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Telling the truth by Marianne Kavanagh

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Our June guest is Marianne Kavanagh.
Photo credit: Marzena Pogorzaly

This is what she says about herself:


Marianne Kavanagh is a writer and journalist. She has worked on staff for Woman, Tatler, the Sunday Telegraphmagazine and British Marie Claire, and has contributed features to a wide variety of newspapers, magazines and websites. She lives in London, but her heart is in Dorset.
 
Most fiction creates the illusion that what you’re reading is true. Gatsby is great, Miss Jean Brodie is in her prime and Emma Woodhouse really does unite some of the best blessings of existence. Historical fiction goes even further, describing people who once lived and breathed – Thomas Cromwell, Mary Boleyn, Machiavelli.

But whether the characters are real or not, the illusion of truth is only maintained if all the tiny details of their lives – dress, food, habits – are accurate. You don’t want the reader to lift her eyes from the page because you’ve got a farm labourer drinking tea when it was a luxury that only the rich could afford, or a young woman zipping up the back of her dress before the hookless fastener had actually been invented.

When I wrote my third novel Should You Ask Me, the detail of everyday life that worried me most was how people spoke. The book is based on a real historical event that happened in 1878 on the Isle of Purbeck in rural Dorset. The more I read, the more I realised that the dialect spoken at the time around Langton Matravers, the village where the Victorian part of the story is set, would have been difficult for anyone outside Dorset to understand.

A wagon full of quarried stone on Steps Hill, Langton Matravers, on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset in about 1895.
It’s hard to imagine a Britain so divided by language, but that’s probably because we’re living at a time when regional diversity in British accents and dialects is beginning to fade away. Recent research from Cambridge University suggests that more and more people in England are going to end up sounding as if they were born in London.

That was far from true years ago. Well until the middle of the last century, the south Purbeck dialect was very much alive. It wasn’t just the soft hum you get from ‘f’ becoming ‘v’ (not ‘friend’ but ‘vren’), ‘t’ becoming ‘d’ (not ‘butter’ but ‘budder’) and ‘s’ becoming ‘z’ (not ‘song’ but ‘zong’), but the vowels sounded different and the little grace consonants (‘going’ had an extra ‘w’ to become ‘gwoin’ and ‘coming’ an additional ‘a’ to become ‘acomen’) changed the whole rhythm of the words.

On top of all this, there was a completely different vocabulary for everyday objects, plants and animals (‘speck’ was lavender, ‘wont’ was a mole, and ‘spawl’ a large stone), and a long list of specialist words for the kinds of thing people needed to describe in this labour-intensive country life (a cage for catching a pheasant was a ‘nicklyvat’, a tree stump after copsing was a ‘mock’ and ‘vlankers’ were the black bits that flew in the air from a wood fire).

My character Mary Holmes is telling her story sixty years after it happened. The remains of two long-buried bodies have been accidentally disturbed in fields near stone quarries, and Mary walks into Wareham police station just before D-Day in May 1944 to say that she knows who they are. So I had a bit of licence – she’s 86 years old, and maybe time would have softened the way she spoke as a child.

But I still wanted her to sound like a woman who’d spent her whole life on the Isle of Purbeck. Before I wrote the book, when I was still gathering together research, I told curator Ben Buxton at the museum in Wareham that I’d probably make Mary speak in dialect. I spent hours reading R. J. Saville’s wonderful booklet for the Langton Matravers Local History and Preservation Society called Zum Lanc’n Zayens, pored over Lilian Bond’s book Tyneham, a Lost Heritage, and listened to recordings of Dorset dialects in the British Library.

An introduction to the local dialect of Langton Matravers by R. J. Saville 

But once my meticulous research was on the page, I realised the horrible truth. My poor reader wouldn’t be looking up from the page because I’d shocked her with some glaring historical inaccuracy but because she didn’t have a clue what ‘The wuz called wum lass Zundee’ actually meant.

In the end, after a lot of stomping around on long walks thinking about all the things I didn’t want (a sort of cobbled together compromise of bastardised language, a glossary at the back, characters constantly repeating things in different ways to make the meaning clear), I decided that what mattered most was to make Mary sound old Dorset in whatever ways worked best.

What was crucial was the rhythm of her speech – it had to hum and slide. Where possible, I’d use the vivid, blunt Purbeck sayings that made me laugh (‘he had a face like a bladder of lard’). Mary would constantly refer to the natural world because her childhood experience was living in a remote community closely tied to the land, and her conversation would be full of biblical quotes because Victorian village life centred round the church – Mary would have sat through Sunday services every week of her life.

Finally I would use dialect words where the meaning was so obvious from the context that there could be no confusion. (My hard-working copy editor Morag Lyall queried both ‘lumpered’ and ‘izemorey’, and I’m glad she did, but I decided to let them both stand.)

As Hilary Mantel said in her Reith Lectures recently, historical fiction is an interpretation of the past. The source material stays the same, but each writer emphasises something slightly different.

The Ship Inn in Langton Matravers

For me, what was important was not only accuracy but clarity. The novel was sparked by the Victorian controversy over the law on the burial of suicides, and I wanted to tell the story of what happened. But Mary, the narrator – a mischievous, devious, frightened old lady – is intentionally making her confession muddled and confusing. William, the young constable in Wareham police station who takes her statement, doesn’t know whether she’s telling the truth or giving him a pack of lies. Because she’s such an unreliable narrator, it seemed important that Mary’s language should be as plain and as simple as possible. Until all the elements of the story began to knit together, I couldn’t risk any words that would make the reader feel lost or bewildered.

Writers of historical fiction try to be accurate. But sometimes, to maintain the illusion of truth, the edges of reality have to become a little blurred.

Should You Ask Me, published by Hodder & Stoughton, is out now.


June competition

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To win a copy of Should you ask me by Marianne Kavanagh, just answer the following question in the Comments section below:


"Which other fictional elderly characters tell stories that are intended to muddy the waters, and do they succeed?"

Then send your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk, so that I can contact you if you win.

Closing date 7th July

We are sorry but our competitions are open to UK Followers only

Welcome to our birthday party! by Mary Hoffman

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The History Girls blog is 6 years old today and we hope you will want to join us in celebrating at our party. It has a special theme as all July we are having a Jane Austen month.

Drawing by Cassandra 1810
18th July sees the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death and the image above remains one of the few we can be sure is of her, drawn by her only sister. (She had six brothers).

Before we start the party, it might be good to remember some highlights of the last six years. Of the 28 HGs who started out in 2011, these are the stalwarts who are left:

Me, Katherine Langrish, Adèle Geras, Caroline Lawrence, Michelle Lovric, Marie-Louise Jensen, Sue Purkiss, Penny Dolan, Celia Rees, Imogen Robertson and Leslie Wilson.

Of the rest, some have come and gone during that time and are much missed, including Harriet Castor, Linda Buckley-Archer, Louise Berridge, Manda Scott, Tanya Landman, Clare Mulley - oh too many to name.

Those who have left often return as guests or stay on as Reserves.

There are long periods of stability but then suddenly we might get 3 or 5 resignations close together, always for reasons of overwork or over-commitment. If you want to know the current list, do go to our About Us page.

And we've had some terrific guests, including Sally Gardner, Kevin Crossley-Holland (our first History Boy!), Tracy Chevalier, Hilary Mantel, Alison Weir, John Guy and Helen Castor

Those who have been guests often become full-time History Girls!

Sometimes we have parties IRL to acknowledge what fun it has been and how long we've been going.

On 18th the History Girls will be having a full JA celebration here but since we are also making much of six years of writing posts for your delectation, we thought we might invite Jane and some of her characters along today.

Guest list

We wondered who would be most fun at a party and I came up with:

Mary and Henry Crawford (I know, I know)
Frank Churchill
Catherine Morland
Mrs Jennings
Mr and Mrs Weston
The Bennet sisters apart from Mary
Mr Bingley
Willoughby and Wickham (because every party needs a couple of villains - see the Crawfords above)
Sir John Middleton
The Musgraves, pre-accident



Let's have the party at Chawton. It's a bit small for us all to crowd in but this first of July date is sunny and warm in Austenland, so we can spill out into the garden.



Have you visited there? You'll know the rooms are quite square. Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved there in 1809 and the mature novels were written there. I think we can lay out our banquet there quite easily. Though it's going to be difficult for me - a gluten free vegetarian - to find much to eat here.

This is our menu:

White soup (Mr Bingley's Ball at Netherfield Hall)

Roast partridges with bread sauce ad roast venison (Mrs Bennet at Longbourn)
Soused lamb and pigeon pie (Mr Knightley)
Veal and ham "cake." (Sir John Middleton)
Roast pork with onions, sweetbreads with asparagus, minced chicken  (Emma Woodhouse, discreetly disobeying her father's preferences)
Ragout of veal, haricot mutton (Jane herself)

Strawberries (Mr Knightley's picnic)
Mince pies (Mrs Musgrave)
Sponge cake, Compote of apples (Mrs Bates)
Rout cakes (Mrs Elton)
Cherries en chemise (Mrs Jennings)
Whipped syllabub (Jane herself)
Buttered apple tart (Emma Woodhouse)

Stilton, North Wiltshire cheese, celery and beetroot (Mr Elton)

To drink? Mr Weston's good wine, of course! And some sweet Muscat from Mrs Jennings.

