So look at what Mantel has done here.
She's taken some words spoken by Anne Boleyn that we know about only from
Kingston's letter written on the day of her execution, I have a little neck.
And created a harrowing moment of recognition and pathos.
And notice that it's Cromwell, Mantel's viewpoint character,
who has this exchange with Boleyn in the novel.
Not Kingston, who actually reports it in the historical letter.
This heightens the immediacy
of the exchange of course.
But it also takes real lib-, liberties with
the archival source on which the scene is based.
Mantel's retelling of this historical moment, imagines
that Anne has spoken about her little neck
on previous occasions, and that she said
it in the hearing of her viewpoint character.
But notice how Mantel protects herself brilliantly against the charge of
inaccuracy by having Kingston say she keeps doing that, creating the fiction
that she' s done it previously.
And thus that Cromwell could have heard her doing it.
And not only that, but Mantel inserts a simile that takes
Anne's historical gesture and turns it into the stuff of horror.
She steps back, puts her hand around her throat.
Like a strangler she closes them around her own flesh.
Like a strangler.
The simile tells you everything you need to
know about how great historical fiction works with the
archive, honoring the historical contract it draws with the reader.
Yet always flirting with the boundaries of the plausible.
So this one example shows us how an author can remain faithful to a
historical source, while also using it as
a point of departure for speculation and invention.
More broadly, one of the most forewarning ways we can begin
to interpret historical fiction, comes from
that awareness of the primary sources.
The particular archives
that authors are drawing from as they put together their narratives.
The translation of the archive into the pages of fiction
is one of the biggest challenges of writing historical fiction.
And as I hope you'll discover, one of
the great pleasures in interpreting and understanding it.