Creating Cromwell: an analysis of the historical novel’s position and potentiality through a study of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy

This article considers the role historical novels can play in representing the past, and to what extent (and how) such fiction can both challenge and enhance historiography. Focusing on Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, it looks at how a novelist can use literary techniques, imaginative reconstruction of gaps in the historical record, and alternative interpretation of existing historiography (including primary sources) to radically alter our perception of the past; and indeed whether as a genre it may be able to do so more effectively than traditional (academic) historiography. In doing so, it traces the development of critical theory on the historical novel from Georg Lukács through postmodern critics such as Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon, to the recent work of Rosario Arias and Elodie Rousselot. Acknowledging the subjectivity and unreliability of ‘history’ (often presented as fact or ‘the past’) it argues for a blurring of the line between historiography and historical fiction, concluding that at least some historical novels should be granted admission to the field of historiography. The first steps towards this have been taken in the gradual acceptance of narrative history as subjective and just as incapable of ever truly representing the past as any other form of writing. It is to be hoped that there might be a similar acceptance of the historical novel’s ability to represent the past (albeit differently), to imaginatively reconstruct pasts that might have been. Rather than an inferior form, sharply delineated from ‘history’, might historical novels form a rich addition to a historiography considered as a spectrum rather than an exclusive and excluding discipline?