Many female authors of contemporary historical novels engage in exactly this process, looking back in time and reinserting the histories of women into the dominant narrative of history in which they are often excluded or marginalized.
In recent decades, literary critics have become increasingly interested in the ways that contemporary historical novels are used to write “history from below.” In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1978), Adrienne Rich describes a process she calls “re-visioning,” a process that is defined as “looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (35). While the facts of Gwyn’s life complicate the novels’ generic plotlines as romance narratives, the romantic elements in turn put pressure on the representation of the biographee’s life, which must make concessions to the demands of the genre. The novels under consideration are all the more interesting for their participation in a specific segment of contemporary “women’s fiction”: the historical romance novel. The fictionalized biography as such is a fascinating hybrid genre, incorporating biographical fact but presenting it in fictional mode. In view of the remarkable rise of fictionalized biography in the past two decades, it comes as no surprise that several novelists have found Gwyn’s life an attractive subject and thus reaffirmed her status as a cultural icon.
Her extraordinary ascent from low-born street girl and possibly child prostitute to orange-seller in the pit of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on to celebrated actress and finally to royal mistress has been the subject of numerous biographies and films and has also found its way into a number of recent novels, or ‘fictionalized biographies.’ Focusing on gender-specific narrative strategies, this paper examines the generic properties of Diane Haeger’s The Perfect Royal Mistress (2007), Susan Holloway Scott’s The King’s Favorite (2008), and Gillian Bagwell’s The Darling Strumpet (2011).
Nell Gwyn, King Charles II’s legendary actress-mistress, is revered as “one of the most attractive characters in British history,” credited with “lifting the spirits of a nation” (Roberts) after eleven years of Puritan austerity.
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