I grew up on a diet of historical novels, mostly the romantic with a small r kind.  However, when I graduated to the classics, I knew I had found my real genre.  "I was born in the wrong era," I thought. 

And then, I became a writer, and I entered an historical era of my dreams, tip-toeing softly, gathering atmosphere, facts, foods, language—a zeigeist entirely different from my own pedestrian existence.  And, still I didn't get it right.  It wasn't until I studied why those classic novels were great that I could dare to presume to publish The Last Waltz.

Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Gaskill, Bronte, Austen—what made them so great that they still continue to be relevant, dramatized, and studied?  I truly believe the answer is that they wrote of redemption of character.  The authors believed in a universe where the hard questions of life had answers.  They believed in right and wrong.

Margaret Hale, of Gaskill's North and South, is my favorite heroine.  Up against the hard questions posed by the English Industrial Revolution—class barriers, poverty, and greed—she managed to redeem all those in her small circle of existence with her love and her righteous principles.  Her influence traveled beyond her circle and redeemed  strategic characters in an industrial town in Victorian England.  This was not a fairy tale.  It was very real, because it depicted love as it really is—a devotion that acknowledges flaws, but works past them, appealing to the innate goodness of man.  Elizabeth Gaskill believed in innate goodness, as did Tolstoy, Hugo, Bronte, etc.

Why is it that the current young generation is turning to fantasy literature in overwhelming numbers?  Because fantasy worlds are built on the existence of good and evil.  Until this age of relativism, that was the nature of art.  And deep within, we still know this. 

World renowned critic, John Gardner, explains this far more eloquently than I, in speaking of my favorite author and his work.  "Leo Tolstoy knew about the universe of despair and endured a perhaps similar spiritual crisis [to that of Sartre], a crisis certainly profound and all-transforming.  He came out of it not with a theory that every man should make up his own rules, asserting values for all men for all time, but with a theory of submission, a theory which equally emphasized freedom but argued that what a man ought to do with his freedom is be quiet, look and listen, try to feel out in his heart and bones what God requires of him—as Levin does in Anna Karenina, or Pierre in War and Peace."(Gardner, John, On Moral Fiction, Basic Books, Inc.: New York, p. 25)

Gardner further asserts that great art always builds, seeking to improve life, not debase it.

Why was Les Miserables one of the greatest stage productions of the modern era?  Because it was heroic.  It made us believe and embrace the idea that man could change, could be redeemed, could love enough to want to sacrifice, even in a time of great blackness and despair.  Though the mid-nineteenth century French revolution failed, Valjean was victorious in his heart and soul.

So when I wanted to write a novel about the triumph of the soul in dark times, I took a lesson from the Greats.  I set it in the past, where it would not be unfashionable.  Is it too late for us?  Genre fiction still deals with good and evil.  Should not literary fiction take a lesson from the popularity of such books, possibly even finding a mission there?

Certainly, we as LDS authors and readers should.  Remember the Orson F. Whitney prophesy:  "We shall yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.  God's ammunition is not exhausted.  His highest spirits are held in reserve for the latter times.  In God's name and by His help we will build up a literature whose tops will touch the heaven, though its foundation   may now be low on the earth."  ("The Arts and the Spirit of the Lord," Boyd K. Packer, Ensign, 1976.)