The Tenth Muse and Framing Historical Fiction

I just got back from a fun and thought provoking few days at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (there are my daughter Mélanie and I above at the Member Lounge). Along with well-loved plays such as an enchanting A Midsummer Night's Dream and a complex, touching, brilliant My Fair Lady, we saw a couple of very intriguing world premieres, Liquid Plain and The Tenth Muse. Both were historical, Liquid Plain about African Americans who had escaped slavery in the 1790s, The Tenth Muse about nuns in 18th century Mexico.  Both plays were strong and intriguing and provided a great deal of conversational fodder for my friend and fellow writer Penelope Williamson and me over lattes and cosmopolitans.

In particular, The Tenth Muse got me thinking about how we frame historical fiction. The play is inspired by the story of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, famed for her writing and intellectual pursuit. But instead of dramatizing Sor Juana's story directly, playwright Tanya Saracho sets her play twenty years after Juana died of the plague (shortly after she fell out of favor with the church). Juana's niece Sor Isabel is an important character, but the play centers around three young women who come to the convent with their own dilemmas and are caught up in Sor Juana's legacy.

As historical novelists, we have a number of choices to make in dramatizing historical events. We have to choose where to stop and start our stories (which sometimes can mean looking back at pivotal events as in this play). And we have to choose whose eyes through which to tell the story. Our own Juliet Grey brilliantly dramatized Marie Antoinette's life with Marie Antoinette as the central character. Other writers tell the story of real historical figure through the eyes of a fictional character - often a friend, lady-in-waiting, valet, or maid. Still others weave together real and fictional events and characters, so that fictional central characters interact with real historical figures, and the plot combines real and fictional events. Lauren and I both fall in this category.

For a writer, there are advantages and disadvantages to both types of story. There's an immediacy to telling a story as it unfolds, through the eyes of the central character. One person I talked to very much enjoyed The Tenth Muse but also said she would have liked to see Juana's story dramatized. On the other hand, while I love writing about real events and people, I also enjoy the freedom of being able to shape the story of my central characters and develop their personalities. This also gives the author more latitude in how the story ends. Without huge spoilers, I will say that The Tenth Muse ends on a more hopeful note than probably would have been possible in dramatizing Sor Juana's life.

Do you have a preference in how the historical fiction you read is framed? What are some of your favorite examples? Writers, how do you approach framing historical events?