1066 and all that: historical novels rule!

My old battered copy. Set in the Late Roman Empire when the Empire was starting to break apart. 

Lately, I've taken to reading historical novels again. 
   My motives are twofold. First, to revisit my girlhood. My mother was a keen devotee of historical novels and passed this liking on to me. Some of the novels we read were factual, others more fanciful. 
    Before there was ever Hilary Mantel or Phillipa Gregory there was Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt and Phillipa Carr. Actually these were all the same person, an English writer named Eleanor Hibbert.     As Jean Plaidy, she wrote fact-based novels, often about royalty in general and English queens and princesses in particular. As Victoria Holt she wrote what might be called Cornish Victorian Gothic. Many of these had heroines who were governesses or companions or orphans or poor relations in large spooky houses with enigmatic masters/heroes, sort of Jane Eyre-ish. As Phillipa Carr she wrote fictionalised history again, but this time about ordinary women rather than royalty. The "Daughters of England" series took readers through English history using the same family down the centuries. 
     There were other authors too; Mary Campbell Barnes "My lady of Cleves" and "Brief gaudy hour" and Margaret Irwin's "Young Bess", and of course, Catherine Cookson, though I never really took to her; a bit too much "trouble at' Mill" for me, with their downtrodden characters and grim settings. As a younger child, I'd loved Rosemary Sutcliffe's novels of Dark Age Britain, so Mary Stewart's wonderful series about Merlin and Arthur, which started with "The Crystal Cave" were a continuation of that historical thread, one of those "take me away" books that you live in for a time and feel lost without when you finish. 

You can visit so many places and times...Renaissance Venice...

....or Theodora's Constantinople, for example.

     And this is the second reason why I have returned to reading historical fiction. With the world in the way it is, it's strangely comforting to reflect that this is the way the world has always been. Other demagogues built walls to keep out barbarians, and the gap between the haves and have-nots was always a gaping one.  
      Historical fiction is a wonderful time-machine; you can visit the past without having to experience the smells and the filth and the cruelty first-hand, and if you get sick of it, just close the book and you're back in your own house in your own time, with carpet and heating and plumbing and modern medicine. Perfect escapism.