Hello everyone, and welcome to Pop Culture Sociologist, the show where I analyze books, movies and TV shows for your enjoyment. I’m Marina Berlin, I’ve been a media and culture critic since 2011, and In this episode I’ll tell you about two of my favorite works that challenge the dominant historical narratives in pop culture. We’ll be talking about the historical romances of KJ Charles and the British mini-series The Devil’s Mistress. Join me, to find out how history can be both restored and reimagined. 

So, I love historical fiction, I grew up reading tons of it, and I’m always interested in the way we tell stories about history, especially in pop culture. In this episode I’ll talk about two different attitudes to writing historical fiction that I find particularly interesting, and that I think have a lot in common, although of course there are many other attitudes that I won’t cover, and will maybe get to in future episodes. In both the TV show and various books that I’ll talk about, the historical times and places are real, but the main character or characters are completely made up.  In most of the examples I’ll discuss I’ll be talking about mostly representations of gender and sexuality. 

what I want to do is dive into the question of authenticity and diversity and what it is we’re doing when we’re taking real history and adding fictional characters to it that are not normally represented in high school history books.  

So, in this episode we’ll talk about the works of KJ Charles, who writes queer historical romances featuring characters who are marginalized in various ways, and we’ll talk about the mini-series The Devil’s Mistress, unfortunately originally released as The Devil’s Whore, which was widely criticized for being an inaccurate portrayal of the English civil wars period, but was still a really fascinating approach to telling stories about sexuality and gender. 

So, let’s begin with KJ Charles. For those who are not familiar with her works, Charles writes historical romances, about romantic relationships mostly though not exclusively between men. 

In this episode I’m going to focus on her “realistic” or “mimetic” novels, although she also has several fantasy universes. 

There’s a lot of historical fiction out there, but for me Charles’ level of research, and ability to situate her characters within a specific historical moment and place and setting is unparalleled. 

Charles’ books are explicitly intended to be escapist fun, but they usually also contain a very solid background of what year it is and what political circumstances, are happening in the in the meantime. The characters are affected by specific events and ideologies. They’re veterans of specific wars, or have conflicts with specific political figures. This is not always the case in romance novels, which sometimes happen in a historical setting that’s divorced from any real politics or events of the period, beyond tropes the readers are already familiar with. 

The reason I point this out is to emphasize that Charles’ books are committed to the historical setting they’re portraying, if not to the same extent as a historical novel that isn’t categorized as part of the romance genre, then still to a very significant degree. 

if you haven’t read any or all of Charles’ books, let me give you a taste of what they’re about. 

The stories are set mostly during the 19th and early 20th century, and they mostly concern men who are romantically involved with other men. Not all of these men belong to the dominant ethnic group in England, though most of them do. Some of them are part of racial and religious minorities. Some of them are poor, some of them are rich, some of them are neurodivergent.

In one story a lord falls in love with his valet, and they have to grapple with their differences in social power and status. In another a high ranking police investigator falls in love with a criminal seditionist, and they have to negotiate the law, which protects the existing social order, including the criminalization of their very relationship. 

In another story an educated boy from a relatively poor countryside family falls in love with a rich landowner who has a terrible reputation. 

In another, a lawyer who’s fighting for justice through the legal system falls in love with the owner of a pornography shop who’s given up on social change. 

All of these stories end well. I can even go farther than that – in all of these stories, the characters have loving family members and friends, and don’t have to hide their relationship from their loved ones or leave the country to be together. 

So, the criticisms that I’ve seen leveled most often at Charles’ stories, though I think they’ve gotten less common as time’s gone on, though they still pop up in discussions of queer historical romance, is that none of these things are very plausible.

There are two aspects to this. The first is the mere existence of these characters, and the inclusion of queer characters or non-white characters in a historical setting, without them being based on real, documented people.

The second criticism is that these characters lead overall happy lives, they have fulfilling romantic relationships, they usually carve out a satisfying niche for themselves and even enjoy a sense of community either with each other or with straight friends or family members. 

What these stories do is create a version of the past that may not be accurate, because after all we have very few records about the real people these stories could have been based on, but that feels plausible. If not in the small details, then definitely in the broad strokes. It creates a sense that these people could have lived in these times, in the ways that Charles describes.

And that accomplishes a very curious thing – on the one hand, this is not real history. But on the other, real history gives us very little to work with.

Real historical records are always, by definition incomplete, due to the passage of time, but they’re also always tilted towards powerful groups in society. They’re unlikely to faithfully document the lives of marginalized people, whether it’s Asian and African people living in England in the 19h century, or women, or poor people, or queer people, or many, many different groups. Those records are always partial, and we cannot rely on them alone to tell the stories of marginalized people. 

