About Historical Fantasy by Sandra Unerman
My new novel, Ghosts and Exiles is set in London in the 1930s. I describe it as a historical fantasy, which sometimes puzzles people who think of fantasy as a single tradition, consisting of The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and other epics set in invented worlds. These days, a much wider range of models is available for the fantasy writer, from alternative visions of our own world, like the Harry Potter series to science fantasy set on other planets. But there is also a much older tradition of stories with a realistic setting, where the fantasy happens in unnoticed cracks in the world as we understand it. Some of my favourite novels are in this tradition, including Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes. In this story about an unmarried Englishwoman of the 1920s, the fantastical elements are so understated, it’s possible to wonder whether it all happens in the protagonist’s mind. But the evocation of character and atmosphere provide a strong sense of the weird and of strangeness under the surface of everyday life. Lolly Willowes was written in the 1920s, so it was not set in the past, but it is an example of what fantasy can achieve in a realistic setting. Another great example is Still She Wished for Company by Margaret Irwin, a timeslip novel, which moves between the 18th century and the 1920s.
I enjoy reading epic fantasy but I’m not inspired to write one. I have set some short stories in invented worlds but these are explorations of particular moments of drama, not designed to open up wider questions about society or the environment. I can’t think of a new variation on the hero’s journey, male or female. War and political rivalry, whether in the shape of aristocratic feuds or the class struggle are powerful themes but they don’t spark my imagination as a writer. Instead, I am intrigued by the choices faced by ordinary people as they try to add meaning to their lives. Setting such moments in a fantasy context makes it possible to explore psychological and social truths at a more playful but also perhaps at a deeper level than in realistic fiction.
I have thought about setting a fantasy novel of that kind in the present. But this would require just as much world building as any other setting, to express my version of what life is like for my characters. In some ways, it would be more restrictive, because I would be afraid of getting things wrong, outside the limits of my personal experience. I could do research, of course, but that would feel more intrusive than research into the past and I would worry more about the inevitable mistakes. More fundamentally, a contemporary setting would not allow me to exercise my imagination in the same way as writing about the past. This isn’t nostalgia: I wouldn’t want to live in a time before modern medicine and modern attitudes to woman. But I have always believed that it’s only possible to understand the present by learning about history. There is, of course, a long-standing contrast between the assumption that people in the past were fundamentally just like us and the belief that they made different assumptions about the world and cared about different things. I think both are true and the tension between them opens up interesting possibilities for the kind of stories I want to write.
Ghosts and Exiles follows on from my novel Spellhaven and looks at what happens to the families who came to London after the downfall of that city. I never studied the 1930s formally, partly because when I was at school, the period would have been considered too recent to count as history. I was introduced to it through some of my favourite detective stories, by Dorothy L Sayers, Josephine Tey and others and, at a more sombre level, by reading about the build-up to the Second World War. Attitudes to women, work and marriage were changing in interesting ways in those days and people were still struggling to come to terms with the impact of the First World War. This all provides the right background for the story I wanted to tell, of a group of adults and children who face an intrusion of ghosts and dangerous magic, while dealing with uncertain beliefs and longings for an unattainable past.
Find out more about Sandra Unerman’s new novel here
Read Sandra Unerman’s earlier post for the Guest Blog here
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