A Warning

A friend of mine told me a story about the famous writer Georgette Heyer, very prolific and popular in her day, especially with her Regency novels. Despite their success, apparently her real interest was in the medieval period and she planned three novels to be set at this time and embarked on years of extremely detailed research to ensure that she would get the historical details correct. She died before completing more than one of these projected novels and that one was published, as far as I can gather, posthumously. My friend's view was that the novel, in spite of all her careful work, was unreadable.

I went to Amazon and checked through their list of her novels and came across what I think must be that novel. It's called My Lord John. It's set in the 14th century and deals with the children of Henry IV, especially Henry V's younger brother, John. I read both her husband's introduction to the novel, where he describes all the research she undertook, and the first two or three pages of the novel itself. I can see what my friend meant. I would not on the basis of these pages be encouraged to read on, which might be unfair because she was a highly experienced writer and sometimes an ability to write a page-turner does not necessarily equate with a particularly good writing style. But it seemed to me that she had fallen into the trap of trying to write the novel in a style that might reflect the speech and language of the time. According to her husband she had immersed herself in the writings of the period, and there is a flavour of this in what I read. It does not entice.

So the language of a historical novel is a tricky area. You don't want to write impenetrable dialogue. At the same time you can't quite employ contemporary informality and slang. You have to pitch it somewhere in between. Since my novel is set in Scotland in the 17th century all my Scottish characters, educated as well as uneducated, would have spoken Scots, and the less educated would have used local dialect forms that I would not be able to access, let alone understand. But even if I were to cast all my dialogue in an educated form of Scots it would be considered unreadable. So I have to find a compromise, using different registers for different occasions. English would predominate, but there would definitely be situations where I would happily use a form of Scots that I would hope would not be too difficult to understand.