Introduction

The crystallisation of history as a discipline in the 19th century had at least two implications for the way in which understanding the past was conceptualised at the time. Firstly, because this process followed similar processes to those the hard sciences had already undergone, the hard sciences’ precepts became the basis for the formation of historical research procedures (Jacobitti, 2000, p. 9; Sreedharan, 2007, p. 118; Southgate, 2014, p. 13). Secondly, this occurred when empiricism/positivism profoundly influenced the academic ethos. Concomitantly, these—but also many other—factors contributed to understanding the past being conceptualised, by and large, as an outcome of diligent collecting and cross-verifying facts that spoke for themselves, to refer to Ranke’s famous phrase (Ranke, 1824, p. vi). Even if nowadays, thanks to postmodernists, we are aware of the shortcomings that this approach to understanding the past entails, the undeniable conceptual progress that academic history has made since its birth is rather selective as regards its underpinnings. For instance, the idealistic naïveté that historians are the truth-wielders giving us access to the past has been abandoned (Wiślicz, 2015, p. 4). Objectivity has been redefined—the erstwhile perfectly achievable ideal that differentiated the historian from his subjective colleagues from less rigorous fields is today not only pursued with the awareness of the partial futility of the gesture but also seen as closely tied with the historian’s unavoidable subjectivity (Daston & Galison, 2007, p. 83). Once marginal, the interpretative view of the historian’s work on facts thrives nowadays (Munslow, 2008). Even the very idea of fact has been expanded (Dolański, 2016, p. 9). However, if one browses through post-nineteenth-century works of history and interviews with historians, one cannot but notice two conflicting trends as regards historical accuracy. On the one hand, some historians still tend to function in very much the nineteenth-century fashion—having amassed what counts as historical data in their works, they put forward their historical accuracy as a guarantee of the unquestionable value of their texts for our understanding of the past (Robinson, 1904, p. 6; Becker, 1932, p. 16; Clifford, 1973, p. v; Marwick, 2001; Joshua, 2014). On the other hand, the more philosophically inclined historians appear to recognise the tenuous relationship between historical accuracy—an unachievable but pursuit-worthy ideal—and understanding the past—a result of interpreting historical data (Frankel 1957, p. 137; McCullagh, 1971, p. 215; White, 1973; McNeill, 1986, p. 1; Munslow, 2008).

In historical fiction, the idea of understanding the past has also evolved. Although the crystallisation of the historical novel as a genre in the 19th century is most often attributed to the growing popularity of realism at the time, the strong influence of the largely and non-coincidentally concurrent rise of academic history (Hamnett, 2011, pp. 32, 173–176), as well as Gothic literature (Wallace, 2004, pp. 15–16, de Groot, 2009, pp. 14–15; Neill, 2018, p. 77) should also be mentioned.Footnote 1 These rather contrasting impulses made early historical fiction strongly focused on offering both a faithful representation of the past and a vivid portrayal of the chosen zeitgeist. However, the then historical novelists’ attempts at faithful portrayals should not be misinterpreted as shots at ousting historians from their the-truth-wielder position. In Waverley, Walter Scott clearly emphasises that his work is based on historical sources—“Letters from the Highlands” and Jacobite rising documents, and even discussions with veterans (Scott, 1814, pp. ix–x and 1985, p. 522). Although the key purpose behind this gesture is to defend the emerging genre from its early criticism (Scott, 1814, pp. v–x, 1–11; de Groot, 2009, p. 7), this gesture also clearly indicates that, in his attempts at investigating the bygones, Scott emulates the historical methodology of the time. Thus, the early historical novel’s takes on accessing the past, pursuing objectivity, working with facts, and evincing historical accuracy might be said to echo those proposed by the academic history of the time. That this was indeed so is corroborated by the historical novelists’ reliance on historical sources and methodology that is revealed mostly in the author notes with which they open their works and in which they admit their indebtedness to various works of historical provenance (Bulwer Lytton, 1834, pp. v, vii–xv; Dickens, 1841, p. 7).

The above does not, however, mean that the early historical novelists inconsiderately copied their colleagues’ methodology. As the name of the genre indicates, historical novel/fiction includes a strong, inventive component which, by its character, precludes a historical novel from being as objective, factual, accurate, etc., as a relevant work of history. Thus, as much as early historical fiction drew on history’s methodology, it did so with a limited intensity so as not to hamper the creative component, which was—and still is—the key one (Scott, 1816, p. v) and which, most importantly, encourages the reader to understand the described past by primarily empathising with the characters that inhabit it (Keen, 2013).

