Now that we’re at the end of A Fugitive Green, we start to look back at the story that we’ve been told. Something that stands out is the timeline, which doesn’t match Outlander’s timeline. It turns out that Diana Gabaldon knows this, and that’s what her footnote is all about.
At the end of the novella, she shares that she knows the timeline doesn’t work. In Outlander, we’re told the ages of Minnie and Hal’s children, and none of them work for the timeline in A Fugitive Green. After all, the story takes place around 1744, which means by the ninth Outlander book, this child should be an adult!
Diana Gabaldon has her reasons for A Fugitive Green
Timeline errors happen a lot in the world of Outlander. I will always come back to how Geillis told Claire “1-9-6-7,” but she actually time-travelled in 1968. Originally, in the main books, she was going to have travelled in 1967, but it’s something that Gabaldon ended up overlooking when writing the next books.
There are other types of inconsistencies, too, such as eye color and other smaller details. These are all elements that readers have picked up on, but the editors of the books didn’t — and that can easily be explained by having a different editor in each book not quite catching the minor details. As a writer, it is something that the author should really catch as they have characters in their minds. But alas, there are mistakes that happen.
Gabaldon notes that the ages don’t work in A Fugitive Green. While she says that she has her reasons for the book, she doesn’t dive into them too much. However, she wants us to look at this story as more of “a wrinkle in time.”
Benjamin is Hal and Minnie’s eldest son in the Outlander books
In the main books, we learn that Hal and Minnie’s eldest son is Benjamin. He is believed to be dead, but we learn in Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone that he has switched sides in the Revolutionary War. He is now fighting on the side of the Americans, which Hal isn’t happy about. He also worries about how he will tell Minnie this.
Ben is in his 20s. At least, that’s the way I’ve viewed him throughout the books, or maybe early 30s. It definitely doesn’t match up with A Fugitive Green, where he would need to be in his late 40s by the time of the Revolutionary War. A way to explain this is that Hal and Minnie suffer a miscarriage or stillbirth, and they decide not to make a big deal about it, so that’s why it doesn’t come up.
It is just something we need to accept in A Fugitive Green. There are sure to be more mistakes like this.
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