Does it ever feel like trespassing, writing about the dead?

The question came at the end of an evening, when the wine was nearly gone and people had stopped being polite. Someone leaned across and asked it plainly. You write about people who are all dead, she said. People who cannot say yes, and cannot say stop. Does that ever feel like trespassing?

I have been turning it over ever since, because the honest answer is yes, sometimes, and the dishonest answer would have been easier.

Here is the distinction I have arrived at, for whatever it is worth. There are two kinds of people in a historical novel, and I owe them completely different things. There are the ones who really lived, the duchess, the admiral, the name you could look up, and there are the ones I invent to stand near them, the housekeeper, the clerk, the second wife nobody recorded. With the invented ones I can do as I like. They are mine. I made them out of research and weather and guesswork, and if I am cruel to them it is a cruelty I answer for alone.

The real ones are different. They had mothers. They had bad mornings I know nothing about. They were, every one of them, more complicated than the single sentence history has flattened them into, and the one thing I try never to do is put words of real malice or real shame into a real mouth. I will let a historical figure cross my page. I will not accuse them of something I could not prove, because they are not here to answer it, and a novel is a terribly one sided court. That restraint is not timidity. It is the only manners available to me.

So I keep the famous ones at the edge of the frame, mostly, and I give the heart of the book to the invented person standing in the corridor. Not only because it makes a better story, though it does, but because the invented person has given me permission by not existing. I can go anywhere in her. I cannot go everywhere in a woman who was real and is gone and left descendants who might, quite reasonably, mind.

Does it still feel like trespassing? A little, on the good days, and I have come to think the feeling is a sign I am doing it properly. The day it stops feeling like anything is the day I should worry, because that is the day the dead have become mere furniture to me, props to be moved about for effect. The small discomfort is respect, wearing working clothes.

What I said to her at the table was shorter than all this. I said that I try to treat the dead the way I would want to be treated by some novelist a hundred years from now, rummaging through what is left of me. Generously. Curiously. Without pretending to know more than the record allows. And ready, always, to leave the worst of me unwritten, since I will not be there to put it right.

She refilled my glass, which I took as a verdict. A kinder one than I expected.

Those questions sat beside me through She Wrote Their Names, set on Ellis Island in 1907, where a stenographer records every word until a young woman arrives and nobody asks her the one question that matters.