Learning or Lying?

In class we have been talking about historical fiction and how it is set in the past and telling the reader about that time in history. Historical fiction, in my opinion, is written to teach readers about history but also make it interesting by putting it into a story format. Is historical fiction really teaching us readers though or lying to us instead?

The Mcleod article was all about historical fiction and gave multiple examples of historical fiction stories. This article also tells the reader how every single one of those examples has mistaken events within the story. For example, in the story Sarah, Plain and Tall the author writes about the women staying with a widowed man being the only woman in the house; in the time period of the story that would be totally unacceptable. There is at least one example of something that the author is lying about in every story pointed out in this article.

I do not understand how stories like this can be considered historical fiction when they are not teaching history at all but rather misleading the reader to believe something is acceptable in history that is not at all. I believe that if an author is going to write a historical fiction book, they need to get the facts straight and include them no matter how violent they are. By lying they are only giving the reader a fake interpretation of how history used to be; an author should not lie to a reader, they should inform them.