8 Most Popular Historical Fiction Tropes

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Historical fiction excels at blending the real and the imaginary. It immerses you in real settings, which are often populated by real historical figures participating in real events, but the story itself is fictional.

Depending on how much research the author does, historical fiction can offer readers a fairly accurate picture of a time period. It may also be more speculative or ahistorical, imagining situations that can range from ridiculous to thought-provoking.

Because it blends fact and fiction, this genre has produced many interesting tropes not seen in other genres.

1. Historical Figures

Historical fiction is often incomplete without any mention or appearance of someone famous from history. These historical figures might even be the protagonists of the story!

In cases where these famous people are only supporting characters, they’re likely to become curious about the main character, and they may either form a rivalry or a friendship. Either way, they gain mutual respect for each other as the story goes on.

These historical characters aren’t always a perfect representation of their real-life counterparts. Some writers try to make the character as accurate as possible, but others create a purely fictional version. It all depends on how serious the historical aspect of the story is.

There is a trend of turning these figures into detectives, hunters, and so on. Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has the American president hunting down vampires after one of them killed his mother.

2. Marriage of Convenience

It was once normal for people to marry for practical, financial, or political reasons instead of love. And while the practice has largely fallen out, it still happens in today’s society.

In historical romances, it’s often one of the biggest obstacles that the protagonist couple has to get past. Much of the story is focused on how these star-crossed lovers fight for their love against the expectations of the society they live in.

Marriages of convenience are a gateway to other common elements in historical fiction. Aside from star-crossed lovers, they can also lead to the abused spouse, climbing up the social ladder, unrealized love, saving the family reputation, and many other tropes.

Charlotte from Pride and Prejudice is a good example. Despite having no feelings for Mr. Collins, she marries him for financial stability and to avoid becoming a spinster.

3. That One Religious Person

In a lot of historical stories, there’s often one character whose biggest trait is their faith. Often, the character is a holier-than-thou person who thinks they’re better than non-believers or those with different beliefs.

They take every opportunity to remind others how much more moral they are, and that everyone else is a sinner on their way to Hell. While they are religious, they consider their religion as more of a weapon they can use against those they think aren’t on the same level as them.

An example is Mr. Brocklehurst from Jane Eyre. He’s a fanatical Christian who often takes biblical quotes out of context to suit his views. He’s also a hypocrite, professing charity as a core Christian value yet denying his students the most basic needs and comforts.

4. Protagonist Ahead of Their Time

To make the protagonists more relatable, writers often write them with modern or progressive sensibilities. This makes the protagonists “enlightened” about issues that are, in the setting of the story, considered normal.

A plantation owner teaches his slaves to read and write. A soldier openly criticizes the war effort. A woman campaigns for the right to vote. All of these characters have a trait that makes them oddballs or outcasts to society.

Of course, there have always been abolitionists, suffragettes, activists, and others who fought against certain issues of their time. Historical fiction likes to take these kinds of characters and feature them as protagonists.

The titular monk of the historical murder mystery Cadfael is one example. His life experiences have given him a unique skillset and worldview that often puts him in conflict with his more traditional brethren.

He regularly goes against church and feudal law if it means achieving justice. He’s also looser when it comes to religion, as he doesn’t condemn relationships outside of wedlock.

5. Political or Social Upheaval

Many works of historical fiction are set in a time period where a great change is about to happen. These real-life changes can be written as they happened, or modified to suit the story.

These are moments in history where an event has a significant impact on the future. As such, many of these events are large-scale and well-known. They’re used as a backdrop to the main story, which is often related to the issue being addressed in these events.

For example, Noughts & Crosses explores the Civil Rights movement, depicting peaceful and violent protests. Only, native Africans conquered Europe and made Europeans their slaves, instead of the other way around. As such, it’s the white-skinned people currently experiencing discrimination instead of the darker-skinned people.

6. Showing Off the Research

It takes a ton of research to have everything as close to reality when your setting is a prominent part of history. When you do all that work, sometimes you just can’t resist showing off what you’ve learned.

In historical fiction, you’ll sometimes encounter long passages of the author simply explaining a specific thing about history. It can be virtually anything, from an object, person, or an event that exists in real life and has some significance to the story.

Used sparingly and cleverly, it equips the reader with the necessary knowledge to further understand the story. But when it’s mainly used to show off, it becomes an info dump that rarely contributes to the narrative.

Garry Jenning’s Aztec exhibits much of this trope. The majority of the novel consists of detailed information about pre-Columbian cultures, including their religion, society, and day-to-day living.

7. The Dual Timeline

Many works of historical fiction feature dual timelines. It’s either a juxtaposition of a modern-day and historical timeline or the juxtaposition of two historical timelines, with one being older than the other.

In both cases, something is introduced to link the two narratives together. Most often, it’s an old artifact that the modern-day character finds, which leads them to learn about their historical counterpart.

It can also be an old person living in the modern era who reminisces about their past. In a few books, the location is also used as the link, with generations of characters from different eras living in the same place.

What this trope does is further flesh out the entire novel. The atmospheres and tones of each timeline differ from one another. Parallels are drawn between the two, and they sometimes converge in some way at the end.

The danger of this trope is that sometimes the more modern narrative lags behind the older one. Being a work of historical fiction, some books tend to focus on the historical timeline more.

So the modern character ends up simply sitting there, reading through a cache of old letters or searching for more information. They become bystanders to their own novel.

Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network uses a dual timeline approach. One story is set in 1915, where a character named Eve is selected to join the titular spy ring. The other story is in 1947, where a college student enlists Eve’s aid in searching for a cousin who disappeared during World War 2.

8. References to the Present

Writers often include cheeky references about things that you, in the current era, know of but still haven’t been discovered in the era that the story is set in. Essentially, something from the future is presented in a historical story, but it is changed to fit the past’s level of knowledge.

For example, it’s impossible for characters of a story set in the classical age to know about airplanes. So if an airplane does appear in the story, they’ll describe it in the most ridiculous terms such as a metal bird, a god’s chariot.

Or, if the story involves someone being transported into the past, their clothes and belongings are treated as things of magic. Army of Darkness is a good example of this. Ash Williams is transported to the middle ages, and his “boomstick” (actually a shotgun) is presented as a magical artifact that can kill at a distance without needing a projectile.

This trope can also be subtle. In Hild (set in 7th century Britain), the titular character is told a story about a dragon’s skeleton that was embedded in a cliff. Of course, no one knew much about dinosaurs back then.

How Can You Tell If a Story Is Historical Fiction?

The main characteristic of historical fiction is that it is set in the past and features the social conditions, cultural atmosphere, mannerisms, and other details of the depicted time period. The story can be purely fictional, or a mix of historical and imaginary events.

The accuracy of the historical aspects in the story largely depends on the author. Some works of historical fiction follow events as closely as they can; but when the writer feels that the story is more important than accuracy, they often keep the major details and fill in the gaps with their imagination.

Historical fiction falls into a wide spectrum, as it can take on characteristics of different genres. For example, historical romance will mostly read as romance, historical mystery as a mystery, and so on.

What links them all is that despite their focus on different elements of fiction, the story and its complications are always related to the time period of the era they’re set in. The setting will always be a visible part of the storytelling.

Do you read historical fiction? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

 

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