The Historical Novel Society Conference 2026: In Quotes

Last weekend I attended my sixth in-person Historical Novel Society Conference. Typically, the annual gathering alternates between American and British locations, but this year HNS UK went to Ireland. The setting? The historic university town of Maynooth outside Dublin. The attendees? A mix of historical novelists, of differing levels of professional experience, from around the world.

As usual, I’m summarizing the conference through some of my favorite quotes from the plenary and parallel sessions. Unfortunately, this year sessions were not recorded, but I still managed to catch a lot of talks.

Finola Austin reporting from HNS 2026!

“Curiosity may not kill the cat, but it certainly encourages me to explore rabbit holes,” Kevin Connolly

Research is always a hot topic at HNS conferences and Kevin Connolly gave us a great overview of the digital resources available to those writing historical novels with an Irish setting. 

“Correspondence will give you the social worlds of your characters,” Professor Terence Dooley

Meanwhile, Maynooth History Professor and conference keynote speaker Terence Dooley suggested letters and auction catalogues as two incredible primary sources for uncovering facts that could be stranger than fiction.

However, the question of how much research is necessary or helpful continues to be hotly debated.

“If you’re writing the truth, who cares about the facts?” John Banville

Keynote speaker John Banville encouraged us to prioritize emotional verisimilitude over pedantic research, while Carol Cram’s advice was similar:

“Don’t confuse accuracy with fidelity,” Carol Cram

We heard from writers who have different “rules” for themselves about sticking (or not sticking!) to the historical record, and, for many, these “rules” evolve between projects.

“The more novels I write, the more inclined I am to take liberties,” Martina Devlin

Anne Easter Smith reminded us that, when conducting independent research unattached to an academic institution, we may face obstacles.

“We are lowly novelists and historians will look at us like this,” Anne Easter Smith

And keynote speaker Vaseem Khan raised the point that some topics and perspectives have been expunged from the mainstream historical record:

“I use my books to talk about the history I didn’t learn about in school,” Vaseem Khan

Leslie Carroll cautioned us to consider the “who” behind each primary source we consult:

“I always weigh what I’m reading against who said it,” Leslie Carroll

And the question of point of view goes beyond research and into the writing process itself:

“Most stories have been written, so it’s about finding a fresh perspective,” Louise Fein

Finding a fresh perspective can help your book become more marketable, but speakers had other tips for helping your novel stand out from the slush or on the shelf.

Give your characters plenty of problems:

“Layer on obstacles to your ideas to strengthen your pitch,” Amanda Geard

Choose a progressive historical figure as your main character:

“Artists are people in society who like to push boundaries and break rules,” Laura Morelli

Or tap into themes that have continued relatability today:

“Sisters have universality. We have expectations of sisterhood,” Kate Braithwaite

I wish there had been more sessions digging deeply into writing craft, but Lenore Hart had some helpful advice for first chapters (before her Q&A got slightly derailed by a hot debate about writing and AI!). 

“Withholding information creates confusion, not mystery,” Lenore Hart

This was my favorite tidbit from her talk, as she advised early career writers not to delay giving readers crucial information, like who is this character and when and where are we they, in a misguided attempt to create intrigue. 

There were also only a couple of sessions digging into the business of publishing, including a keynote conversation between Essie Fox and her publisher, Karen Sullivan.  

“First novels contain seeds of everything we’ve read,” Essie Fox

I liked Essie’s idea about going back to your first novel to rediscover the passions that first brought you to writing. And Karen’s thoughts on not “chasing” market trends, as a historical novelist, were well-received by the writers in attendance:

“Trend-driven publishing is flawed,” Karen Sullivan

To round out this recap, I’ll turn back to John Banville, whose rejection of the idea that writing is a form of self-expression really stuck with me. His insistence that our novels are “no longer ours” when they’re out in the world resonated, especially in an environment where you don’t know whether to lead with what you’ve done or what you’re working on next.

“I can’t remember my own books. They’ve left me. They’re in the past,” John Banville

That’s a wrap for HNS 2026, but I’m looking forward to the North America conference in Pittsburgh in 2027! If we met at the conference, please stay in touch. If we didn’t, feel free to get in touch too. You can find me on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, and sign up for my monthly email newsletter here.

