Historical Fiction Turns a Life Into a Story
Our day-to-day doesn’t follow an obvious plot. The arc of the past is visible only in hindsight.
When Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, production temporarily stopped on the sixth season of Netflix’s popular historical drama The Crown, which charts the second Elizabethan age in the United Kingdom. It was done out of respect, a Netflix source said, but it also highlights the strange relationship the real crown has with The Crown. The series depends on actual people and events, but the demands of storytelling mean that the facts must be made to cohere into something beyond a biography: a narrative, as Helen Lewis wrote.
