Perhaps Tomorrow by Jean Fullerton

Since I read Katherine by Anya Seton in my early teens I have had a lifelong love of historical fiction so it seemed natural when I started writing nine years ago to set my stories in the past.

I chose the Victorian period as it reflects many of the concerns and issues, such as the introduction of new technology, the impact of scientific and medical advances on society, that we have today. It was also a period when centuries of long-held beliefs were being questioned. Slavery was abolished, Catholics were emancipated, philanthropists pressured successive governments to improve the working conditions of the poor, and women started to challenge the male preserves of education, politics and the professions.

East London, where I was born is a very special place for me and as a fifth generation Cockney I wanted to bring the story of my own ancestors who lived in the vibrant, poverty stricken dockland area to life. My first novel, No Cure for Love, was set in Whitechapel 1832 during a cholera epidemic. The hero was Doctor Robert Munroe, who battled to improve the plight of the poor and the heroine was Ellen O Casey, an Irish pub singer desperately trying to scrape together the passage money to take her family to New York.

My second book, A Glimpse at Happiness, continued the story when Josie O’Casey, Ellen’s daughter, returns to England twelve years later in 1844 and my latest, Perhaps Tomorrow, the third in the Wapping series, is set three years after that. The idea for Mattie’s story in Perhaps Tomorrow came to me as I was writing A Glimpse at Happiness as I felt she needed a handsome hero of her own. All the books are linked but can be read as stand-alone stories.

Mattie is a widow struggling to keep the family coal business solvent and herself and her family out of the workhouse -which, in a time before the welfare state, was a plight many women found themselves in. The situation was made even more difficult by the fact that women weren’t allowed to own property, operate bank accounts or have dealings with commerce of any kind. Of course, there were always women who fought against the odds and built business empires but they had to work doubly hard to succeed.

And for the women who went before us the daily grind was back-breaking. The day started before dawn when you had to rake the ash from the grate and light the fire before drawing your water from a stand pipe in the backyard. You physically did the washing and scrubbed the floor. Before stainless steel you had to keep you baking dishes clean by scrubbing them with sand. There was a constant battle to keep bed-bugs, cockroaches and head lice at bay, not to mention the mice and rats. In addition to this they had to cope with often a yearly round of pregnancy and the dangers of childbirth but surely the most heart-breaking part of their life must have been coping with the loss of a child which almost every mother in the 19th century would have experienced.

Although Perhaps Tomorrow is a fictitious work I have trawled through research papers and contemporary diaries to bring women’s everyday experiences to life. After reading contemporary accounts of their lives I couldn’t help but admire the hundreds of unnamed women, our great-great-great grandmothers in fact, who worked every hour God gave them to put food on the table and keep a roof over their family’s heads. I hope that my book sheds light on their stories and, in a small way, honours their struggles.

http://www.jeanfullerton.com/

Kill-Grief by Caroline Rance

A scribbled sentence in sepia ink; the scrawl of someone who drew the short straw and took the minutes of a meeting in 1756. I was looking through the archives of Chester Infirmary when I found a detail that spoke of lives and stories lost to history.

The note recorded that the infirmary's porter had been sacked for drunkenness. This wasn't a one-off bender – he'd been warned about his drinking before, and had now used up his last chance. The governors paid him his wages plus an extra 10 shillings, and sent him on his way. That note is pretty much the porter's entire contribution to posterity. Without the booze, he wouldn't have left any impression on the historical record at all. And if that had happened, he'd be like most people who have ever lived.

What was he like as a person, I wondered? Why did he drink so heavily? What had happened in his past and where did he go after he was booted out of the hospital? Why did the governors give him that 10 shillings?

This snippet of information inspired the gin theme of Kill-Grief and the porter, Anthony Wells, became one of the main characters. He's not a typical romantic hero. On the contrary, he's wasted much of his past and, to begin with, doesn't see much of a future either. But the story isn't really about him. It's about Mary Helsall, a young woman who becomes a nurse, challenges the prevailing stereotypes about women in medicine, and fights for survival against the shadows of her past and her own flawed character. The inspiration for her, too, came from brief mentions of nurses in the infirmary records. I was intrigued by the fact that a nurse called Mary Kelsall (I changed the spelling for the book) only lasted a few weeks in the job, to be replaced by someone called Mary Jones. What if, I wondered, the two names belonged to the same person?

Eighteenth-century nurses didn't (and still don't) have a great reputation – they are often seen as drunk, incompetent slatterns – but they were individuals coping with exhausting work, inadequate resources and violent patients. It would hardly be surprising if they sought to numb their emotions with alcohol, but I wanted to bring them into the light and portray them as individuals.

Mary finds herself on the receiving end of the stereotype – her perceived lack of morals meets with either disapproval or prurience from others – but although she is sometimes infuriating and self-destructive, she begins to discover just how capable she really is. She and Anthony realise that they don't have to accept what life has dealt them. Instead, they can use the only thing they have left – determination – to carve out their own future.

