Life & Wisdom Quote by Helen Dunmore

The line quietly punctures a persistent fantasy about “historical fiction” as a special category with special gear: extra research, extra gravitas, extra permission to be “literary.” Dunmore, a poet by training, shrinks that distance to almost nothing. She’s not denying the labor of period detail; she’s refusing to let it become the headline. The real work, she implies, is constant across eras: shaping a consciousness on the page, calibrating voice, managing pacing, staging desire and dread. Time period is wardrobe; the body underneath is craft.

Her “as far as I’m concerned” matters. It’s a gentle stake in the ground against a gatekeeping conversation that often treats historical settings as either escapist costume drama or as the more “serious” sibling of contemporary realism. Dunmore’s phrasing nudges both camps: if you think contemporary fiction is easier because you can “just write what you know,” you’re romanticizing it. If you think history automatically lends depth, you’re outsourcing meaning to scenery.

Contextually, Dunmore wrote across forms and often across time, with a poet’s sensitivity to texture and omission. The subtext is almost ethical: readers and critics love to reward the visible labor (the archive, the facts), but writing’s hardest pleasures are invisible - the sentence that holds, the character who surprises, the emotional truth that doesn’t care what year it is. She’s reminding us that authenticity isn’t a timestamp; it’s an achieved effect.