The Best Historical Fiction Set in the 18th Century

What drew you to writing historical fiction set in the 18th century?

I’m not sure it was the time period, but a particular story—the story of a midwife in 1700s Maine who delivered over 1000 babies over the course of her career and never lost a mother in childbirth. I remember thinking that it would make an incredible novel. I stumbled across the story that became my book The Frozen River when I was pregnant with my fourth son, so I was very much in the world of pregnancy and childbirth, and was astonished that a woman who lived such a long time ago could have such an extraordinary track record. But I didn’t begin writing it for thirteen more years.

Is it difficult to get inside the minds of people who lived such a long time ago? How do you approach that?

Everything I wrote before The Frozen River was set in the early 20th century—1917 to 1945, roughly—and it is easier to tell a story when your main character lived within 100 years of yourself. I did find it very challenging to go so far back in time, because it’s easy in historical fiction to bog yourself down. You can try to get the details so right that you bury your story in the minutiae of that world.

But it helps to remember that they are just people, and people don’t change; we all want the same things. If you’re a woman in the world, it means you’re struggling with the same things that every woman before you has struggled with.

Once I realised that this was just a mother, a woman who had been married for a long time, and a woman who had dedicated herself to serving the women in her community, I began to hear her voice and to move forward.

Yes, I can imagine it is very easy to get lost in the research. How do you balance that kind of historical homework with planning a plot?

For this story in particular, I was concerned that it was set so far back in time that people wouldn’t want to read it. You wouldn’t believe the number of times readers have told me that they ‘don’t want to read a story that doesn’t have electricity.’

That’s a surprising distinction.

It’s a strange, arbitrary rule. But I was aware that this is a point at which many readers become uncomfortable. So then it becomes my job to make them forget I’ve moved them several hundred years into the past. If you’re telling a story that took place a long time ago, you still have to make people feel that the world is real.

The ‘world building’ in historical fiction is, I think, equivalent to that of science fiction or fantasy. You’re dealing with different rules. You’re dealing with horses and carts and wagons—and candles, as opposed to walking into rooms and flipping on a light switch. So I’m always looking for the brush strokes that make it feel real. A few things the imagination can catch onto, but not so many that we go three pages describing how to row a boat. It’s a balance.

The first book you’ve selected takes a very literal approach to the idea of travelling back in time. Can you tell us about Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, which has been adapted into a very popular television show?

I love this book. I have no idea how it’s interpreted in the wider world; all I know is that the first time I read it, I fell in love with a country, not just the characters.  Jamie and Claire have this incredible love story, there’s time travel, there’s war—there’s a lot going on in this story. There’s even a murder mystery buried at the heart of it. But she gave me a window into a world I’d never been able to witness. I read it so long ago, but it stuck. And of course, she’s written many sequels since then.

I watched a couple of the first episodes of the television show, and I loved them and thought they did a great job. But I had to step away, because I felt like I was sharing this thing that I loved—that was personal to me—with the world. When I fall in love with a book, I feel like it’s mine, like I don’t want to share it or see another person’s interpretation of it. So I haven’t seen a lot of the show, but I think that the novel is a masterwork of how to transport a reader to a previous time, and to make them care about the world those characters inhabit.

I read that book decades ago, and I still think about Jamie and Claire. It’s a love story for the ages.

Two of the books that you’ve chosen to recommend, including Outlander, have an element of time travel or time slippage. I wonder if that device helps the anxious reader you described, the reader who is intimidated by the idea of historical fiction—because you can see yourself and contemporary culture reflected in one of the main characters.

Yes. Time travel gives us a willing suspension of disbelief. You’ve been picked up, you’ve been transported. Establishing that up front with the reader, I think, helps them overcome their hesitation, because it feels fantastical. It’s a little bit of magical realism that helps them make the transition in their minds.

The second book you wanted to recommend is Susanna Kearsley’s historical novel The Vanished Days, which is also set in 18th-century Scotland—a period of great political upheaval.