With the development of the historical novel and its subgenres, we might notice that, as regards understanding the past, the balance between the use of historical methodology (objectivity, facts, accuracy) and literary empathy kept changing. To simplify, until the last decades of the 19th and early decades of the 20th century, mainstream historical novels were informed by academic history methodology very strongly (especially visible in their concerns with being historically accurate). But as the two world wars and socio-intellectual advancements of, inter alia, psychology and modernism kept denting the heft of history as a discipline, historical fiction started distancing itself from the methodology of academic history. Nowadays, even if, across-the-board, historical novelists still rather extensively base their works on historical research—which is, in my opinion, one prerequisite of decent historical fiction—they openly stipulate that their works are subjective interpretations of the past that make no attempt whatsoever at showing the truth but merely a truth. This is visible in contemporary historical novelists not only constructing works that strongly appeal to our emotions at the expense of facts but also in them openly arguing in favour of a predominantly affective mode of understanding the past. For instance, Hilary Mantel characterises her A place of greater safety as follows:

THIS IS A NOVEL about the French Revolution. Almost all the characters in it are real people and it is closely tied to historical facts—as far as those facts are agreed, which isn’t really very far. It is not an overview or a complete account of the Revolution. […]

My main characters were not famous until the Revolution made them so, and not much is known about their early lives. I have used what there is, and made educated guesses about the rest.

This is not, either, an impartial account. I have tried to see the world as my people saw it, and they had their own prejudices and opinions. Where I can, I have used their real words—from recorded speeches or preserved writings—and woven them into my own dialogue. […]

I am very conscious that a novel is a cooperative effort, a joint venture between writer and reader. I purvey my own version of events, but facts change according to your viewpoint. Of course, my characters did not have the blessing of hindsight; they lived from day to day, as best they could. I am not trying to persuade my reader to view events in a particular way, or to draw any particular lessons from them. I have tried to write a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book that one can think and live inside. (Mantel, 2010, pp. ix–x)

Interestingly, this preoccupation with emotions and experience—and enabling an understanding of the past primarily through them—has generated a situation of concern for many scholars of the genre. For instance, according to Liedeke Plate the publishing market’s realisation of the financial value of affect- and experience-targeted retellings has resulted in it capitalising on such works. The commodification of this type of writing about the past has turned it from a gesture with which to “counter a tradition of silence and alleged misrepresentation [and change] the future” to an activity of manufacturing short-lived products—literature-packaged pasts that are to be consumed and discarded. This mass-selling of affective and experiential pasts, as she observes, faces one with the question “what is there to learn, cognitively, strategically, about how the past feels affectively and somatically, except, as Gumbrecht suggests, to ‘enjoy the moment’?” (Plate, 2011, pp. 20–25)

Although I do not answer this question directly, I do engage with the problem of the cognitive value of contemporary historical fiction with regard to the means of understanding the past. And my approach is twofold. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memoryFootnote 2 and Katherine Reay’s The London house (a work of historical fiction that explicitly but also very imaginatively engages with the issue of historical accuracy), I propose the concept of prosthetic past. In order to elaborate on the idea, I have structured the article as follows: in the next part, I capitalise on Landsberg’s prosthetic memory to give grounds to my idea of prosthetic past and refer to Reay’s The London house as an illustrative example with which to support it. Subsequently, I propose a tripartite discussion of the concept-cum-novel to explicate what I call prosthetic past. The article closes with my consideration of several implications of the presented findings.

Prosthetic past and The London house

In Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture, Alison Landsberg defines the eponymous concept as follows:

This new form of memory, which I call prosthetic memory, emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum. In this moment of contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history […]. In the process that I am describing, the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live. The resulting prosthetic memory has the ability to shape that person’s subjectivity and politics. (Landsberg, 2004, p. 2)

Even if this quotation might suggest that the author develops her idea with respect to experiences taking place in specific circumstances, it is quite deducible that this form of memory might be forged not only in a cinema or museum. We can, after all, immerse ourselves in historical narratives wherever we encounter them and in whatever medium they reach us; be it also at home when we play a historical computer game or on a train when an audiobook preoccupies us to the extent that we miss our station. Despite the undeniable differences between the experiences the mentioned media generate, the potential for one to forge a “personal, deeply felt memory of a past” can be unlocked by any “mass cultural representation of the past” (Landsberg, 2004, pp. 2, 19).

