Literature as a mirror for history: What can we learn from the books we read, about our past and present?

I’m sure we’ve all heard the phrase ‘literature holds a mirror up to society’, in a GCSE English class, probably, but is this really true? Many authors create worlds different from ours, with imaginary characters and fantastical situations; however, they still want to highlight challenges and culture in the time they are writing. After all, inspiration has to come from somewhere. If we look back, this ‘mirror’ is very easy to see in classics, such as The Great Gatsby, which reflects the depravity and immorality of the Roaring Twenties, with figures like Tom and Daisy Buchanan and the setting of the Valley of Ashes. Fitzgerald was commenting on the vacuous nature of society, the attitude with which the rich live by, and the prejudice between ‘old’ and ‘new’ money. However, at the time, his work wasn’t appreciated to the same level it is today, as he was simply writing about the people who were alive at the same time as him. Perhaps we need some hindsight to fully appreciate the mirror that art holds up to our world. However, with that in mind, I decided to pick a book to read to see how it compares or responds to our society. After all, if literature reflects society today, it must reflect history if we look back.

Naturally, this took me to the Booker Prize 2025 shortlist, where I looked for a book that would interest me, and was short enough to read in the time I have to write this article. After much debate, I settled on Audition by Katie Kitamura, a very reasonable 199 pages focusing on an actress and her relationships with those around her, especially her husband Thomas and a new addition to her life, Xavier. The book tackles issues such as abortion, identity, and expectations placed on women, in both the theatre/film industry and wider life. And more prominently at the end, the book focuses on the loneliness of modern life, the approval that we constantly strive for, from everyone, especially as a woman.

Audition presents us with a struggling woman who is striving to balance the constant expectations that are being placed on women […] a clear response to the author’s experience of womanhood in our society

The world created in the novel completely mirrors the ‘ideal’ life: a nice house, a successful job, and a secure marriage. However, Kitamura’s writing quickly highlights the flaws, especially from the perspective of a working woman. She explores the regrets that the unnamed narrator has surrounding motherhood and identity. Something that, at the moment, is a very prominent issue for women, with ideas of ‘traditional’ womanhood reviving in ideas such as ‘trad wives’ and the type of rhetoric being pushed by men such as Andrew Tate on social media. As well as a lowering birthrate in developed countries, and more radical feminists calling for women to completely reject men altogether. This book can tackle how the narrator deals with all of these diametric expectations with her saying near the start of the book, “Like all women, I had once been expert at negotiating the balance between the demands of courtesy and the demands of expectation”. This is then explored through the appearance of Xavier, a man who, in part one, claims to be her son, and in part two, becomes that. The lines between reality and fiction are blurred as the reader tries to work out what is really happening. Is the narrator so desperate for a son that she has let this man into her home, or has she ignored her son all her life, to the point she forgot he existed, to better her career? In the end, it seems this was all a facade that the three characters are playing into, in an attempt to create a perfect family. It seems that Kitamura is suggesting women can’t be ‘perfect’, our narrator already has a very successful career, much more so than her husband, but she is still haunted by her abortion and miscarriage, both of which occur before the book begins, and her ‘duty’ to give her husband, Tomas, a son, something which she never seems to have any desire to do. Audition presents us with a struggling woman who is striving to balance the constant expectations that are placed on women to be career-driven, the perfect mother, and the perfect wife, all at the same time. In this way, it is a clear response to the author’s experience of womanhood in our society.

Writing and art as a whole will always be reflective of the society we live in

Now, would I say that all literature is a response to society? Well, yes, to some extent. Even books which would not be considered the best, or win a Booker prize, must reflect society in some way. Ideas often stem from wanting to convey a message, one that will have been formed by the people one meets, the politics they are exposed to, and countless other experiences. This positionality means that writing and art as a whole will always be reflective of the society we live in. Even if this comes across in less obvious ways, such as in historical fiction which interests the author as they want to highlight the similarities between then and now, or kids’ writing which will aim to teach children about the world they are growing up in. We all know that The Hunger Games is a great example of this, exposing corrupt power systems and class issues, to name a few. If you were to go through all the books ever written, I think you would get a pretty accurate study of historiography, highlighting socio-economic issues, lifestyles, and priorities that were dear to people at the time the books were written. It may be harder to see it now, but books such as Audition do reflect the time we live in and, perhaps, in another 50 or so years, an article will be written analysing how it explored life in the 2020s, just as we do with books such as The Great Gatsby or Wuthering Heights.