Well...yes and no

. Oh, firstly, the whole Anastasia thing - yes, 20th Century Fox and a dozen others since. It's a lovely idea, but just not so. And, much as I think Ingrid Bergman a great actress, she just
wasn't anything like Anastasia.
My difficulty is this: non-fiction books appeal to people who have an interest in your subject. Having first written a biography of my subject, I found it rather stifling to be confined by what can be proved. Whatever can't be proved by archives and primary sources, is seen as speculation. That's fair enough and it's true that maybe we can't know
exactly what someone thought/felt unless there is proof. Of course, we seldom write or record our own inner experiences so how can there ever be proof of that? How can I prove I feel something? I can't. In the world of biographers and academia, there is a kind of 'snobbery', I think. Golly!! I experienced this when I wrote to
some people about writing my subject's life as a novel and their reponse was so snootyy ("I have researched this extensively...how dare you??" - like I hadn't researched it and didn't know it to my fingertips!! LOL). But what if you really want to get to the heart of someone. So, you read their letters, watch their life unfold, see how you think they saw the world and write it into a novel simply so that you can include the feelings, thoughts. By writing it as a novel, you are not claiming it is definitely how they saw the world, but, after extensive research, it's your interpretation of it. Isn't that closer to the truth than simply a series of events and superficial gleanings from archives?
Then there are historical novels, which take a character from history and make up a whole fantasy around them. As an example, the numerous stories of the Tsar's daughters who supposedly survived that horrific execution, had various affairs with guards and did all kinds of things that were just so out of character with those real people! Is that the same category as what I just described? I think not.
And then there are books like 'The Mudlark', which is obvious fiction - the story of the little urchin meeting Queen Victoria - but the portrayal of the real Queen Victoria (in the film version, right down to the slightly German accent!) is so spot on that it seems real.
Then, there is historical fiction in which the fictional characters live in a particular era. The events of the era are accurate, but the characters are entirely fictional.
It just seems there are so many threads of historical fiction and sometimes 'historical fiction' is too broad a term.