Additionally, the above quotation also suggests that these are the effects of forming prosthetic memory rather than the process itself that are of interest to the author. Indeed, the remainder of Landsberg’s work corroborates this view as we can merely flesh out from her text that suturing oneself into a larger history progresses via affective transference or identification and that it involves meaning making (Landsberg, 2004, pp. 120, 124, 145). Of course, Landsberg is both entitled to be interested in the effects rather than nuances of the processFootnote 3 and in the right to point to these two ways in which it might develop. My intention is not to debunk her theory but, as a matter of fact, expand on it. However, in what follows, I do not delve into the mechanisms via which prosthetic memory formation develops. This is so, first, because I believe that this is a matter that requires at least a book treatment. Transference and identification are two of the many psychological mechanisms—alongside, for instance, internalisation, introjection, and combinations of these—with which we handle the narratives we encounter, the historical ones included. Furthermore, even if an individual tends to resort to a particular mechanism when confronted with certain narratives, his or her particular reaction is likely to vary in nuances (the difference between mild introjection, incorporation, and assimilation is that of degree), and might, for various reasons, suddenly involve atypical mechanisms for him or her (Ford & Urban, 1998, p. 306). To put it simply, there are as many reactions to historical narratives as there are narratives themselves, and no succinct text would be capable of reflecting this experiential complexity.

Most importantly though, my interest is not in these mechanisms but in what Landsberg’s theory brushes over. Although it merely hints at the apprehension of a narrative about the past, I do believe that this matter merits more attention. After all, if one projects one’s life on a historical narrative, one projects it onto a past life construct apprehended in one’s mind on the basis of the narrative, not on the narrative in toto. Apprehending a narrative does not denote that we simply take it in as it is, but, in the process of understanding it, we create its construct in our minds. And, as it might be further deduced, the various mechanisms with which we form prosthetic memory are attached to the constructs of the past that we create when processing a given narrative.Footnote 4 Thus, in what follows, I intend to elaborate on what I call prosthetic past—to put it briefly for now—a mental construct of the past that is the basis for shaping one’s prosthetic memory. In order to unpack and substantiate my point, I resort to Reay’s The London House as it tells a story with which I can support my idea.

The book’s dual narrative opens on October 17th, 1941 when Caroline Waite—for the sake of clarity, thenceforth called Caro—tries to help her colleague, Martine, escape Nazi-occupied France. Whether this help is of any effect remains a mystery for most of the novel as the author closes her prologue with a cliffhanger—as Caro leaves Martine’s workplace, she is caught by the Gestapo, and they drag her to their headquarters in Paris. Subsequently, the author starts developing the storyline that concerns Caroline Payne, a great-niece of Caro. Caroline is accosted by her colleague, Mat, to confirm that, in 1941, her great-aunt betrayed her country by revealing classified data concerning the Special Operations Executive (for which she worked) to her Nazi lover, Paul Arnim, and then escaped with him. This information dumbfounds Caroline, thus far convinced that her relative died of polio as a child. Most importantly, it also prompts her to investigate the thorny and knotty history of her great-aunt, the task on which the remaining part of the novel focuses (Reay, 2021).Footnote 5

As I intend to show in what follows, while the girl immerses herself in piecing together the life of her great-aunt with the help of Mat, she encounters discrepant narratives of the past that tend to be mutually exclusive, self-undermining, and even purposefully untrue. Thus, before Caroline is able to form a prosthetic memory concerning her great-aunt, she delves first into the process of creating prosthetic pasts—constructs of her great-aunt’s life that serve Caroline as the background against which, finally, she can form the prosthetic memory of her great-aunt’s life.

