Creating Authenticity to Foreground Women's Experience in Historical Fiction

Bryony Stocker (2012: 309) posits three methods of writing ‘authentic’ dialogue in historical fiction: ‘immersion, hybridisation and reader guidance’. The technique of ‘immersion’ creates its effects by incorporating a combination of contemporary informal language structures and contextual references. The language structures give the dialogue accessibility and verisimilitude; the inclusion of historical detail serves to signify authenticity to the reader. Following on from Stocker’s work, this paper discusses the use of ‘immersion’ and ‘hybridisation’ in a first-person narrative voice. It examines the use of first-person narrative voice as a device for creating authenticity in Hannah Kent’s novel, Devotion (2021), and my own novel, The Last Music Keeper of Venice (2024). I will explore the primacy of interiority in endorsing the ‘authority’ of the subject through first-person narrative voice as a direct address to the reader. This will be followed by a discussion within a feminist context of the devices of developing a powerful awareness and depiction of the narrator’s physical body, delineating the self as separate from others and adding depth to the narratorial self. I will finish with a discussion of the motif of women’s archives as a metaphor for the broader feminist historical (fiction) project of returning women to the historical narrative.