- Location
- Derbyshire
David Flin: If writing for a mainstream audience, one has to write something that will strike a chord with that mainstream audience. I can write about Edwardian life till I am blue in the face, but Bloody Downton Abbey is what the mainstream audience consumes because that's what it understands about the period.
Yes, the sense of a lost golden age pre-1914 is so engrained that when I wrote about the genuine 1911 Great Unrest on a BBC forum, people insisted that it was a counter-factual scenario rather than true history. This was despite books like The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935) by George Dangerfield and the very crisp and focused The Edwardian Crisis (1996) by David Powell which I would recommend to anyone with an interest in modern British history - let alone more academic texts on the period.
The point you raise David is a challenge in non-alternate historical fiction too. My wife wrote a historical novel which had the mainstream attitude that women were not permitted on late 18th Century/early 19th Century ships at all. This is despite the fact Lord Nelson complained there were so many women on many of his ships that they were consuming all the drinking water. No, they were not prostitutes but wives of officers and artisans, including the blacksmith, and yes, wooden ships did have forges on them. However, she knew if she portrayed a ship as it was genuinely, many readers of historical fiction would turn away saying she was trying to push a Feminist line, just being odd or lazy with her research.
The latter's cropped up in a pure fantasy setting I've read before, but at least there it feels more justified because it's that explicitly not actual history even if it's drawing very heavily from the stereotype of 18th Century Britain, albeit that also perpetuates the matter in pop culture.
Though David's suggestion of the Partition does feel like something you might be able to get a mainstream UK audience for even if production is only greenlit because of the South Asian community here. At the very least 'United India and Pakistan/Bangladesh' is concise enough to be easy to explain