The Angel of Ferrara Benjamin Woolley Goldsmith’s College, University of London Submitted for the degree of PhD I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own Benjamin Woolley Date: 1st October, 2014 Abstract This thesis comprises two parts: an extract of The Angel of Ferrara, a historical novel, and a critical component entitled What is history doing in Fiction? The novel is set in Ferrara in February, 1579, an Italian city at the height of its powers but deep in debt. Amid the aristocratic pomp and popular festivities surrounding the duke’s wedding to his third wife, the secret child of the city’s most celebrated singer goes missing. A street-smart debt collector and lovelorn bureaucrat are drawn into her increasingly desperate attempts to find her son, their efforts uncovering the brutal instruments of ostentation and domination that gave rise to what we now know as the Renaissance. In the critical component, I draw on the experience of writing The Angel of Ferrara and nonfiction works to explore the relationship between history and fiction. Beginning with a survey of the development of historical fiction since the inception of the genre’s modern form with the Walter Scott’s Waverley, I analyse the various paratextual interventions—prefaces, authors’ notes, acknowledgements—authors have used to explore and explain the use of factual research in their works. I draw on this to reflect in more detail at how research shaped the writing of the Angel of Ferrara and other recent historical novels, in particular Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I then examine the issue from the opposite perspective: the use of fictional devices in history, considering whether or not this compromises or enhances historical authority and validity. I end by critically examining the prevailing notion that the borderline between fiction and history has become blurred, arguing that, while each influences the other, the distinction is one of type rather than degree. Contents THE ANGEL OF FERRARA - A NOVEL .............................................................................................. 5 DAY ONE .............................................................................................................................................................. 6 DAY TWO .......................................................................................................................................................... 13 DAY THREE ...................................................................................................................................................... 47 DAY FOUR ......................................................................................................................................................... 68 DAY FIVE ........................................................................................................................................................... 81 DAY SIX ............................................................................................................................................................105 DAY SEVEN .....................................................................................................................................................129 DAY EIGHT .....................................................................................................................................................186 DAY NINE ........................................................................................................................................................224 WHAT IS HISTORY DOING IN FICTION? ................................................................................... 236 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................237 Historical Fiction ............................................................................................................................................ 238 Fictional History .............................................................................................................................................. 239 Fiction and History ........................................................................................................................................ 241 HISTORICAL FICTION .......................................................................................................................................244 FICTIONAL HISTORY ........................................................................................................................................287 FICTION AND HISTORY ....................................................................................................................................304 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................ 314 What is History doing in Fiction? A Practitioner’s Perspective What is History Doing in Fiction? Introduction When Vladimir Nabokov was up for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobson protested: ‘Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?’ (Boyd 1993: 303). The joke was revealing—literary culture is like the animal kingdom, writers part of its fauna, their acts to be observed by experts from a critical distance. What, then, can authors say about literature? Does their role in creating it give them any kind of privileged insight into its production? The Booker-Prize winning critic and novelists A. S. Byatt apparently thought not. ‘I have never taught “creative writing”,’ she declared in 2000. ‘I think I see teaching good reading as the best way of encouraging, and making possible, good writing.’ (Byatt 2000: 1) But when it comes to creating works that draw on scholarly research (in particular, historical research) as well as personal experience, imagination and literary connoisseurship, Byatt adjusts her view. While ‘it is customary for writer-academics to claim a kind of schizoid personality, and state that their research […] has nothing to do with their work as makers of fiction’, she thinks it is ‘dangerous to disintegrate’ in this way. Hence, in her lecture ‘True Stories and the Facts in Fiction’, she felt it productive to explain ‘the relations of precise scholarship and fiction’ by examining the choice and uses of the historical sources she drew upon in the writing of her short stories ‘Morpho Eugenia’ and ‘The Conjugial Angel’. (Byatt 2000: 92) This critical component of my PhD thesis follows her example. When it comes to knowing what and how ‘precise scholarship’ is used in a piece of creative writing, whether it is fiction or history, being a good reader is not enough. For this reason, the focus is on the practitioner: how writers combine history with fiction in the creation of their works. I will concentrate on mostly Anglophone authors who have influenced my own writing, and who in one way or another reveal the operations of historical research in the construction of their works. 237 What is History Doing in Fiction? The first chapter will consider the issue from the point of view of the novelist. I will look at my own experiences of writing the creative component of this thesis, and at the work of other historical novelists who have helped shape my own writing. The second chapter will switch to the historian’s perspective, looking at whether novelistic techniques such as storytelling and focalisation enhance or undermine historical authority. The conclusion will attempt to expose the similarities and the differences between the two forms of writing (historical and fictional) with the aim of finding out if the border between the two is really as porous as is sometimes assumed, and what this says about the role of history in fiction. Historical Fiction History and fiction in their modern forms have grown up together, but historians and philosophers of history, as well as literary critics, generally treat the mixing of the two with suspicion if not disdain. Yet, since Sir Walter Scott invented the modern form, the historical novel has thrived.* The first chapter will begin with an assessment of the genre, focusing on one of its defining features: the ‘paratext’, the prefaces, author notes or acknowledgements that signal a work’s historical credentials. I will survey how much and how little these paratexts tell us about the scholarship used, and what they reveal about the authors’ motives for drawing upon it, which range from filling the gaps in the historical record to bearing witness to lives neglected by posterity. I will then attempt to construct a comprehensive and candid paratext for the creative component of my PhD, the historical novel The Angel of Ferrara, examining in detail what, how and why history was used in the work. I will identify the sorts of sources I drew upon, noting their type and quality and the reasons for my selection. I will try to * Jane West seems to have given the genre its English name, in the title of her 1812 Civil War novel The Loyalists: An Historical Novel (see Hamnett 2011: 72), but most studies accept Scott’s primacy, starting with Hugh Walpole’s early critical history, published to commemorate the centenary of the author’s death (Fleishman 1972 p.xv). 238 What is History Doing in Fiction? follow the traces of these sources through the work, and consider their impact on the