, at least in her own work, stories about the Other that are not written in consultation with those Others tend to follow dominant, oppressive narratives that misrepresent lived experience. Filipa Bellette (2013), has similarly interrogated her own whiteness, showing a recognition of and challenge to her own unconscious biases and racism with respect to writing African-Australian characters. Although Bellette and LeClerc do not use the term autoethnography to describe their process here, it closely resembles such, and they provide valuable examples of how exposing individual writing processes can pose important cultural questions about how otherness is represented in fiction. However, none of this scholarship deals with the long-dead historical Other, who cannot be consulted or provide feedback on our efforts to represent them. I can no longer consult my grandmother about the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic violence she experienced and witnessed in Sydney during World War One as a child, because she has been dead for almost forty years. There does not appear to be any Creative Writing scholarship, either, on the possibility that easy and unlimited online access to oceans of information about historical Others might lead to assumptions – not so much among scholars and novelists but among fiction readers – that ‘rightness’ of representation does in fact exist.
Today, the general reading public has access to most of the online research resources that novelists and scholars use. Readers of historical fiction can fact check or follow their historical curiosities beyond the pages of a novel as they have never been able to before. Even empirical research of walking the streets and landscapes of a place can now be shared: there is no need to travel to Lithgow to look at its Edwardian architecture or surrounding foothills when Google Maps Street View can do the job on your phone. Need to find examples of the popular hairstyles or hemlines for 1914? Rosary beads? Irish Republican posters? Ask Dr Google to show you some digitised photographs. There is seemingly no need to try to touch or experience a glimpse of the past itself as something other when the answers sought can be so easily found by computer search engines. An illusion of closeness to the facts of history is created here, but in effect the distance between the researcher and the past has widened. Looking at a photograph of a World War One era rifle or reading about its operation is not the same as firing this rifle yourself, because less mutable sensory details, such as the violent, bruising kick of the butt against your shoulder and the smell of linseed oil in its timber, are not accessible via images and text. Doubtless most historical novelists continue to undertake experiential research whenever they are able, as do I, because it enriches story and is enjoyable, but I have certainly increased my use of digital tools, and presumably other historical novelists have, too. I have used combinations of Google Maps and historical maps sourced online to reconstruct areas in places as diverse as London, Rabaul, Port Hedland and Berlin, because I could not afford to visit them physically, or justify such expense for one or two scenes. I have accessed online archival footage of the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge with no intention of challenging my fear of heights by going up there myself. Historical novelists have, however, always used a variety of research materials to inform their depictions human experiences of the past and tend to understand the imperfectness of their attempts to create verisimilitude from those materials. What is different now is that the reading public, via the general democratisation of information brought by the Digital Age, might now be more likely to assume they have a similar authority or expertise in interpreting historical research materials, when they do not.
Regardless of how historical novelists conduct their research, increasingly reader-researchers let them know when they think they have spotted a mistake in historical detail. Judging by reviews on the online book review sites like Goodreads, for some readers, critiquing a novelist’s research performance has become part of their reading experience. Such readers rarely show depth of understanding of the way historical facts are used by novelists, that there is a distinction between factual accuracy (based upon agreed historical evidence) and the way the authentic feel of a story (sometimes created from popularly accepted myths or preconceived notions about the past) might give the illusion of accuracy (Saxton 2020, 125-9), and so readers might not be aware if an author has actually made a mistake or presented facts that are unexpected or unusual. This goes to what has been called the ‘Tiffany problem’ by historical novelist Jo Walton (Russo 2024, 8), who described it in relation to readers’ disbelief that the modern-sounding name Tiffany is actually medieval. I encountered a similar disbelief from a reader of my first novel who did not accept that Australian and British soldiers of World War One might have used the word ‘fuck’ expletively or adjectivally, even though assurance of this could be found at the time via the well-regarded language resource, Online Etymology Dictionary; the reader had not seen this word appear in their own reading of World War One history, but had not considered the reason for this was that ‘fuck’ had been taboo in print until 1965 (Harper 2001–2025, np). Despite these kinds of misunderstandings, comments from readers claiming that a novel was ‘impeccably researched’ or ‘poorly researched’ or ‘full of anachronisms’ or ‘riddled with historical inaccuracies’ are commonplace on the internet. There is a Listopia