Reprinted with permission from the 2025 Summer Issue of Write On!, the online magazine of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, part of the Spotlight on Diversity and Inclusion series.
Beginning novelists are always admonished to “write what they know,” but I subscribe fully to the belief that a novelist is allowed to imagine all kinds of beings in all kinds of worlds, if they can do so convincingly. However, if you are writing about a devout member of a particular religion, and you are a member of a different religion (or none), potential pitfalls abound, and you are in danger of betraying your ignorance.
How did I come to understand the difficulty of writing about a religion not my own? When my husband and I visited Scotland for the first time, we toured the grand, old Traquair House, which is billed as the oldest continually occupied home in Scotland. During the tour, the guide pointed out side-by-side portraits of a lovely woman in a forest green dress with one arm cradling a little brown and white whippet, and a dashing, ruddy-cheeked, young man in a full suit of armor. The guide told us that the woman, Winifred Maxwell, Countess of Nithsdale, had, in 1716, rescued her husband from the Tower of London the night before his scheduled execution.
I had never heard this story before and was astounded. Even though I had only published non-fiction books up to that point, I decided to try to give this tale the dramatic treatment it merited in the form of a novel.
But there was a catch.
Winifred and her husband were persecuted Catholics and I am Jewish. What did I know about Catholicism, much less Catholicism in Great Britain in the 18th century when Catholics were brutally oppressed? Could a Jewish author writing about a Catholic heroine be considered guilty of cultural appropriation?
Respect and Nuances Matter
Well-known, non-Jewish, American novelist William Styron caused a storm of criticism when he published his bestselling novel Sophie’s Choice in 1979. Memories of the Holocaust were still raw, yet the primary Jewish character in the novel, Nathan Landau, behaves monstrously.
Nathan first saves poor Sophie’s life and then treats her with appalling brutality and sexual savagery. In addition, the despairing and sympathetic Sophie, who is the primary victim of the Holocaust depicted in the novel, is not only a once-privileged Gentile, but has grown up steeped in the widespread Polish antisemitism of her time.
The fact that Nathan is suffering from a severe and ultimately suicidal mental illness does not make his extreme behavior easier to swallow for the Jewish reader. Barbara Foley, English Professor at Rutgers, commented that Sophie’s Choice was “an essentially solipsistic interpretation of the Holocaust” because “it promotes sympathy for a Gentile at the expense of a Jew.”
When I began my own journey to tell the story of the near-forgotten heroine Winifred Maxwell in a novel, I thought I knew a lot about Catholicism. I had studied the Middle Ages. I had Catholic friends. I even knew something about the “priest holes” in some of the grand homes of England, where priests hid because their presence in England was illegal.
But, honestly, I had no idea how bad things really were for Catholics until I started digging.
Persecution of Catholics lasted for over 200 years and they were essentially Catholics in name only because they were forbidden to host a priest, attend a mass or even own a rosary. They could not hold public office or vote. Everyone, including Catholics and Protestant Dissenters, was required to attend Church of England services or pay a fine.
I would have been foolish indeed to attempt to write a novel from Winifred Maxwell’s perspective without trying to understand the enormous hardships she faced at that time as a Catholic in England. It was her fury at the longtime mistreatment of her family that inspired her absolute determination to flout a cruel government and save her husband’s life, whatever the cost.
The Need for Sensitivity Doesn’t End With Publication.
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak are books with Holocaust themes written by non-Jews, that treat Jewish characters positively and have not aroused the same kind of controversy as Sophie’s Choice.
However, Lois Lowry commented in a recent interview that her young Jewish readers often asked her why the heroine of her book isn’t Jewish. Her answer was, I thought, surprisingly insensitive: “When you write a story, the protagonist is always the one who has decisions to make, and in 1943, the Jews didn’t have decisions to make. The Christians had all the choices.”
In actuality, Jews had lots of decisions to make during the Holocaust—terrible decisions, such as whether to fight the Nazis and die, or be led like sheep to concentration camps and die anyway. This tone-deaf comment by Lowry highlights the need to exercise extra care, both in crafting a novel and in speaking about it, if you are writing about a religion not your own.
So, What Should You Do?
Does this mean that you should never create an unpleasant, distasteful or downright evil character who practices a religion that is not your own? Can a Jewish novelist, for instance, create an evil Muslim character? What about vice versa? What if you are trying to expose a harm committed in the name of a particular religion?
These are huge and difficult questions beyond the scope of this essay. But in such cases the same requirements to exercise care apply, possibly amplified, and your best bet is to always do your homework. In short: research, research, research.
If you are planning to write about such a sensitive topic as religion, or create characters whose religion is far removed from their own, you owe your subjects and readers an extra effort to learn as much as possible about what is foreign to their own experience.
Obvious techniques involved in developing fiction should be employed with even more care than usual:
- Learn as much as possible about the religion and its practice in the relevant time period. Consult historians, theologians, clergy, etc., who are knowledgeable about the religion and the period.
- Ask people who practice the religion in question to be Beta readers. Ask them to note if the depiction of religious ritual and practice in the novel is accurate and if the descriptions of the lives and emotions of the characters ring true.
- If you are not only writing about a character of another religion, but writing from the perspective of that character, even more in-depth research might be necessary.
BREAKOUT
For additional resources relevant to this topic, WFWA’s D&I Committee recommends:
- D&I webinars “Understanding Diversity” and “Authors & Allyships”
- WFWA D&I Presentation “How to Truthfully Portray the Past Without Harm”
Sources:
Barbara Foley, “Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narratives, ”Comparative Literature, v. 34 (1982), pp. 330-60, quoted in Jean W. Cash, “Styron’s ‘Pseudofactual’ Portrayal of the Holocaust in Sophie’s Choice,” CEA Critic, v. 52, no. 4 (Summer 1990), pp. 29-34.
Michael Lackey, “The Scandal of Jewish Rage in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice,” University of Minnesota Morris Digital Well, Summer 2016.
https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=eng_facpubshttps://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=eng_facpubs
Molly Parr, “Four Questions with Lois Lowry, Newbery Award-Winning Children’s Author,” jewishboston.com, December 4, 2024.
https://www.jewishboston.com/read/four-questions-with-lois-lowry-newbery-award-winning-childrens-author/
Patricia Bernstein earned a Degree of Distinction in American Studies from Smith College. She has published three non-fiction books, the most recent of which, Ten Dollars to Hate, was a finalist for a major award from the Texas Institute of Letters.
A Noble Cunning: The Countess and the Tower, Patricia’s debut novel, is based on the true story of a woman who rescued her husband from the Tower of London. The book has been awarded gold medals by the American Bookfest and the IPPY awards and first place in the Catholic novel category by the Catholic Media Association.
