I much enjoyed Stephen Sedley's thoughtful review of my novel The Winding Stair.
Sedley suggests that Francis Bacon's handwritten memorandum "Reasons for the Remove of Coke" was not intended for King James I, since it lacks a formal address. But this hardly decides the matter: a separate note of address may have gone missing, or the memo might have been delivered via a clerk or courtier. At any rate, Bacon's memo was very likely read by James, since most of its (non-obvious) recommendations were adopted.
One of the purposes of The Winding Stair is to get as close as possible to that impossible ideal, the reality of a given period. Sedley looks in vain for detailed attributions, but one advantage of the novel form is precisely that, as with Bacon's memo, it allows the reader to sidestep the usual academic scaffolding. Not because that scaffolding is unimportant, but because it can get in the reader's way, and because the shaping context of current academic debates can itself be a source of anachronism and mystification.
Similarly, The Winding Stair's use of the historical present is less an homage to the peerless Hilary Mantel than a means to embed contemporary documents in the narrative without breaking the link with the reader. This is assisted in turn by the use of language that does not range beyond the 17th century. Where it uses fiction to tell the story, the novel does so not merely as a heuristic, so to speak, to make the narrative more vivid and compelling, but as a means to interpret the past more effectively.
Of course, every historical novel from Waverley to Wolf Hall draws what it can from the materials at hand. But for all its great scholarship, even the Wolf Hall trilogy departs from the historical record in a few places that make a significant difference to the characters and plot, notably in the depiction of Sir Thomas More as a torturer.
Whether The Winding Stair succeeds or not is ultimately for readers to judge, of course. But, good or bad, it is an attempt to put fiction in the service of fact as much as vice versa, and so -- perhaps -- to create something of historical as well as artistic value from the genre.
Jesse Norman
Hereford
[An abridged version of this letter was published by the LRB in Vol. 45 No. 17 · 7 September 2023]