page on Goodreads entitled ‘Most Inaccurate Historical Fiction’, which currently contains 105 novels covering a broad range of historical periods. Readers also regularly erupt in condemnation of white-privileged authors who make perceived cultural missteps. For example, US author Jeanine Cummins was widely accused of appropriating and misrepresenting contemporary Mexican culture in her internationally bestselling novel, American Dirt (2020). Barbara Kingsolver’s equally popular, Demon Copperhead (2022), a reimagining of Charles Dickens’ bildungsroman David Copperfield (1850), set in the 1990s among the entrenched poverty of the Appalachian Mountains of the United States, was variously criticised by readers for its exploitative appropriation of Appalachian culture, ‘poverty porn’, and white saviourism. Historical fiction that has been culturally criticised includes Kate Grenville’s internationally acclaimed novel of Australian colonial frontier violence, The Secret River (2005), for excluding or overwriting the experiences of Aboriginal people (Leane 2016, np); and Australian author Heather Morris’ internationally bestselling Holocaust romance, The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), has been deemed ‘devoid of documentary value’ because of its factual sloppiness (Witek-Malicka 2018, 7-17), and criticised for its trivialisation and appropriation of trauma (Schloss 2023, np). Important, meaningful cultural criticism of historical fiction tends to come mostly from the academic sphere or more formal reviews. With the exception of famously controversial historical novels, such as The Tattooist or The Secret River, which caused heated and polarised discussion in online forums, readers tend to nitpick at period details and incorrect words, dates or geography, rather than an author’s ideological choices in this genre. Perhaps this is because these kinds of details are the most easily accessible facts to check. Readers are possibly not as inclined to search through pages of Google Scholar looking for confirmation and curiosities as novelists are; and besides, scholarly literature can be dense and dull for those not engaged in this kind of research themselves. But perhaps readers also somehow intrinsically know that the people of the past are different kinds of Others, because we cannot ask them how things really were, and therefore, essential truths about their experiences remain elusive. Exploration of the differences between the way readers and writers respond to the idea of the historical Other is beyond the scope of this article, but it could be worth further investigation.
In any case, readers have, quite reasonably, always had an interest in and expectation of receiving well-researched, faithfully written historical novels. Jerome de Groot (2009) has argued that, while history is essentially ‘other’ and historical fiction is an enriched sense of that otherness – a narrative space we enter to experience something alien and yet familiar – facts matter in this genre for two basic reasons: the reader’s enjoyment of the story and the author’s authority to write it (1-10).
The novelist’s authority is often asserted via an author’s note explaining the novel’s research and intentions – as Scott did at length in Ivanhoe (1819) in an introduction, chapter notes and footnotes. Kate Grenville, at the back of The Secret River (2005), offers only two brief paragraphs, giving a rather standard explanation that some characters have some basis in fact but that all characters are fictitious, and that ‘countless’ but uncited documents were consulted in the writing of the novel (415); the following year, however, Grenville published an entire memoir explaining the research and her ideological intentions in Searching for the Secret River (2006). Authors’ demonstrations of research and intention are as individual as the novels themselves: Anita Heiss’ Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (2021) includes a glossary of Wiradjuri terms, a ‘Historical Note’ and resources section (377-89); Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) includes an ‘Author’s Note’, photographs, an afterword from the son of the man whose life the novel is based upon, additional biographical facts and a map of the concentration camp (261-71). Such paratextual material is designed to show the reader some proof that the author has conducted appropriate and adequate research, so that the reader can be assured that the history related is true. Authors are not necessarily asserting factual accuracy in these notes but are showing how they have attempted authenticity. To this end, an author might include a sense of their positionality to the historical Others of the novel here as well. For example, Grenville makes clear that in her rendering of Aboriginal history, she is not Aboriginal but has listened carefully to Dharug Elders; Heiss makes clear she is Wiradjuri, honouring her community through her work; and Morris makes clear she is not Jewish but has faithfully recorded the story of a Holocaust survivor. My own author notes usually contain some similar sense of positionality. While I cannot speak for other novelists’ motivations in this respect, what I think I am assuring the reader of here is that I have some sort of ethical authority to tell this story, rather than one based only upon the traditional authority of the historical novelist as interpreter and synthesiser of facts (De Groot 2009, 1-10), and that my attempts at authenticity, in terms of faithfully researching and representing Others, are likewise ethically sound. And the reason I do this is because inauthentic representation of Others, or such representation that are perceived to have been poorly researched in a cultural sense, can cause reader outrage.