Trending: Fin de Siècle Yellow

Butter yellow may be trending in 2026, but in vogue colors aren’t a new phenomenon. I recently read The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, a collection of weird, genre-defying short stories first published in 1895. It got me thinking again about the importance of the color yellow in literature published near the end of the nineteenth century.

The collection’s title refers to a fictional play that drives several characters mad in the course of the short stories. In the opening story, “The Repairer of Reputations,” we are told, “It is well known how the book [The King in Yellow] spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists.”

Other nineteenth-century literature fans may recall another corrupting yellow book—in Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. “His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered…After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.” In fact, there are 22 references to “yellow” in Wilde’s most famous novel. It’s used to describe everything from gloves, wine, roses, Chinese hangings, and silk damask, to hands, faces, and a skull. 

You might also think of the maddening yellow wallpaper in Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s 1892 feminist short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper:” “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”

So, what’s up with all this yellow?!

In the latter half of the nineteenth-century, books containing lascivious and scandalous content, often imported from France, were wrapped in yellow paper to act as a warning (or an advertisement, depending on your tastes) to readers. 

Yellow was understood to be the color of aestheticism and decadence. There was even a British journal, The Yellow Book, dedicated to works that referenced these movements. Aubrey Beardsley, illustrator of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, was its first art director. The specific yellow book Wilde includes in The Picture of Dorian Gray is Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 À Rebours (Against Nature), which I reviewed back in 2013. This seminal work of decadent literature charts the life and mind of a protagonist whose desire to live aesthetically has fatal consequences. 

Yellow journalism was also a term for early tabloid journalism, as the so-called yellow press sensationalized news stories to turn a profit (sound familiar?). 

For the writers and artists I’ve mentioned in this blog post, yellow was the color of modernity, but that meant it was also the color of danger, corruption, sensation, sickness, and contagion. In the story “The Yellow Sign,” the protagonist says of the fictional play, The King in Yellow, “Oh the sin of writing such words—words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis!” The message? Pick up a “yellow” book, including the one you’re reading now, at your peril.

Thanks for reading and stay in touch—on Facebook, Instagram, or X. Want to get more updates from my blog? Sign up for my monthly email newsletter here. 

2024: My Year in Reading—A Retrospect

Happy New Year! After tracking my progress via Goodreads, today, for the fifth year in a row, I’m sharing a retrospect on the books I read in the last year. (Here are the links to check out the 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 editions if you’d like to travel back in time!)

In 2024, as in 2023, I read 50 books, an average pace of approximately 50 pages a day. 

My preference for fiction over non-fiction remains clear, with 41 vs. 9 books read. But my non-fiction reading covered topics of particular interest to me, such as art (All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley, and The Art Thief, Michael Finkel), ballet (Turning Pointe, Chloe Angyal), and the nineteenth century (Stranger in the Shogun’s City, Amy Stanley, reviewed here, and The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, Margalit Fox), and expanded into less expected areas (e.g., memoirs by Flea, Esmeralda Santiago, and Patricia E. Beattie, and the story of an eighteenth-century naval mutiny, in David Grann’s The Wager).

When it comes to fiction, for the first time in one of these reviews, one contemporary author dominates—I read six (!) novels by Tana French in 2024 and continue to love her work. 

I reviewed three novels as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, covering books set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first: Edward Carey’s Edith Holler, Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York, and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music. And I also read and blogged about two pieces of nineteenth-century French fiction in translation: Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert, and The Animal, Rachilde. 

My interest in my own genre, historical fiction, remains strong, accounting for 20% of books I read last year. Other strong themes for the year in fiction included witches (The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, Melinda Taub, The Manningtree Witches, A.K. Blakemore, The Witches of New York, Ami McKay, and Weyward, Emilia Hart), ballet (Tiny Pretty Things, Dhonielle Clayton and Sona Charaipotra, and The Dance of the Dolls, Lucy Ashe), and, as ever, books by friends/acquaintances (Marvelous, Molly Greeley, The Last Star Standing, C.G. Twiles, and What's Eating Jackie Oh?, Patricia Park). 

Thirty-five books I read this year were by women, and 15 by men, which is slightly more gender-balanced than in 2023. 

In 2025, I’ll again be aiming to read 50 books. My reading resolutions? Continue to embrace the unexpected (one of my favorite 2024 reads was Chelsea G. Summers’s A Certain Hunger, a book about a female cannibal!), prioritize joy in reading, and continue to support writer friends. 