And if none of the fare above appeals, do feel free to bring your own.

We must have some music, of course. We are spared being delighted by Mary Bennet because we meanly didn't invite her, but who else can play? Oh Frank Churchill seems to have sneaked Jane Fairfax in and she is a far superior player.

I think we'd better have some dancing. Try this Napoleonic Cotillon and Reel

Or if you fancy something less sedate, this Sir Roger de Coverley

Oh dear, we have some gate-crashers!

I had already spied Mr Woodhouse in the corner (for Emma wouldn't come without him) supping some gruel and toying with a soft-boiled egg, but he's harmless enough, only concerned that you should all be wearing enough shawls. Though it's a fine day, remember.

No, but word has got round about the party and Lady Catherine de Burgh has rapped imperiously at the door, accompanied by her toady, Mr Collins.

Shall we let them in?

Let us know in the Comments below who exactly you think it would be nice to see here and who can be ever so politely refused entry.

I'm going to see how many ex-HGs and guests I can get to come and join us.




Miss Fisher and Melbourne, by Gillian Polack

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If Phryne Fisher had not been fictional, she probably knew two of my great-aunts. 

Today my thoughts keep returning to Phryne Fisher. I’m just discovering how very popular she is outside Australia. What brought these thoughts to me was not her popularity. It was Table Talk. Table Talk was a Melbourne magazine published from 1885-1939. Wikipedia tells me it absorbed Punch for its last decade or so of its existence. 

Table Talk appears (sort of) in Kerry Greenwood’s Life of Phryne (normally described as detective novels, roughly translated into a TV series) and it appeared in the Polack Saga (my family’s unwritten history). 

Let’s begin with the Sisters Polack. They were spinsters and ran a very exclusive shop in 17-19 Royal Arcade, Melbourne. That’s the arcade looked after by Gog and Magog. I go to the Arcade these days mainly for hot chocolate. It’s still full of the kind of style one associates with Greenwood’s novels. You can see why Phryne would have known the shops there, just by walking down the ground floor, admiring the shop windows. 

Royal Arcade, Melbourne Picture: Gillian Polack 2013


Table Talk consulted with my great-auntsabout what styles and fabrics were about to emerge from Europe and somesociety women ordered their tennis dresses there. Possibly not Miss Fisher or her ilk. She might have known them, however, because it was a good place to buy accessories, get changes made to a garment, and possibly to hang out.

This amuses me, for my family is Jewish. So very Jewish that I borrowed from the Polack sisters’ lives (just a smidgeon) to create a scene in The Wizardry of Jewish Women. Which now has a new cover, so let me share that with you. (Today is the Day of the Pictures and the Day of Unexpected Capital Letters and most certainly the Day of Bracketed Thoughts.)



Why is the family near-link amusing? It’s not only because my great-aunts dressed Melbourne so beautifully and I myself am not a sartorical treat. One of Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher novels used the Melbourne Jewish community of that time as a setting. 

The lives of her characters are very far removed from the lives of my great-aunts. The Misses Polack spoke no Yiddish and used their raisins to make fruit cake. They ate the family Christmas pudding. No Yiddish, no raisins. Afternoon tea with a silver service. Very Anglo-Australian in their Judaism. Very educated, but not in most of the matters that Greenwood uses in the novel. Their niece was a pianist and Gilbert and Sullivan was more important than Kabbalah. 

I talk about this side of the family a lot and I put it into a novel, because it doesn’t get talked about or written about much in fiction. Greenwood’s Raisins and Almonds fits what people think of Australian Judaism much more closely. The Jewish community in Melbourne during that time was mixed and complex and could easily fit both groups, and more.

Images of Melbourne flood my mind whenever I read the Miss Fisher books or watch the TV series. I've lived in Canberra for years, but my childhood included time in Phryne's part of Melbourne, for I lived in a south-eastern suburb. 

An important location for filing Phryne is Ripponlea. Even this building overlaps with my life. Mainly, let me admit, the sort of overlap you get with school excursions. My old school friend (who’s not old, but we’ve known each other for most of our lives) took me there for a recent birthday, in memory of all those times we wandered round the building. 

In the Phryne Fisher series, that single building is used to represent more than one location. I’ve been tested by this ever since the series was first released. Every episode I wanted to ask why this staircase was not considered to be in the same house as the room a scene took place in ten minutes earlier. This means that when I visited last year, I took photographs of all kinds of corners and angles, so that I could anchor myself and not be led astray by filming. Pictures like this.


Picture: Gillian Polack

And this.
Picture: Gillian Polack


It all comes together, though. The past and the present. The film and the reality. I hinted at this in the last picture. The reason we were in Ripponlea that day was to see an exhibition of the costumes from the latest season of Miss Fisher. This means you can decide for yourself if Phryne would have bought a tennis dress from a Polack.

Picture: Gillian Polack
Picture: Gillian Polack


Picture: Gillian Polack

Article 1

Writing Routines by Debra Daley

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The first thing I do each morning is meditate for around fifteen or twenty minutes. Nothing fancy, just concentrating on my breath. I love the time just before dawn when the present moment is quiet and the day to come feels full of promise. The sounds that you can hear are meant to be there – birds, the wind in the branches, rain pattering on the corrugated iron roof. Sometimes on a misty morning a hulking container ship will sound its horn as it slides into the harbour. 

Meditation helps me work at being focused and undistracted. I’m not always successful at that, but at least I have the intention. Occasionally I practise various kinds of pranayama. These are methods forcontrolling the breath, which is the source of prana, or vital life force. I believe in nurturing the life force as a first defence for keeping illness at bay. After meditating I practise yoga for about thirty minutes.

Writing is an unhealthy occupation. The sitting for hours. The racing mind. As I’ve got older I feel the effects more of long hours at my desk. In order to tell the stories that keep welling up in my mind, and to be here for the people I love, I want to remain as healthy as possible. That means staying limber and keeping the joints lubricated. I’ve practised yoga for many years. I’ve always been a physical person. I need to vent the psychic energy that builds up from too much mental work by running or, more usual these days, walking. I used to practise ashtanga, a vigorous style of yoga, but in the last year I have preferred a more intuitive yin approach. I love backbends and balances especially. I practise mudras too – hand and finger gestures. 'Mudra' in Sanskrit means "sealing in energy". I hope that mudra work will keep my fingers pliable and thwart the onset of arthritis. I would hate not to be able to use my hands fully.


If the weather’s agreeable, I inspect the garden looking for things that need to go on my to-do list and picking anything that's ripe. I've had a good crop of cabbages and cauliflowers this season and a poor crop of leeks. 


I grow most of the food we eat, and raise most of the crops from seeds or cuttings. Sometimes I will walk down to the beach and gather kelp to use in the garden, or driftwood and pine cones thrown up by storms for the fire.



It’s winter now here in Oceania, and the citrus trees are in fruit, but otherwise the garden tasks are less pressing. I should have turned the compost this week and dug in manure for the garlic beds, but I haven’t. I tell myself that I am preserving my energy for the spring rush. 


On a good day I’ve got all of this out of the way in order to be at my desk at nine. I work from home. I try to approach the everyday income-earning work with equanimity, although of course I would always rather be writing fiction. I always dispatch the income work first, so that I can reward myself with creative writing after that. If I’ve been editing or copywriting, I will switch from my desk to the sofa by the window to take up my fiction work. I’m in the first draft of a new novel at the moment, which means I’m writing primary material, and I prefer to do that by hand. 

For years I wrote in cafes and libraries and sometimes even on buses. I wrote my last novel but one, Turning the Stones, in this peripatetic way. I could do it because I had to, but temperamentally I’m more suited to the hermitage. These days I have a room of my own and there is not a day that I do not deeply appreciate it.


This is the view from the sofa. The jars on the window sill are my sourdough starter. I bake two big loaves of bread once a week. I planted all the trees you can see here: a Villa Franca lemon, a Queen palm, two olive trees, one Greek and one Italian, a pomegranate tree that is leafless at the moment. In the background, across the valley are massive oak trees planted by settlers in the 19th century, and a stand of regenerated native trees. My maternal family settled in this region in the 1860s and developed a farm they called Silver Park. 

During the years when my children were growing up, writing fiction was secondary to being a provider – although I did keep writing whenever I could carve out an hour here and there. I don't regret those years. I just tried to play a long game. I knew that eventually I would have the time again to devote to a writing career – and now I do. And having to wait so long for it, I guard my time most jealously.


May everybody be happy.


May everything move in the right direction.

Doctor Brewer’s Guide to Science - Katherine Langrish

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A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar (with an appendix of questions without answers) by the Rev. Dr Brewer, Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
Thirty-Eighth Edition
Above 300,000 copies of this work in circulation
London
MDCCCLXXX
Here then, is a book of popular scientific knowledge which was clearly selling in vast numbers in the second half of the 19thcentury. My husband has had the book on his shelves for years and we're rather fond of it, but I knew nothing about the author (other than the stated fact that he was a clergyman) until I looked him up on Wiki as I was writing this and discovered that - lo and behold! - he's the Dr Brewer of  'Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable', which is of course far better known, has gone through many a new edition and is, I hope, considerably more reliable. The good Doctor was born in 1810 and died in 1897 and this, his book of facts (or non-facts) about science, was first published in 1848.

