Don't know much about history

Image by Ylanite Koppens from PixabayThe main characters in The Changeling Tree series, Rose, Alison and Margaret disagree about whether, as a time-traveller, it's possible to change history, and one of the challenges of writing historical fiction is that readers may expect historical accuracy. The problem is that strict adherence to what can actually be documented to have happened leaves no scope at all for making things up. Another approach is to build a story around historical facts but to fill in the gaps with invented dialogue and events. For my historical fiction, the history is a background, and I try to get it right, but more or less everything in the foreground is made up. If I need to take liberties with historical and geographical reality to make my stories work, I do.

For example, The Changeling Tree series depends on an fictionalised version of Leicester, in which the area around what's now Western Park, off Hinckley Rd, continued in use as agricultural and forested land into the twentieth century. That allowed me to isolate Agnes Lightborne's cottage in a small patch of undeveloped ancient forest surrounded by fields. By the time Margaret inherited it, housing developments were encroaching on the fields and by the time Rose was born, there was just a small wood (called a spinney in this part of the world) among the houses. When Rose was sent back to her gran's at the beginning of The Changeling Tree, all that remained of the ancient forest were the trees in Margaret's garden.

There is an area called Dane Hills in Leicester and there's also a Spinney Hills Rd. I've requisitioned those names for slightly different areas just because they fitted with the story I was telling and with my fictional history for those areas, though I appreciate that this is likely to irritate and confuse people who know better. 

The Leicestershire Asylum is now called the Fielding Johnson Building and belongs to the University of Leicester. It closed as an asylum in 1908, but I've chosen to keep it functioning into the 1950s as a haven for Agnes's brother Harry in The Time Before. Matron has a clear view, from her office in the Asylum, of the war memorial in Victoria Park because the later university buildings haven't been built. Anyone who's worked in the Attenborough Tower may agree that this wouldn't have been such a bad thing.

In general, if any of the historical or geographical details in the series are jarring, it's better to do your own research than to assume that what I've written is in any way reliable. If you know that I've got something wrong, my excuse is that it's fiction and I'm just making stuff up here.