"Never a Saint": D. Carlota Joaquina Protagonista de Episódios das Lutas Liberais num Romance Histórico Britânico

By constructing a narrative which is parallel to History itself, historical novels often succeed in making the fictionalised version better known to readers than the one in history books, as I demonstrated in the book Entre a História e a Ficção: as Invasões Francesas em Narrativas Portuguesas e Britânicas (2012). Picking up the thread of this earlier work, which offered examples of how figures from the Peninsular War were romanticised in Portuguese and British works of fiction, the present article looks at the process of recreation of a controversial figure from the same period, who was not included in the referred book. Dona Carlota Joaquina (1755-1830), a Queen who is not remembered favourably in the nation’s collective memory, appears as the leading figure in a British historical novel written by F.W. Kenyon which relates episodes which took place in the aftermath of the Liberal Revolution of 1820.