In E.L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (his 1994 novel of post-civil war America), the narrator McIlvaine addresses the reader: ‘We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory to your time. There is nothing quaint or colourful about us.’ Doctorow reminds the reader that our sense of modernity is an illusion. As Delia Falconer has eloquently noted apropos Doctorow’s novel, the contemporary historical novelist has a valuable role to play:

I believe that the best historical novelists make the past new again by reigniting its past struggles and presenting it as a place of competing interests and voices whose story has not ended but continues in the present […] never assume that the past is quaint and safe, that its struggles are over and done with, that its facts are merely facts.