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Edgar
Allen Poe and Barbara Cartland: Could
there be any two writers with less in common? As a child, when everyone
else was reading books about babysitting clubs and young love, I was
plowing through the entire works of these two authors. (Eventually I
gave up on Cartland, who published 723 books before her death.) I loved
these two writers because they took me to different places and times,
without asking me to leave the galaxy, like some other writers might. I
loved Poe because he showed me that normal-looking people could still
be crazy (a fact that most children already deeply suspect), and I
loved Cartland because she saw that everyone longs for one great epic
love.
For me, the escape into story
with these two writers was complete,
and yet the farther away from home they led me, the closer each brought
me back to the fundamental truths about the human condition. Both
writers, in his and her own crazed and fervent ways, introduced me to a
different time and place, and gave me characters who were nothing like
myself. And in the midst of all this foreign material, I saw my own
intimate fears and desires played out and played upon. In the pages of
these long-ago stories, I felt an immediacy, a great sigh of relief, as
if all my secrets rushed out into the open whenever I turned the cover.
This is the promise of
historical fiction. Readers can shrug away
the burdens of ever-changing technology and complicated family
dynamics. Traveling back in time allows us to strip away the noise and
confusion of our own age and listen closely to the unchanging problems
and passions native to the human heart. Instead of focusing on how our
lives are different from the characters’ lives, we search restlessly
for the ways we are alike. And sometimes, when we find those beautiful
duplications, we find renewed strength to return to our own lives.
Never was this lesson so clear
to me as when I met a young reader at
a recent signing. Soft-spoken, with delicate features hidden by long
feathers of wispy blond hair, this young woman confessed that she had
an ulterior motive for reading my books. She was a single mom, she
explained, who had lost the love of her life to an affair.
Broken-hearted and alone, she struggled to raise her daughter with
strength and wisdom. “I read your books,” she said, “because maybe if I
read about great women from the past, I can learn how to be a great
woman myself.”
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This
precious reader, so wounded by life and
love, needed a story that gave her an escape, restored her courage, but
most important, she needed a story that did the delicate work of
mending her broken heart from a distance. Her wounds were too raw and
too painful to read a story with settings similar to her own. The power
of story, which is grace made plain, worked best when she could see it
happening to another woman far, far away.
That’s why I write historical
fiction, and that’s why I read it
still. I’ve discovered many more incredible writers since my childhood
love of Poe and Cartland; I don’t even mind leaving the galaxy once in
a while now. I’ve developed a taste for trolls and a fondness for
mysteries, but only because I know that somewhere back on the shelves,
another writer waits, one who will lead me deep into the past to find
the grace made plain for the present.
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