We all think about it, maybe in conjunction with regrets. I guess the eternal question of what-if fascinates me. After writing it, I wondered why I had chosen this fictional trope. The idea that she might change her 17 th century idol’s life in the past has reverberations for her future and the possibility of theirs together. In my novel, The Renaissance Club, changing history has intriguing possibilities for love, art, and my heroine’s career. Preventing a murder by traveling into the past has all sorts of interesting possible complications, both related to detection and psychology. Time travel romances are now huge, and even more intriguing is the way traveling through time has invaded other genres, for example crime fiction, in the recent The Psychology of Time Travel by debut author Mascarenhas. The basis of how you would time travel is a science fiction concern, but that kind of time travel used to be the only genre. The new time travel novels that have women leading these explorations makes it all the more fascinating to me. They’re fun speculations, as is the consideration as to whether or not you could change the past and so alter the present day. Could history branch and provide alternative universes? It’s a respectably scientific speculation, popular ever since Einstein. I love the “if only, then possibly” fictive trope. They need to fix history, for good reasons-such as, “don’t we wish Jane Austen had written more books?” Or “If only we could have prevented the Plague from decimating Siena and rescued some of its artists.”
The Scribe of Siena, The Doomsday Book, The Jane Austen Project are novels that feature women who have big goals. I like the ones who have a political, literary, or even crime-solving purpose. Some just want to change their own present, and some even venture into the future in order to alter their lives now. Some aim to improve the present world by changing its past, in large and small ways. There’s nothing wrong with that reason for parting time’s folds, but a fascinating subset of time-bending heroines have other agendas. Most of these characters fall into another century and fall in love.
Time travel novel heroines? It’s a pretty short list.
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