See Jill Lepore, “Just the Facts, Ma’am: Fake Memoirs, Factual Fictions, and the History of History,” The New Yorker, March 24, 2008, available from: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/03/24/080324crat_atlarge_lepore.
Historians and novelists are kin … but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes. The literary genre that became known as “the novel” was born in the eighteenth century. History, the empirical sort based on archival research and practiced in universities, anyway, was born at much the same time. Its novelty is not as often remembered, though, not least because it wasn’t called “novel.” In a way, history is the anti-novel, the novel’s twin, though which is Cain and which is Abel depends on your point of view.
