What Writers Owe To Historical Fiction

Alix Christie interviews Andrea Barrett about “Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction.”

OVER THE COURSE of her illustrious writing career, Andrea Barrett has excelled at extracting human drama from the seemingly dry material of the scientific past. The subjects of her novels and stories range across 19th-century Arctic exploration; contemporary family dynamics; the theories of Darwin, Linnaeus, and Mendel; the American military presence in Russia after World War II; and scores of other episodes in the history of our efforts to understand ourselves and the natural world. Some literary critics have identified a divide between Barrett’s first four “contemporary” novels and the later historical fictions for which she has been widely acclaimed. Yet all of her work examines the intertwined helix of imagination and intellectual pursuit. From the astronomy of her debut novel Lucid Stars (1988) to the excursions into entomology and fossils in her latest collection Natural History (2022), scientific exploration offers an overarching metaphor for the quest to understand the cosmos and humanity’s place in it. As Barrett told The Paris Review 22 years ago, her writing career, too, has been an evolutionary process. Over time, she came to trust her “ability to bring alive characters from other times and places, who were interested and involved in things beyond the narrow confines of my life experience.”

I met Andrea Barrett in 1998. She was a visiting professor at Saint Mary’s College of California, where I was working on my MFA in fiction. At the time, I had no inkling that I would eventually follow in her footsteps, writing fiction based on historical facts and long-dead people. All I knew was that, fresh off winning a National Book Award for Ship Fever (1996), Barrett was a luminary—a status that has only grown over the past 25 years, which have brought with them six novels, four story collections, dozens of essays, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

I was therefore overjoyed to learn of her new book, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction. Here at last, I thought, was a meditation from one of its leading practitioners on this peculiar species of fiction set in the past that has never sat very comfortably under the label “historical fiction.” How does Barrett create characters who “live in history” rather than stand before it as a backdrop? In the seven essays that make up Dust and Light, the writer discusses the differences between history, biography, and what she calls “literary historical fiction,” as well as the ways her own work differs from what might be considered its more “commercial” counterparts. As the late, great Hilary Mantel once observed about the death of Anne Boleyn in her Wolf Hall Trilogy (2009–20), “the historian will look back and tell you what happened, but I will walk with you with the characters who don’t know the end of the road and help you imagine how it felt to live those terrible few days.”

Barrett is a master of this immersive art. Her tales are as absorbing and enthralling as those of the models she cites—including Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Colm Tóibín, and others. In Dust and Light, she teases apart her own idiosyncratic process for the benefit of readers and writers alike, describing the particular alchemy of fact and fiction that can bring a distant era to blazing life. We corresponded in early February 2025.

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ALIX CHRISTIE: The title of your new collection refers to dust, a metaphor you repurpose from a 19th-century scientist to refer to the material out of which stories are fashioned: the outward, visible events and characters. Is what this “dust” refracts—the deeper concerns of any story—also the “light” of the title?

ANDREA BARRETT: It is! As long as that also includes the thoughts and emotions aroused in the reader by the story’s formal concerns and techniques. The ways rhythm, structure, diction, image, tone—everything we can do with language—affect us subconsciously.

You describe your work as “literary historical fiction.” Exceptional practitioners of this form include Toni Morrison, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Hilary Mantel. What differentiates these works of literature from the broad genre of historical fiction that includes romance, thriller, and adventure?

This is very blunt, but, ideally, “literary” historical fiction partakes of all the resources of any literary fiction—in contrast to some romances, thrillers, or adventure stories rooted in history, in which the elements of plot and action dominate everything else, including character and language. 

Today, as you note in the book, we have a veritable “banquet” of excellent stories set in the past, far more than one might have imagined a decade ago. Why do you think this is?

