Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike L
I agree with your about Robert Goddard, but I'm not sure that I'd class Jane Austen or Cholotte Bronte as historical fiction - more like fiction that was written a long time ago.
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So at least we know they are authentic and well researched.
But I guess you're right, that is a valid distinction - although we may want to ask the OP whether they meant
Historical fiction or
historical fiction (if you see what I mean).
To me there is nothing like the "being there" sense you get from reading Dickens, Austen, Wells ... (pick your author), to give you a sense of the time and place. It may not have been written as Historical fiction but that is what it has become (and just think of all the contemporary writers who will become part of a new genre as time passes).
I love that the books written long ago take me some pages to adjust to the writing - the adjustment is part of the transport. Sure I think Goddard is a wonderful author, and sure I enjoy some of Michener and some others, but the experience is quite different to reading those authors that lived in that time. Personally I consider H.G.Wells novels to be historical now (they barely qualify as the science fiction they were written as originally) because they transport me to a time when not just the language, but their very way of thinking, was subtly different to what it is today.