It is unnerving to imagine making a mistake that might anger readers, and today these nerves, and author notes, reach beyond the page into the internet, as novelists are expected to repeat their explanations of themselves and their work, their inspirations and unique qualifications for writing this or that story on rounds of blog and podcast interviews each time they publish a new book. There is an intrusive scrutiny of and access to authors that simply did not exist before the internet. Readers can research not only the facts contained in novels but the novelists who write them. Even a relatively small, middlebrow historical novelist like me takes care to stick to the script. It is strangely alienating, perhaps a form of author-otherising that might be best explored outside of this essay, but what effect is this new and unsettling research relationship between readers and writers having on my fiction and my relationship with the historical Other?
To answer this question, it is useful first to further define what kind of historical fiction I write. It can be described as ‘realist’ (as can all the novels discussed so far), in that the history adheres to the generally accepted or known chronicle of facts (de Groot 2009, 111), and period details are created from contemporaneous primary sources; the characters, regardless of what facts have inspired them, are fictional – even those based on real people are inevitably fictionalised to some degree – but the things they do and what happens in the story occur plausibly within the historical setting and chronology. Arguably, most historical fiction is realist, and in most of these novels, the novelist finds gaps in what is factually known and imagines stories from within the essentially unknowable spaces of what was lived (de Groot 2009, 3). For the reader, these realist historical novels can be educatively serious or romantically escapist, or combinations thereof; they can be comfortingly nostalgic or challenge with new perspectives; they can bring the past close to ask us about now, or exoticise it so that we marvel at differences. Other contemporary forms of historical fiction, such as postmodernist, counterfactual and alternative historical fictions, reject or disrupt conceptions of known facts in order to challenge previously accepted narratives, and challenge the idea of history itself. A well-known example here is Philip Roth’s counterfactual history, The Plot Against America (2004), in which the United States in 1940 signs treaties with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, becoming, momentarily, an openly and officially antisemitic nation; by upsetting known historical facts, Roth shows how we are only ever an election away from a different world. There is much scholarship on novels that challenge history in this way (de Groot 2009, 109-138; Lewis 2011, 169-181), but while postmodernism rose to popularity in the 1980s alongside the advent of the personal computer, there does not appear to have been investigation into the effect of technology on how we understand, research or reconceptualise history, or write historical fiction. Perhaps, then, my autoethnographic enquiry into what is happening to my realist historical fiction might act as a starting point.
Recent scholarship from British historical fiction author Melissa Addey (2021), which questions the emphasis we place upon factual accuracy in this genre, has provoked new reflections for me. Addey argues that focusing primarily on the way novelists use historical facts unbalances our appreciation for what she has termed the creative ‘playframes’, or modes of fiction, in which writers work with those facts. Addey identifies three basic storytelling playframes authors employ. First, there is the rare Ventriloquist (423-5), who extensively reproduces historical fact to tell the story; an example of this is the Booker Prize shortlisted novel When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (2020), which has also been described as a ‘non-fiction novel’ (Banville 2020). Second, there is the Mosaic-Maker (425-8), who looks into those informational gaps or fragments in the historical record and fills them with fictional life; most historical novelists do this. But then there is the more inventive Magician (428-30), who relies on a supernatural or surreal element to take a reader into ideas and experiences of history. A famous example of the Magician mode occurs in Markus Zusak’s young adult historical adventure novel set in Nazi Germany, The Book Thief(2005), in that the story is narrated by a non-human character: Death. Of course, many authors employ a mix of these historical fiction approaches. But curiously, I have realised that, over time, my work has become more ‘magical’ in approach.
