I’m posting a link to a talk I gave at Gladstone’s Library last year. I dislike the sound of my recorded voice intensely, so it has taken me more than a year to get up the courage to listen to this. And what a relief to discover that the first voice on the podcast was not my own, but the wonderful Louisa Yates, Director of Collections and Research, who introduced me.
https://player.fm/series/gladcast/the-historical-novel-a-very-slippery-genre-an-evening-with-writer-in-residence-rachel-malik
It’s a three part talk. The first part is a kind of Bibliomemoire where I talk about the role of historical narrative and detail in my childhood reading, including Jean Plaidy and Winston Graham’s Poldark series. The second part is a very brief history of the development of the historical novel in the 19th century and its impact on the novel form more generally. Part three is about a particular form of historical novel, the kind that tries to recover or reconstruct the history of those who are usually forgo