He sets out his educational aim in the ‘Preface':

No science is more generally interesting that that which explains the common phenomena of life. We see that salt and snow are both white, a rose red, leaves green and the violet a deep purple, but how few persons ever ask the reaon why!  We know that a flute produces a musical sound, and cracked bell a discordant one – that fire is hot, ice cold, and a candle luminous – that water boils when subjected to heat and freezes from cold; but when a child looks up into our face and asks us ‘why?’ – how many times is it silenced with a frown or called very foolish for asking such silly questions! The object of this book is to explain above 2000 of these questions (which are often more easily asked than answered) in language so simple that a child may undestand it, yet not so foolish as to offend the scientific.

Brewer adds a personal anecdote about hearing a child ask her father ‘Why is the kettle so black with smoke?’

Her papa answered, ‘Because it has been on the fire.’ ‘But,’ (urged the child) ‘what is the good if its being black?’ The gentleman replied, ‘Silly child – you ask very foolish questions – sit down and hold your tongue.’

His defence of childish curiosity is very disarming. All the same, the Doctor’s own answers are often not very much more helpful, as can be seen from the following tautological set of Q&As on the very first page:

Q.           What is HEAT ?
A.           That which produces the sensation of warmth.

Q.           How is this sensation produced?
A.           Simply by an exchange of temperature with some substance warmer than ourselves.

Some previously unimpressed reader of the book has commented in light pencil at the top of this page: ‘When he doesn’t know the answer, it is the “Will of God”.’ 

Q.           What is LIGHT?
A.           The unknown cause of visibility. The most usual method of obtaining artificial light is combustion accompanied with flame.

Feeling perhaps that this wasn’t quite enough, Dr Brewer adds a more in-depth footnote which ends with a perhaps lucky flourish in the general direction of the truth:

The two theories of light most usually received are those of Newton and Huyghens.  According to Sir Isaac Newton, luminous particles of an elastic imponderable fluid, called ether, dart in all directions from the surface of light-giving bodies like the sun. Much the same as an odour from a flower. According to Huyghens [sic], the aforesaid ether is merely a vehicle, or medium of light, just as air is a medium of sound […] but it is highly probable that that ere long electricity or magnetism will be found to be the cause of light, and that the notion of a luminous ether will be wholly discarded. 

To cite only 17th century scientists in the late 19th is what you might call super-cautious. Michael Faraday had proposed in 1847 that light might be an electro-magnetic vibration, and this was borne out by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865, so Dr Brewer is a long way from cutting-edge science here. Still, he does at least show some inklings of awareness of modern developments. (And I do rather like that doubtful yet poetic image of the sun as some sort of cosmic dandelion, exuding light as a rose exudes perfume.)

Sometimes it looks as though his Q&As have been designed to point a moral rather than to address any likely question or genuine curiosity:

Q.           Why are shoes HOTTER for being DUSTY?
A.           Because dull, dusty shoes will absorb heatfrom the the sun, earth and air; but shoes brightly polished, throw off the heat of the sun by reflection.

Here’s an odd one.

Q.           Shew the wisdom of GOD in making grass, the leaves of trees, and ALL VEGETABLES, excellent radiators of heat.
A.           As vegetables require much moisture, and would often perish without a plentiful deposit of dew, God wisely made them to radiate heat freely, so as to condense the vapour (which touches them) into dew.

There are other oddities:

Q.           Why does the savour of delicious food make the mouth of a hungry man WATER?
A.           Because the salivary glands are excited by the savour of the food. This is a wise provision of GOD, who thus excites the flow of saliva by the odour of the food, before it is needful to masticate and swallow it.  

And I can’t figure this one out at all:

Q.           Why are the ILL-FED instinctively averse to CLEANLINESS?
A.           Because cleanliness increases hunger, which they cannot allay by food.

I’m sorry, what? And sometimes Dr Brewer simply gets things wrong, as when he claims that hail is caused by rain passing ‘in its descent through a cold bed of air, and being frozen into ice.’ The person with the pencil has noted critically in the margin: ‘Rain forced upwards into colder air’.  And I do feel that, especially by the year 1880, the Doctor really should have been able to do better than this set of Miscellaneous Questions near the end of the book. 

Q.           Why do the BUBBLES in a CUP of TEA range round the SIDES of the CUP?
A.           Because the cup attracts them.

Q.           Why do the BUBBLES of a CUP OF TEA follow a tea spoon?
A.           Because the tea spoon attracts them.

Q.           Why are the sides of a pond covered with LEAVES, while the middle of the pond is quite CLEAR?
A.           Because the shore attracts the leaves to itself.

Q.           Why do all fruits, etc, (when severed from the tree) FALL TO THE EARTH?
A.           Because the earth attracts them.              

Oh dear. Perhaps he was getting tired.


Dr Ebenezer Cobham Brewer



Getting Dressed as a Regency Lady - Joan Lennon


A Chattering Of Choughs and A Scream Of Swifts Sheena Wilkinson

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I’ve spent this week at the Scattered Authors’ summer retreat at Charney Manor in Oxfordshire. The manor is thirteenth century, with Elizabethan additions, and the adjacent churchyard has graves from many centuries so it’s easy to feel especially historyish. There are over twenty writers around, several of whom write historical fiction. There may even be another History Girl or two in the vicinity…


I’m typing this in the garden while a scream of swifts dives and wheels around us, and I wonder, what do you call a group of historical writers? A chattering, perhaps, as in choughs? I don’t often have the chance tochatter to other historical novelists so I wanted to use this post, falling so serendipitously on the last day of Charney 2017, to reflect some thoughts of today’s writers of historical fiction, particularly for young people.

Several writers joined me, all of whom have written historical fiction, sometimes straight, sometimes with a twist – an element of the paranormal; an alternate history, or even a comedy diary. Our reasons for writing historical fiction varied. I fell in love with history, especially that of the nineteenth and twentieth century, via an inspirational teacher, whereas Lynne Benton suffered from a boring history teacher at grammar school, which made her determined to write books which made history interesting and exciting to young readers.


Michelle Lovric only ever wanted to write historical fiction. She loves narratives where the characters have to deal with more severe problems than can be solved by Google and mobile phones, with more visceral anxieties and more bodily risk.

Tim Collins enjoyed the challenge of applying the aesthetics of the comedy diary to historical subjects, and talked about the humour sparked when modern sensibility meets historical context – as in Blackadder.

 

Kath Langrish remembered the excitement surrounding the Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Library in 1972. She wasn’t able to travel to see it, but was given the book about it as a school prize. The book promptly fell to pieces, but her interest in the Egyptians – and in history – didn’t.

 

Katherine Roberts was motivated by a desire to write about horses, which kept her settings historical, and she loves to weave magic and spirituality into her stories in a way that wouldn't work with a modern setting.


Mary Hoffman admitted to loving the freedom of writing parallel histories where she was the absolute world expert on Talia, her alternative version of Renaissance Italy. However, she also writes straight historical novels, saying that she loves the research involved.

She had had to give up history at school but we all agreed with her that history was accessible with ‘books and a brain’. Likewise we all recognised that lovely serendipity when you find a fact that really chimes with your story.

Most of us agreed that writing for young readers was harder than writing for adults, mostly because of what you can’t take for granted. We all cared about historical detail and accuracy, but never at the expense of story. I have a horror of my books being presented as ‘worthy’. 

The talk meandered through Icelandic sagas, Venice, portrait painting, sculpture, medicine, spirituality – to be honest, my head was reeling. We considered such issues as whether historical fiction should say something about today’s society – I think it inevitably does, because unless you aim for some sort of pastiche, any work will always, to an extent, reflect the time in which it was produced. 

There were only a few of us, but between us we had very different reasons for writing historical fiction, and were attracted to widely differing periods. I suppose that’s why a blog like The History Girls works – there are so many different voices and perspectives on the past. 

As Kath Langrish said, so much exciting stuff happened in the past, and if you discount it, you’re not left with much.

The swifts wheeled and dived the whole time we talked. Their ancestors were probably here, doing exactly that, during most of the periods we discussed. I hope their descendants will still be doing so in the future, when the writers of that time gather on the lawn and talk about their books set in the turbulent 2010s.






Sulpicia's birthday

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by Antonia Senior 

It is mid-afternoon on a Saturday and I am in a pub. Alone. With no children. I am hanging around, waiting for child 1 to emerge from a dreadful, dark din of trampolines and neon, where she is at a birthday party. I seize the quiet. 

I am working on some translations of the poet Sulpicia. Partly for fun - now that I review books for a living, my lifetime devotion to reading for pleasure, relaxation and solace has been tainted. Books are work, now. A minor, personal tragedy. I need something to fill the book-shaped hole.

