Naomi Kelsey writes historical fiction like she’s sick of watching the same stories get used as wallpaper. Not the “immersive” kind that invites you to sigh over corsets and candlelight. The kind that treats the past as a working system: fear as policy, virtue as a mask, romance as a cover story for power. She keeps picking up the myths we’ve been trained to swallow—witches, explorers, Shakespearean villains—and she holds them up like fingerprints.
Start with The Burnings. North Berwick. 1589. Scotland and Denmark braided together through court politics, marriage, and the convenient hysteria of witchcraft. Kelsey doesn’t romanticise the accusation; she names it for what it is: a male panic button with a body count. “When a man cries ‘witch’, no woman is safe” isn’t a tag-line, it’s a mechanism. The point isn’t that people in the past were superstitious. The point is that superstition is useful. It gives authority something to point at when it needs to discipline women, punish the inconvenient, and reassert control without admitting it’s doing exactly that.
Witches aren’t a genre garnish; they’re a receipt. Every “bewitching” cover and cosy bonfire aesthetic is an attempt to launder the fact that accusation was governance.
This is where Kelsey needles the genre. Historical fiction loves to posture as moral education while still delivering entertainment comfort: the reader gets outrage, then gets release. The trial ends, the monster is named, the brave woman survives, and everyone goes home with the warm feeling of having condemned the past. Kelsey’s work is meaner than that. It keeps the spotlight on the habit, not the spectacle: how fast a community learns to collaborate with cruelty when it’s dressed up as protection. How easily a king’s paranoia becomes a public sport. How quickly “belief” turns into permission.
Then The Darkening Globe does the same thing to another national myth: the heroic age of Elizabethan exploration. 1597 London, a returning husband from the so-called New World, a strange woman brought back like a secret, and an enormous painted globe that starts turning and accumulating new images as deaths follow. Gothic? Absolutely. But Kelsey uses the uncanny object the way she uses witchcraft: not as decoration, as evidence. The globe is a domestic intrusion, a hulking symbol of the wider world crashing into the home—secrets, possessions, stories brought back from elsewhere and installed as if the household must simply accommodate them.
Exploration narratives are built to make theft sound like bravery. They’re built to centre men as protagonists of “discovery” while everyone else becomes cargo, rumor, consequence. Kelsey threads that cultural lie straight into the marital space, where a wife is expected to be grateful, patient, silent, and not too curious. If she fears she’s being lied to, she’s “paranoid.” If she asks questions, she’s hysterical. That’s not a historical quirk. That’s a gendered script the genre still pampers.
And now look at what she’s doing next with Pale Mistress: a 17th-century Cyprus retelling that drags Othello into psychological-thriller territory by shifting attention to Bianca—the woman history doesn’t bother to keep in the room. The murdered are famous. The overlooked woman is the point. Kelsey’s question isn’t “what if we told this from a different angle?” like it’s a cute exercise. It’s: who gets erased so the canon can keep its clean lines? Who gets reduced to a function so a villain can look inevitable and a tragedy can look fated? She’s writing about gaslighting, envy, ambition—the slow, engineered making of a scapegoat—because that’s what “classic” stories often are: a machine that turns someone into the explanation.
The genre loves a retelling that feels like empowerment. Kelsey’s are more dangerous: they show you the story as a weapon, then ask why you ever called the bruise “timeless.”
This is why her work leaves the genre nowhere to hide. You can’t drape it in “atmosphere” and pretend that’s substance. You can’t call it “feminist” and think that absolves you. You have to confront the actual apparatus: accusation, reputation, narrative authority, the social reward for not noticing. Kelsey isn’t interested in rehabilitating the past into palatable drama. She’s interested in how the past trained people to cooperate with harm—and how the present still borrows the same scripts because they work.
If you want the soft version—myth as comfort, history as escapism with a righteous aftertaste—go elsewhere. Kelsey is writing the myths as evidence, and evidence doesn’t care what you hoped the story would be. Read it like that. Keep it that sharp. Insist.