I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm a historian in my own mind.
I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
We've all faced the charge that our novels are history lite, and to some extent, that's true. Yet for some, historical fiction is a way into reading history proper.
I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.
I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way.
It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.
Oh no, I'm not a historian or anything like that.
I am a historian. I do a lot of research, and I try to get it right.