That aside, Sulpicia is a real (probably) and fascinating character, and she might find her way into the book I am writing which is set in Augustan Rome. So I have dusted off my latin dictionary, clutched a dog-eared Loeb, and set about translating her. 

Happiness. Quiet and Loeb.
Sulpicia is not widely known, and yet hers are the only surviving lyric poems written by a woman in Latin. According to Ellen Greene, editor of Women Poets in Ancient Greece and Rome, we know the names of about 100 Greek and Roman women writers; but only 50 of those wrote words which survived - mostly in fragment form.

Remarkably, we have 6 surviving poems by Sulpicia. Less remarkably, male critics have split into two camps on the poems. Camp 1 believes that the poems have no merit. Camp 2 insists that as the poems have merit, they cannot possibly have been written by a woman.

Sulpicia's poems have passed down to us as part of the Corpus Tibulliarum - a body of work written mainly by Tibullus and other members of the coterie surrounding Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. A one-time co-consul with Octavian, he was also a patron of the arts - and, it seems, Sulpicia's Uncle and guardian. 

Sulpicia's poems are conventionally structured elegiac couplets about love - specifically the passion she feels for a man called Cerinthus. The fashion at the time was for love poetry addressed to pseudonymous objects of passion, who may or may not exist. 

Some critics, notably Thomas Hubbard, have suggested that Sulpicia is fake - an invention of Tibullus, to pastiche the feelings of a young, love-sick, aristocratic girl.  Professor Alison Keith, a leading classicist, has refuted this argument, citing the rather tortuous logic that Hubbard uses to reach his conclusion.

The reality is, that we don't know. All we have are the poems, that profess to be written by a woman. As a writer of historical fiction, I get to wade in with my hobnail boots, and declare that I choose to believe in Sulpicia's existence. There are few enough female poetic voices echoing down from Augustan Rome, without deciding that the one we have does not exist. And in the absence of facts and secondary sources, it is a choice; a leap of faith. 

When in Rome last week, I visited the frescoes kept in the Palazzo Massimo which were found in the ancient ruins of a mansion on the banks of the Tiber - in the grounds of the standing Villa Farnesina. Lord, they were magnificent. They are believed to have been painted in the Augustan era, perhaps even at the behest of his daughter, Julia. And the subject of all the frescoes were women; women at work, at play, at home, in the fields. Women as slaves. And women as enthusiastic lovers. 


A fresco from the Villa Farnesina in the Palazzo Massimo museum, Rome.


         IS it really too much of a leap to see Sulpicia's work being read aloud in this room? 

Anyway. Enough of unknowables. We have her words, and we should celebrate them. This is my favourite poem, with my bash at a translation. Forgive me, for I'm sure she put it better. 

XIV

Here comes my loathsome

birthday.

I will be dragged to the odious countryside,

melancholy,

and without Cerinthus.


What is sweeter than the City?

No country-house suits this

girl.

Nor the freezing river of Arretium and all its

fields.


Now, peace, Uncle Messala!

Your eager care oppresses

me.

Journeys are often

timed so very badly.


There, they take me.

Here, I leave my heart and soul.

Since power forbids me

to be

judge of my own life.



For those that are interested, Here is a picture of the Latin, with the Loeb translation by its side. Loeb translations are much more exact renditions of the Latin itself - but what sounds poetic in the rhythmic syntax of a Latin poem can sound stiltedly awkward when directly rendered. I'm a bit new to translating (apart from under exam duress 100 years ago) so please, tell me if you think I've messed it up!

 




A chat with Sophie Masson......by Adèle Geras

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Sophie Masson, the prolific and energetic writer of books for children, young adults and adults, has recently spent a month in Cambridge and I took advantage, I have to confess, of her presence to ask her if she would answer some questions for me to go on this blog, because I thought readers of History Girls would be interested in her views.
She is an indefatigable blogger as well as a writer and a publisher of her own imprint, Christmas Press....I have to declare an interest because she's published a book of mine. Below is one of hers:




Her Author Site is  :www.sophiemasson.org and her blog is to be found at :www.firebirdfeathers.com

Below is a link to a very full and fascinating interview in which Sophie tells us about her approach to writing historical novels for children. It's well worth listening to all the way through because she says things that will resonate with many of the writers on this blog, and with many of its readers too.



https://hnsaustralasia.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/imagining-past-podcast-series-sophie.html


I then asked Sophie some questions by email and here they are with her answers.


AG:You come from a very interesting background, and you are sort of straddling two cultures. It seems to have done you nothing but good to be half French. Can you say if your life as a child had any elements in it that you can see, looking back, led straight to your interest in all things historical?

SM: Yes, most definitely! My father is a huge history buff and always talked a lot about the past, not only our family's - he knew stuff about it going back to the 16th century and had the genealogical table off by heart!- but also the history of France, especially the bits he was particularly interested in: the Gallo-Roman period, the Middle Ages, the French Revolution. He had lots and lots of old books and newspapers - lots of primary sources as well as secondary ones -  and he is also very good at making history come alive in stories. We also had quite a few 'bandes déssinées : comic-type graphic novels which dealt with historical subjects (it's a big thing in France, telling history in BD for kids). And at school in Australia, I was really interested in history. I did both Ancient and Modern History in high school and read a lot of historical novels as a teenager, including those by such authors as Jean Plaidy and Anya Seton.

AG:Do you think the story is more important than the history when writing a novel? I know you'd never twist any verifiable fact but how much leeway do you have to invent stuff?

SM: I think the story has to be front and centre in a novel, but the history is the back of it, as it were, and needs to be properly understood and kept to in terms of the major events, dates, people etc. However I think one does have a certain leeway in inventing things. What I try to do is find a gap in the historical record, even about some thing or someone famous and work around that. I did that with my Ned Kelly books for instance. 



The life of Australia's most famous folk hero and legendary outlaw has been well documented, but there are still lots of areas which aren't known, of possibility there for a touch of authorial embroidery! And where the historical record makes it difficult to insert your character in, say, a famous event, I try to approach it from a lateral view. For instance in  The Hunt for Ned Kelly, I couldn't put my main character, Jamie, at Ned Kelly's last stand in Glenrowan, because there is a very documented record of exactly who was there and Kelly historians would be down on you like a ton of bricks if you played too fast and loose! Instead, I had Jamie act as a messenger for one of the  major newspapers in Melbourne which was publishing a new edition every couple of hours as more news of what was going on in Glenrowan came down the telegraph wires from the reporters who were there (having been invited to witness the capture of the Kelly gang by the police, a real media circus!) People were so drawn into the blow by blow accounts that lots didn't go to work but hung around outside newspaper offices, waiting for more news as it happened. When I found that out, I thought that was the perfect way to convey the urgency of the events and have Jamie involved while not playing too fast and loose with what happened.



AG: If you could pick only one century to write about, which would you pick and why?

SM: The 19th century is great and I've written lots about it, but I also love the 12th century and the 17th century. Really, every century has interest.  It depends on the story.

AG:Several of your books could be called Historical Fantasy. Does fantasy writing, like historical writing, have rules? If so, what are they? And is it easy to make these two genres mesh?

SM: The two genres are very similar in that they ask for a greater suspension of disbelief on the part of readers than does, say, contemporary realism. So whether you're talking about the  'real' past or  a past that has added magic - which is what much of my 'historical fantasy' is - then you need to make sure it all feels believable, on its own terms. There are no real rules, other than that. Even when you're writing 'alternative history', as I did with The Hand of Glory, 



which imagines an Australia where France has colonised the western part of the continent, the way history was changed to achieve the result had to feel logical and believable.
It's easy in fact to make the two genres mesh, by making it not only about the external facts of the time or internal emotions of the characters, but also about their world view and beliefs. For instance, in Forest of Dreams, which is set around the life and work of 12th century poet, Marie de France, I set it within the medieval world view, where shapeshifters and witches were as much part of life as knights and serfs. It then becomes a picture  of the imaginative world of the time as much as the real world.

AG: Can you tell us a bit about your latest novel, Jack of Spades?

SM: Jack of Spades is set in Paris in 1910 and follows the adventures of a 16 year old girl, half-French, half-English Linda Duke, whose father, a Shakespearean academic, goes missing while on a research trip to Paris. Linda goes looking for him and falls into a dangerous world of spies, terrorists and political machinations that draw her deeper and deeper into the heart of a very dangerous secret plot. It came out of my fascination with Belle Epoque Paris, with its many contradictions: glamour and misery, arts and anarchy, unstable politics and  respectable bourgeois life. It was also the beginning of the modern British intelligence services, when they employed amateurs, even young people, on assignments. It was a lot of fun to write and seems to have gone down  very well with readers. Which is always very pleasing, of course!



AG: Thanks so much, Sophie. It was great to see you in the UK. Hope you visit again soon!

'Piss Clear and Defy the Physician' by Karen Maitland

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Credit: Wellcome Library, London
I imagine most historical fiction authors have a collection of favourite reference books they dip into on many occasions, and one of my treasured volumes is The Medical Mind of Shakespeare, written by Aubrey C. Kail. The author uses extracts from the plays of Shakespeare to reveal not only the diseases and their symptoms, which were familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences, but the medical and surgical practices of the time. The book covers everything from childbirth to geriatrics, including venereal disease, medicines, mental illness and the four humours.

