Magical Realism in Women’s Fiction – 7 Novels

Magical realism in women’s fiction — magic and stories about relationships just seem to go together. In my reading adventures, they certainly have, from Susanna Kearsley to Sarah Addison Allen to Alice Hoffman. I find magic really woven into the fabric of our ordinary world, so magical realism — the insertion of fantastical elements into the commonplace — seems to me natural.

Is time travel magical realism, fantasy, or science fiction? This is a complicated question I ponder often, as the author of a time travel series. So many fall into the category of fantasy, in my view, while others are hard science fiction, implementing time machinery and other mechanical or technological devices. Mine uses genetics! The emphasis for me is pure women’s fiction focus: the transformation of the main character through her (or his) journeys into history and back. So in the most important way, I’m writing women’s fiction with a magical realism element.

 

Magical Realism in Women’s Fiction

Why are relationships so important in our life journeys, and in our fiction? There are many unseen layers of reality, and love is one of the biggest and most surprising. I open my arms to wonder and the mysterious whereever I find it. I lovewhen a story of personal transformation — women’s fiction — includes a supernatural element. It could be time travel, as in my own novel The Renaissance Club. It could be a magical recipe ingredient that has the power to affect those who eat the product, as in a novel I just read.

The title of Susan Bishop Crispell’s Dreaming in Chocolate drew me in. When I shared a podcast with Susan, I was delighted to hear more a woman with a magical table and a gift for creating chocolate delights. Her creations have the ability to affect others. How she can’t use that gift for the benefit of her very ill daughter forms the core of the story. Crispell’s book is a prime example of the subtlety that differentiates magical realism from fantasy. In fantasy, magic contextualizes more of the entire world, but in magical realism, it’s the world we know, but with sudden, often inexplicable magic.

Sarah Addison Allen’s stories are classic examples, especially her debut novel, Garden Spells. Another recommended read about a family whose culinary creations have magical properties, but can’t solve their own problems. Her book The Sugar Queen had magic that also revolved around food. Read that one if you have any issues around food. (Who doesn’t?) And another one involving magic and food is Erica Bauermeister’s The School of Essential Ingredients. This tale is of a cooking school whose magical culinary art affects all the participants.

Susanna Kearsley’s novel The Shadowy Horses is a ghost story with heart and history. It’s also time travel. The characters are affected by the presence of a Roman legionnaire whose spirit helps them. I recommend this story for a few shivers and a lot of uplift. Kearsley’s magical realism novel Belleweather, also involving time travel, was called, “Part history, part romance, and all kinds of magic.”

Magic in Our Lives

Magic is a real element in our lives, whether we think we can explain it or not. Magical realism in women ‘s fiction seems to be realism at a deeper level, the level where the mysterious presents us with “more things, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Shakespeare had that wonderfully right! Maybe it’s because we tend not to see the larger picture, but when the unexplainable occurs, we call it magic. Life is the biggest magical event. No one yet has really explained why it happens.

The one truly magical — because it’s inexplicable — element in our lives is love. No formula can  calculate it, no rational philosophy can plumb its reality. All my books involve love and magical realism. They take place in the ordinary world, where love and strange occurrences and invade the quotidian, bending time, turning history upside-down, bringing back dead poets as guardian angels, and showing artists from the past what their future will be.