Susanna Kearsley is one of my favourite authors. She’s Canadian. But she has had a lifelong fascination with Scotland, particularly the Jacobite era, and specifically one family that really existed, the Graeme family, which appears in most of her books, if not all.

This particular story, The Vanished Days, is about a young widow called Lily, who is trying to claim her husband’s portion of money from the failed Darien expedition, and a man named Adam who has been sent to investigate Lily’s claims. Adam and Lily have a history, and as you move through the story, you don’t know who is telling the truth and what their motives are. As you go back and forth between their perspectives—and back and forth in time, from the late 1600s to the early 1700s—you have this mystery that builds and grows. You want to know what their relationship is, what she’s hiding, and what he’s hiding from the people who have sent him.

Again, it all takes place in a beautiful, lush Scottish setting. It unfolds from the Highlands all the way down to Edinburgh, and it builds and grows with the scenery of the story. You can tell that Susanna Kearsley loves this country, its history, and its people.

I’ve always felt that my job as a writer of historical fiction is to make my readers really care about the people that I’m writing about—especially because all my characters so far have been real people—and Susanna accomplishes that. She pulls you in, gives you this amazing setting and people you care about, and throws you head-first into their lives. It becomes this wonderful, immersive experience.

Every time she has a new novel come out, I go and buy it and read it immediately. I’ve loved them all.

You mentioned that you often write about real people from history. Does that give you a sense of added responsibility?

Yes. I didn’t set out to write novels about real people and events. It just happened that way. My first novel was based on real people, then my publisher wanted another one. You know how it goes—you get inspired, you find ideas everywhere.

So, thus far, all my characters have been real. But it’s intimidating. You want to portray their lives accurately, but you are a novelist telling a story, and no one’s life is recorded perfectly in its entirety. We have dates, events, maybe letters or autobiographies. But we don’t ever get to know what was said behind closed doors, or what people’s motives and intentions were. So we have to fill in the gaps.

I like to find my stories in the gaps between the facts. And then, at the end, in the author’s note, I do my best to ‘fess up to anything that I don’t know, made up, or had to rearrange for the sake of the story. Because there does come a point, usually when I’m about 75% done with a novel, where I have to give myself permission to say: This is a novel. Some of this is real, some of it is not, but I’m telling you a story.

Let’s talk about the third historical novel you’d like to recommend. This is The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, set in Georgian high society.

I have a fondness for stories about orphans, and this particular one is about a young woman whose name is Red. She’s never known her mother. Her father dies when she is very young, and she is given into the care of an English gentleman. She’s raised as a lady in Bath, England, and early in her adult years she discovers a document that describes a fortune-telling method called ‘the Square of Sevens,’ something that her father was in possession of and worked very hard to make sure she had access to. The story is Red trying to figure out what this is and how it works. She’s trying to figure out why people are trying to steal it, and her friends and loved ones begin dying around her as these elements close in.

It’s a really wonderful mystery within a puzzle. Who were her parents, her mother in particular? How did her parents come to be guardians of this very specific fortune-telling device? What is she going to do with it now that she’s the caretaker of it?

It’s a really fun romp, a love story, and a coming-of-age novel that gives you a really interesting look into Georgian society in England in the 1700s.

Interesting. I enjoy Georgian comedies of manners, like Pride and Prejudice. Although I think that’s set somewhat later, around the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

When I put together my list of books, it was revelatory to me. I realised how few books are set in the 18th century, particularly 18th-century America. If I look at my shelves, I have hundreds of historical novels. Many of them are set in the 1600s, many in the 1800s. Countless books are set during World War Two. But for some reason, fewer in the 1700s, and in 1700s America, almost nothing. It was an in-between time in our history. We had the Revolutionary War, when we gained independence from England. Most of the fiction we do have is set then. But almost nothing else.

It got me thinking that perhaps that’s why The Frozen River was so difficult to write. It was an odd, in-between time in American history.