One of the practises the author examines is ‘water casting’, the examination of urine as a key to diagnosis. Macbeth says,

If thou couldst, doctor, cast the water of my land,
find her disease
And purge her to a sound and pristine health.’

While in Twelve Night, Fabian urges that the urine of the supposedly mad Malvolio should be examined.

Credit: Wellcome Library, London
‘Carry his water to th’ wise woman.’

This either suggests that lay people or cunning women in Shakespeare’s time were also using this art, or that Shakespeare was slightly scornful of this medical practise.

But using urine as a major diagnostic tool was nothing new. Throughout the Middle Ages, most physicians relied on examining the urine of the patient as one of the best aids to diagnosis. So much so, that whereas now a doctor is generally depicted with a stethoscope, in the Middle ages, the profession of a physician was shown by them holding a urinal in the shape of the bladder. 

In 1180’s in St John’s Hospital in Jerusalem, physicians were required to visit each patient twice daily accompanied by two servants, to check their pulse and urine. The servant would hold the urine sample up to the light, so that the doctor could examine it, then quickly deposed of it because of the heat. The second servant carried the medicines and syrups, including oxymel, made from vinegar and sugar syrup which the Arab physicians considered helpful in treating fevers, opening obstructions and preventing putrefaction.
Physician Constantine the African at
Schola Medica Salernitana

The Statutes of Roger de Moulins, in 1182, state that the hospital in Jerusalem must employ four ‘wise’ physicians (miegesl medici) who were qualified to examine urine and make a diagnosis. In 1177, 750 wounded crusaders were admitted to the hospital which already had 900 sick and wounded patients. So, these four wise physicians must barely have reached the end of their first round of urine samples before they had to start again on their second visit of the day.

Physicians employed by a town would often have to sign contracts obliging them to inspect the urine of any townsperson who requested it. Physician’s guilds warned their members that some citizens would try to test how competent they were by bringing in a sample taken from someone else and giving false symptoms that did not match those suffered by the person who’d produced the urine. They taught their members which questions to ask to try to uncover the truth.

Urine Colour chart c. 1506
Credit: Wellcome Library, London
By the early 15th century, almost every physician would have owned a colour-chart in the form of a wheel pattern of around 20 little urinals, each varying slightly in colour, against which he could match the patient’s sample. He would also look for the different stages of ‘digestion’ of the urine, depicted by a tree-like diagram, as well noting density, content, cloudiness and how the clouds moved or precipitated out. Each sample of urine was examined at the top, middle and bottom of the flask which indicated the health of different parts of the body.
15th Century Urine chart showing colour
linked to 'digestion' of urine.
Wellcome Library, London

This emphasis on urine being an indicator of the state of health of a person may have partly been responsible for the life-token superstition in a which persisted right up into the 19th century. If a family member was setting out on a long journey, a bottle of their urine was hung on the wall. If the urine remained clear, their loved ones knew they were well. If the urine became cloudy, they had fallen ill or were in danger. If the urine dried, they were dead. When relatives were sailing to the other side of the world, it might be months or years before any word was received of them and such life-tokens became hugely important.

But the other reason for using urine in life-tokens was that along with blood and saliva, it was considered to have magical properties. In folk medicine, if an animal or human’s illness was believed to have been caused by witchcraft, the evil-eye or a curse, the spell could be broken by boiling the victim’s urine in silence in a sealed room at night. Other items might be added such an iron horseshoe nails or the victim’s hair or nailclippings. It was boiled until the victim cried out, which was taken as sign the spell had been broken.
Witch-bottle buried under a house floor after 1820
Credit: Portable Antiques Scheme


If witchcraft was suspected urine was added to a ‘witch jar or bottle,' together with pins, nails and anything made from iron, and also items that would bind the evil such as thread or brambles. It would be hidden in a chimney or near a fire where it would heat up. As it boiled and the pins moved, the ‘witch’ would be racked with pain until she or he confessed or lifted the curse. In later centuries, the bottle was simply placed under a floor or in the roof space to ward off witchcraft and evil.

As the 16th century proverb wisely says – Piss clear and defy the physician.
Physician with Urine Flask 14th Century
Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

A Latin Library on Your Phone

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by Caroline Lawrence

We live in an extraordinary age of access to research and resources. Every day more and more photo galleries, manuscripts and scholarly articles come online. 

As an author of historical fiction set in Ancient Rome I have at my fingertips all the primary sources, commentaries and maps any scholar could ask for. 

But one of my favourite tools is an app I bought a few years ago for less than a fiver. Paul Hudson devised the SPQR app as a resource for teachers and students of Latin. 

It has tons of useful features but the ones I use most are the Latin dictionary, the Latin parser and a select library of Latin authors, most with translation included. These are all available offline, so you don't need access to the internet once you've got the app. 

You can find the works of Apuleius, Augustine, Augustus (Res Gestae), Bede, Caesar, Cato, Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Jerome, Juvenal, Livy, Martial, Ovid, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Propertius, Sallust, Suetonius, Tacitus, Tibullus, Virgil and Vitruvius just to name a few. 

Those that come with the English translation include St Augustine, Caesar, Catullus, some of the Cicero, Horace, Jerome, Juvenal, Livy, Martial, Ovid, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, most of Suetonius, Tacitus, Virgil and Vitruvius. 

In my Roman Quests books for kids, I use a Latin word for each chapter header and invite my young readers to guess the meaning and then check if they are right at the back. 

To make sure I’m using the best word, I type in the word and do an author search both in English and Latin. 

Because Hudson has used translations out of copyright, they are sometimes outdated. So the ruder Catullus poems are left blank as they were in some earlier translations. But some of the out-of-copyright translations are a revelation. Dryden’s translation of Virgil's Aeneid, for example. 

The wound pours out a stream of wine and blood;
The purple soul comes floating in the flood.



Or this translation of Aeneid 9.571ff


His shield thrown by, to mitigate the smart,
He clapped his hand upon the wounded part:
The second shaft came swift and unespied,
And pierced his hand and nailed it to his side,
Transfixed his breathing lungs and beating heart:
The soul cam issuing out, and hissed against the dart. 

It was thanks to this app I discovered Dryden. For that alone it was worth the money. 


But I use it every day.  

For a full list of features go HERE.

The producers of the SPQR app also offer an utterly addictive version of Latin hangman. So next time you want to play a game, forget about angry birds and candy jewels... 

...go revive your Latin!

Caroline Lawrence has written the million-selling Roman Mysteries and is now writing books for kids aged 8+ set in Roman Britain, The Roman Quests. The third one, Death in the Arena, is out 13 July 2017.

Sunbeams in a bottle – Michelle Lovric

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My local celebrity seems a cheerful chap, even in death. This is Lionel Lockyer’s grandiose tomb and effigy in the north transept of Southwark Cathedral near my home in London. 
 
The Cathedral has been in the news lately, for sad reasons. It had hosted the funeral of Keith Palmer just days before the nearby Borough Market was targeted for another terrorist attack. The whole area became a crime scene, with the cathedral sealed off within the police cordon.

 Elegant and grand as Southwark Cathedral is, it’s difficult to remember that the building was promoted to cathedral status only at the beginning of the last century. Before that, it was been variously known as the church of Saint Saviours and Saint Mary Overie, named after a local ferryman’s daughter, as legend has it, and the small dock that survives at the end of Clink Street near London Bridge. The survival of that dock is now under threat of a £5 million development that wishes to wall it up, with the replica Golden Hinde floating inside like a rubber duck in a bath. But that’s another battle and another blog for another day. This one’s about a famous quack of this parish and his particular wonder-drug.

When Lionel Lockyer was consigned to this tomb in 1672, the church was still Saint Mary Overie. Perhaps his effigy’s smile can be attributed to the amazing effect of his ‘miracle pills’ that failed their inventor only at the ripe old age of seventy-something. These pills, like all quack medications, claimed to be able to cure absolutely everything from gout to scurvy to syphilis to rickets to infertility to gout. And, like all quack medicines, they boasted a special ingredient – in this case, sunbeams. These solar ingredients were essential, the quack claimed, ‘dispelling of those causes in our Bodies, which continued, would not only darken the Lustre, but extinguish the Light of Our Microcosmical Sun.’

The pills were sold in boxes stamped with Lockyer’s coat of arms. They retailed at a hefty four shillings a box, and were available from some forty London establishments, including ‘Mrs. Harfords at the Bible in Heart in Little Britain, Mr. Russel’s in Mugwel Street near Cripple Gate, Mr. Randal’s at the Three Pigeons, beyond St. Clements Church, in the Strand, Thomas Virgoes, cutler, upper end of New Fish Street and Mr. Brugis, printer, next door to Red Lyon Inn, in Newstreet near Fetter Lane.’

Apart from sunbeams, the pills’ ingredients were a sworn secret. Lockyer claimed to have shared his recipe with only three trusted men. 
Some time around 1650, Lionel Lockyer began to print handbills about his Pillulae Radiis Solis Extractae. These quickly became known as Lockyer’s Pills, perhaps because that title was far easier to pronounce.

