What historical fiction is
A historical novel is a work of fiction whose principal action takes place in a past the author did not personally inhabit. Margaret Atwood’s working test is useful: if the story is set before the writer came to consciousness, it is historical. Publishers often use a simpler ruler — fifty years before publication — which is why the 1970s are now a historical setting and the 1990s soon will be.
Setting is not enough. A book set in 1848 that could, with a change of hats, be set in 2024 is a contemporary novel in fancy dress. The era must alter what is possible: who may speak, who may inherit, who may leave, who may live. Research is the means; constraint is the point.
The genre holds both the supermarket wartime bestseller and the Booker-winning court chronicle. That breadth is a gift and a hazard. You must still choose a shelf. How to position the book depends on which room of the house you are actually writing in.
Who it is written for
“Everyone who likes history” is not a market. Historical fiction is bought, in the main, by adult readers — disproportionately women — who want to be transported and morally implicated at once. Age-banding matters because it changes word count, viewpoint age, and the heat and violence a publisher will accept.
Adult (the core market)
Eighteen and up on the copyright page; in practice the buyers are often women between thirty and seventy. They come for immersion, moral pressure, and a world that feels researched without being lectured. This is where Ken Follett, Kristin Hannah, Hilary Mantel and Kate Quinn sit.
Young adult (12–18)
A teenage protagonist, coming-of-age stakes, and a tighter word count. History is the vice that squeezes the adolescent — war, prejudice, a forced marriage, a hidden identity. Think Ruta Sepetys, Elizabeth Wein, Laurie Halse Anderson.
Middle grade (8–12)
Shorter, cleaner, and emotionally bounded. The past must be legible to a child without flattening it into a lesson. Number the Stars, The War That Saved My Life, Goodnight Mister Tom: danger is real, but the reader is held.
Cross-over exists — Sepetys is read in schools and in adult book clubs — but you still write toward one primary reader. Agents ask “who is this for?” on page one of the pitch, and they mean it.
Popular sub-genres
Sub-genre is the fine print of the contract: tone, heat, body count, and which promises you must keep. A dual-timeline wartime mystery is not a failure of purity; it is a stack of promises. Keep all of them, or cut the ones you cannot.
Wartime & occupation
The Second World War still dominates the charts, with the Home Front, Resistance and Holocaust-adjacent stories close behind. Earlier wars (Napoleonic, Civil War, Great War) have devoted but smaller rooms.
Historical romance
The largest commercial cousin. Regency and Victorian remain the engines; medieval, Tudor, Western and mid-century all sell when the love story is the spine and the era supplies the obstacles.
Biographical historical
A real life, novelised — queens, artists, scientists, the woman beside the famous man. The risk is the Wikipedia novel; the reward is a private room the archive never recorded.
Dual timeline
A present-day investigator (a letter, a house, a secret) braided with a past narrative. Hugely popular with book clubs. Both strands must be novels, not a frame and a lecture.
Mystery & crime in period
From C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake to the wartime spy novel. The puzzle must be solvable with the forensics of the day — no DNA, no CCTV — and the social order is part of the locked room.
Family saga & epic
Decades or centuries, often a house, a trade or a bloodline. Pillars of the Earth, Pachinko, the century novel. Scale is the product; the unit of drama is still one person in a room.
Ancient, medieval & mythic
Rome, Egypt, the Norse world, Arthur, the classical retelling (Miller, Haynes, Barker). Sources are thinner; atmosphere and scholarship have to do more work.
Historical fantasy & alternate history
Magic or a forked timeline laid over a real century — Jonathan Strange, The Underground Railroad, Fatherland. The historical grain still has to be true, or the speculation has nothing to push against.
Common tropes — and how not to be owned by them
Tropes are ingredients, not sins. Readers of historical fiction come for a handful of them the way mystery readers come for a body. The work is to make the familiar feel inevitable in this century, for this person.
The letter, diary or hidden room
A document that should not have survived. Use it as a spark, not as a substitute for scenes.
The woman who will not keep her place
Beloved, and overused. She still needs a historically possible lever — money, skill, a male ally, a loophole in the law — not modern slogans.
The war-scarred man
Silence, drink, a limp, a rank he no longer holds. Give him a present-tense want, not only a past-tense wound.
The marriage market
Property, jointure, reputation. In romance this is the engine; in literary historical it is the trap.
The outsider in the palace
Servant, Jew, colonial subject, governess, translator. Access with no power — a superb point of view if you respect the cost.
The real event as a ticking clock
A coronation, a massacre, a voyage, a trial. Readers who know the date will feel the dread; readers who do not still need a human deadline.
The dual identity
Passing, spying, a false name, a hidden faith. Identity is plot in any century where the wrong name can hang you.
The house that remembers
Estate, tenement, convent, ship. Place as character is almost a requirement of the genre — if the rooms are generic, the century will be too.
When you know the room you are in, the next questions are practical: how long the book should be, how to begin the research without drowning, and how to keep a reader who already knows the king will die. That is the craft studio.