"You're not a historian, you’re a fraud. How dare you write a historical fiction novel?" I imagine readers shout. “You shouldn’t write a book you have no expertise
in!”
However, I take heart; I’m in good company. As keynote speaker, Tracy Chevalier
(author of Girl with a Pearl Earring)
said at the recent Historical Novel Society Conference (2016) in Oxford, "It isn’t like we all set out to
write historical fiction".
 |
| Author Tracy Chevalier speaking at HNS Conference (2016) |
As it
happens, my experience of coming into historical fiction was much like Tracy’s.
Like for her, there came a time when I wanted to know about my ancestors: who they
were, where they came from, what kind of lives they led. I wanted to know
something of their occupations, things that happened to them, what events went on around them. Anyone who’s done any genealogy will
know how addictive it is. It’s like being a private investigator into your
ancestors’ lives. You start off by just wanting to know their names, but soon
you want to know why this person or that person might’ve been absent at a
particular time during a census, or why another person might have come to stay.
You might
find that neighbours or friends have an influence over one of your ancestor’s
lives, as happened when one of my ancestors, Robert Jamieson, a rather prolific
chap, named one of his children after a good friend of his, John Watson. Because of the Scottish naming tradition, the third son of that
child, Watson Jamieson, was named after his father. In Scotland:
- ·
the
first son was usually named after the man’s father’s father
- ·
the
second son after the mother's father and
- ·
the
third son after the father.
 |
Robert Jamieson named his son Watson
after his friend John Watson |
(the girls
were likewise named after the mother’s mother, the father's mother then
the mother). That the first Watson Jamieson had children with
three women meant that two of his sons called their first son Watson. And those
boys, in turn, so-named their third son. The Watson name grew slowly along that line, and so Robert
Jamieson paid homage to his friendship with John Watson for generations after,
even if they didn’t know it. There weren't many Watson Jamiesons in each census, and I soon found that all the ones that turned up in the UK were related to that original one. It was fun to work out how they related.
Anyway, I digress. My ancestor's doings caught me into the past. Discovering that my great, great grandfather was
the manager of the then prestigious Bell’s Pottery in Glasgow, having worked
his way up through the ranks from ‘presser’ to ‘potter’ to ‘manager’ was
another story I enjoyed researching. Some of my ancestors' occupations included a few weavers, a teacher, a potter, New Forest gypsies who tended to be simply called labourers (including one bought to trial for horse stealing) and a carpenter. So many little details brought each person to life.
 |
| Genealogy: little snippets bring a person to life. |
From there,
it wasn’t a great leap from being fascinated by my ancestors’ past to loving
researching this new writing project when it fell into my lap. And it really did fall into my lap. In an online
auction, I had bid on and won some 300-year-old trial pages; all I wanted to do
was hold a piece of book that had survived that long. One of many trials in the reign of King Charles II, I yearned to hold it. Indeed, when I received it, I was in awe, hardly
wanting to handle or turn the pages for fear of destroying a piece of history. However, having read the first page, like any good book,
I was hooked. Gently and with reverence, I turned each leaf as if it would crumble
(as it happened, it was sturdier than I imagined but, once read, I only
turned those pages once more... to photocopy them so I wouldn't have to
handle them anymore. The guilt I would’ve felt if they’d survived over 300
years only to be destroyed by me would’ve been too much to bear!)
 |
The pages that begun my journey
discovering Elizabeth Cellier's life |
You’d think
I might straight-away run to the computer and look up Elizabeth Cellier, the
woman whose bold and lively personality had me turning the pages with the eagerness of an
undiscovered treasure map. But, to be honest, it was still early days for me on
the information highway and, though I’d found out a heck of a lot about my
ancestors online, it never occurred to me that Elizabeth wasn’t a total
unknown. I’d never heard about her in history class.
Later, I leafed through the copy I’d made of the trial and idly wondered whether there
would be anything at all online about this strong woman; I really didn’t expect
there to be. I was wrong. Straight away, I was excited to find a copy of the original
trial documents. Then I found the book, Malice
Defeated, that she’d written and the trial I'd got referred to. Excitement turned into a research frenzy. Digging
deep, I found lots of references to her, one reference leading to another. The
old genealogy bug raised its antennae and pretty soon I’d pieced together that
this woman had her fingers in many pies – midwifery, writing, politics,
charity - but it was all in pieces. She was more fascinating than I ever gave her credit for and I wanted
to tell her story.
But, hey… I’m
no historian. Surely I can’t write a historical novel without having expertise
in history?
 |
Elizabeth Cellier's story in her own words,
many of which are incorporated into
The Popish Midwife |
It’s true, at
school I was more interested in the sciences, particularly physics and biology.
I was into robots, space and modern medicine. So, I put aside my
curiosity of the past to concentrate on the future. I have always considered history a weak
area of my education. And, yet, here – unexpectedly – was a story I wanted to, had to, write. How could I possibly be so arrogant as to think I
could write a story about a woman in a period I could barely remember basics
about, let alone have a clue how she might actually have lived? But, that didn't stop me wanting to write her story. I really wanted to. It was a need. A compulsion.
