The Scandal of the Season, indeed

In 2007, Sophie Gee published her first novel, The Scandal of the Season. Gee is an Australian-born academic who studied eighteenth-century British literature at Harvard, and her first novel clearly takes its inspiration from her scholarly interests.

The novel is a fictional account of the real-life events which inspired Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. Gee's text richly evokes the Augustan period, its fashions, homes, food, all set amidst the madly competitive literary circles of ubran London. Most of the characters are based upon real historical figures, and Gee makes the period come alive through their narratives. There is also a pretty steamy romance between (who else) the fair Arabella Fermor and the very dashing Lord Petre.

Kathryn Hughes, who reviwed Gee's novel for The Guardian, scoffs that in The Scandal of the Season, "Sophie Gee has rewritten [The Rape of the Lock] for the kind of people who keep up to date with the Prince William/Kate Middleton saga, even though they pretend otherwise."

Ouch.

New York Times reviewer Jessica Grose is a little more balanced in her article; she contextualizes both Pope's poem and Gee's novel within the broader sociocultural paradigms of celebrity, gossip, and trashy headlines.

When I read this novel, The Rape of Lock took on a new level of significance for me: Gee portrays Pope's text not simply as a clever social satire, but a public document which bears testimony to the people Alexander Pope knew and the personal circumstances in which he lived and worked.

All this raises the question: what can historical fiction (and, I add, period films) do - and not do - for our understanding and reception of primary literay texts?