The past that never was

As has already been noted, when Caroline meets Mat and they discuss the letter in which Caro’s betrayal is described, she has no memory of her great-aunt whatsoever. We learn from the heroine that this is so because her family has consistently maintained that Caro died from polio in childhood (Reay, 2021, pp. 8, 30–33). Having been granted this information, we might infer that Caroline does not have any memory of the sort for two reasons. First, she was born long after her great-aunt died, so there would be no chronological possibility for them to meet, and thus for Caroline to form some first-hand memory of her great-aunt. Second, if Caro died as a child, there is, to simplify, no past about which Caroline might form a prosthetic memory. This state of affairs changes when Mat shows her a copy of the 1941 letter by the Special Operations Executive head-officer, which confirms that “[w]ithout permission, [Caro] boarded a transport boat to Normandy on 15 October and was identified outside Paris two days later. She joined German Gruppenführer Paul Arnim, with whom we have confirmed she had a previous romantic connection” (Reay, 2021, pp. 10–11). At this point, Caroline is still convinced of the non-existence of the Caro of whom this letter speaks: “But it’s still wrong… It can’t be my aunt” (Reay, 2021, p. 12). As the above indicates, encountering a historical narrative does not necessarily translate into apprehending it, as it might also end up with one simply rejecting it.

It is only after Mat reveals that Caroline’s father has confirmed the veracity of the letter that the girl starts hesitating. The situation grows even more complex when the protagonist asks her father about the matter, and he reveals the following:

“He’s right and you, of all people, know that. I hoped a bluff would stop him, because if he goes to print, there’s nothing I can do.” Dad’s hands dropped to his sides. “You can’t sue over the truth, but lying only makes it worse.”

“I didn’t know I was lying.”

[…]

“Are you serious?” he finally asked. “How can you not remember that day? We only found out because of you.” (Reay, 2021, p. 22)

Thanks to this exchange, we learn that it was the eight-year-old Caroline who, accidentally, found a letter that Caro had written on October 7th, 1941 (i.e. as a grown-up individual), showed it to her entire family, and thus dispelled the lie they had been fed with. Paradoxically, it turns out that the young Caroline completely erased learning about her great-aunt from her memory and kept on living (and, perplexingly, her family members as well) as if her great-aunt had indeed died from polio in childhood (Reay, 2021, pp. 30–33).Footnote 6

The above establishes an excellent basis on which to expand on several issues in which I ground the idea of prosthetic past. First, returning to the question of various reactions to encountering a historical narrative, Caroline is a character illustrative of how these might differ. As an eight-year-old, she completely represses its discovery from her mind. As an adult, first, she appears to act along the lines of a rational person not believing in oddities that go against her long-standing “knowledge,” and she rejects the narrative, this time on rational grounds. After her father reminds her about finding the letter, she becomes wary about it but still does not believe it (Reay, 2021, pp. 12, 22, 30–33). It is only—to jump ahead in my discussion—while she immerses in familiarising herself with the available versions of her great-aunt’s pastFootnote 7 that she gradually starts internalising pieces of her great-aunt’s life and then forms a prosthetic memory about it. Caroline’s different reactions to, by and large, one and the same historical narrative indicate that apprehending such a narrative varies because it depends, as we might deduce, on an individual’s general psychological makeup, emotional condition, the stimuli one receives in a given encounter, and other factors, the discussion of which is beyond my scope here, but the configuration of which informs one’s particular response to a given narrative.

Furthermore, even if Caroline’s grasp on this narrative’s heft is surely much better with each encounter, there is apparently something that keeps missing in her initial rejections to apprehend it. To explain this, let me point to the common denominator of these situations as it allows for a more concrete inference: neither young Caroline nor her older version segues into forming a prosthetic memory about the betrayal narrative because her family bonds prevent her from starting to concatenate this narrative with the family’s past. In other words, it is impossible for her to create a meaningful mental image of the past at which she could target her prosthetic memory formation mechanisms because this narrative goes against everything she knows about her family. As the next part of my analysis shows, it is the gradual process of forming this mental image, i.e. forming prosthetic past(s) about her great-aunt’s life, that aids the girl in forging her prosthetic memory of it.

