LETTERS

Wrapped up in books

Thank you for the recent feature on Sir Walter Scott (The Man Who Invented Scotland?, September). For many of us, the way into history has been through the door marked “literature”, and so we welcome the obvious connections between the two disciplines. I would urge more of the same, for isn’t reading literature written in the past a form of time travel? Do we not live and breathe the Georgians in Austen’s novels, the Victorians in Dickens and the First World War in Sassoon and Owen?

I would also argue that modern novels with a historical setting have a place in lighting the fires and feeding our faculties of historical analysis. I series and enjoying its rich historical context, from mining and smuggling to the Napoleonic wars. (Winston Graham obviously enjoyed the research!) And, of course, as you showed in the Scott feature, novels that look to the past reveal as much about the times in which they were written as the historical period they describe.