Historical Anachronisms in Romance: or, Why Historical Romance is the Only Place You’ll Find Dukes With All Their Teeth
When does historical accuracy go too far, and how often is it gatekeeping? Author Elizabeth Everett discusses historical anachronisms in romance.
History is dirty.
That’s fine for the most part. I don’t mind dirt, and I’m a huge fan of historical dirtbags.
However, when I am reading a romance, I don’t want dirty. Unless it’s dirty talk, of course.
Hence the conundrum.
Historical anachronisms are part and parcel of historical romance for many reasons, dirt among them. Most historical romance authors strive for historical “accuracy” (inasmuch as anyone can lay claim to historical accuracy without having lived through the period), but they are writing for a modern audience and a modern audience has a baseline tolerance for hygiene that far exceeds normal standards in the 1700s and 1800s.
Accuracy smacuracy—you’re never going to sell a romance about an octogenarian gouty duke with wooden teeth and a bi-weekly bathing schedule. Not to mention, there were only around 27 real-life dukes in Regency England which cancels out half the romances on the shelves since romance authors have populated the British Isles with 7,000 (sweet-smelling) sexy dukes.
Where then does an author draw the line between fiction and history? And must they?
These days historical accuracy is a third rail in historical fiction. For some, it is the entire point of the genre. Why else would they do the tremendous amount of research and why else would readers turn to historical fiction to better understand the world?
For others, historical accuracy is a gatekeeping term. A distressingly large amount of prejudice is disguised as literary criticism. It dismisses works of fiction centering BIPOC or LGBTQ+ people as wishful thinking rather than scholarship or simply “wokeism” run amok, ignoring the work of an increasingly diverse pool of historians and the ever-widening scope of their scholarship.
Rather than historical accuracy, I would call this “historical hegemony.” This sort of criticism won’t allow happily ever afters for queer folk, and has no room for Black queens or Brown aristocrats.
History, we all know, is written from a point of view. I would go so far as to say that history becomes fiction the moment a pen touched paper to record an event. A white European historian’s record of the colonization of North America by interlopers (wait, wasn’t North America “discovered”?!) is a different rendition of history than a native historian’s record of what happened when the Europeans showed up.
Aside from the obvious anachronisms that serve as running jokes in historical romance (Teeth! Hair! Bathing!) the gatekeeping group finds a slew of admirable character traits to be suspect.
For example, there is much dissent against the notion that men could be feminists in the 1800s. One of my favorite two-star reviews was from a reader who complained of my heavy-handedness with the “feminist malarky.” Undeniably, women were at a legal and social disadvantage to men—and still are—but in the historical records we find the writings of men such as Frederick Douglass and H.L. Menken who echoed the sentiment found in the poet Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Broad Axe.” It describes an ideal world as one “where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men, where they enter the public assembly and take places the same as the men.”
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I’m not interested in writing heroes who must be convinced that women are as intelligent as men. I find such characters unappealing and the opposite of romantic. Is it anachronistic to portray a gentleman, earl, or secret agent hero with enough humanity and humility to treat an educated woman with admiration and respect rather than with derision or disgust?
Another complaint is that any reexamination of history’s villains is anachronistic. Everyone knows Richard III was a humpbacked, ugly schemer, with a Napoleon complex (just as everyone knows Napoleon had a complex) because hello, Shakespeare? To suggest alternative interpretations of his actions is heresy, based not on modern scholarship but on outdated tradition and unsustainable biases.
Is it an anachronism to introduce audiences to heroes and heroines who once were omitted completely from the historical romance genre?
In my opinion, it is far more important when you are reading a period romance to ask if the author has given you a believable physical, social, and cultural context in which these characters play out their lives. Do you walk away from their work with a desire to learn more about the period? Has the book widened or changed your perspective on groups with which you were unfamiliar in this age? Black, Brown, queer, neurodiverse, and physically challenged men and women existed then just as they exist now—can you see them set in that historical period, and are they living full lives?
This is how I want to write and what I want to read. I’ll be looking for the same when I review historical fiction. I will no longer use the phrases “historical accuracy” or “historical anachronism” in my book reviews. I’m not convinced this criticism is completely free of prejudice and I’m trying hard to unlearn some of my own.
So, bring on the young sexy dukes with their minty fresh breath and the feminist malarky. I’m here for it all.
Elizabeth Everett lives in upstate New York with her family. She likes going for long walks or (very) short runs to nearby sites that figure prominently in the history of civil rights and women's suffrage. Her series is inspired by her admiration for rule breakers and belief in the power of love to change the world.