The pasts that were coming to be

As we follow Caroline’s story, we learn that neither her father’s revelation nor her own sudden recall about finding the mentioned letter and showing it to her family make the girl take the story of her great-aunt seriously (Reay, 2021, pp. 22, 30–33). As a matter of fact, her encounters with this narrative have very little effect on her because she considers it a slander that should be ignored. It is only after Mat presents her with a draft article about Caro and the girl realises that its publication is going to “destroy” her father that Caroline decides to act (Reay, 2021, pp. 37–48). Her initial acting on the narrative is, however, of a peculiar nature—despite the contrary emergent evidence, she delves into her family archival stores (predominantly, Margaret’s letters and diaries and Caro’s letters), hoping she would be able to disprove the story or, at least, attenuate its horrifying contents (Reay, 2021, p. 49). However, her attitude changes as soon as she starts reading the letters:

London House

26 August 1940

Dearest Margo,

I’m sorry I yelled last night. […] Father wrote to me last year that I was “amounting to nothing.” I hope he doesn’t truly feel that way, but words have power and those now sit between us. You don’t believe that. I can feel it. Remember that. Remember that no matter what happens tomorrow, next week, or next year, you and I are one—and you, of course, are our better half.

Yours, as always,

Caro

My eyes scanned the words again. Amounting to nothing. They weren’t simply words on a page. Crossing eighty years, they were daggers. While I hadn’t heard that exact configuration, I’d felt the black abyss of similar statements. Quitting law school after two years is a waste… You need to grow up… Finish anything… Stop acting like a child and commit. […] Amounting to nothing. Yes, I could understand that pain. (Reay, 2021, pp. 72–75)

Although, in her letter, Caro reveals that her family sees her as a black sheep (which might presage her later betrayal), Caroline clearly restricts herself while drawing conclusions from these claims. Much as she understands her great-aunt’s pain, she also openly claims she does not apprehend the big picture (and, as we can deduce, her great-aunt’s life in its entirety). And both this understanding of a detail and lack of general apprehension are crucial to how I think we apprehend historical narratives. That Caroline understands a detail gives her a starting point on which to build her more and more extensive understandings of her great-aunt’s past. That she does not understand the big picture is what scotches her forming prosthetic memory about it—after all, how can we forge a “personal, deeply felt memory” of a past (Landsberg, 2004, p. 2) if we have yet to understand this past? But, more importantly, it is also what lends her the impetus to figure out her great-aunt’s story. When taken together, the above observations support the argument that we start apprehending the given past from a detail concerning it (starting point) and with a view to its more or less immediate context; a larger history, as Landsberg calls it (2004, p. 2).Footnote 8

However, figuring out what is next by successfully relating the sequentially emergent details to the more and more detailed context—which may foist itself on one, especially if one is familiar with Gadamer’s hermeneutic circleFootnote 9—is not necessarily what follows. Much as it might be the case in linear narratives constructed to guide the reader carefully along a consistent story, nowadays—with non-linear narratives dominating in high-brow historical fiction—the more likely option is that a reader would need to go through a more complicated process. And Caroline’s handling of the story of her great-aunt corroborates this claim to a substantial extent. Albeit she starts learning about her great-aunt’s 1941 betrayal, she then jumps to 1940 only to return to reading about Caro living the life of a carefree Parisian girl for whom the most important in life are the latest fashion, meeting Salvador Dalí, and drafting her sister, Margaret, to visit Paris; and for whom 1941 rumours about “turmoil in Germany” are exaggerated and something not to concern herself with (Reay, 2021, pp. 12–91). This chronological vertigo does not abate even after Caroline decides to order the letters she uses to understand the past with respect to Margo’s diary (Reay, 2021, p. 98)—the relatively chronological presentation of Caro’s life between 1928 and 1939, and then up to the closing of 1941, is regularly interrupted by various meeting notes, memos, telegrams, field summaries, and other SOE documents pertaining somehow to her and brought to light either by Caroline or by Mat. The novel closes with the Paynes learning about Caro’s last moments in Ravensbrück, and then with an epilogue depicting two scenes—Caro’s last conversation with her supervisor in which she asks him to send the fabricated information about her betrayal to her family as well as her arrest by the Gestapo and transfer to their headquarters (Reay, 2021, pp. 334–344).

