In some historical novels, the problem never arises in the first place if the protagonist is principal secretary to King Henry VIII, the Reformation is bound to come up. Some authors supply an omniscient third-person narrator to plug possible gaps in historical knowledge, as in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), where Orlando sends a letter to “Mr Nicholas Greene of Clifford’s Inn” and helpful parentheses explain that “(Nick Greene was a very famous writer at that time).” Others have first-person narrators do the same job as they reflect retrospectively upon their own lives from a future vantage point, such as Tom Crick in Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), who must note the “precise” date (“July, 1943”) during which the novel’s events took place in order for him to make emotional sense of them 40 years later.
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