How Historical Fiction Does What History Textbooks Do Not

Fiction has a critical role to play in showing the perspective of women and marginalized groups, as well. Our point of view may have been silenced in the official historical record, but we can mine diaries, letters, and newspaper archives to find stories of everyday women like us. We can discover the real human cost of history in ways that textbooks cannot, and that so much non-fiction does not. The challenge lies in going deeper than many of these personal records allow to poke at the ashes of burnt letters and journals that dared show anything other than the morally upright narrative assigned to women, to dig beneath the social norms of the day and see the rough edges that have been sanded away by myth. We were there. We were human and flawed. We contributed. Our perspective matters.

Source: How Historical Fiction Does What History Textbooks Do Not