In her powerful poem “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo”, Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska remarks on the limitation of history: “History rounds off skeletons to zero. / A thousand and one is still only a thousand.” Where history ends, fiction begins. It falls to writers to tell the stories of those uncounted individuals, to question conventional understanding of what has come before us, to fill in the gaps and silences of a vanishing world, to show what might have happened or what nearly didn’t.

Historical fiction is an intriguing hybrid of fact and fiction. Set in the past and usually involving historical events and personages, this genre inevitably demands some reckoning with what remains in the archival records. Yet it is, first and foremost, a work of literature requiring a leap of imagination and creativity. For plot development or dramatic purposes, events may be concertinaed, settings relocated, gaps fictionalised, interactions embellished, dialogues invented. When historical records and fictional narratives are seamlessly blended, the line between reality and fantasy can become ambiguous. This refined skill in storytelling gives rise to anxiety among historians, who are concerned that literary representations of history could be mistaken as true and reliable accounts of the times. Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning historical novels, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, for example, are wrongly taken by some as a factual depiction of the Tudor period. In one of her BBC Reith Lectures, Mantel contends that while history is many things, it is not the past. “History, and science too, help us put our small lives in context,” she pronounces. “But if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art.”

Hilary Mantel’s novels are neither the first nor the last to influence the way people view certain historic events or figures. The novel Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, for instance, has allegedly shaped the popular perception of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. This raises an interesting question. Do novelists have a duty to deliver an accurate account of the history they present in their work? Stephanie Merritt, a literary critic and the author of a popular historical thriller series, clearly thinks not. She declares, “A novelist has no real duty to anything except the story he or she is creating, the characters who inhabit it and whatever view of the world he or she is offering with the novel’s ending.” Indeed, if historical adherence were the only criterion that mattered, one could only imagine the bleakness of a world without Shakespeare’s history plays, Homer’s Iliad, Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms (《三國演義》) and a whole raft of other beloved classics. However, maintaining a reasonable degree of fidelity to historical facts is a necessity of the genre. The setting, characters, dialogues, as well as political and social atmosphere—all of these aspects must ring true in order to achieve a sense of realism, which is the key to immersing readers in the alternative reality of the novel. Anachronisms and errors, such as characters with modern sensibilities, may snap readers out of their reading trance. The most satisfying works of historical fiction are often those meticulously researched and skilfully crafted in a way that strikes a delicate balance between hard facts and wild fancy.

When it comes to the blurring of fact and fiction, the reader has as much responsibility as the author, if not more. When we are mesmerised by the illusory world constructed by the author, it is always helpful to remember that fiction, historical or not, is fiction. There is no better way to pay tribute to a great novel than investigating the real history behind the story. To many readers, historical fiction is a stepping stone to reading non-fiction accounts and biographies. For example, Janet Lewis’s The Wife of Martin Guerre is based on a real-life case in the 16th century. Readers who are enthralled by the impossible moral dilemma of Bertrande, the fictional heroine, would probably want to read historian Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre to find out what befell the real Bertrande. History and historical fiction, therefore, are not necessarily mutually exclusive; they complement one another.

History is ultimately driven by desires, fears, expectations and hopes—the very essence of humanity. Through historical fiction, we are treated to a glimpse of the private and human moments, and the inner lives of those who have shaped the world we live in today. Historical fiction at its best gives sense and meaning to the chaos of history, allowing us to see the present more clearly and reflect on how we have or have not changed. Pablo Picasso says it best: “Art is a lie that makes us realise truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.”