He was happier to say what was not in the drug, promoted as ‘a gentle remedy for all ailments in all persons regardless of sex, age, and constitution’: it was apparently free of harmful chemicals like mercury or sulphur of antimony. Thus it made a claim for itself as an early champion of the ‘wellness industry’ – even for the healthy it served as a ‘preservative against all accidents as contagious aires, for which it stands Centinel in the body and not permitting any enemy of nature to enter.’

 Case studies and testimonials to this effect were abundant and graphic. Among the 74 cases he relates: ‘Mrs. Dixon suffered for two years at least with a griping, gnawing pain in the belly, and by the use of my Pills, and God's blessing upon it, was cured; For before she had taken of my Pills six times she had a live worm come from her by Siege, four yards long; the woman lives in Dead-man's Place in Southwark, near unto the Colledge Gate. Her age is about thirty-two years, the worm came from her the latter end of May, 1662. If any desire to see the worm I have it by me’.

Lockyer cited the case of a young man who ‘told a friend of mine, that he had the POX, who gave him two boxes of pills, and in three weeks time he was perfectly cured, although he scared went to bed sober all that time, and within three weeks time he married a wife and both of them very well to this day.’

Then there was James Carr, afflicted with nose cancer and failed by numerous physicians and surgeons. Two boxes of Lockyer’s pills and Carr was cured. 

Indeed, Lockyer continued, if army and navy physicians and surgeons had given his pill to their patients, they would have saved tens of thousands of lives.

But Lockyer’s legend was not safe in his own advertising. A rival apothecary expended considerable bile and expense in a campaign against him. William Johnson sought to debunk the whole sunbeam story, saying that he analysed the pills and found them rich in the dreaded antimony. The exact same medicine, he said, could be had for 3 pence an ounce, compared to the 16 shillings Lockyer charged. He demanded that Lockyer should ‘either confess himself ignorant, or a Notorious Lyer in Print.’

Lockyer claimed to have a royal customer, adding a letter from a ‘Person of Quality’ who claimed that on June 13 1664 Lockyer calcined the powder of his pill in front of King Charles.
This letter seems to have provoked an American apothecary named George Starkey (quack-title ‘Eireneaus Philalethes’). His response described Lockyer’s Pills as ‘A smart Scourge for a silly, sawcy Fool’. Starkey threw mud at Lockyer’s credentials, describing him as a former tailor and a butcher. He too described the precursor of the sunbeam pills (christened ‘mercurialis vitae'by Lockyer) as ‘a very common and churlish medicine’ consisting principally of salt of antimony dyed bright red with cochineal.

Starkey even took exception to Lockyer’s quackish deployment of Latin, saying that he deserved to be untrussed and beaten bloody for his lapses.

Lockyer appears to have responded with yet more testimonials and handbills. It is thought he may have distributed upwards of
200,000 copies. And it served him well – his estate, on death, was revealed at more than £1900 in cash, plus a quarter share in a shop and leaseholds of four buildings.
 
 

His will provided for a substantial donation to charity as well as a sumptuous funeral for himself, and the Saint Mary Overie effigy resplendent in a fine wig of bouffant curls and a fur-trimmed robe.

Quack medicine is all about the advertising, which, in this case, continued even after the Lockyer’s decease. The brand-friendly epitaph reads:

Here Lockyer lies interr'd enough: his name

Speakes one hath few competitors in fame:

 A name soe Great, soe Generall't may scorne

 Inscriptions whch doe vulgar tombs adorne.

 A diminution 'tis to write in verse

 His eulogies whch most mens mouths rehearse.

 His virtues & his PILLS are soe well known..

 That envy can't confine them vnder stone.

 But they'll surviue his dust and not expire

 Till all things else at th'universall fire.

This verse is lost, his PILL Embalmes him safe

 To future times without an Epitaph.

 And indeed the pills survived their originator. One James Granger reported seeing Lockyer’s Pills still for sale by Newbury the Bookseller in St Pauls Churchyard one hundred and fifty years later, in 1824.


Michelle Lovric’s website

Michelle Lovric is the co-writer of  My Sister Milly by Gemma Dowler, published on June 29th by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Books

Six of the Best Austen Adaptations by Katherine Clements

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that the film is never as good as the book. That hasn’t stopped millions of Austen fans enjoying countless movie and TV versions of her novels. I can’t prove it, but Jane must be one of our most adapted authors, along with Dickens and Shakespeare. She’s become the undisputed queen of costume drama; the slate of BBC adaptations alone reads like a history of British broadcasting.


It all began in 1924, when the proposal scene from Pride and Prejudice was aired on the BBC’s first radio station to an exclusive London audience. The first filmed version came 14 years later – a lavish affair, broadcast live from Alexandra Palace in May 1938, scheduled in the now traditional Sunday evening slot. Sadly, this performance (pictured above) and many other live broadcasts from the 30s and 40s are now lost. Videotape recording wasn’t possible until the 50s so the earliest BBC adaptations we have in their original form come from the 1970s.

There is a delightful film from the BBC with lots more information about those lost Austens here.

The most famous early adaptation must be MGM’s 1940 production of Pride and Prejudice, starring Greer Garson as Lizzie and a brooding Laurence Olivier as Darcy. With an occasionally hilarious script and dubious costumes, this is Austen given the Golden Age of Hollywood treatment, well before matters of authenticity were a consideration. Still, it’s essential viewing for Austen completists. The fabulous trailer gives a flavour…


Through the 70s and 80s, regular remakes were largely low budget TV movies or series, but the 90s brought a resurgence of interest in the author, with both the popular BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and movie hit, Sense and Sensibility, penned by Emma Thompson. 1995 was a good year for Austen fans and brought Jane’s work to a whole new generation.

Since then we’ve seen modern takes on the novels, such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) and Clueless (1995); sequels, prequels or homages like Death Comes to Pemberley (2013) and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016); and films about Jane’s life, like Becoming Jane (2007) and Miss Austen Regrets (2007). It’s testament to the timelessness of Austen’s work that public appetite is endless. And I haven’t even touched on theatre and musical productions, of which there have been many. There’s even a feature film of Sanditon, Jane’s final unfinished novel, in production, though it seems to have stalled at the time of writing.


Jane Austen means different things to different people. I go back to both the books and the adaptations like an old comfort blanket, but it’s not just nostalgia or escapism; every time, and at different stages of my own life, I’ve found new understanding and significance beneath the romantic veneer. So, in honour of the lady herself, here are a few of my personal favourites…

Pride and Prejudice (BBC TV, 1995)

Well, it had to be, didn’t it?! This version rightly deserves its place on just about every ‘best costume drama’ list you’ll find. OK, so the acting is overwrought in places, and some of the characters are a bit clichéd, but this classic, with Colin Firth as Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennett, holds its head high above any other adaptation. There’s a respectable BBC version from 1980, and the 2005 film is not totally without merit, but Firth’s lake swimming scene remains a defining pop-culture moment that turned a whole generation on to Austen.

Sense and Sensibility (Film, 1995)

Emma Thompson won her second Oscar for the screenplay of this 1995 movie version of Sense and Sensibility. It was a labour of love and the result is pitch perfect. Sumptuous visuals and star turns from Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman and others make this a must-see. Funny, moving, warm and witty, it captures the spirit and the underlying message of the novel. Thompson’s Screenplay and Diaries offer an entertaining insight into the making of the film and are great addition for superfans.


Emma (ITV, 1996)

It’s a toss up between this version and the 2009 BBC version scripted by Sandy Welch and staring Jonny Lee Miller and Romola Garai. Both are very good, but I think I prefer the portrayal that Kate Beckinsale gives of Austen’s misguided heroine. The 1996 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle was entertaining enough, but a bit too treacly for me.

Sense and Sensibility (BBC, 2008)

Penned by Andrew Davies (who also wrote the 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice), this high quality adaptation comes a very close second to the movie mentioned above. It’s quieter, subtler and closer to the book. It looks beautiful and the performances are excellent, especially from Hattie Morahan as Elinor, who apparently refused to watch Emma Thompson’s earlier portrayal for fear it would influence her too much. I think it’s fair to say that David Morrissey as Colonel Brandon, good though he is, can’t hold a candle to Rickman.


Clueless (Film, 1995)

Not a traditional take but a brilliant one. Transporting the plot of Emma to a group of moneyed teenagers in Beverley Hills in the 1990’s was a stroke of genius by director and writer Amy Heckerling. The cultural references might be of its time but, just like Austen's novels, it's smart, witty and satirical, and has well-deserved cult status. I like to think Jane would have approved.

Love and Friendship (Film, 2016)

A recent addition but one I enjoyed very much, down to a razor-sharp script, gorgeous production design and a great performance by Kate Beckinsale. As Lady Susan, she of Austen’s often overlooked epistolary novel, Beckinsale delivers an anti-heroine with wonderful complexity and screen magnetism. Director, Whit Stillman, published an accompanying novelisation of the story (a brave move?) entitled Love &Friendship: In Which Jane Austen's Lady Susan Vernon is Entirely Vindicated. A great example of how Austen’s work continues to be reimagined.