My first novel, Black Diamonds (2007), and the next four novels that followed, were all researched primarily in the old-fashioned way, although with increasing enthusiasm for Trove and Google Scholar. These novels contain no significant element of the supernatural beyond the forces of true love triumphing over hard times in Australian history. The most exotic, alien or Other aspect about these early novels is perhaps that the first was set in Lithgow.[4] But my sixth novel, Jewel Sea (2016), took a dramatically magical turn. Set amid the lucrative pearling trade of the early twentieth century, one of the narrators of this story is a cursed and sentient pearl who has the power to summon storms, and in the course of the story, this pearl becomes so enraged by capitalist colonialism, she sinks a luxurious steamer off the coast of Western Australia, taking its load of wealthy passengers to the bottom of the sea. It was, I had supposed, just an interesting experiment with semi-omniscient voice and perspective inspired by a mention of a cursed pearl in a history book (an actual physical book) about the real-life sinking of that steamer I was reading for pleasure – Annie Boyd’s Koombana Days (2014). I did not imagine the experiment with what I had thought was fantasy would be repeated. But more recently, this magical element has returned. My historical romance novella, The Rat Catcher (2022),involves a legendary, impossibly giant rat called Old Scratch who creates mayhem in Federation Sydney during an outbreak of the bubonic plague, in his own rampage against injustices inflicted upon the city’s poor. In fact, all of my current fictional works in progress, including the novel I am writing for my doctoral thesis, are similarly ‘magical’. Why am I doing this?
These magical elements, in line with Addey’s thinking (428), do not interfere with historical fact; they embellish it. Neither do these elements operate as fantasy; the angry pearl and the giant rat do not change the ordinary happenings of the world: a storm actually sinks the steamer, and common rats spread plague throughout Sydney. I am not writing anachronistically, either, in the sense of deliberately injecting contemporary ideas and details into historical settings, the way that, for example, the TV series Bridgerton rewrites and reforms racial strictures in an alternative version of early-nineteenth century Britain to liberate modern audiences from them (Russo 2024, 25-6). In Jewel Sea, the rich are still rich and in The Rat Catcher, the poor are still poor. Magical realism might describe how I incorporate the magical into the real world in a natural, uncontested way, but this term itself is perhaps too broad and lacking in clear definition (Warnes and Sasser 2020: 1). I am, I think, ‘repurposing’ my fiction in a neo-historical sense, breaking from accuracy of fact and authentic representation of the Other to communicate something specifically for readers today (Teo and Fresno-Calleja 2025, 15). The pearl represents all those who have been harmed by capitalist colonialism, and the giant rat represents all those who have been harmed by poverty. What is behind this shift in my writing, though?
Over a span of thirteen novels, it is probably inevitable that I would experiment in all kinds of ways. But in considering how the only major external change – unlimited and easy access to online research materials – might have affected my research and writing practice, three key answers have emerged.
First, unlimited research – and my happy embrace of it – has caused me to find dominant narratives repetitious, and therefore, uninspiring. Creatively, it now seems too mechanically easy to reproduce schemas that have been used thousands of times before – such as experiences of individual, ordinary World War One troops being used to show the destructive power of Empire. Even subgenres of historical fiction I should feel an affinity with in terms of my positionality, such as those focused on twentieth-century women’s experiences, are themselves becoming repetitive. In the Australian sphere of quality commercial women’s historical fiction, bestselling authors, such as Kelly Rimmer, Natasha Lester and Belinda Alexandra, are writing novels that share remarkably similar themes, voices and perspectives; their latest novels – Rimmer’s The Paris Agent (2023), Lester’s The Mademoiselle Network (2025), and Alexandra’s The Masterpiece (2024) – are all set during World War Two in France and involve women of uncommon courage and intelligence fighting Nazis. I continue to have no literary interest in writing stories that make no critical exploration of Australia. But I want to show the familiar Australia in a more alien, more ‘other’ way.
