Historical Novels Set In the 1700s

What drew you, as a historical novelist, to the 1700s?

In my own school history lessons, and in a lot of the historical fiction I grew up reading, there was a huge amount of focus on the Tudor and Victorian periods—yet in between those well-trodden eras, the 18th century seemed to be a bit neglected. But there’s so much fascinating material there! Enlightenment, revolutions, the horrors of colonialism…

I became obsessed with the 1700s while writing about the ‘golden age’ of piracy in my first historical novel, Saltblood. When it was time for my next novel, I couldn’t bear to drag myself away. I felt that I’d spent so much time immersed in the 18th century, and done so much research—particularly into the nautical milieu of the period 1700s—that it would be a waste not to revisit that time.

It was actually while researching Saltblood that I first came across Alexander Selkirk, who became the basis of my next novel, Cast Away. Selkirk was the real-life Scottish sailor whose extraordinary survival on a remote island was the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk was rescued by Woodes Rogers, who features in Saltblood because he later went to the Bahamas and led the crackdown on the pirates.

Though I’d only encountered Selkirk in passing while researching that earlier novel, I couldn’t get him out of my mind. His story touches on so much of what makes the 18th century so fascinating: exploration, war, colonialism, and even the creation of arguably the first realist novel in English. Selkirk was irresistible as a subject.

Your first novel recommendation, Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, portrays Manhattan in the 1740s and channels an 18th-century voice. Would you tell us more?

In 1746, the mysterious Mr Smith arrives in New York like a grenade, and sets off a sequence of events that manage to be both endlessly surprising and absolutely inevitable. In Golden Hill, Spufford musters so many of the potent elements that make that period so fascinating: his portrait of a nascent Manhattan is a potent jostling of empire, race and class.

Golden Hill engages so knowingly and cleverly with history. It treads that very fine line of being postmodern, ironic and self-reflexive, but also somehow making us, as readers, care very deeply and sincerely about the characters and story. In this sense it reminded me a little of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White: each of these brilliant historical novels is simultaneously a pastiche of a certain kind of novel, and a beautifully sincere example of one.

Spufford’s writing has a tremendous vibrancy that captures the explosive energy of the New York of the time. And even though it’s a decade since I read Golden Hill, it contains a death scene so vividly realised that it still haunts me in its horrifyingly visceral details. The ending is gorgeously open-ended, and the various changes in the modes of narration serve to refresh the long narrative. And always, throughout, we’re guided by Spufford’s sharp-eyed intelligence and expansive imagination. It’s an absolutely masterful novel.

The next historical novel set in the 1700s that we are going to discuss is one of my favourite books of all time: Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. Would you introduce it to our readers?

By focusing principally on a few key figures from the French Revolution—Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins—Mantel manages to create an incredibly rich and epic tapestry that somehow encompasses both large-scale historical events, and intimate, personal insights into these figure’s childhoods, emotions and relationships. And given that many readers already know so much about how the revolution unfolded, it’s impressive that Mantel keeps us gripped, particularly given the novel’s vast size—during Covid lockdowns I used it as a makeshift yoga brick! Her conjuring of the period is utterly immersive; you emerge, blinking, into the present day, in awe at what Mantel has achieved.

Where do you see the border falling between historical biography and historical fiction about a real person or, in this case, real people?

This question becomes a lot more pressing from an ethical perspective when dealing with living people, or even with people with close relatives still living. When it comes to novels set centuries in the past, I’m less bothered about the ethics of it—I think readers are intelligent enough to understand that in fiction a writer will inevitably be filling in many gaps in the record. But I also think readers are discerning enough to appreciate when an author has done their research, and I do enjoy a good ‘author’s note’ at a novel’s end that offers some clarity about where the line lies between fact and fiction.

Yes, me too.