What books did you enjoy reading in 2024 that I should continue adding to my list? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want to stay in touch? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter here.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Doll Factory, Elizabeth Macneal (2019)

My Neo-Victorian Voices series is dedicated to books written in the twenty-first century, but set in the nineteenth. Last time, I reviewed Marley, Jon Clinch’s 2019 novel about Scrooge’s business partner from Charles Dickens’s 1843 A Christmas Carol. This time I’m writing about Elizabeth Macneal’s debut novel, The Doll Factory, which is set in 1850s London.

The Doll Factory (2019)

The Doll Factory is the story of Iris, who spends her days painting dolls for a laudanum-addicted shop owner, and working alongside her disfigured twin sister. Her life changes forever after meeting two men—Louis Frost, fictional member of the real-life group of artists known as the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), and Silas, a lonely taxidermist and curator of curiosities. Iris has artistic aspirations of her own and so agrees to model for Louis, despite her parents’ and sister’s opposition and concern for her virtue. Meanwhile, Silas grows increasingly obsessed with her, fantasising about adding her to his morbid collection.

The novel is dark and certainly not for the squeamish, but there are moments of levity too. The PRB’s dinner and pub conversation is well wrought and believable, and their quirks add colour and interest. Macneal includes anecdotes both real and apocryphal about William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti et al., from imperilling their models by posing them in bathtubs to killing an unfortunate wombat that ate a box of their cigars.

I also found a secondary point of view character, Albie, particularly compelling. He’s a single-toothed street urchin who brings Silas dead animals and dreams of one day earning enough money to buy a set of fake gnashers (that or saving his sister from prostitution). The conclusion to his story was one of the best paragraphs of a beautifully written book.

Elizabeth Macneal (1988- )

But the heart of the novel is how well Macneal paints Silas, with his delusions, fixations and obsessions. If you enjoy getting into the heads of creepy and amoral characters, this novel is a wonderful exercise in understanding a disturbed mind. If you’d prefer to stick with the heroes, this won’t be for you. In this regard, the novel reminded me of Catherine Chidgey’s 2005 The Transformation, which I also reviewed for this series and very much enjoyed. The denouement of The Doll Factory, which brings Silas and Iris together, keeps you guessing and is hard to put down. Warning: you might miss your subway stop.

There’s just enough time and space dedicated to the technicalities of painting for readers with a particular interest in the art. And the Great Exhibition provides a wonderful historical backdrop to the vents of the novel. If I had to quibble, I’d say the love story isn’t as successful as the rest of the book, but this may be a question of personal taste. No spoilers here, but I was longing to see Iris choose for herself vs. being chosen and yearned for an even greater contrast between Louis and Silas’s desire to own her, especially towards the end. Overall, The Doll Factory is more than worthy of the attention it’s received. If you love the Gothic and Victoriana that’s more macabre than Christmassy, this one’s for you!

Do you have recommendations for which novel I should review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

And if you want email updates about my own forthcoming novel, Bronte’s Mistress, which tells the story of Lydia Robinson, the older woman who had an affair with Branwell Bronte, sign up for my mailing list below.

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Art Review: Boilly: Scenes of Parisian Life, The National Gallery, London

Recently the Secret Victorianist found herself back in London and on the hunt for nineteenth-century culture in the British capital.

‘A Carnival Scene’ (1832)

The National Gallery’s ‘Scenes of Parisian Life’ exhibition is the first dedicated to lesser-known French painter Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) in the UK. It features around twenty paintings but what the exhibition lacks in scale it more than makes up for in variety, demonstrating the range of Boilly’s subjects and media.

Looked down on as ‘just’ a genre painter in his day without the support of the establishment given lauded neoclassical history painters like Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Boilly’s output was dictated by public taste and market forces.

'Comparing Little Feet' (1791)

After arriving in Paris in 1785, he did a brisk trade in scenes featuring young woman in elegant interiors, often with a risqué edge. One of these, ‘Comparing Little Feet’ (1791) was on display at the National Gallery. In it, two women strip off their stockings, ostensibly to compare their shoe sizes.

However, in the tumultuous time of the Revolution, Boilly found himself in hot water for his brand of titillating art. He survived with his head but pivoted—to more patriotic subjects, visual illusions and the Parisian crowdscapes for which he is most remembered.

