Peter Vansittart, Prolific Writer of Historical Fiction, Is Dead at 88
Peter Vansittart, the English writer who breathed new life into the historical novel by mingling myth with modernity, and by injecting 20th-century preoccupations into historical settings as various as Roman Britain, medieval France and 16th-century Germany, died on Oct. 4, in Ipswich, Suffolk. He was 88 and lived in Kersey.
His death was confirmed by Jill Harbinson, a neighbor.
Mr. Vansittart confounded expectations in a much-abused literary genre, writing in language free of “forsooths,” adopting a disabused if not cynical tone and roaming freely over the centuries. “The Death of Robin Hood” (1981), for example, began in Sherwood Forest about 3,000 B.C., leaped forward to the era of King John, took another leap to the Luddite rebellions of 1812 and ended up in the Britain of the 1930s. “Parsifal” (1988), after beginning in ancient Gaul, wended its way to Heinrich Himmler’s headquarters in Westphalia.
For Mr. Vansittart, the past was never wholly past, and rarely romantic. He was drawn to crumbling empires, upheaval, moral crisis and grim struggles that whittled heroism down to a human scale. In his novels about the late Roman empire, like “Three Six Seven” (1983) and “The Wall” (1990), his characters dealt with inflation, immigration, the clash of old and new beliefs, and the moral problem of justifying war.
“The past was different from the present, but it wasn’t that different,” he said in a comment cited in the reference work “Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers.”
This idiosyncratic approach cost him the rewards of best-sellerdom normally associated with novels about clashing Roman legionaries, or King Arthur and jousting knights, deflated by Mr. Vansittart in novels like “Lancelot” (1978) and “Parsifal.”
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His death was confirmed by Jill Harbinson, a neighbor.
Mr. Vansittart confounded expectations in a much-abused literary genre, writing in language free of “forsooths,” adopting a disabused if not cynical tone and roaming freely over the centuries. “The Death of Robin Hood” (1981), for example, began in Sherwood Forest about 3,000 B.C., leaped forward to the era of King John, took another leap to the Luddite rebellions of 1812 and ended up in the Britain of the 1930s. “Parsifal” (1988), after beginning in ancient Gaul, wended its way to Heinrich Himmler’s headquarters in Westphalia.
For Mr. Vansittart, the past was never wholly past, and rarely romantic. He was drawn to crumbling empires, upheaval, moral crisis and grim struggles that whittled heroism down to a human scale. In his novels about the late Roman empire, like “Three Six Seven” (1983) and “The Wall” (1990), his characters dealt with inflation, immigration, the clash of old and new beliefs, and the moral problem of justifying war.
“The past was different from the present, but it wasn’t that different,” he said in a comment cited in the reference work “Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers.”
This idiosyncratic approach cost him the rewards of best-sellerdom normally associated with novels about clashing Roman legionaries, or King Arthur and jousting knights, deflated by Mr. Vansittart in novels like “Lancelot” (1978) and “Parsifal.”