New fictions of seventeenth-century women: Making better accounts of historical subjects, and, Unquiet things: A novel

Hardy, Ellen (2024) New fictions of seventeenth-century women: Making better accounts of historical subjects, and, Unquiet things: A novel. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

New fictions of seventeenth-century women: Making better accounts of historical subjects.

This essay identifies a popular movement in contemporary fiction towards (re)visioning the lives of women who, although they can be found in the historical record, have been largely marginalised from its telling. Rather than designing fictional characters and situations in order to explore the social and political concerns of a particular era – as more ‘traditional’ historical fictions might do – these novels are focused on illuminating the inner lives and lived experiences of women whose voices have struggled to break the surface of the archive. The essay argues that this movement, as yet under-theorised, is part of a wider development towards creating ‘better accounts’ (Haraway, 1988) of historical subjects, expressing the legacy of new historicism and feminist critiques of the ‘unknowability’ and ‘unsayability’ of pure postmodernism.

The discussion is situated within critical approaches to historical fiction and narrative historiography since the mid-twentieth century, expanding to include contemporary explorations of archival and material absence; mess and uncertainty; erasure, haunting, agency and affect. Recent examples of these novels are examined, their subjects women in seventeenth century Europe: Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton (2016), Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen (2021) and Unquiet Things. The essay concludes that fiction’s relationship with the historical record is changing, resulting in forms that reject both the notion of history as human progress and the intense, extensive self-reflexivity of historiographical metafiction. These lenses are smaller, preoccupied with the complexities of individual subjectivity; with how much is materially lost to history and what can be imaginatively communicated from its traces – a position vital in creating a more inclusive ‘historical record’ at a moment of political and environmental crisis that threatens bodies and knowledge anew.

Unquiet things: A novel about the suicide behind England’s first public museum, based on archival records

London in 1638 is at a tipping point between old worlds and new, between magic and science, between peace and war. Hester sees little of this, having chosen a stifling spinster’s life rather than marry a cloth merchant chosen by her father. But then an offer comes from John Tradescant, a famous plantsman, explorer and owner of the The Ark – the most significant cabinet of curiosity in England, a huge collection of natural and man-made wonders from across the expanding world. The marriage places Hester in a sphere she has only dreamed of but where she, illiterate and faced with a turbulent domestic life, struggles to find purchase. Isolated among the Ark’s objects she starts to sense they have their own voices, strange sounds she must keep to herself or risk ostracism and persecution.

When ambitious lawyer and astrologer Elias Ashmole visits the Ark and offers to catalogue it, Hester believes she might at last have a stake in the collection’s future. But across years of insidious manoeuvres Elias positions himself as the collection’s rightful guardian, culminating in a night of drunken betrayal that excludes Hester from her inheritance after John’s death – save for a few objects she has submerged in her garden pond. When her ownership of the now garrulous collection is finally severed Hester goes to join her hidden objects under the water, where she is found drowned. Meanwhile Elias uses the collection to found a museum in his own name, the Ashmolean at Oxford. But when he visits his completed creation, doubt creeps in – is his enterprise the success he imagined? Has he silenced all the questioning voices?

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	02 Dec 2025 11:08
Last Modified:	02 Dec 2025 11:08
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101177
DOI:

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