Coaxing Narrative from History
- elichvar
- 3 minutes ago
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Andrea Barrett
Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction
W.W. Norton & Company /2025 /189 pp / $26.99 Hardcover
Reviewed by Amanda A. Gibson / December 2025
A few years ago, I grew fascinated with a nineteenth-century photographer, Anna Atkins, who used a photographic process called cyanotype, which employs sunshine and chemicals to make ethereal blue images. Although Atkins was the first to publish photographs, she is all but lost to history, overshadowed by male photographers of her era. Unfortunately, historical details about Atkins are sparse, though she lived in a milieu of privilege, surrounded by academic scholars. I felt uncomfortable making up facts about Atkins and, worse, fabricating drama for characters based upon real people who were captured more fully in the historical record. Moreover, the timeline of Atkins’ life didn’t fit a traditional narrative arc. After completing several drafts of a novel, I decided to shelve it, unsure of how to fairly portray history and its characters through today’s lens.
Thus, I was thrilled when I discovered, in a Key West bookshop, Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction, by Andrea Barrett, in which Barrett demonstrates how history can be curated, manipulated, and augmented to create a robust narrative—all in the service of story. I loved her National Book Award-winning collection of stories, Ship Fever, published in 1996. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Award, Barrett weaves both history and science into her stories and novels. Barrett promises in the Introduction to Dust and Light to explore the “perils and well as the potential” of culling history and keeping only what fits.
Dust and Light is largely a compilation of previously published essays in which Barrett describes her process of research and writing and dissects the work of other writers of historical fiction. Barrett explores an idea by researching thoroughly, collating facts and events, and weaving details into a narrative. “I let the material lead me, following the hints of glitter among the heap of rubble and, by sifting and sorting until I’d found more, linking one bit to another and another.” Because her writing so often focuses on scientific exploration, Barrett has spent decades reading about botanists, zoologists, surveyors, map makers, oceanographers, and astronomers. For example, when she wrote her novel The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), she read the journals, letters, and memoirs of nineteenth-century Arctic explorers. By immersing herself thoroughly in the world of her subject matter, Barrett begins to understand what her characters feel.
Reading Barrett’s essays, I came to understand that writing historical fiction is a process no different from any other fiction writing, even though historical fiction relies on external material. “The materials we’re using, whether autobiographical or historical, need to be dissolved entirely into the work, freshly embodied in characters, images, and language bringing the scene alive for the characters and hence for us.” Descriptions of historical events by historians and writers will diverge because, as Barrett quotes Tolstoy, “’A historian and an artist, describing a historical epoch, have two completely different objects.’” Historians aim to capture the historical record, whereas the fiction writer interprets the record to create story.
Barrett allayed my concerns about conjuring events and behaviors both for Atkins and for other characters based on real people. I cast a famous photographer of Atkins’s era as the antagonist, imbuing him with a competitive and malicious streak. It is his character for whom I experienced the most qualms about taking liberties. Barrett reveals that she in fact invents characters to serve as foils for a protagonist, creating interactions that allow Barrett to imagine the interior life of her subject. For example, when writing a story called “His Biography” about Alpheus Spring Packard, professor of geology and zoology at Brown University in the late 1800s, she invented two female characters with whom Packard engaged in order to show his thoughts and feelings and his attitudes toward women. She did so to bring history alive in a way a historian can’t. To cull the historical record judiciously, and add depth of character, is to “make art from materials that in other hands might become history or biography.” Barrett notes that one critic observed that Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall, among other books, understood that “novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case.”
I feared that one of the greatest shortcomings of my draft novel was the fact that I couldn’t wrestle the timing of Atkins’s life into a narrative structure. To introduce drama into my storyline, I compressed her life’s events and conjured others. Barrett notes that “dutiful adherence to the life-as-already-recorded paradoxically keeps . . . characters from feeling really real.” Quoting writer Bruce Duffy, Barrett explains that fiction must use narrative compression, so fiction by its terms doesn’t equate to the standards of biography or history, which adhere to factual timelines. Barrett observes that “fiction works like fiction, not like biography; it is not expository, linear, dense with explanation but allusive, digressive, mysterious, compact. The fiction is driven by the characters’ emotions—not by my forced adherence to predetermined events.” What is most important in fiction, Barrett notes, is robust characters and a propulsive narrative.
Barrett discusses biographies that employ tools of fiction and names several books that inhabit the “shadowy” combination of history, biography, memoir, and fiction. Barrett lists authors whose work is fiction rooted in fact, among them Hilary Mantel, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Julian Barnes. Writers such as Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers “have brilliantly used fiction to represent, re-create the lives of enslaved persons.” All these writers go through a process of meticulous research followed by a weaving of story to serve the genre.
Emboldened by Barrett’s perspective, I understand that I can both respect the past and create a compelling narrative. I can honor Atkins’s life and still fashion a timeline of events that moves the narrative forward. Creating personalities and behaviors for my characters who once lived enhances the story and allows readers to feel a connection. Readers of historical fiction will find Barrett’s analysis fascinating, and writers who might be struggling like me will find it reassuring. Barrett has parted the thorny tangles of the moral and ethical underbrush so I can see the path forward on my novel. Free from worry about deviating from the historical record, I can tell the story of Anna Atkins, a woman who might otherwise remain hidden in the folds of history.
Amanda A. Gibson’s writing has appeared in journals such as The Common, Five Minutes, Orca, and JMWW. She’s working on her second novel. Amanda writes about the transformations people experience in everyday life. More about Amanda can be found at www.amandagibsonauthor.com.