This hotchpotch insight into Caro’s life clearly indicates that apprehending a historical narrative is highly likely to be much more problematic than Gadamer might have wished it to be. Much as historical data might occasionally be given to us in a near-perfect order and on a silver platter, more often than not, the reverse is the case—they emerge in related yet not necessarily directly adjacent contexts. And, as our apprehensions of the past tend to develop along the lines that the available information dictates, these apprehensions are also likely to develop simultaneously in a few adjacent contexts, for instance, along two or three lines. After all, with the help of Mat, Caroline concurrently reconstructs her great-aunt’s life as if in two such contexts—in the decade covering approximately 1928–1939, which shows Caro as the family’s black sheep and traitor, and in years 1940–1942, which show her as possibly the first female British spy.Footnote 10

More importantly though, this hotchpotch reconstruction of her life signals yet another issue of essence to my discussion. As might be deduced with regard to the contexts mentioned above, the reconstruction carried out in these provides Caroline and the reader with two constructs of the past—one in which Caro is a black sheep and a traitor and one in which she is a heroic spy. In what follows, I would like to enlarge on this idea (including its prosthetic character).

As has already been mentioned, when Caroline embarks on exploring her great-aunt’s past, her intention is to disprove or attenuate the betrayal narrative. And this is what she, as it were and with the help of Mat, manages to achieve to a substantial extent. First, she establishes that Randolph George Payne, and not Paul Arnim, was her great-aunt’s lover (Reay, 2021, p. 86). Second, she shows that, until September 1939, Caro was completely uninterested in politics; even to the point of making rather ignorant claims, such as the following one:

How is me staying [in France], working where I love, in a country I adore, a betrayal of all Father believes in? […] And what makes him so sure Herr Hitler will turn his eyes west from Poland? Hitler has what he wants and now France and England have made their stand. It’s probably all over and, in days, we’ll see Hitler back down. (Reay, 2021, p. 80)

Thus, although Caroline does not find even one piece of information that would conclusively dismantle the betrayal narrative, she does manage to debunk the claim that Paul Arnim was Caro’s lover and put in doubt the one about her betrayal and escape. More importantly, by analysing Margo’s letters and diary records, she manages to reconstruct the pre-war life of Caro in greater detail. Hence, alongside Caroline we learn that, after her sister, Margo, catches scarlet fever, Caro is separated from her and—on the grounds that she overreacts—sent to London and then to Switzerland to a boarding school. This is a double blow for her—first, because she is very close to her sister (they think about themselves not as separate individuals but in terms of “we”); second, because, from the favoured child, she becomes the problematic and rejected one. It is thus not very surprising that she does not return home after she finishes school but takes a job in the fashion industry and visits her family as rarely as possible, preferring to enjoy her carefree life among the Parisian glitterati (although it might be surprising to learn that her family is offended with her decision and labels her “tresse”—the traitor, in their conversations; Reay, 2021, pp. 148–157, 259–269). Thus, the image of the past which Caroline reconstructs and apprehends throughout more than half of her “journey” into, roughly, the inter-war period is that in which Caro struggles with her family more and more and in which she turns into a traitor, most likely, out of fear that Europe slowly plunges into World War II.

Interestingly, this is not the image of the past that Caroline forms her prosthetic memory of. Much as she apprehends it, chapter 23 of the novel offers “a game changer” (Reay, 2021, p. 190) that makes this construct, by and large, redundant. As Caroline and Mat head for the National Archives at Kew which hold the remnants of the documents connected with the SOE, Mat admits to a potential discovery:

“There was so much in those letters, Caroline. […] She didn’t share secrets, per se, but she gave enough clues that now, with files no longer classified, it paints a picture. A really complete picture.”

[…]

“A spy.” […]

“It means a shift in history, Caroline.” His smile was a broad thing fuelled by endless coffee and the entire tin of shortbread cookies Mom had delivered at midnight. “My article before was positing that your aunt worked for the SOE as a secretary, maybe in records or something, as that was common. But it was about how we view history, how it affects us, changes us, and we grow, rebound, and move forward. But what if I can prove your aunt was the very first female SOE agent? Her dates signal she was on board in 1940, putting her at the very beginning with Giliana Gerson and Virginia Hall. Earlier even—and they weren’t British. See? That’s a game changer. The stuff of history books and careers. This is no longer a discussion about nuances and perspectives but a seismic shift in the actual events themselves.” (Reay, 2021, p. 190)

And their visits to the archives start confirming this. First, they find notes attesting not only that Caro offered aid in “fact-finding missions” but also—after her offer was rejected—that she reconnoitred all the same and successfully (Reay, 2021, pp. 194–197). Second, they also dredge up the information that Caro became an agent in the autumn of 1940 and notice that, since then, her name does not appear in the SOE documents at all, but a new agent’s does—Rose Tremaine is the one who participates in various actions, and goes missing and is presumed dead two days before the Paynes receive the dreadful letter from the SOE head-officer (Reay, 2021, pp. 189–214).