Persuasion (BBC, 1995)

To my mind we are still waiting for a really good adaptation of Persuasion but this version starring Amanda Root and Ciàran Hinds is the best to date. This originally aired on BBC Two in 1995 – what a year that was for Austen adaptations! The global success of Sense and Sensibility increased interest in all things Austen, and Persuasion was given a cinema release in the US and won several Baftas. This adaption leans heavily on the central performances, which I like for their realism and subtlety.


So there you have it. Which are your favourites?

A final note: This is my last post for History Girls as, due to other commitments, I must regretfully step down. Thanks to everyone who has read and commented on my posts and to my fellow History Girls: It’s been fun but, to paraphrase Mr Bennett, I have delighted you long enough!



Playing Paris: judging beautiful books

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by Antonia Senior

Last year, I was asked by the Historical Writers Association to chair the judging committee of a new award: the HWA Endeavour Ink Gold Crown. I had been on the judging panel the year before, for the Debut Crown, so I had some inkling of the scale of the task.

We announced the longlist a few weeks ago, and the shortlist is coming out on Thursday. Watch your twitter feeds, History girls, and help us trumpet and holler these wonderful books to the world. Prizes are crucial in an environment in which even the most brilliant writers struggle with the issue of visibility.

Waterstones, the only bookseller of scale left, is risk averse, buying a handful of copies of books it likes, rather than taking bets on large numbers. When it does take a book to its heart, it can work miracles: witness the extraordinary rise of The Essex Serpent. But that is one book. The supermarkets are now major players and entirely judge a book by its cover. If the last bestseller was blue and bosomy, they will take a punt on the next blue and bosomy one which comes along. Meanwhile, online, algorithms push readers deep into silos based on previous purchases. Algorithms tend to make bestsellers sell more, while the unknowns sink, traceless.

The timidity of booksellers, the rise of the algorithm and the panicking of the publishers make it a tough environment in which to be an author. Enter the prize.

My postman hates me. He already delivers a baby-elephant weight of books to me every month, in my capacity as a reviewer for The Times. Add the prize books, and things become ridiculous. As the the deadline drew to a close, the post office had to lay on a special van for my post.

Book Post. GULP!

We had almost 100 entries. An incredible start to the prize's life.

But as the books tumbled from the pile it became obvious that we had an issue to resolve. It was something that we had anticipated - I had a lengthy chat with Imogen Robertson, the HWA's excellent chair, before joining the judging panel. It is this: how do you judge such different books? How do you play Paris, when you are choosing between sub-genres? Paris was not asked to choose between three different types of beauty; he was choosing between three personifications of womanhood, only one of which was pure beauty.

How do you hold a booker prize contender in one hand, and a swords 'n sandals thriller in the other, and choose between them? On what basis? We had literary books, psychological thrillers, crime novels, adventures. We had a glorious smorgasboard of different styles and types, whose only common denominator was a historical setting. But this is not a prize for settings.

We decided that our answer to this conundrum - and our governing principle - should be passion. It is, after all passion, that brought most of us as readers and writers to historical fiction. Passion that grabbed us as children, pinned us to our spot under the duvet with a torch, and forced us to read just... one.. more... page. Of Sutcliffe, Forester, O'Brien, Renault, Plaidy, Cornwell, Graves, Scott, Dunnett, Dumas. Not always high literary writers: but all possessing that magical alchemy of making the past seem real, and urgent and peopled with characters of flesh and heart.

This passion can take us to the murky, brain-aching depths of a literary novel - there are several books on our longlist that cannot be tackled lightly. But it can also take us to a battle-field, where, scarred and breathless we watch our hero falter. To the beginning of a love affair, or end of a voyage.

I am not denying historical fiction its intellectual heft here - no need to do that in the wake of Hilary Mantel's utterly brilliant Reith lectures. I am merely making the case that a purely intellectual satisfaction is not all that this particular genre offers to its devotees. The prize, and its longlist, reflects that conviction.

This is the long-list:

Watch out for the shortlist on Thursday and let us know what you think. I think it is a corker.
And if you're short some Summer reading, you know where to start...

BIRDS, WATER AND FOLDS IN TIME – Elizabeth Fremantle takes inspiration from the Norfolk Broads

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An aerial view of the Broads
I swore my devotion to London many years ago. It is where I was born and where I did most of my growing up. Even during a three year sojourn in Paris I was desperately homesick for London, so it has come as something of a surprise to find myself in Norfolk.

Tommy and Lola take a drink

I made the move to find a new perspective on my writing and have found that the proximity to nature not only stimulates my imagination but also brings me closer to the past. Time obeys different rules here. The rate at which the abundant and vigorous plant life beside the water at the lip of my garden, home to all manner of life, grows gives the sense that without man it would take a mere few years for nature to reclaim its territory and erase all sign of centuries of progress. Yet life also seems to slow here and small but regular events, like the daily 7am battalion of tiny goldfinches that come to feed on the thistles near my kitchen and the little Chinese water buck that leaps out of the barley as I pass with my dogs each evening, or the family of stoats that have made their home beneath the barn, offer simple delight. It is easy to imagine my seventeenth century characters also experiencing such ordinary rural happenings and it no doubt helps that I live in a cottage that dates from their time, albeit altered beyond recognition inside and certainly a good deal more comfortable.

The remains of St Benet's
I have always found inspiration whilst walking alone and here, in pockets of wilderness with no sign of modernity, the experience is intensified. Nature echoes with the past, whispering things to me as I walk by. The Broads have a topography all their own, vast, constantly-changing skies over a flat expanse of land that is saturated with water and alive with hundreds of species of bird. The act of walking in solitude through this landscape, with only my dogs for company, one trotting at my heel, the other always running on ahead, allows my mind spooling through the heads of my characters, hearing them speak, imagining existing in their bodies, bringing them into vivid life.

A favourite place is St Benet's Abbey, a few scattered ruins that mark the site of a vast medieval religious establishment founded on the site of a ninth century monastery. It seems so remote and tranquil, with just the odd boat gliding past on the nearby maze of waterways and I imagined those early monks at their devotions without the interruptions of ordinary life. But after a little research I discovered that in fact in the past the area around St Benet's was a hive of activity and commerce. By the twelfth century the East of Norfolk was documented as being one of the most densely populated parts of the country. Indeed St Benet's was the site of a rebellion during the peasant's revolt.

A sail in the distance
With the population so large, woodlands were cleared for fuel and building. But once timber supplies grew short, locals turned to peat as an alternative source of fuel. By the fourteenth century the vast holes created by peat extraction began to fill with water as sea levels rose and the whole area was regularly devastated by flooding. Nature's attempt to reclaim supremacy over the land.

Before long, humans fought back with complex systems of drainage and the 200km of navigable waterways of the Broads came into being. By the beginning of the twentieth century the Broads were a hugely popular tourist destination and continue to be so, but still out walking it is possible to wander for miles and barely encounter a single soul. I still find it curious to see at a distance the sail of a boat passing languidly across a vista of marsh and farm land,on an invisible ribbon of water hidden by the raised dykes on either side. As I walk, aware of small birds fidgeting in the reeds, the rustle of something, an otter perhaps, in the undergrowth, a quick smatter of raindrops, time folds back on itself and I am in the past.


Breaking through a wall of silence: Researching the Women’s Palace in old Tokyo by Lesley Downer

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The dimensions of the Seraglio and the extent to which it exerted a malign influence upon the conduct of public affairs may be measured by the number of its inhabitants. 
A History of Japan, 1615 - 1867, by Sir George Bailey Sansom (1963)
Only existing photograph of
a lady of the shogun's court
(Life in the Women's Palace
 at Edo Castle
)

In a couple of weeks my new novel,THE SHOGUN’S QUEEN, will be published in paperback. It’s set in the Women’s Palace in old Tokyo, a place surrounded by secrecy and about which until recently almost nothing was known. In fact it was treated rather like a shameful secret.

I’m not sure when I first stumbled upon the fact that the shogun - the de facto ruler of Japan for several hundred years - had had a harem or something very akin. I’d lived in Japan for years, absorbed myself in the history, literature and lore, had written books, even lived with geisha, yet never heard a word of any harem. 

It seems three thousand women lived in the O-oku, the ‘Great Interior’ of Edo Castle, in the city we now call Tokyo. They all swore an oath of secrecy, never to speak or write of anything they heard, witnessed or experienced. In 1868 the castle was handed over to the enemy after a bitter civil war. The occupants were expelled and everything that had gone on was expunged from the history books. Most of the women had come from families on the losing side and many found themselves homeless. Most kept silent till their deaths. 
Shogun being served by his ladies - tableau, Nijo Castle, Kyoto

A search of the library at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, revealed a single book on the palace, entitled Life in the Women's Palace at Edo Castle. In old age one of the ex-ladies-in-waiting had broken her silence and spoken to her son and a couple had agreed to be interviewed. 