Although I started out by looking at historical sources, the book is completely fictional. I've no idea whether the real Chester Infirmary had anything to do with smuggling, murder, gin-fuelled romance or dodgy dealings in body parts – but through some tiny snapshots of real lives long forgotten, the characters emerged, and their story took shape around them.

Website: http://www.carolinerance.com/
Blog: http://thequackdoctor.com/

The House of Women by Anne Whitfield

My story ideas are born from all sorts of sources. Usually when I’m doing something mundane, like ironing or washing the floor etc, and ideas will come into my head then. Sometimes they might come from researching. I might be flipping through my research books and I’ll see something interesting that leads to ideas for a story.

I love the Victorian era. It was a time for immense change. Populations were growing rapidly and people were no longer content to stay in their own village. Of course, there were circumstances which forced many people to leave their homes and search for new lives, and this only highlights the way people adapted to new changes. The Victorian era gave women freedom to travel and explore and in many ways educated them beyond their role as mere mothers and wives. A fascinating time.

The House of Women was a great book to write. The idea came from wondering what it would be like to have a young woman at a cross roads of her life. Grace was always busy taking care of everyone else and not listening to her own wants and needs. I loved the idea of a large family all pulling different ways. With a selfish mother, a tyrannical father and seven daughters, the family was complex, but add to that a lost love, a heroic butler and a handsome stranger - well, the real fun began then!
I wanted to know how far I could push Grace. I wanted to see what she would do and how she would react to certain situations. Above all I wanted to show a strong yet vulnerable character, who did what she thought was the best for her family and ultimately herself – only it takes a while for her to really find out what that is and along the way she runs a gauntlet of emotions and experiences.

http://www.annewhitfield.com/
http://annewhitfield.blogspot.com/

Testament by Alis Hawkins

Testament started life as the germ of an idea for a radio play – a vague image of a ghost in an Oxford college lodge. The usual questions followed to see if there really was a story there: who was the ghost, why was he there, who was he haunting, why?

The answers to those questions soon exceeded the scope of sixty minutes’ radio drama and my imagination overran the bounds of any real city. So Testament became a novel and I set it, not in Oxford where I would have had to stick to what actually happened there in the fourteenth century, but in an entirely fictitious city - Salster.

My central character is a mason – more than just a mason, actually, a master builder – but I wanted him to be an outsider so I made him something of a pariah within his craft and gave him a patron who, as well as being monumentally rich, was also a heretic. I also gave him the son he and his wife had been waiting twenty years for. But the whole point of the book – the central reason for the book’s existence, in fact - is the boy turns out not to be the son he had hoped for.

Toby, the master mason’s son, was what the ghost in the college had turned into; no longer a ghost but a real live fourteenth century boy. A real live and very different boy.

So far so expansionist. But my imagination hadn’t finished with the narrative yet. I decided not to write it as a straightforward historical novel. No. I wanted to have somebody in our own time looking back on the story, trying to piece it all together, to make sense of it, the way we do with real historical narratives.

So, I needed a device to link two narratives separated by more than six hundred years. But what?
Newly discovered documents? Hackneyed.
Dreams? Flaky.
Time shifts with some kind of vaguely supernatural/quasi-psychological underpinning? Irritating.

A medieval wall painting hidden by circumstance until now? Perfect. Medieval wall paintings are fascinating – often containing little narratives all of their own.

Nothing about the people or the buildings or the circumstances in Testament could be said to be an everyday tale of fourteenth century folk.
The building Simon – my master builder - plans is extraordinary.
His patron is out of the usual run of magnates and is a Lollard heretic.
Simon’s master carpenter is none other than his wife.

Did things like this really happen, people always want to know.
Not often, is my response, and never – as far as I know – in exactly this way; but they could have and that’s the fascination of writing historical fiction. This could have happened.
Women did, in some circumstances, practice male crafts and were even masters.
There were Lollard heretics who – seemingly out of the blue – believed things that differed sharply from the orthodoxy of the day.
The extraordinary building Simon creates could have been built in the city I’ve invented. The university, both very like and utterly dissimilar from Oxford and Cambridge, is a plausible institution.

And, from the point of view of the twenty-first century characters in Testament, all of it did happen. The fourteenth century narrative represents part of the history of Salster, where the college Simon built for his patron still stands. The people who inhabit the college now – twenty-first century people who fill the book with blog-posts and email and cyber-attacks – are as much of their time as Simon and his family are of the fourteenth century and it’s in the meeting of these two times, in the grasping of the present to understand the past, that the key to the book lies.