For my own historical novels, I do an enormous amount of research, and even when speculating I try never to include anything that could be ruled out by the historical record. And if you do your job properly, even the invented parts will be informed by all the research that you’ve done, and that should make them richer and more plausible. But I’ve also been lucky, or perhaps canny, in choosing historical figures about whom we know a little, but not too much. That’s the sweet spot where a novelist can play!

How did you approach the research for your new novel Cast Away?

I dived into all the usual things that you would expect from historical research: the accounts from his rescuers, particularly Woodes Rogers, who gives a fascinating account of the practical details of Selkirk’s survival on the island; historical maps; various other records from the archives, including details from the ‘kirk sessions’, the local Scots ecclesiastical courts, which showed that Selkirk was twice hauled up before these courts for wild behaviour in his youth.

But given the extreme and specific nature of Selkirk’s experience as a castaway, I also did a lot of experiential research. For example, I camped alone on a remote Tasmanian island for a week, and I learned how to cure and tan animal hides using traditional methods.

Wow.

This process is as disgusting as you might imagine. I maintain that these less traditional forms of research taught me as much about Selkirk as any number of historical documents.

I can see that. Your next recommendation is Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. It’s a historical novel that offers a rather different view of Paris in the 1700s. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a novel about perfume, where Süskind’s book excels is in its sensory evocation of the period. The protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, moves through the underbelly of mid-18th-century France, from Paris to Grasse, following the exquisite sense of smell that is his blessing and his curse. Scent is one of the senses that’s notoriously difficult to capture in words, yet Süskind manages it brilliantly, so that while we’re disgusted by Grenouille’s crimes, we also find ourselves viscerally caught up in his urges, becoming almost complicit.

The novel builds to a gory climax, a heightened sensory frenzy that you’ll never forget—however much you might wish to.

Next, you’ve chosen to recommend Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women. It follows the story of a woman born into slavery in Jamaica at the end of the 18th century. Would you tell us more?

James’ The Book of Night Women was an easy choice for this list because of its incredibly powerful narrative voice. Its narrator recounts the story of Lilith, born enslaved on the Montpelier Estate in Jamaica in the late 18th century. While Lilith’s suffering and resilience under slavery are innately compelling, what strikes the reader almost as much is the stunning language used to describe them. The novel is written in dialect, an arresting Jamaican patois that brings a freshness to every sentence. It’s a hugely difficult novel, because of the traumas that Lilith survives—but it feels urgent and true, and I recommend it to everyone.

Thank you. Your final recommendation of a historical novel set during the 1700s is Masqueraders, by Georgette Heyer. Tell us about it.

Heyer is best known for her novels set in the Regency Period, but she has a few set in the 18th century, and her writing is such a delight that I couldn’t resist including one. Masqueraders is a fantastically entertaining romp, with shades of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, as a pair of Jacobite twins, Robin and Prudence, cross dress in order to conceal their identities. It was published in 1928, so the usual disclaimers about outdated gender roles apply—there are lots of ‘masterful’ men, and dubious notions of consent—but despite this, the thread of potential queerness running through the whole novel makes its gender politics much more interesting than many such books. And the twins’ father is a truly memorable character—a glorious, maddening creature of pure ego. The archaic language that Heyer uses takes a bit of getting used to, but once you become accustomed to it, I defy you not to enjoy this absurd and witty novel.

Has spending so much time in an 18th-century mind changed the way you look at the world?

I think it’s made me more aware of the currents of power at work in the world. With hindsight we can look back at the 1700s and see very clearly the different forces at work—the expansion and consolidation of empires by European powers; the steady flow of wealth that they drained from their colonies; the resistance, uprisings and revolutions that were the inevitable result of various systems of oppression.

Because it was a naval age, you can trace these flows of wealth and power almost as clearly as the shipping routes that were so important then. I think, or perhaps hope, that being immersed in that era has made me more aware of how power and wealth still circulate – no longer by sail, but still discernible and still interconnected. And the history of the 18th century has taught me a lot about how resistance and resilience are just as necessary now as they were in the 1700s.