Abstract
The thesis is in two parts: a historical novel, The Inheritance of Peter Tye, based on family history and genealogical research, and a critical commentary concerned with historical fiction and authenticity. It considers the novel as a way of narrating and bringing to life the family records found in the archives, creating a heritage of stories, and examines ways in which writers might incorporate their own multi-generational histories into their work.The commentary asks whether archives used in a transparent, structured manner can provide a research framework for fiction and in doing so find meaning in the lives of ancestors by articulating the writer’s relationship with them. This intention to link past and present is evidenced in the decision to use a dual timescale in the novel, following Peter Tye, a modern narrator, as he interacts with his personal heritage, develops characters and events, and creates his own inheritance of stories.
If the nature of archives is to catalogue the past while the writer’s role may be to provide a work of historical fiction that observes historical accuracy as far as possible, then the commentary sets out ways in which the novel illustrates the tensions in the writer’s task. Historiographers have stressed the ‘creative turn’ in historical writing (White, 1973), suggesting that creative storytelling is a potentially more authentic approach to recounting history. Novelists like Hilary Mantel have highlighted the ways in which fiction can give life to historical characters (Mantel, 2023). My own approach incorporates this attention to storytelling as well as to history to create a ‘personal heritage novel,’ within an ethical framework.
Peter Tye, the narrator of the novel, is a genealogist researching his own family history. While I, as the writer, am using my own family history to write creatively, Peter as the novel’s narrator, finds himself drawn into storytelling, writing not a dry factual record of his family but a historical novel that spans generations and continents. Peter realises his imagination has been fired into creative action by both his archival discoveries and by his own aching desire to leave these newly found stories to the next generations. Peter decides to tell the stories of three individuals - Keziah Root, her son George, and George’s sister-in-law, Charlotte Ellis. For Peter, this resurrection of the past through storytelling, allows him to find a new life for himself, and both he and his characters effectively escape the archives. When he realises that this personal heritage is only of value if it can be passed on, he is forced to look not only to the past for traces of connected family and kinship, but to the present where there will be family members he is yet to meet.
| Date of Award | May 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Dr Amanda Hodgkinson (Supervisor) |