The book is difficult to summarize adequately, for although the title promises a linear tour through three hundred years' worth of historical fiction, the chapters actually proceed in snapshot fashion. Perhaps intentionally, the reader is left wondering about that "the" in The Historical Novel...; Maxwell is not interested in narrowing down the genre's capaciousness. As a genre, he comments, it is "hard to isolate or get into focus" (8), and the study itself feels strangely elusive at times. However, at least two themes recur with some regularity. First, Maxwell finds that both the French historical romances and the Waverley Novels preoccupy themselves with ringing changes on the interrelations of "particular history" ("the life of a town, a country, or especially a renowned figure" [13-14]) and the "secret history" (which "uses hidden personal motives or characteristics to clarify the meaning of conspiracies or other struggles for political and military power" ). In Scott, this tension plays itself out through the apparently contradictory styles of world-historical narrative and the "seemingly improbable portal of antiquarianism" (59). Rather like Wordsworthian spots of time, Scott's narratives "offer glimpses of history" (93), which turn "history" into something escapable--yet they also represent historical existence as "immersion" (98), from which neither character nor reader can necessarily escape at all. Second, Maxwell dwells on the significance of violence, which manifests itself in two popular plotlines: tales about royal pretenders (Perkin Warbeck and company) and warfare, especially "siegecraft." Such stories enable novelists to imagine and critique a particular type of hero, whether the "world-historical individual" (170) who vanishes into the imagination or the "collective protagonist" (172) who defends and batters down the walls. The specifically English historical novel, Maxwell argues, turns out to be the province of childhood, both in the form of the children's historical novel and in historical novels featuring children. Maxwell's exemplary "English" novelists in this respect are G. A. Henty and Charlotte Yonge, whose works, he argues, "highlight the steep learning curve of the young person pushed into a historical crisis" (252).
In dating the historical novel back to 1650, Maxwell punches a hole in the genre's usual chronology, but he also takes aim at its most prominent theorist, Georg Lukacs--as the study announces on its very first page. But the study engages with Lukacs only by appearing not to engage with Lukacs; after Lukacs' rather non-triumphant entry in the introduction, The Historical Novel's theoretical limitations generally appear only in asides, as when Maxwell notes that Lukacs "avoided Dumas" because "the attempt to apply the Waverley formula of the 'classical historical novel' to Bragelonne would make a hash of the formla and the book" (149). Noting, correctly, that few scholars actually finish The Historical Novel, Maxwell points out that it "fixate[s]" (66) on the historical novel as modeled by Scott, and treats all later attempts at the form as sad deviants from the original; when Lukacs shifts his attention from Scott to Balzac, the historical novel qua form simply vanishes into contemporary realism. Maxwell, however, rejects Lukacs' glum sense that the historical novel simply declines and falls. Rather, there are historical novels, and the form continually regenerates itself in new shapes as the centuries wear on. (Indeed, Maxwell could have followed Tomas Hägg by dating the historical novel back to antiquity!)
Despite its title, then, this study does not define a genre so much as demonstrate how porous its boundaries are, and many of its larger implications remain unstated. What does it mean to transform the "English" historical novel into a quintessentially regional genre? (And is the "English" historical novel really as localized as Maxwell argues?) Where does Irish historical fiction--treated by critics from James Cahalan on as a deeply troubled genre--fit into the Franco-Scottish paradigm? Is it significant that women historical novelists seem to drop out of the middle of Maxwell's argument? One wonders, too, where modernist reworkings of the historical novel--e.g., Ford Madox Ford's The Fifth Queen, or Virginia Woolf's Orlando--fit in this scheme. Nevertheless, readers already well-versed in the theory of historical fiction should find this a stimulating read.