Genre

Historical Fiction

The Novel and Its Forms

A genre setting invented characters and plots against real events, real historical figures or a documented past, using the fiction to dramatize what a chronicle can only report. Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), published anonymously and set during the 1745 Jacobite rising, is the genre's most influential founding text and lent its name, the Waverley Novels, to the string of historical novels Scott wrote across Scottish and English history over the following two decades; he did not publicly confirm his own authorship until 1827. Whether Waverley is truly the form's starting point is itself argued rather than settled; see the dissent on this entry.

The description itself, Scott and Waverley (1814), is well documented; what is genuinely debated among literary historians is whether Waverley is the genre's true starting point or whether an earlier work, notably Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves (1678), has the better claim. See the dissent on this entry.

Facts

Place of Origin

Scotland; Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) is the genre's most influential founding text and lent its name to the Waverley Novels, though see the dissent on this entry's own description for an earlier rival candidate. 1

Notable Example

Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958). 1

Defining Trait

Sets invented characters and plots against real events, real historical figures or a documented past, using the fiction to dramatize what a chronicle can only report. 1

Defining Trait

Setting and World 2

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The Novel Scott Was Ashamed to Sign

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Walter Scott was already one of Britain's most famous poets when Waverley appeared in 1814, and he published his first novel with no name on the title page at all. The book, set in and around the failed Jacobite rising of 1745, sold well enough to demand a second printing within weeks, yet Scott kept up the anonymity for thirteen more years, continuing to publish an entire shelf of novels, the Waverley Novels, under the same blank byline, 'by the author of Waverley,' rather than his own name. He gave no single reason on the record; biographers point to a poet's reluctance to be seen slumming in prose fiction, still a genre with less prestige than verse, and to a taste for the game of public guessing itself, which ran for over a decade before Scott confirmed what most literary London already suspected. The anonymity did nothing to slow the genre he had, whether he signed it or not, effectively founded.

Whose Novel Came First

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Call Waverley the first historical novel and a French comparatist will ask about Madame de Lafayette. La Princesse de Cleves, published anonymously in 1678, sets an invented love story inside the documented court of Henri II a full century before its own composition, naming real courtiers and real political intrigues around its fictional heroine, which is exactly the historical novel's defining move a hundred and thirty-six years before Scott. The usual answer favoring Scott is not that Lafayette failed to do the same thing first, but that Waverley did it at greater scale, with a fuller apparatus of documented battles, dialect and social detail, and did it as the deliberate opening move of an entire program Scott then pursued across two decades of novels, where Lafayette's single book had no immediate genre of imitators behind it. Whether that difference in scale and consequence is enough to make one book a genre's true origin and the other a precedent nobody built on is a real disagreement among literary historians, not a settled fact this entry can flatten into one name.

FAQs

How old must the events be for a novel to count as historical fiction?

Definitions differ; the Historical Novel Society requires works written at least fifty years after the events.

There is no single agreed answer, because definitions differ as to what constitutes a historical novel. The Historical Novel Society, for one, defines the genre as works written at least fifty years after the events described.

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