Maybe it’s partly the way all writers build on the work of those who come before them? In addition to the many I mention in the book, 20 or 30 years ago some wonderful writers gave us examples to build on. Think, for example, of Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool (which was published in 1986 and set in 1889); Ron Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (1991; set in 1906); Jim Shepard’s Nosferatu (1998; a fictional life of F. W. Murnau, who died in 1931); and Margot Livesey’s Eva Moves the Furniture (2001), which begins in 1920. 

What do you love about looking back? Do you see any fundamental difference between fictions set in the past and those set in the present—some things the former can do that the latter can’t?

I loved history enough that I did a stint in a graduate program when I was in my early twenties; my first clue as to what I might actually want to do came when I started a play about a schism in the Franciscan order in the late 13th century, rather than working on my thesis proposal. The fictions I’ve written since then, set in both the past and the present, feel the same to me in terms of what they try to do.

Most writers of historical fiction immerse themselves in research. Yet at the same time, you write that “facts can’t drive a piece.” Why, then, do we spend so much time soaking up all we can learn about a given time and place?

This probably differs for everyone, but for me, all that “wasted” time is in service of trying to immerse myself so thoroughly in my characters’ physical and intellectual worlds that I can try to write from inside their experience. 

How important to you is it that the history you relate is accurate?

I do try to get the facts right, if I can establish them. If an actual character was known to have visited an actual place on an actual date, to have been born or died in a certain place at a certain time or married a certain person, I won’t alter that. Other writers do—some will change the dates of major political events, the lifespans of historical characters, and so on—and with good reason. But that makes me queasy. I think my own sketchy, early education made me realize that for some of us, what we read in a historical novel might be all we’ll ever know about a particular period or event. On the other hand, that hesitation keeps me from writing the fun kinds of alternate or speculative historical fictions that I sometimes enjoy reading.

What is the most important thing you need to know about your characters, for all of these facts to be “dissolved fully into fiction”?

What they love—not who, but what. How does the world look to them? What moves them? What are they most drawn to? What do they want to learn about? What excites them?

Have you ever been accosted by a descendant of someone you’ve written about?

Never. Although now I will worry about it …

You describe your own research and writing process as “odd,” inefficient, even crazy—months and years of amassing information with no clear idea of where you’re going. What do you tell your students about this approach versus other more linear ways of working?

That it doesn’t matter how you work, how odd your methods might look to someone else: if your method works for you, accept it and embrace it. Get over comparing the way you think you should work with the way you do work. Just work.

How, in this mass of historical detail, do you “discover” a story you want to tell? 

Oof. If I knew that, I expect I would have written many more books.

Historical fiction can create a kind of “double vision,” in which both writer and reader bring contemporary understanding to historical events. How do you do this without falling into anachronism?

It helps if we’re aware, as we write each line and scene, of the possibilities of that double vision. Ideally, we want to leave little touchstones that make that leap possible for a reader—without them being visible or imposing contemporary understanding onto past events.

“Exploration” is a guiding metaphor: allowing yourself, like the Arctic explorers, to be carried along by the current. How much do you think real writing requires us to relinquish control?

If we don’t relinquish control at some point, nothing real gets on the page. We’re left with simple imitation or an exercise in pure will, neither very satisfying. 

Hilary Mantel deplored the fact that journalists constantly asked about parallels with today, maintaining that her work was “not simply a coded or disguised way to talk about the contemporary situation.” Are you asked that as well?

I do get asked that, and I never know what to say. I’m not doing that any more than someone writing a contemporary novel is talking about a contemporary situation. We’re not talking about anything—that’s journalism, or history. We’re making a form of art, which operates in a different way and plays by different rules. 

In the essay in the book called “The Sea of Information,” you describe how the attacks on 9/11 derailed your ability to work for some time. How well are you able to write now, given the political instability of the moment?

I can’t write at all, just now. I’ll probably stop being so fixated on the news at some point, but these days I’m mostly just steaming with anxiety and sadness.

Can you tell us what you are working on now?

Trying to understand what’s happening in our country. Does that count as work? 

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Featured image: Photo of Andrea Barrett by Barry Goldstein.