The historical novel is a conservative genre. Although Sir Walter Scott in many respects paved the way for the great nineteenth-century masterpieces of contemporary realism, as Georg Lukács claimed, he also firmly established romance as the dominant mode for historical fiction. Nowhere is this stark division more evident than in the work of Gustave Flaubert, for while Emma Bovary's dreams of romance wither amid the mud and manure of rural Normandy, the Carthaginian princess Salammbô soars to the heights of romantic fantasy, rescuing the veil of the goddess Tanit, inspiring the impossible love of a Moorish rebel chieftain, and dying of a broken heart as her Moor is torn to pieces by a frenzied crowd. A few notable exceptions can be found, above all William Makepeace Thackeray's Henry Esmond (1852) and Tolstoy's War and Peace (1863–69), but, as Ernest Leisy and Peter Green were among the first to recognize, it was not until the twentieth century that historical novelists began making a serious effort to think their way into the mentalities of the past and create characters and plots that were as plausible and authentic as the costumes, settings, and other antiquarian lore of their fictions. Prominent among the pioneers of this new model of full-fledged realism in the historical novel, a tradition that would ultimately boast such luminaries as Robert Graves, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Mary Renault among many others, stands Sigrid Undset and her medieval trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–22).