The French History of England: The Late Seventeenth-Century Historical Novel Across the Channel

Abstract

This article explores the development of late seventeenth-century novel through the lens of the “Channel zone”—a space of intense literary and cultural intersection between Britain and France in the period. While scholarship has often emphasized the influence of French nouvelles historiques on English fiction, this study identifies a paradox: despite the proliferation of French novels addressing English history, English publishers and readers were remarkably selective in what they chose to translate, because not all French works had the same impact or interest in England. This article first examines why only a fraction of the French novels depicting English history published between 1667 and 1703 reached English audiences. By analysing the historiographical context, the paper argues that the French interest in stories about the English royalty was fuelled by a combination of political curiosity, religious turmoil, and a blurring of boundaries between the historical discipline and historical novels. However, when these texts were transported to England, they underwent a generic transformation. English publishers, acting as market gatekeepers, shifted focus from the body politic to the natural bodies of their monarchs, recasting these works as secret histories to satisfy a growing interest in their private and even scandalous lives. The second half of the paper analyses a reversal in this cultural exchange through The Secret History of the Duchess of Portsmouth (1690). This text, a translation from English into French, suggests a circularity of influence, whereby a secret history, a predominantly English genre, eventually reshaped the French nouvelle historique. The paper concludes that the discarded fragments of history, the private lives of the nobility and their hidden emotions became one of the foundational pillars upon which modern English fiction was built.