I could almost hear the croaking voices of the old ladies as they explained the etiquette and protocol, the hairstyles, clothing and duties of each rank of lady, ruminated over which classes were high enough in rank to enter the presence of the shogun and his wife and which were not. They described the recruitment process, the three daily audiences, the annual festivities, the parties. 
Nun with shogun (Life in the Women's Palace at Edo Castle)
Very few of the three thousand women, they explained, ever became concubines. Concubines were chosen usually by rank but sometimes when the shogun happened to spot a particularly lovely girl in the gardens or even out on the street. Ienari, the thirteenth shogun, set a record with fifty three children born to twenty seven concubines - though only the concubines who bore children are listed in the records and he probably enjoyed the company of many more.

Whether you were a concubine or the shogun’s wife, sexual activity ended at the age of thirty. There were tales of frustrated ladies-in-waiting, condemned to a life of celibacy, who sneaked out to sleep with handsome monks, carpenters or kabuki actors and were harshly punished with exile or even execution. 
Himeji Castle women's quarters

I was struck by the fact that unlike the harems of the Topkapi in Istanbul and the Forbidden City in Peking, there were no eunuchs in the women’s palace or anywhere in Japan. Four nuns - shaven-headed and officially desexualised - acted as intermediaries between the men’s and women’s palaces but the O-oku was run not by them but by seven hard-smoking elders who had once been concubines. In Japan the women ran their own affairs. 

I would have given anything to have seen the palace. But not only had the castle been taken over by the enemy, it had burnt down many times. There was nothing left. 

I started off by visiting Himeji Castle in Japan. Every lord, I discovered, had had a harem, and the buildings that housed the harem of the lord of Himeji are still there, though they are empty now, just bare wooden walls and tatami-matted floors with nothing left to imagine of the life. 

Then I went to Nijo Castle in Kyoto. Magnificent though it is, this was just the shogun’s pied a terre, a mere shadow of the splendour of Edo Castle. The painted transepts and gold encrusted screens, designed to impress visitors, are still in place in the grand audience halls. 

Bridge and Great Gate, Women's Palace,
Edo, late 19th century
The women’s quarters, conversely, are much quieter and calmer, domestic in mood, walled with screens painted with ink-brushed scenes of country life and peopled with mannequins of the shogun and his women in lavish kimonos. I spent a long time there, imagining the jealousy and back biting, picturing the women tiptoeing around fearful of putting a foot wrong while all the while hoping they would be spotted by the shogun and elevated to concubine. 

And finally I went to Edo Castle, now the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Where the women’s palace once stood - with its white walls and ranks of dove grey roofs, its thousands of women in exquisite kimonos rustling through the corridors and across the walkways - is now the East Gardens. I crossed the bridge that spans the moat to the Great Gate where merchants used to wait. 
'Site of Oh-oku'

Inside there is nothing but an endless expanse of lawn marked at one end with the granite foundation stones of what was once a five-storeyed tower. I paced out the area, awed at the vast size of the place. Then I walked down Tide-Viewing Slope up which the women were carried in painted palanquins before entering the palace, never to leave again. 

Finally I discovered a small sign, half-hidden inside a hedge. It read ‘Site of Oh-oku,’ final confirmation that thousands of woman had once whiled away their lives here, on what is now an empty expanse of lawn.


Lesley Downer's latest novel, The Shogun's Queen, is set in the Women’s Palace. It comes out in paperback on July 27th. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey and Farleigh Hungerford Castle

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by Marie-Louise Jensen

In honour of our July celebration of Jane Austen, I thought I'd draw readers' attention to the research done by Janine Barchas in her work Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location and Celebrity.
This came to my attention through some coincidences.

When I set my second YA novel The Lady in the Tower at Farleigh Hungerford Castle near Bath, I had no idea at all that I was treading in Jane Austen's footsteps. I had no idea until Janine wrote to me and told me that her daughter was reading my novel (bought on holiday in New Zealand, as far as I remember!) and she had realised that it was set in the very castle that she had researched in connection with Austen's Northanger Abbey.

All Austen fans remember Catherine Moorland's disappointing, abortive drive to Blaise Castle with the dreadful John Thorpe. In her book, Barchas points out that this was a ludicrous trip to a castle so far away when there was a very popular ruined castle within six miles of Bath - an easy drive. Farleigh was, according to Barchas, a popular day-trip for visitors to Bath, and full of the kind of gruesome Gothic history that would have appealed so much to Catherine Moorland. Barchas further proposes the theory that Northanger Abbey was based on Farleigh Castle. Once that connection is made, it seems blindingly obvious. Jane Austen's family, she tells us, had a guide book including Farleigh Castle and it is even annotated in her hand. It is very likely she visited the castle herself.

There are many dark tales connected with Farleigh Castle. Austen alludes to the murder of John Cotell by his wife Agnes. His body was allegedly burned in the kitchen range and she and two servants were later prosecuted for the murder. This is echoed in Austen's novel when Catherine Moorland suspects General Tilney of doing away with his wife at Northanger Abbey.

This incident had only a brief reference in my novel; I was more drawn by the tale of Lady Elizabeth, locked in the Lady Tower for several years. But it's strange to realise that I was inspired to write a story by the same location as Jane Austen without knowing it.

I can thoroughly recommend Janine Barchas' book on Austen. It's a fascinating read, and reveals many things, among others Austen's subtle sense of humour. Much is still amusing for a modern audience today, but other things require context. For example, Barchas points out that Thorpe was the name of the local map maker in Bath in Austen's time. Giving John Thorpe his name when he cannot find the way to Blaise Castle and doesn't know about Farleigh Castle is a little dig that only locals would have understood. There are many gems like this in Barchas' research.


Francis Masson, plant hunter: 1741-1805 - by Sue Purkiss

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A couple of months ago, I wrote a post introducing the plant hunters - you can find it here. Logically, my first subject should be Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), a wonderful, larger-than-life character who travelled with Captain Cook on his first voyage round the world, and then persuaded King George III to put him in charge of his garden at Kew, which Banks developed into the immensely important botanic garden which it still is today. He also became President of the Royal Society, and played a considerable part in fostering the talents of scientists such as the Herschels and Humphrey Davy.

But as it happens, I wrote about him some years ago, when the History Girls were asked to choose their favourite historical character. So you can read about him here - but this month, I'm going to write about Francis Masson.

Francis Masson

Masson was closely linked to Banks. Born in Scotland, he was working as an under gardener at Kew when Banks spotted his potential, and sent him off with Cook on his second round-the-world expedition. (Banks was meant to be going himself, but the Admiralty felt that his conditions were a trifle unreasonable - among other things he wanted to take a pack of greyhounds and his own personal orchestra - and they were unable to agree on terms.)

After three and a half months at sea, Masson parted company with Cook at Cape Town, in South Africa. As is the wont of plant hunters, he went looking for plants and found danger; on Table Mountain, he was so entranced by the glorious variety of flowers before him that he lost all sense of time and direction, and completely forgot that he had been warned that a gang of escaped convicts was on the loose - until he heard the sound of men's voices, and, more ominously, clanking chains. He crept through the undergrowth to an old shepherd's hut, where he sheltered till he was able to slip away as dawn broke.

Strelitsias - Bird of Paradise flowers - on Table Mountain: one of the hundreds of species Masson sent back to Kew. 

Evidently not put off by this brush with danger, he hired a covered wagon, a driver and a guide/translator, and set off cheerfully on a 400 mile round trip into the interior. Naturally, along with a range of exciting new plants, he encountered treacherous rivers, steep mountain paths, poisonous snakes, rampaging hyenas and so on. But he made it back safely, and to Banks' delight, was able to deliver more than 500 new plants to Kew.

But after risking life and limb in search of new plants, gardening at Kew really just didn't cut it any more, so he was soon off again; this time via Madeira, Tenerife and the Azores to the West Indies. His difficulties this time began when he got to Grenada, and the French invaded. (Bear in mind, this being Jane Austen month, that their dates overlap - hers are 1775- 1817 - and that while her books have the drawing room in the foreground, they have war in the background: many of her male characters are in either the navy or the army.)

Instead of hunting for more plants, Masson found himself conscripted into the militia and then captured and imprisoned by the French. He lost his plant collection, but, thanks to the intervention of Banks, he was released. (But how long would the messages necessary to achieve that have taken?)

Things didn't get a great deal better. In St Lucia, his next port of call, a hurricane destroyed his new plant collection and his journal. Disheartened and miserable, he sailed home early in 1781.

Another plant introduced by Masson - the streptocarpus, or Cape Primrose.

However, he bounced back, and after a pleasant two-year trip to Portugal, in 1786 he went back to Cape Town. Travelling was much more difficult this time, as Britain and Holland were at war and the Dutch were in charge in South Africa. Nevertheless, he stayed here for some years, only returning home in 1795. As usual, he couldn't settle, and persuaded Banks to send him off again, this time to North America. He'd survived so much, but the bitter Canadian winter was too much for him; he died there, thousands of miles from home, in 1805.

For the information in this post, I'm indebted to The Plant Hunters, by Toby, Chris and Will Musgrave, published by Seven Dials.


Sue Purkiss's novel for children about the plant hunters - Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley - comes out at the end of September.




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