Hi Everyone,
I'm going to throw this out there and I hope that I don't get attacked for it.
I'm now at the point where I'm researching all the tiny little details that I didn't research before I wrote the first book of my historical mystery series. I did research the more general stuff so I could write the book (plus I had quite a bit of background on the time period from my graduate English literature studies) but I felt that all the tiny little details would be better left researched once the book was written and revised and the plot and characters were in place.
One thing I'm noticing is that there are some things that I feel my characters would do that might not have been entirely accurate for the period.
For example, my book takes place in 1903 California (specifically, a fictional town somewhere between Sacramento and San Francisco). The main character and her brother are from an upper middle class family, so they are not stinking rich but they are well off.
In the book, Adele (my MC) decides to take a Mexican man and his wife and their family of 5 kids to run the household (as she owns a small shop so she works outside the house). She is a New Woman and doesn't have the kind of airs you see in something like Downtown Abbey. She treats them well and enjoys having their children in the house. They all help with the housework (the man doing stuff like butler, valet, and gardening work, the wife doing cook and maid work, the kids helping out with the housework) but she is not hugely demanding or fussy. She wants to give them steady work and a place to live, as they live in the downstairs of her house.
In doing my research, I know that it is highly unlikely that this kind of situation would have existed, even in America where people treated servants differently than in Britain (so please do not come at me with "but no one would do that!" kind of crap - I KNOW that!). The more likely scenario would have been for Adele to employ a maid-of-all-work or something like that, someone who wouldn't have a family, and her brother would have probably employed a valet and the relationship between them and the servants would have been a much colder and more distant one. I'm not saying that Adele and her brother's relationship is warm and fuzzy with the Mexican family. They don't sit in the parlor and play games in the evenings together - there is still that distance between master and servant. But I don't feel like I want to change the situation to something that would have been totally historically accurate because the Mexican family do come back as reoccurring characters and I think they add flavor and color to the series.
I know there will always be anal readers out there who will poo-poo writers who aren't 100% historically accurate, but I think there has to be a balance between being historically accurate and being true to the characters and stories you create. Do you agree?
I apologize if the tone in this post is a little defensive. I've seen people on these boards attacked before for asking about historical accuracy and how deep you want to go.
Tam
I'm going to throw this out there and I hope that I don't get attacked for it.
I'm now at the point where I'm researching all the tiny little details that I didn't research before I wrote the first book of my historical mystery series. I did research the more general stuff so I could write the book (plus I had quite a bit of background on the time period from my graduate English literature studies) but I felt that all the tiny little details would be better left researched once the book was written and revised and the plot and characters were in place.
One thing I'm noticing is that there are some things that I feel my characters would do that might not have been entirely accurate for the period.
For example, my book takes place in 1903 California (specifically, a fictional town somewhere between Sacramento and San Francisco). The main character and her brother are from an upper middle class family, so they are not stinking rich but they are well off.
In the book, Adele (my MC) decides to take a Mexican man and his wife and their family of 5 kids to run the household (as she owns a small shop so she works outside the house). She is a New Woman and doesn't have the kind of airs you see in something like Downtown Abbey. She treats them well and enjoys having their children in the house. They all help with the housework (the man doing stuff like butler, valet, and gardening work, the wife doing cook and maid work, the kids helping out with the housework) but she is not hugely demanding or fussy. She wants to give them steady work and a place to live, as they live in the downstairs of her house.
In doing my research, I know that it is highly unlikely that this kind of situation would have existed, even in America where people treated servants differently than in Britain (so please do not come at me with "but no one would do that!" kind of crap - I KNOW that!). The more likely scenario would have been for Adele to employ a maid-of-all-work or something like that, someone who wouldn't have a family, and her brother would have probably employed a valet and the relationship between them and the servants would have been a much colder and more distant one. I'm not saying that Adele and her brother's relationship is warm and fuzzy with the Mexican family. They don't sit in the parlor and play games in the evenings together - there is still that distance between master and servant. But I don't feel like I want to change the situation to something that would have been totally historically accurate because the Mexican family do come back as reoccurring characters and I think they add flavor and color to the series.
I know there will always be anal readers out there who will poo-poo writers who aren't 100% historically accurate, but I think there has to be a balance between being historically accurate and being true to the characters and stories you create. Do you agree?
I apologize if the tone in this post is a little defensive. I've seen people on these boards attacked before for asking about historical accuracy and how deep you want to go.
Tam