This year I’ve been part of a book club a friend from church started with the intention of bringing together a group of women of different ages and stages – eight of us aged from the early 30’s up to 60’s. We meet about every six weeks on a Saturday afternoon and in addition to reading books we have listened to a TED talk on YouTube and discussed it when we came together.
At our first get together we talked about books which would interest us and one of the ladies, a mature age student studying psychology at university, said that she doesn’t read fiction.
Well, that put a damper on things for some of us!
However, I also remembered that I used to think that reading fiction was second rate. Why would you bother when you could be improving yourself by reading something factual? I don’t think that anymore and I’ve discovered that good fiction plays some important and I’d say even vital roles.
I’m only going to look at one of them here.

All my children have read Churchill’s four volumes of The History of the English-Speaking Peoples (Ambleside Online schedules these in years 7 to 10) and had no difficulty keeping track of the flow of history in them but I’d noticed that that wasn’t the case for a number of families who tried using them.
I wondered about that, and my theory was that our children read a lot of historical fiction that gave them significant padding which helped fill in Churchill’s narrative by the time they started reading his histories.

”Let a child have the meat he requires in his history readings, and in the literature which naturally gathers round this history, and imagination will bestir itself without any help of ours…”

Apart from some very boring lessons on Communism, I never studied history at school and anything I’ve learned about history has come from what I’ve read since leaving school.
I’d skimmed Churchill’s volumes but never read them properly, so I decided to read the second volume, The New World, as I’d been reading some books set in that time period and wanted to consolidate my knowledge and see if I could fill in the gaps in my mental historical timeline.

The New World covers two centuries (1485-1688) and includes the Renaissance & Reformation, The English Civil War, and The Restoration. I thought I’d struggle with getting my mind around so much that was going on but was surprised that the historical fiction I’d read helped with this. Obviously, a fictional account is more concerned with telling a story and is a work of imagination, but good authors research their subject and give an accurate feel for the times. I will add that when I read fictionalised accounts I usually always choose older books (pre-1965 or thereabouts, depending on the author). I think their literary quality is superior and I’ve been disappointed by many of the more modern books of historical fiction so tend to avoid them. These are some of the books I’ve read more recently that helped me to get a handle on this time period:

Here Was a Man by Norah Lofts – a novel about the life of Sir Walter Raleigh

A Child From the Sea by Elizabeth Goudge – Charles II

Towers in the Mist by Elizabeth Goudge – the times of Queen Elizabeth I

The White Witch by Elizabeth Goudge – the English Civil War and its aftermath.

Royal Escape by Georgette Heyer – Charles II when he was a fugitive in England before the Restoration.

The historian Alison Weir has written some fictionalised books set during this time period (Anna of Kleve, Innocent Traitor and others) that complement her nonfiction books on the same time period.

Charlotte Mason believed in children making their own connections. We don’t have to force the connections or try to fill in the gaps we think are there and I’ve found this to be true as an adult, too.

Our book club decided that we would all choose a book and if anyone of us didn’t want to read a certain title then we could just skip it. It turned out that those who didn’t read the assigned book often turned up for the discussion anyway. One of the younger ladies who works in statistics or some related field, and tends not to read fiction, read a book I chose (Mr. Standfast, which I’ve read about half a dozen times) and she really enjoyed it. 🙂