The reader is privy to Simon’s story in a way that the twenty-first century characters aren’t. From a vantage point of privileged knowledge, the reader watches Simon’s life and work being pieced together by the twenty-first century characters in a patchy, sometimes inaccurate way and that’s the way I wanted it. I didn’t want my contemporary characters to fully understand events in the fourteenth century because, in the real world, that’s never possible. We can understand certain things, see through a glass darkly, but we will never completely understand the past and the people who lived there. We can’t.
Damia Miller – marketing manager to the twenty-first century college and would-be wall-painting decipherer - discovers enough of the mystery of Simon’s life to enable the college, mired in financial difficulties, to move forward confidently into the future; but she doesn’t uncover the whole truth.
Only the reader is given that.

http://www.hawkinsbizarre.blogspot.com/

The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton by Elizabeth Speller

Before I started writing novels (this is my second, following The Return of Captain John Emmett, which is a current Richard and Judy book club choice) I wrote about history and travel. These themes all came together when I set my novels in the early 1920’s, with flashbacks to the Great War. Just as travel books are, most importantly, about creating a powerful sense of place, so historical fiction uses many of the same ideas and techniques to recreate a place in time as well as physical locations.



When I’m reading I dislike feeling I’m being lectured to or that the author’s research, however virtuous, is too dominant. So I tried to let the background to my novels be something that a reader could absorb rather than be told about. But what I found hardest were the little details of the period. Did middle class men have pocket or wristwatches? How many houses had electricity? How much make up did a ‘nice’ girl wear and would a couple have sex before marriage in 1921? How many servants were kept in a small country house? How long did it take to drive 80 miles?



But there was also research specific to the plot of The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton. My first book had mostly been set in London and Gloucestershire – my home county. The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton is set in Wiltshire in an area I also know quite well, from the dense Savernake forest to the standing stones at Avebury and Stonehenge: extraordinary and mysterious archaeological remains that I had studied at university. I remembered the lecturer standing by Silbury Hill and pointing about him (through the drizzle!) describing the whole area as ‘a vast ancient ritual landscape.’



Where better to set a book about death, the disappearance of a child, and layers of secrets?I started researching hedge mazes - a very old feature of gardens, many of which vanished had in the twentieth century and which had always fascinated me. Then there were Saxon churches and the first hydro-electricity installations in private houses, sometimes wondering as I wrote how novels always seem to take off into unknown areas. But perhaps the most fun was looking into the massive British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924, which was intended to raise spirits crushed by the losses and privations of war (it was, incidentally, the early scene in the film The King’s Speech where the future George Vith made his halting and embarrassing first address). The original Wembley Stadium was built as the centrepiece of this show. It was the largest exhibition ever held and attracted 27 million visitors to a strange (and wonderful for a writer) mix of worthy industrial exhibits, a fun-fair, a specially constructed sea-side, replicas of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the Taj Mahal and a coal mine, a full Canadian rodeo, massed marching bands and much else besides - not all of it smooth-running. It is even less smooth-running in my novel, where a second girl vanishes into the chaos, crowds, noise and spectacle of the exhibition and where the connections between war, families and landscape are slowly unravelled by a psychologically bruised former infantry officer helping restore a village church.

The Somnambulist by Essie Fox

It was strange how my novel came about. I’d been thinking of something quite different when one hot summer evening I went along to a performance at Wilton’s music hall – a dilapidated venue in London’s East End still open for public events today.
That performance – Handel’s Acis and Galatea is a baroque and beautiful operetta that tells of unrequited love and results in tragedy for all. It went on to become the plot around which my own Victorian story unfolded, even using sections of the libretto to head up individual chapters.
That venue – Wilton’s hall is built at the back of a bar, an intimate rectangular theatre full of arched niches that used to hold mirrors, and a high vaulted ceiling from which there once hung a glorious crystal chandelier. The balcony is supported by elegant brass barley twist pillars that glint and flash when reflecting the lights. And while gazing at those cold metal posts I felt my mind spinning through spirals of time, imaging Wilton’s in its prime, almost able to hear the popping of corks, the raucous laughter, the music hall songs. There wasn’t a moment of doubt in my mind that this was where my novel would start.
The next morning I woke with three distinct characters in mind. I really don’t know where they came from. It was almost as if they’d simply been waiting for me to bang the knocker on their door – which fronted a grand Victorian house in Tredegar Square in East London, not that far at all from Wilton’s hall. And inside was a dark-haired young woman called Phoebe who lived with her mother, Maud, a strictly religious widow who campaigned for all theatres and bars to be closed. Their home was shared with Cissy, Maud’s much younger, more glamorous sister who once had a singing career on the stage to which she was about to return, performing as Galatea at Wilton’s music hall – a performance that Phoebe goes to watch – and what Phoebe sees and does that night heralds change for the lives of all three of them.
If you read The Somnambulist I hope you will share the excitement I felt that first night when I visited Wilton’s hall, and I hope you will share my affection and fears for my heroine, Phoebe Turner as she gradually wakes from long years of deception and opens her eyes to the tragic truth that has haunted her life since the day she was born.

http://www.essiefox.com/
For more information on Wilton’s music hall, see Essie’s blog, The Virtual Victorian http://virtualvictorian.blogspot.com/2009/10/wiltons-music-hall.html

Ten Historical Fiction Gems

The first ten are up! Take a look at the fascinating stories behind these fantastic books. Each author describes their inspiration and impetus for writing their novel. And - not a King or Queen in sight!

Another ten coming soon.