By Jocelyn Green
The Manhattan Confessions was not the original working title of my latest novel. But when we (my publisher’s team and I) landed on it, we knew it was a keeper.
Confessions. That single word evokes long-buried secrets coming to light, potential scandal, and high-stakes consequences. This is true for two parallel storylines in the novel which span from the late nineteenth century to the Roaring 1920s. The setting of Manhattan offers fertile ground for both.
In life and in historical fiction, Manhattan has always been rich with secrets, ambition, reinvention, and scandal. The island’s density, its constant churn of people, and its rigid yet often contradictory social codes create the perfect conditions for hidden lives to flourish.
At the heart of this dynamic is anonymity. Unlike smaller towns or rural communities, where everyone knows one another’s histories, Manhattan has long offered the ability to disappear into the crowd. Especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, waves of immigrants arrived with little more than a name. Records could be altered, accents softened, pasts left behind. But anyone could—and still can—forfeit the familiar and embrace a life and identity entirely new in New York.
For a novelist, this creates immediate tension. If a person can reinvent themselves, then who are they really? And how long can that reinvention hold? A chance encounter, a slip of the tongue, a letter from the past—any of these can unravel the carefully constructed present. Manhattan, with its crowded streets and intersecting social worlds, makes coincidence feel inevitable.
Anonymity also enables moral flexibility. A woman who might be constrained by reputation in a smaller setting can experiment, take risks, or even commit transgressions in New York that would be impossible elsewhere. Yet the city is not lawless, but governed by a complex web of formal and informal rules. The balancing act between freedom and constraint generates a trifecta of conflict, motivation, and fear. Characters are constantly negotiating what they can hide, what they must reveal, and what will happen if the two collide.
The Gilded Age and the Jazz Age, both featured in The Manhattan Confessions, are often remembered for their glamour and excess, but they were also defined by strict codes of behavior, particularly among the upper classes. Reputation was currency. A single scandal could ruin a family, end a marriage, or exile a person from polite society. The stakes of secrecy were extraordinarily high.
The fiction of Edith Wharton captures this world with remarkable precision. In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart’s life is shaped by what she can and cannot reveal. Her social survival depends on maintaining an image that aligns with the expectations of New York’s elite. Yet she exists in a precarious position—financially insecure, dependent on the goodwill of others, and constantly navigating situations that could be misinterpreted. A hint of impropriety, a suggestion of hidden behavior, is enough to destroy Lily’s standing.
Similarly, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence explores the quiet power of what remains unspoken. The novel’s characters are bound by an intricate social code that dictates not only behavior but also perception. Everyone knows more than they say, and the true drama unfolds in the gap between public appearances and private desires. Newland Archer’s internal conflict—between his duty to society and his feelings for Ellen Olenska—highlights how secrecy operates not just externally but internally. Manhattan, in this sense, is a place where people learn to live double lives, even within themselves.
By the time we reach the Jazz Age, the rules have loosened, but the allure of secrecy has only intensified. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, presents a Manhattan and its surrounding world that thrives on reinvention. Jay Gatsby is the quintessential figure of self-creation: a man who constructs an entirely new identity in pursuit of a dream. His wealth, his parties, even his manner of speaking are part of an elaborate performance designed to obscure his origins.
Yet Gatsby’s story underscores a key truth about Manhattan as a setting for secrets: reinvention does not erase the past. It merely conceals it. His carefully curated life depends on the continued suppression of his history, and when that history surfaces, the consequences are fatal. The city, with its bright lights and endless opportunities, both enables his transformation and accelerates his downfall.
What unites all these works, and what makes Manhattan such rich terrain for historical fiction, is the interplay between visibility and invisibility. The city is a place of spectacle: grand houses, lavish parties, bustling streets. At the same time, it is a place where crucial truths remain hidden just beneath the surface. Characters are constantly seen and judged, yet rarely fully known. This creates a sense of psychological pressure that drives narrative tension.
Confession, in this context, becomes a powerful narrative device. To confess is to risk everything—to trade the safety of secrecy for the possibility of authenticity or redemption. In a city like Manhattan, where identity can be fluid, confession has the potential to reshape not only how others see a character but how the character sees themselves. It can be liberating, destructive, or both.
The emotional pull of buried truths comes from this duality. Secrets allow characters to survive, to navigate hostile or restrictive environments. But they are also isolating. They create distance between individuals, even those who are physically close. In a crowded city, a person can feel profoundly alone if they are carrying something they cannot share.
Historical fiction set in Manhattan amplifies this tension when placing characters at moments of social transition. The Gilded Age’s rigid hierarchies give way to the more fluid, yet still fraught, dynamics of the Jazz Age. Old rules persist even as new possibilities emerge. This in-between space is particularly conducive to stories of reinvention and scandal, because it destabilizes assumptions about who people are and what they can become.
Ultimately, Manhattan endures as a setting for secrets because it embodies contradiction. It is both anonymous and intensely social, liberating and constraining, glamorous and unforgiving. It invites people to imagine new versions of themselves while reminding them that the past is never entirely out of reach. For historical novelists, this makes the city an inexhaustible source of possibilities.
Jocelyn Green is a bestselling, award-winning author of numerous fiction and nonfiction books, including The Metropolitan Affair, The Windy City Saga, and Wedded to War. Her books have garnered starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly, and have been honored with the Christy Award, the gold medal from the Military Writers Society of America, and the Golden Scroll Award from the Advanced Writers & Speakers Association. She loves Mexican food, Broadway musicals, strawberry rhubarb pie, the color red, and reading with a cup of tea. Jocelyn lives with her husband Rob and two teens in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Visit her at www.jocelyngreen.com.
If you enjoyed this article, consider subscribing to The Strand Magazine.
We publish newly discovered stories, original fiction, and interviews with major writers.
Be the first to comment