Working on the assumption that Caro indeed served as a spy, they also notice that both her letters and her behaviour after August 26th, 1940 (also as described by other characters) might be read considerably differently. The letters become “calm, directed, and focused” and, in a circumlocutory way, indicate that Caro is Rose Tremaine—she mentions her “other work,” her across-the-desk colleague is Rose Tremaine, she promises to “drop the façade and stop pretending to be brave” one day and asks Margo to “[p]ull out our letters and find [her] in each shared story and in each detail. It’s all there” (Reay, 2021, pp. 237–267). Her avoidant and erratic behaviour that irritates her family so much turns out to be in sync with the missions carried out by Rose Tremaine—Caro asks Margo to excuse her absence on her own birthday in July 1941, and it turns out she has “a huge, red, and jagged scar across her forearm” (Reay, 2021, pp. 190, 197–199, 255–258).

Step by step, a “new” image of the past emerges for Caroline and Mat (and, of course, the reader). One that Caroline forms a prosthetic memory of but also one that has little to do with the hurt child that has grown up to keep betraying her closest ones in retaliation. In this version of the past, Caro is, most likely, the first female British spy and one with substantial success. She alienates her family to keep her espionage secret so that they are put in no jeopardy. Although only the reader is familiarised with this information, while Caroline and Mat merely surmise that something alike might have happened, it also turns out that it is at her request that Nelson procures the false letter her family receives; also with a view to protecting them (Reay, 2021, pp. 337–344). Finally, she falls into the hands of the Gestapo after a desperate fight and, having been recognised as a spy, she is sent to Ravensbrück, where she is shot on November 25th, 1942 (Reay, 2021, pp. 326–333).

The prosthetic pasts that (do not) give grounds for prosthetic memory

The short summary of the novel’s contents included at the beginning of this article allows a rather obvious inference that the larger history into which Caroline—and the reader—might be sutured is that of Caro’s life.Footnote 11 However, as the previous section shows, there is not one but two constructs of her past that are available in the book, and, as has already been suggested, Caroline forms a prosthetic memory of only one of those. In this section of my text, I would like to expand on the potential of prosthetic pasts to become grounds on which to form prosthetic memory.

In the first part of the novel, we might observe how Caroline gradually apprehends the betrayal narrative and even empathises with her great-aunt to a certain extent: she understands her pain stemming from her family rejecting her, the boldness of her decisions, and her fight against “loss and displacement, abandonment and regret” (Reay, 2021, p. 97). Thus, if she forms a mental construct of the past that could be the basis for shaping her prosthetic memory—and it could as it does activate her empathy, even if provisionally—this construct might be treated as a prosthetic past. It should be remembered though, that the more Caroline uncovers about the betrayal narrative, the more questions she has, and her sense of the narrative’s inaccuracy grows: “More questions than anything”; “If Caro loved Grandfather, then she probably didn’t have an affair with a German. And if she didn’t have an affair with a German—if that’s not true, the very premise behind her supposed defection—then what else isn’t true? Possibly all of it” (Reay, 2021, pp. 98, 156). This suggests that, much as one might construct a number of prosthetic pasts concerning particular events, not all of them give grounds on which to form a prosthetic memory, as some of them become redundant.

