Real? Fictitious?

His­tor­i­cal fic­tion, invent­ed by Sir Wal­ter Scott with his nov­el Waver­ly (1814) is a remark­ably flex­i­ble form, offer­ing every­thing from what might be called cos­tume dra­ma to metic­u­lous­ly accu­rate depic­tions of real events and peo­ple. My own work shares that range. Books like Mid­night Mag­ic, or The Book with­out Words, ref­er­ence the his­tor­i­cal moment, but not much more. Crispin, is (I hope) very accu­rate as to place and time, but has only one real char­ac­ter, John Ball. The Man who Was Poe tries to depict Edgar Allan Poe’s real char­ac­ter in a real place, at a real time, but all else is fic­tion. The Fight­ing Ground is real as to place, event, and time, but all char­ac­ters are fictional.

Sophia’s War, just pub­lished, goes anoth­er way. Here all events, place, and most char­ac­ters, are his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate. Even minor char­ac­ters are real. BUT—the main char­ac­ter, Sophia (and her fam­i­ly), is a work of my imag­i­na­tion. That said, it is Sophia, who, if you will, caus­es the real events to hap­pen. How can that be? In the cel­e­brat­ed case of Bene­dict Arnold and John André, though stud­ied count­less times by his­to­ri­ans, there are some key events which hap­pened but which have nev­er ful­ly been explained. Coin­ci­dence? Luck? The hand of Prov­i­dence? Enter Sophia, and those events are explained in as excit­ing a way as I could write it. It is my attempt to give life to Ralph Wal­do Emerson’s notion, “All his­to­ry is biog­ra­phy.” Sophia’s War is real his­to­ry, as lived by a real, fic­ti­tious person.