Writing animals into historical fiction

For millennia, humans and animals have coexisted in different ways – protecting each other, comforting each other, and eating each other. Whenever your historical fiction is set, if animals aren’t involved, you may be missing an opportunity to give your reader deeper insight into your characters, story, and setting. This post asks questions about the relationships between human characters and animals and looks at examples of how they are answered in popular historical fiction.

What animals does my character come into contact with? In what circumstances?

For many of us nowadays, interactions with animals are limited to specific circumstances, like snuggling with our pets, scooping spiders out of the bath, or watching birds from our windows. Our forebears’ contact with animals may have been very different. Research the animals that would abound in your characters’ geographic location, social milieu, and daily routine, and then explore what that would mean for each character, be they the stable hand who grooms a horse, the coachman who drives it, or the lord who buys and sells it at auction. If your character is the stable hand, then they are with the horse when it awakens, when it eats, and when it is ill or injured. The coachman knows each horse’s temperament, decides how best to put them to work, and sits in the rain with them for hours, waiting for the ball to end. The lord may take his horse out to make social calls, to hunt, or – if he is an officer as well as a gentleman – to lead a charge into battle. Each situation presents a very different interaction between characters and creatures, in different places and moods, to different ends, and with different visions.

How does my character view animals?

For characters in many historical contexts, animals would have provided transport. Your characters may see them as brutish beasts of burden, useful tools, meek servants, or loyal friends; each perspective tells the reader something. Animals also provided historical humans with protein, whether farmed or hunted, and warmth, through companionship, feathers, fur, wool, silk, dung fires or oil lamps. Here your characters’ perceptions can vary too. Do they see animals as precious commodities, to be cared for and nurtured, or as a source of wealth, to be exploited? The view you choose for your character can give your reader a window into their worldview and personality.

Characters may also see themselves reflected in particular animals. In The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O’Farrell singles Lucrezia out from the rest of her family by making her unafraid of the tigress her father keeps caged. While her siblings flee screaming, the connection Lucrezia shares with the tigress also foreshadows her own fate:

“Was there no hope? the tigress seemed to be asking her. Will I always remain here? Will I never return home? Lucrezia felt tears welling in her eyes.”

Showing your reader the animals your characters identify with can be powerful.

What do my characters’ interactions with animals say about them?

Depicting how your characters treat animals, and how animals respond to them, lets you give your reader vital glimpses into your characters’ nature. At the beginning of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel introduces the young Thomas Cromwell through this beautifully crafted scene which shows how different he is from his blacksmith father, Walter:

“Their hooves gripped in Walter’s hands, they’d tremble; it was [Cromwell’s] job to hold their heads and talk to them, rubbing the velvet space between their ears, telling them how their mothers love them and talk about them still, and how Walter will soon be over.”

Mantel does not need to tell us that Walter is violent; the horses do that. Cromwell’s fear of the father he will soon run away from shines through, and so do his uncannily incisive understanding of others and his way with words, both of which will shape the rest of his story.

What do animal interactions say about my character’s place and time?

The interactions a character has with animals can be telling, and so can the interactions denied to them. In Geraldine Brooks’ novel Horse, the setting – the antebellum South – defines Harry’s connection with his horse, Darley:

“No one at the Kentucky Association could know that Darley belonged to a Black man, so the horse would race in Dr. Warfield’s colors… as if it were his own. Harry also had to ask the doctor’s help in paying the entry fee… [the fee] was one hundred dollars, and Harry had only managed to save fifty dollars since buying his wife out of bondage.”

Later, Darley is sold by one white man to another, without Harry’s consent. Brooks reveals the injustices her characters face through their connections to animals.

What other roles can animals play?

Animals can serve as props, narrative devices, and even supporting characters. In Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus goes further and makes an animal character – Six-Thirty the dog – a third-person narrator of key events that no human character could have witnessed, because if they had, the events would not have happened:

“Six-Thirty didn’t like the police parking lot, especially the way the police backed out in such a sloppy hurry. He didn’t even like the friendly policemen who sometimes waved to them as he and Calvin jogged by, their slow trudge in sharp contrast to Calvin’s vigor…
As he and Calvin approached, Six-Thirty sniffed the air. It was still dark. The sun would rise in about ten more –
CRACK!”

Six-Thirty is the only character who could witness the CRACK, and carry its consequences forward through the rest of the novel. His thinking is cleverly and comedically anthropomorphised, but his behaviour never is. He always acts like a dog, even while understanding more about the human world than even the most doting dog-owners among us usually give our four-legged friends credit for.

Asking yourself questions like these about how your characters would have experienced animals is one more way of bringing stories to life, and life to stories.