Nearly all the historical fiction published in Spain during the Franco years (1939–75) can be fully understood only in the larger context of the writing of history during that period. While it is clear that Franco used raw military power to win the Spanish Civil War and to establish his regime by force, the need to sustain his authority and legitimacy over time required other and more elaborate mechanisms. One of the most compelling was the regime's attempt to assert control over the history of the nation, to make history an instrument of the government's own progamme – in other words, to exploit history as a source of power. This entailed a number of coercive practices – regulating academic appointments in history, controlling funds for research, creating publishing venues for books and journals, censorship, and so on. Above all, it meant that the regime sanctioned a historiography that defined Spain as a unified nation whose essence grew from the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula beginning in the late eighth century and culminating in 1492. The origin of the nation was thus located in the heroic deeds of Christian warriors who defined and defended Spain against all that might threaten it. In this way of thinking, the Francoist regime was part of a continuum, along with the imperial Catholic Spain of the past, and fully embodied Spain's historic destiny. For Francoist historians it was as if history in 1939 had come to its inevitable and perfect climax, with the new Spain of Franco representing a return to the nation's glorious past too long forsaken by those in power.

Since historians of the regime asserted their authority over narration of the past, and since they made the truth and meaning of history largely the private property of the State, any narrative that set out to represent the past of Spain necessarily stood in some relation to the historiography of the regime. Much historical fiction of the period is necessarily polemical, because it is written explicitly or implicitly against the grain of the predominant discourse of Francoist historians. As a result, the historical novel during the Franco period to a large extent addresses not only historical events per se, but is also intimately concerned with just how the past can be known, with the nature of storytelling, and with the contingencies of historical meaning.