So in a way, what Charles’ books do is the work of restoring all the stories we were never going to get. It’s replacing holes in the real fabric of our knowledge, with fictional patches. 

And it’s doing it with a very specific agenda – to give voice to the ideas and lives and joys that history very deliberately tried to keep out. It’s not an accident that queer lives were often hidden from the records, or deleted from them. There was an agenda at work there, and there’s an agenda at work when it comes to the sort of stories that are taught in every history class at school. 

A criticism I hear often about this sort of fiction is that it replaces the real historical record in people’s heads, with pop history – a version that never existed and potentially contradicts what the past actually looked like, since no matter the amounts of research, fiction authors are ultimately not historians. Sometimes they have to sacrifice accuracy for entertainment value, that’s part of the trade. 

But what I would say is – since we have these gaps in the historical record, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect those gaps to be filled with information that simply doesn’t exist. I would argue that these gaps can *only* be filled with fiction, and then the question becomes what the nature of that fiction is, and what agendas it serves. 

Which brings us neatly to the TV show I’d like to talk about today, which I think is another fascinating example of what can be done by inserting fictional patches into historical events. “The Devil’s Mistress”, a star studded British mini-series that aired in 2008, is today a pretty esoteric piece of TV, that I always recommend to people as soon as they demonstrate an interest in sociology. 

Basically, the core premise of the show is – what if we show the events of the English civil war, but through the eyes of a woman we made up. if you don’t know what the English civil war is referring to it’s a period during the 17th century where the king of England was deposed and executed and replaced by a man called Oliver Cromwell. Eventually, as we all know from watching Netflix’s The Crown, the monarchy did end up returning to England. 

Of course, for me the most meaningful version of the story of these events was in Alexandre Dumas’ musketeers sequel, 20 years after, in which the musketeers try and fail to save the English king from being executed. It was very jarring to realize, after growing up reading that book, that those events were viewed very differently in England and in France, at the time. 

Anyway, the show follows the fictional Angelica Fanshawe, a character who lives through the entire civil war, gets to know all the major players the show portrays, and ultimately is the one to survive the war and come out on top, when most of the historical characters meet very unfortunate ends. 

In general, if we’re going to fictionalize history, I’m very OK with creating a fictional woman whose eyes will be our perspective on all the events. But the thing I think is really interesting is that the English civil wars are a time when the entire existing social order in England was in flux. They ended the monarchy, which had been around for centuries, and like at any time of massive revolution, people were trying to figure out what the world they wanted to live in would look like. 

There are two particular moments I want to stress in regards to this. 

The first one is what the show does with the real, historical character of Thomas Rainsborough, who was a high ranking military officer who fought to end the monarchy. In the show he’s portrayed as a Puritan and somewhat of a religious extremist. Here’s a clip from a moment in the show when he attacks an important fortified position, and the conducts negotiations with enemy’s soldiers. 

So, basically he’s attacking this place, which has not only soldiers but also civilians, including women and children, on Christmas day, and when the occupants beg him to give them a reprieve for the holiday he tells them they blaspheme by celebrating the lord’s birthday so, he’s going to conduct business as usual. 

Of course, the show isn’t a documentary and it’s inaccurate in many ways, if only due to omitting a lot of key characters, condescending events, portraying historical speculation as truth, and so on. 

So, Rainsborough is an extremist and a religious fanatic. When Angelica meets him his troops have taken over her childhood home, and have destroyed her mother’s chapel. Rainsborough refuses to apologize for this, since Angelica’s mother was a catholic and therefore as good as a heathen. Here’s a clip of how that exchange goes:

Rainsborough’s ideas about equality range from the fact that there should be no nobility and no monarchy, through the idea that that most people should live modestly and humbly, to the fact that Rainsborough believes that women in England, especially women of high status, are raised to be ornaments and companions of men, instead of thinkers and do-ers in their own right. Here’s him talking to Angelica about what sort of woman he’d like to marry:

He, again a soldier and a religious fanatic, aspires to marry only the sort of woman he feels will be his equal, who will want to have a free mind that can keep up with the sort of work he’s doing in transforming England. Here’s another conversation they have, where Rainsborough again stresses that women’s status is part and parcel of the class system and of the unjust distribution of property that only benefits rich men. 

Again, this isn’t about accuracy or what Thomas Rainsborough’s views on gender actually were. The point here is that this show portrays a historical reality in which a devout christian from the 17th century who’s spent his entire life in the military believes that women should be able to own property and that they need to be emancipated from the dominance of men in their lives. That’s as natural to him as believing that Catholicism is heresy and that the class system is inherently immoral. 

