"The good ended happily and the bad ended unhappily. That is what fiction means."
—Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
It happened like this: my current work in progress,
My Father's Son, has a strong backdrop of true history, but I'm not certain if it can be classified as historical fiction. I haven't taken a real person and true circumstances and humanized them out of the history books as did MM Bennetts in
Of Honest Fame, or, created characters to orbit around historical figures as in Georgette Heyer's
An Infamous Army.
Rather, I've come up with my own cast of characters caught up in sometimes fictional events (a brigade of black-ops attempting to broker a treaty with French Royalists), but real events in others (the Vienna conference, Napoleon's 100 days, the battle of Waterloo). They stumble over, evade or work with Fouche, Talleyrand, Metternich, Castlereagh and Wellington. Does that still qualify as historical fiction? Or, would it be more accurate to call it historical romance?
And, then there's this whole other genre that I've been hearing more and more about: Regency romance—"Regency" referring to the era when the Prince of Wales ruled in the stead of Mad King George, his father, from 1811 to 1820. My series of stories centers in England, begins in 1809 and stretches out from there. Would it be accurate to classify
My Father's Son as a Regency romance? Danged if I know.