Next you wanted to recommend Upon a Starlit Tide by Kell Woods. It’s described as a work of ‘historical fantasy.’

Kell Woods is an Australian author who I’d never read before. Upon a Starlit Tide is really fun. I don’t know if I’d call it full fantasy, it’s more like magical realism. It takes place in 1750s Brittany, and it’s a delightful mash-up of the Cinderella story and The Little Mermaid.

Again, it’s the story of an orphan girl who is adopted into a very wealthy family. She’s the youngest of three sisters, and their father is a shipbuilder. The story begins the morning after a terrible storm, when a sailor has been washed onto shore. Technically, he’s off-shore and she swims out to rescue him. That sets into motion this entire series of events where she begins to question who she is and where she came from, and what secrets her parents aren’t telling her.

Then you have this delightful conflict with the step-sisters—or in this case, the adoptive sisters—and all their rivalries and tensions. There’s a delightful love triangle as well. You’ve got Lucinda, the young woman at the heart of the story, the sailor she’s just rescued, and then a privateer she’s been friends with for most of her life. And, of course, you have the occasional fantastical being that is just there in the story as if that is the most normal, logical thing in the world—to have a conversation with a garden fairy.

I loved this book. It reminded me why fantasy novels are my comfort food. When I want to escape and just block out the world, I will pick up something like a historical fantasy. She did such a great job of blending these fairy tales.

That’s interesting. I’m not very familiar with it as a sub-genre or hybrid genre. But I can see how there might be a link between fantasy and characters living in more superstitious times.

If you are going to blend genres, I actually think that historical fiction and fantasy are a perfect match. They work so well together. You already have to do all the world-building, you’re already asking your reader to step outside everything that they are familiar with. So putting them together is natural. I think that’s why Game of Thrones did so well.

I think Game of Thrones was very loosely based on the English Wars of the Roses. With added dragons, obviously.

It’s historical and fantastical at the same time. There’s a part of us that just wants to be taken away. We want the battles, the epic love stories, the rivalries, the conflicts between good and evil. It’s a winning combination.

Your final book recommendation is The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V.E. Schwab. I think this also has fantastical elements?

It does, a little bit of magical realism. This is quite different from the others I’m recommending.

It begins in 1714 France, but half the story is told in the present day, while the young woman we know as Addie LaRue tries to find her place in the world. The gist of the story is that Addie was born in the 1700s, was about to be married off in an unwilling way, but made a deal with the devil. She’s never going to die, but the price she pays is that no one will ever remember her.

She takes the deal because it gets her out of a terrible situation, but then she proceeds to pay for it dearly for 300 years. So it’s a story of loneliness—who you are when you cannot form a relationship over time. It’s the story of memory—who you are when you meet the same people over and over, but it’s like they are meeting you for the first time. And then, of course, it’s a story about legacy—who you are when there’s nothing to be remembered.

But my favourite parts of this story are the historical elements. We see Addie navigating 300 years in time: what she has to do to survive as she navigates an ever-changing world around her. I thought it was so clever, so creative. I think it’s one of the best premises I’ve come across in the last ten years. I loved reading it.

Have you always loved historical novels?

I realised quite late that I had always loved history and learning. One of my favourite quotes is from Rudyard Kipling, that “if history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” A good history lesson is just a good story.

So, I’ve always loved to write, I’ve always loved history, and at some point I realised that writing historical fiction allowed me to fill in the gaps in my own education. No one gets through their education having learned everything. For me, I have an ongoing opportunity to plug those holes.

I’ve written about the jazz era in New York City. I got to write a novel set on the last flight of the Hindenburg. I got to write about the Romanovs during the Russian Revolution. I’ve written two novels set during World War Two, one in France and the other in the Philippines. Now I’ve written about post-Revolutionary War America, and I’m currently working in medieval Ireland. So it becomes the world’s best kind of homework, the kind I want to do.