And, as it might be argued, the reason for this is another issue that Landsberg’s theory brushes over. Even if Landsberg is right in emphasising the influence of affect on the formation of one’s prosthetic memory, she mistakenly cuts out of the process its rational aspects (Landsberg, 2004, pp. 47, 120). As might be deduced from the above, the apprehension-related issue which this segment of the novel potentially signals is that understanding a historical narrative also engages our rational faculties—Caroline’s doubts are of a logical rather than an emotional character. Of course, for one completely unfamiliar with a given topic, even a terribly erroneous but affectively powerful historical narrative might lend an impetus to forge a related prosthetic memory. However, it also seems apt to argue that the narrative in question has to be sufficiently rationally convincing so that its affective influence could indeed be of any lasting consequence. As it seems, because Caroline finds the betrayal narrative more and more unconvincing, no formation of related prosthetic memory in her can be found in the novel, and her engagement with the narrative develops only as far as her empathising with some of her great-aunt’s struggles (Reay, 2021, pp. 90–101). That this is so is corroborated by her reactions to her great-aunt’s first-female-spy narrative. While Caroline builds her apprehension of this version of her great-aunt’s past, it might be observed that the narrative appears to her more and more probable—like the previous one, it is historically accurate but, unlike the betrayal narrative, this one also appears to Caroline to be meaningful because she is capable of linking it tightly with what she knows about her family’s past. Thus, the more meaningful it becomes, the more her empathy for it shows: “Even when arguing, the sisters were on the same side. They were united. I missed that with my sister” (Reay, 2021, p. 198). It is, therefore, the concatenation of historical information and its rational and affective processing that makes this prosthetic past start translating into prosthetic memory: “It wasn’t the scholars who needed to process Margo and Caro’s story—it was me. When I read their words, the narrative I found was my own, and, in understanding their story, I began to see my family, my father, and myself. To learn from it, rather than repeat it, felt vital” (Reay, 2021, pp. 202–203). The Paynes’ resolutions to travel to Ravensbrück and launch an official vindication of Caro (Reay, 2021, pp. 332–336) clearly point to them suturing themselves into her history and making her life their prosthetic memory.

Conclusions: Prostheses with which to go beyond historical accuracy

In their reflection on contemporary authors’ flexible attitude towards historical accuracy and authenticity, Katherine Cooper and Emma Short point to two key motivations informing the phenomenon: catering to readers’ demands and following the postmodern criticism of accepted ideas (2012, pp. 5–6). And Reay’s novel clearly falls into these patterns. The author herself admits that she constructed the novel so that it would mix elements most captivating for readers: “spies, betrayals, love, friendship, twin sisters, a family secret, high fashion in Paris in [the] 1930s” (Bostwick, Linden, Reay, 2022). Moreover, although she does not allude to the postmodern achievements explicitly, her awareness of the problematics of the interpretation of facts (Bostwick, Linden, Reay, 2022) and the way she constructs her novel indicate clearly that her novel is written with a view to the postmodern challenging the widely accepted. Irrespective of whether these two motivations are consciously employed by Reay or not, they do translate into a work of historical fiction which emphasises the heft of historical accuracy and which shows how unwise it can be to limit oneself to working with facts only. Much as both versions of Caro’s life are reconstructed—or emplotted, as Hayden White would claim (White, 1978, p. 83)—on the basis of diligently collected facts that Caroline and Mat dredge up from various documents, facts alone are insufficient, first, for Caroline’s family to find out that she was not a traitor but a spy (and made the official documents lie about her); second, for Caroline and Mat to reconstruct the last years of Caro’s life—although readers learn about these from the epilogue of the novel, Caroline and Mat keep reconstructing the last years of her life not on the basis of a fact that would confirm that Caro is Rose Tremaine (and later Nanette Bellefeuille) but on the basis of surmises. They keep surmising that the scar that Caro and Rose have is one and the same; they keep assuming that Caro’s birthday absence is caused by the mission that Rose had to undertake at the time; they keep believing that Rose’s reports are also Caro’s. Nowhere in the novel do we find any factual confirmation that Rose’s successes and Nanette’s death are those of Caro. Despite this lack, the reader is given to understand that it is exactly by going beyond historical accuracy—to what Carlo Ginzburg calls conjectural knowledge (1989, pp. 103–106, 117)—that Caroline and Mat are able not only to reconstruct the story of the girl’s great-aunt but also to turn it into a prosthetic memory for the Paynes.

Thus, as might be further deduced, Reay’s wary attitude towards historical accuracy as a means of understanding the past is not criticism for the sake of criticism. Her novel clearly appreciates its value, and, even though she emphasises its shortcomings, she does this so that these deficiencies could serve her as the grounds on which to propose an alternative—as she dismantles the idealistic vision of historical accuracy guaranteeing that one understands the past, she also offers in its lieu a much more viable take on historical accuracy as the basis for a more complicated process of understanding the past. And this, I believe, is what makes her affect- and experience-targeted novel not yet another product which is to be discarded. Much as it undeniably is a mass-sold commodity, it also shows itself as cognitively valuable thanks to the historical accuracy alternative it proposes. Finally, its intellectual depth is also inspirational for the proposed prosthetic past theory.