Second, I was becoming alienated within the research and writing process by ethical concerns over what stories about the historical Other I might tell. Magical play with narrative voice and character has, for me, stretched the boundaries of who might tell the stories I want to write and the ideologies they carry. If an angry pearl is commentating on Australian racism, who is going to argue with its right to do so? By speaking through a non-human character, can I say something more meaningful about our shared human history in this country? It feels like a deepening of ethical engagement on my part, but is it in effect a more ethical approach? Or is it another form of a white writer oppressively silencing Others’ voices, however inadvertently? Am I only crafting a mask to hide my whiteness? In an autoethnographic sense, these questions are not neatly answerable, but they challenge my expertise, keep me unsettled ideologically, and invite other scholars to consider and criticise.
Third, I want to unsettle the reader’s newly assumed shared authority and challenge the idea that the general reader of historical fiction is an appropriate judge of any author’s research, or their ‘right’ to tell a particular tale. No reader has ever seriously condemned my own research, or accusatorily questioned my positionality, but even a positive comment such as ‘impeccably researched’ is troubling because most readers have not done the work to know how well a novel might have been researched. As noted, readers are usually less experienced researchers, who are also probably more vulnerable to mistaking misinformation and myths about the past as truth. Preconceived ideas about the past, built not only from the play of facts within historical novels, but within films and TV shows (as well as unconscious gaps in reading history itself), can cause a reader to believe a novelist has made a mistake, too (Russo 2024, 8). Further, assumptions about an author’s positionality can lead to incorrect or unfair accusations of exploitative appropriation; for example, as furious debate raged about US author Jeanine Cummins’ appropriating Mexican experience, it became clear that she, as a white-identifying person, cares about the experiences of Latin American people generally because her grandmother is Puerto Rican (Kembrey 2020). Perhaps, in the context of digital democratisation of both information and communication, it could even be argued that readers who comment on novels online have, like other social media users, become content creators, rather than passive consumers, and that, therefore, their motives and knowledge are inherently difficult to assess (Tan et al, 2021, 190). I am attempting, then, to wrest back some authorial authority – both the traditional authority of the historical novelist in the discovery, interpretation and synthesis of facts, and the ethical authority to tell the stories about the historical Other I wish to tell – by making voice or character so ‘other’ that it is beyond the reader’s ability to research. Perhaps this is problematic, too, in that I am effectively attempting to silence the reader or avoid what might be fair judgement from them. But then, perhaps it is reasonable to expect readers to be more considered in their responses. Or perhaps this question itself is futile. Readers may interpret my research and positionality however they wish, no matter what tricks of fiction I employ. And if the future entails increased sharing of research spaces between writers and readers, and increased pressure on writers of commercial historical fiction to give readers what they desire, then the novelist’s authority might be irrevocably changing.
There is no conclusion and no end point to the questions I might ask to challenge my own understanding, and this present enquiry into researching and writing historical fiction is also in flux, because the information revolution that is effecting change continues to evolve. But ease of access to information and the illusion of closeness to the past it brings do seem to be prompting the magical or speculative turn in my historical fiction. Stephanie Russo (2024) has described the ‘anachronistic turn’ as the current moment in historical fiction in which storytellers deliberately inject the past with contemporary ideas and facts to speak to the issues and anxieties of today (6); perhaps I am playing with the facts in a similar way, but via an element that sits outside history’s chronicle. There is some evidence that other Australian novelists are also otherising or ‘magicalising’ their historical fictions. For example, Jock Serong, acclaimed author of Australian male-centred, action-packed realist crime and historical fiction, has taken a magical or speculative turn with his most recently published novel, Cherrywood (2024). A novel that defies neat genre categorisation, its central narrative vehicle is a surreally floating maybe-Edwardian pub that mysteriously moves around 1990s Melbourne and does so because its timbers once comprised a paddlesteamer, the Cherrywood. This near-sentient paddle-steamer-cum-pub is used to explore layers of Australian colonial history across the twentieth century and ask questions about the capitalist drivers of that colonialism that continue to haunt Australia today. The novel could be described as magical realism in its blending of fantasy and reality via a steady and compelling third-person voice, but what is interesting about it to me is that its Magician playframe uses a non-human, extratemporal entity, the Cherrywood, to carry its ideology. Another Australian author who has experimented with the Magician recently is poet, memoirist and otherwise-realist novelist Leah Kaminsky. Her historical novel, The Hollow Bones (2019), traces the life and cold-blooded self-interest of a Nazi zoologist, Ernst Schäfer, across the years of the Third Reich, but unusually, the story is interrupted by wistfully melancholy sections narrated by a present-day taxidermied baby panda (long-ago killed by Schäfer), who questions the unconscious cruelty and complicity of us all from her glass box in a museum. There is nothing ‘magical’ about Kaminsky’s panda, but she certainly enables a fresh view of fascism and hypocrisy. Both Kaminsky and Serong are using speculative playfulness in these novels not to question historical fact or time but to bring new light to the familiar – giving us an un-human view to help us see our complicated, messy humanity and history more clearly, and voices or entities we cannot refute because they are not human.