Another moment I want to pause on is with Edward Sexby, another soldier and an ally of Cromwell who’s portrayed on the show as Angelica’s close friend and partner. Sexby comes from a much more modest background than the rest of the characters, and finds himself, like Angelica, on many different sides of winning and losing as the war progresses. Angelica lives in luxury and in squalor, sometimes she’s the ally of the most important men of the age and sometimes she’s on trial for being a beggar. 

Sexby, like her, searches for his place, and has trouble finding it. He keeps bumping into Angelica when their positions are at odds, and they keep helping each other and saving each other. 

There’s one particular point at which Sexby, who’s probably the most conventional character on the show, who kind of goes along with other people’s ideas but doesn’t necessarily propose any of his own, there’s a point at which he and Angelica meet again, after a long period apart, and during this encounter Angelica is wearing traditional men’s clothes at the time – a shirt and trousers, and Sexby is wearing something similar to a dress. 

There’s this moment where they realize the other has chosen this outfit, for various reasons, and it’s not a moment of comedy. It’s not about the ridiculousness of crossdressing, or catching each other in an embarrassing situation. 

It’s a marker of how utterly meaningless the artificial divisions we create in society are. Like the division between rich and poor, noble and common, so is the division between men’s roles and women’s roles. Angelica can wear men’s clothes and walk around the world with everyone assuming she’s a man, and nothing about her is different because of it. Sexby, a veteran soldier, can walk around in a skirt, and nothing about him is different because of it. 

There’s a moment where they look at each other, acknowledge this, and then eventually each change into the quote-unquote appropriate clothes for them. 

I love that moment, because like Rainseborough’s beliefs, they introduce plausible things into a void of knowledge. I mean, Angelica is a fictional character so we know in advance any scene with her didn’t actually happen. 

But did people cross-dress in 17th century England? Of course they did, as they did during any and every period of history. We don’t really know whether Sexby ever did or didn’t, but introducing it as an idea, as something very mundane that could have happened, especially during a time when the entire social order was being called into question, shows us how similar the past is to the present, if not in the details then in the spirit of things.

People have always questioned the gender binary, and it’s a myth that no one before the 19th century thought to themselves – hey, you know what, women should be able to get an education and own property. Those ideas were not invented a hundred years ago. They could exist easily, even in the mind of a religious fanatic. And this show wants to show you that possibility. Did Thomas Rainsborough have an affair with a woman called Angelica Fanshawe? No, he didn’t. And once you accept that as a piece of fiction, the show uses that suspension of disbelief to say – by the way, here’s how someone like Rainsborough could be a feminist who fought for women’s rights. Here’s how that reasoning works, in this period, under these circumstances. Did Rainsborough actually say those things? Definitely not to Angelica, because she didn’t exist. But now you have it in your head how these simple ideas about equality could exist even in the 17th century, even in the mind of someone like Rainsborough.

The thing I love about the KJ Charles books is that they use the gaps we have in history to fill in the stories we’d never get to hear. And because we’d never get to hear them, we’re allowed to make them as optimistic and happy as we want. I mean, real history is also filled with real, queer couples who led full, happy lives, I can’t recommend the show “Gentleman Jack” enough in that regard, but the great innovation of Charles’ books is bringing those stories to people who were not in the top 1% whose lives were recorded in great detail at the time. 

And “The Devil’s Mistress” does the same thing – using the 17th century reality where the social order was rearranged to demonstrate how basic the ideas that we now think of as modern are. You don’t need a social sciences degree to understand that women are as capable as men of owning property and getting an education. You don’t need modern gender theory to realize that the idea that people are only allowed to wear certain forms of clothes is ridiculous. And you can tell all of those stories on the canvas of the English civil war, because you can tell them pretty much anywhere. 

I don’t mean to imply, of course, that it doesn’t matter how we portray real historical people and events in fictional narratives, or that accuracy doesn’t matter at all. I love history, and like many I’ve always found the misconceptions that pop history in the form of novels and movies inspires to be somewhere between tragic and annoying. 

However, if I could leave you with one thought about this, the next time someone complains about Bridgerton or some other historical fiction thing pushing an agenda and not being historically accurate, please remind them that the goal of popular history is, for better or for worse, never to be accurate. It’s to entertain, and in the process always to serve a certain agenda, and marginalized people are allowed to claim that agenda, just as the powerful have been allowed to claim it, in real history and in the fictional one. 

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if you want to talk to me about the episode I’m on twitter at berlin_marina or popsocpodcast. In addition to being a media critic I’m also a published author and poet of science fiction and fantasy, so if you’re interested in that you can read about it on my website, marinaberlin.org. Thank you for listening, thank you for letting me tell you my thoughts, I’m Marina Berlin and I’ll see you on the next episode of Pop Culture Sociologist.