'The Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio’ (1799)

His ‘The Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio’ (1799) (also on view) is a ‘who’s who’ of the Parisian art world at the advent of the nineteenth century, including 31 painters, sculptors and architects and, of course, Boilly himself. Notably, not a single woman is invited to this idealised meeting of the minds, despite the Revolution being an unprecedented period of freedom for women artists.

Crowd scenes featured in the exhibition include ‘The Barrel Game’ (1828), ‘The Poor Cat’ (1832) and ‘A Carnival Scene’ (1832). All depict the colourful menagerie of nineteenth-century urban life, with city-dwellers of every class side by side. Hidden in the paintings are dramatic incidents that provoke a smile—a child grasps at an apple, a man urinates against a wall, a boy picks a pocket, a dog runs off with a carnival mask.

'The Poor Cat’ (1832) 

Boilly’s humour is distinctive, even if his expression in his self-portraits is usually stern. He coined the term ‘trompe-l’oeil’ (a trick of the eye) for works in which uses one medium to imitate another. His painting of crucifix appears 3D, while his signature seems to be pinned beside it, a slightly blasphemous advertisement.

'A Trompe-l'oeil: Crucifix of Ivory and Wood' (1812)

Observing Boilly’s Paris is like reading Dickens’s London. Never has the nineteenth century looked so alive. 

‘Boilly:Scenes of Parisian Life’ is free and open to the public at The National Gallery until 19^th May 2019. Visit if you can.

Do you know of any New York-based nineteenth-century-focused exhibitions you’d like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Art Review: It’s Alive! Frankenstein at 200, Morgan Library & Museum, New York City

In the summer of 1818, twenty-year-old Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin, although living as ‘Mrs Shelley’ with Percy Bysshe Shelley in Geneva) wrote one of the most culturally influential stories in the English language. Her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has spawned countless adaptations across multiple media and has come to be a definitive part of the Gothic and Romantic movements.

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1781)

To mark the bicentenary of the novel’s creation, the Morgan Library & Museum has unveiled a major exhibition dedicated to the work and its influence.

Three Witches, Henry Fuseli (1783)

I began my visit by exploring the Gothic art that inspired Shelley and her contemporaries. Many of these paintings draw upon or suggest narratives, such as Henry Fuseli’s 1781 The Nightmare, in which a demon crouches atop a prostrate woman’s chest, and his 1783 Three Witches, which has influenced subsequent depictions of Shakespeare’s weird sisters. There are also skeletal depictions of Death, such as John Hamilton Mortimer’s drawing of Death on a Pale Horse (c.1775) and multiple instances of men and women attempting resurrections by an open grave.

Death on a Pale Horse, John Hamilton Mortimer (c.1775)

In the next section of the exhibition it’s easy to see synergies between the Gothic imagination and contemporary scientific advancements. Doctors and anatomists are depicted as grave robbers, while artists show their instruments destroying and restoring life, as well as extending it.

The Anatomist Overtaken by the Watch, William Austin (1773)

Parts of the Frankenstein manuscript are on display, as well as letters between the Godwins, Shelleys and others. The romance of the Frankenstein’s creation, and the characters of Shelley, Shelley, Byron and Keats, seem to add to its mystique and appeal, as much as the story itself.

The manuscript

In a second room we move out of the nineteenth century and into Frankenstein’s afterlife in film and graphic novels. We trace the monster’s evolution from reanimated corpse to superhuman villain to participant in superhero-style showdowns. The movies become weather vanes for the sensibilities of their time. For instance, the creature’s accidental child killing appalled audiences in 1931 and so the moment was cut from the film. The bride of Frankenstein (a creature Viktor chooses not to animate in Shelley’s original tale) becomes part of our cultural inheritance—here you can observe her wig, listen to her blood curdling screams.

A poster for the 1931 adaptation

At the centre of the exhibition is Richard Rothwell’s 1840 portrait of Mary Shelley. She watches over proceedings serenely as movie buffs, bibliophiles, and lovers of the macabre file through. I couldn’t help but wonder what she’d think of how Frankenstein and his monster have outlived her and evolved and how amazed she’d be that a tale born out of her time has come to represent so much about generations since.

Mary Shelley, Richard Rothwell (1840)

Which NYC exhibitions should the Secret Victorianist visit next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.