How I Came to Publish My First Novel
Friends, an agent, several editors, and an erring libido
Two British friends encouraged me to write a novel. At first I rejected their kindness out of hand. Something about being trained as a historian led me to dismiss instinctively the idea of making things up. In grad school I learned to drop a footnote listing the source for each new assertion, so that it could be reviewed independently and verified by other readers. History is not a science, but one of its claims to truth rests on other historians’ being able to follow up the references in your footnotes. It seemed like an outrage not only to do away with footnotes, but also to invent a story that had happened only in my imagination.
Slowly I came around to the notion that I might say a lot more in fiction than was possible in nonfiction. I’d spent many months in Windsor over the years working in the Royal Archives. A retired teacher from Eton, across the river, rented me some rooms in his house so that I didn’t have to commute back to London every time I had to do research in Windsor. I was often wandering around the public parts of Windsor Great Park, or along the river at Eton, on rainy weekends when the archives were closed. I watched the boys who went to school there. They wore white tie and tails to attend classes. In the afternoon, they’d dress like…