Serong has stated that he wrote Cherrywood because he ‘wanted to have fun’, to break free from the strictures of accuracy and ‘literal truth’ demanded by realist historical fiction and instead write the way experience ‘feels’ (Nichols 2024, np). He certainly creates a powerful ‘emotional authenticity’ (Russo 2024, 118) by this approach; as does Kaminsky, but beyond this, I do not know if these authors are reacting at all to the information revolution in using non-human perspectives. Such perspectives, of course, are not new to literature anyway, and have been employed in myriad ways for social commentary, from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Perhaps, at this moment inside the present revolution, the question of how and why the non-human is operating in historical fiction now that can only be answered novelist by novelist, and self-reflexively. But what I think is emerging from my enquiry is that historical worlds are not as unfamiliar as they once were, because of our ever-increasing access to facts, and because in certain popularly fictionalised historical worlds, such as the world wars or medieval Europe, repetitions of historical facts can give the illusion of familiarity. And if my historical novels are changing as a result, perhaps the work of other writers is too. No doubt the rise of artificial intelligence is going to accelerate these changes in the years ahead as well. Although exploration of AI’s effect on writing and researching historical fiction is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that recent developments here have been swift and concerning. Earlier this year, according to the Australian Society of Authors, thousands of Australian books (including six of my own) have allegedly been used by tech giant Meta to train its AI (Heath 2025, np). And in internet research, Google’s ‘AI Overview’ is now embedded at the top of search listings, so that the first information seen is generated by AI. While it will always remain that any source material needs to be checked for accuracy, AI Overview has so far regularly generated incorrect information in the course of my research – for example, in a search only days ago, telling me that Christina Stead, and not Ruth Park, is the author of The Harp in the South. Google currently provides a disclaimer that ‘Generative AI is a work in progress and info quality may vary’, but it is not displayed on the information AI Overview produces, and so inexperienced researchers may not know that such information is not to be trusted. Further, if, as some fear, the future may be largely authorless, at least in terms of production of information, news and more generic fiction, what will that mean for readers’ relationship to story and truth? It is impossible to know, but perhaps it is time, now, that we, as a reading and writing community, started asking all these kinds of questions.
Disclosure: As a freelance editor, Kim Swivel edited Jock Serong’s novel, Cherrywood, for HarperCollins Australia in 2023; she does not have an exclusive or professionally dependent relationship with this company.
Acknowledgements: I wish to express my deep gratitude for the generous advice and encouragement of Stephanie Russo and Hsu-Ming Teo in the development of this essay.
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[1] My fiction is published under the penname Kim Kelly.
[2] My Macquarie University Master of Research thesis, ‘Rescuing (My) Jews from Obscurity’, explores how autoethnography can be a research tool for exploring the ethics of storytelling where the characters of my historical fiction are based on members of my own family. Beyond this, at present, there is no other explicitly autoethnographic research on the writing of fiction.
[3] For non-Australian readers, ‘Anzackery’ is ‘the celebration and promotion of the Anzac legend [of Australian soldiers and military feats] in ways that are excessive and bordering on jingoism’ (Macquarie Dictionary 2003-, np).
[4] For non-Australian readers, Lithgow is an economically depressed coal town beyond the scenic Blue Mountains of New South Wales, which most Australians would not have visited despite its significant as an industrial hub during World War One.
Historical Fictions Research Network 