What is the role of history in historical romance? Historical romance has long been one of the most popular forms of romance fiction. Its popularity has attracted scholarly attention in early critiques of the romance genre, studies of historical fiction, and stand-alone monographs. However, as Hsu-Ming Teo noted in 2012, scholars tend to focus on gender roles and representations of sexuality in historical romance while “the issues of history and historiography are never properly explored.” And yet, how romance novels represent history is important to both authors and readers alike. In this article, I examine the second novel of Alyssa Cole’s Loyal League trilogy, A Hope Divided, to demonstrate how Cole’s Civil War novels engage in reparative history while also providing insightful explorations of historiographical meaning-making and its long impacts on American civic life. Throughout A Hope Divided, Cole not only highlights aspects of the war that are often overlooked but also foregrounds the complexity of narrating such a past, especially in a way that centers characters and voices that have been systematically marginalized in the historical record.
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The Loyal League trilogy is a historical romance series that is deeply invested in the representation of history. Cole clearly wants her readers to be aware of the narrative process of history-making that brought America to this point, still carrying the weight of a war that happened more than 150 years ago. History is not something that happens in the background of her romances; it is something the characters create with every choice they make and with every frame they place around their experiences. By moving her fictional characters through well-researched and complex historical moments, Cole shows her readers a new picture of the Civil War while also demonstrating how competing pictures of the war were created and shaped into narratives.
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One of the key points that Cole makes about history in A Hope Divided is that finding the history of marginalized people may require looking in nontraditional places.
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A second, related point that Cole elaborates in this novel is that history is shaped by the person telling it, and by the form that the story takes. Cole demonstrates this through the story of Marlie’s birth.
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being able to ignore certain parts of history, or treat them as a past that is perfectly sealed off and separate from the present, is a position of privilege that distorts history and its lessons. Marlie does not demand that Ewan give up all of his Stoic principles, but she does insist that he place them in context and acknowledge both the ancient world’s failings and their continued impact on contemporary society. [...]
To make sure that the reader doesn’t lose this point about the connections between the past, present, and future, Cole has Ewan think about the ways future societies might react to his moment in history: “he knew American slavery to be a horrible stain upon the world. Would it be brushed away so cavalierly when people read of America in some distant future?” (96).
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