what year were colours invented? vibrant lives of long-ago women

A friend of my son’s sat at the table, looking through old photos with us. “What year were colours invented?” he asked, absently.

I cocked my head. “You mean colour photography?”

“No,” he said. “I mean colours. Like, back in the day, they had no colours. Like this,” he said, indicating a black-and-white photo of my grandmother, circa 1920, chopping wood in the yard of the old homestead. “Like, there was no colour, see? The trees were gray, the sky was gray, her clothes were gray. What year did they start having colour in the world?”

After shushing my son’s laughter, I explained that, actually, there was colour in those days. Everything was in colour. The poplar trees in the yard might have been an emerald green, the sky was blue as a Manitoba morning. In 1920, my grandmother’s hair was likely still the colour of straw and her dress would be a little faded, no doubt, but it was probably made of gingham, so it would be a lively pattern of white with either a bluebell blue or maybe a soft, sturdy pink.
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“The world was full of colour back then,” I told him. “And people’s lives were as beautiful and colourful, or as ugly or plain or hard, as ours are today. Just that we can’t see it in the pictures. They didn’t yet have the technology, colour photography, to really let us see their world in full colour as it was.”​

WE JUST CAN'T SEE IT IN THE PICTURES

In some ways, reading historical fiction is like this. I know that women long ago must have been fully human, complex and multi-dimensional, perhaps a little flawed, but large as life. And yet, too often, the characters I read are just … lack-lustre. One-dimensional. Syrupy good. Or, on the other hand, they are powerhouse women, full of confidence, and brandishing suspiciously modern sensibilities, attitudes, and worldviews. Sometimes, they possess scientific or medical know-how not in keeping with their place in history. (Being a medical doctor who has travelled back in time helps here: winking at you, Diana Gabaldon.)

This is the job of the writer of historical fiction; to bring to life, in ways both believable and meaningful, characters from forgotten times. The best kinds of historical fiction show women’s lives in full, vibrant colour.

This vibrancy begins with accurate details of life in their place and time, which requires the writer to research, research, research, and study actual history. Most writers of historical fiction tend to focus on a particular time period; for instance, Scotland during the Jacobite rebellions, or Southern Ontario in the Nineteenth Century, or Western Canada during the Great Depression. To study that history, we read copiously, but with focus, about our period. We read coursework, we do library research, we read biographies, go to museums, examine historical artifacts and tools and processes. We hear oral histories. ​  

RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH

For my novel, A Seven Year Ache, based broadly on the lives of my kin and set thirty years before my birth, besides coursework and reading in history, sociology, and women’s studies, I had inherited many oral stories about my mythic grandmother and aunties, and was also able to conduct life story interviews with elderly relatives. And I did many hours of genealogical research, corroborating the stories with censuses, marriage, birth and death records, county maps, homestead records, and newspaper clippings.

Along with the research, writers also spend copious hours thinking and planning, especially when pre-writing and while drafting. We think about our characters and we think about what our characters’ lives would actually be like. Some writers begin with extensive written notes and storyboards. I did a great deal of thinking while walking my dogs down long, gravel roads and while highway driving back and forth to my home town. I walked the fields and roads of Pretty Valley, where my characters had lived; I kept company at every season with the once-noble Roaring River. Sometimes, if I had been worrying at how to handle a certain character arc or how to reveal the next plot point or how to work the next bit of dialogue, I would actually awaken in the morning, having dreamed the solution.

For most of the history of the world, the vast majority of women were what we today would call working-class; people without professions who worked with their hands and on their feet. Often, they had little or no education. Granted, there is an inordinate amount of interest in the stories of that tiny group of women with the servants and castles and elegant, ritzy social affairs in need of attendance, but that was not the experience of most women. For most women, on a daily basis, there was work to be done, actual physical work, without which, in many cases, they and their families could not have survived.

So, women in good historical fiction don’t have a lot of time for primping. Or daydreaming about Prince Charming. They are busy, busy, busy.  Probably, as in Gabaldon’s Outlander series, bringing herbs and expertise to an 18th century Scottish clanswoman in labour. Or, as in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, at the tender age of sixteen, having to earn one’s keep as a housemaid. In fact, even while incarcerated in the penitentiary, Grace was hired out as a domestic servant to the Governor. ​

19th CENTURY JAIL CELL

In A Seven Year Ache, set in Manitoba during the Great Depression, the prairie women are, by necessity, hard workers and their work often carries the novel onwards. My Rosie cooks for her family and her mother’s, nine children in all. This requires chopping and bringing wood for the stove, preparing vegetables she has herself grown, and using meat from animals she has herself raised and slaughtered. She has to milk the cow before churning butter, and carry and heat water from the well before scrubbing clothes on a scrub-board and hanging them on an outdoor clothesline, winter and summer. Rosie also supervises and directs all those children and feeds and changes the babies, all while finding time to ruminate on her unsatisfying marriage and an ever-present ache for passion and fun.

Women of that place and time were kind of busy. Hence, the old saying, “A man may work from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.” ​

Characters in good historical fiction must have engaging, well-drawn personalities and interesting yet believable responses to their context. But again, it’s a thin line writers walk; to build deeply engaging and relatable characters that inspire the reader's empathy—but minus the implausible 21st Century worldview and mindset. 

Vibrant women characters engage in realistic but appealing ways with the world in which they live. They influence, and are influenced by, the contingencies of that world. Atwood’s Grace, though from a poor background, works her situation to attain any benefit she can. Outwardly cooperative and grateful in her relations at the penitentiary, still, she is careful in what she reveals to Simon Jordan, often manipulating the interactions so as to retain her own control of the truth.

Roaming through the Highlands on horseback with Jamie Cameron, fighting the King’s dragoons, was dangerous, tedious, and cold for Claire Randall in Outlander, the food was nothing to write home about, and oh, that rocky ground she and Jamie had to lie on! Sometimes, they just tossed and turned for hours! ​

OLD MAN OF STORR, SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS

My Rosie was a feisty girl, taking after her tough, unconventional mother. But she got worn down by the unending, backbreaking work, the poverty and hopelessness, the dirt and the failure and the kids coming one after another. Weak to temptation and devastated by deaths in the family and other terrible losses, her eye was drawn to someone she was not supposed to be looking at, an error of unknown consequence.

This is our final gift of vibrancy to the lives of historical women; we bequeath to them deep and riveting emotional lives. They have dreams and desires, sometimes unrequited; they have sorrows and longings and, in some cases, a mean and unrelenting ache. Claire’s longing was for her true husband. Grace’s longing was for privacy and justice and freedom. Rosie’s was for passion and excitement and … something, just something better than the hand that was dealt her.

It all begins with a writer’s certainty that women in the past were real people. Knowing this, we paint them large and true. ​

A CERTAINTY THAT WOMEN WERE REAL PEOPLE