So, I wrote her story without any of
the detail, everything I knew about my new heroine. I woke up at 6am and wrote for a while then, after I returned from
work, walked the dogs, fed my kids and did all the dreary things I had to do in
a day (I’m talking housework – scurge of my life!) I would try and write a bit
more in the evening. A couple of months later, I had the story down from
beginning to end, but so many square parenthesis marks ‘[…]’ to show missing
facts, or things I needed to find out that it was almost more of them than
story. But, that was fine, I thought. I had to start somewhere, and getting her
story down was the hardest part. Ha! Little did I know!
 |
| The Popish Midwife: Early draft showing some missing details |
So, then came
the real work. Reading about every character in the book, finding out
everything I could about each of them, how everything I found fitted together
in wider society. All the time, I was building up a large file of images of
Elizabeth Cellier herself, I also added those of all other characters she
bumped up against, many of them being historically well known. The other people
Elizabeth related to needed to be real too. Luckily for me, Elizabeth had
related chunks of conversation in her book, which I integrated and adapted as part of the
dialogue in my book. After months and months of reading trial notes, as well as
broadsheets and pamphlets of the time, seventeenth century language became like
a second language to me (though I had to dampen it down a little for modern
consumption and readability – another topic for discussion entirely).
But it was
those other little details that took the most time to get right, like ‘what did
they eat and drink?’, ‘what did they use for lighting?’, ‘what were the roads
made of?’, ‘what was their knowledge of things, such as science?’. The latter
details, though I was so tempted, I didn’t actually use, but put in a folder
for future consumption. The book was already growing too big! However, as any
writer and reader knows, you can’t ‘fact-dump’. It’s best not to simply use
everything you find, but weave only what’s relevant to your main character into
the story as she interacts with these things. I’ve read some excellent stories,
where it’s obvious the author has just been so excited to find out all the
little everyday details that they’ve felt they simply have to fit them in somewhere, either that or they’ve felt that putting them all in will make it more ‘real’. I put in
only a small amount of my research, but, hopefully, the rest of it has come out
in smaller ways. Sometimes, it's a case of just knowing a detail can stop you making a faux pas of stating something untrue.
And then,
the editing.
The editing
is so hard for any book. One read-through after another, picking up different
things each time. But editing historical fiction, there’s an added problem. Say
you have to cut a scene by two thousand words (Elizabeth’s second trial scene,
I discovered, was eighteen thousand (yes, seriously!) words and even I knew it
was too long) – what do you take out? If that was how it happened, would it
lose credibility if a certain part was removed? What if you removed a witness
or two? What if you removed a scene that had nothing to do with the story, but
was central to showing her character? One scene that I removed was of Elizabeth
Cellier meeting Samuel Pepys in The Tower of London. I haven’t found one bit of
information that she met him, anywhere. However, she was a regular visitor to
The Tower, visiting and doing errands for the five lords imprisoned there for
their supposed part of The Popish Plot. Who’s to say she didn’t meet him? Or, why wouldn’t she have had a conversation about
Pepys’s imprisonment, when it would obviously have been a great talking point
between the lords and of great interest to herself? But, while it would’ve been
interesting for to me to put it in, it was a distraction from the story. I took it
out.
 |
The Popish Midwife: an early research notepad file -
lots of interesting bits n bobs |
Finally, The Popish Midwife was finished. I no
longer felt, or feel, ignorant about the subject matter. The seventeenth
century is no longer a gap in my knowledge. I found out so much about it, and
my heroine’s life, I almost feel I might’ve lived through that period. Where
once I feared being exposed as some kind of fraud, someone who knew nothing
about what I was writing, now I can confidently say that everything I wrote was
as accurate as I could make it. I became an expert by writing the story
I had no expertise in.
Funnily enough, recently,
when re-reading the first chapters, I actually came out in a cold sweat, hairs stood up on my arms, because I thought I’d totally messed up a
detail about one of the minor characters, another real-life midwife whose story
I’m now writing – Marie Desormeaux. I had called her a Huguenot, and yet I knew, yes,
knew, the whole reason I’d discovered
her was because she’d also been called ‘The Popish Midwife’ on a set of playing
cards. Oh my, how I fretted! If there was one wrong detail in the book, would
everyone point at me and ask how many other things were wrong? Would it destroy
my credibility as a historian story-teller? Would my rep be in ruins? I would have to
change it – obviously! But, there was a niggle. Why had I called her a
Huguenot, when she was obviously Catholic? I went back to my notes. Yep, there
it was, Catholic, BUT… yes! There it also was. She had begun life in London as a
Huguenot. What a relief! My rep was no longer in tatters.
So, really, what
would be the big deal if I’d made that ‘fact’ up? So what if I fudged a fact to
make it fit my story? Would that have been so bad?
 |
A panel including authors Margaret George, Andrew Taylor
and Jenny Barden, discussing whether novels can tell
greater truths than history books |
As Andrew Taylor
said at that same HNS conference, ‘First and foremost, we are telling stories,
engaging the reader. The most important thing is the story. Without the story, it is
nothing.' Margaret
George added, ‘The gaps in sources leave wiggle room to answer the
question, ‘What makes them tick?’. Truth be told, there are a lot of pure
fiction stories simply set in the past, and there is nothing at all wrong with
that. And there are probably as many again where a person/event from the past
is used as a basis for the story, but where the story is all made up. Again,
there’s nothing wrong with that. But, for me, having every known thing correct
was important. I wanted it to be as close as I could get it to real events, to
relive those few years with Elizabeth.
Of course, I
wasn’t there, and can’t really be sure of what happened. So my melded events
and facts with fictional scenes had to made sense to me, scenes I felt sure had
to have happened for the other known events to have happened. And that’s what
makes the story fiction rather than non-fiction, even though it’s as close to
what I know as I can make it. It’s the fiction that brings Elizabeth’s story to
life, rather than simply describing events. It’s the ‘supposing’ what happened
in between, guessing what her motives were that make her story human.
So now, if I
state the very first sentence again: "You're not a historian, you’re a fraud. How dare you write a historical fiction novel?" I beg to differ. I have become a historian of Elizabeth Cellier’s life, by my very research
of it. I didn’t know anything but, through research, I now have a much better
understanding of the time. I take great satisfaction, though there may indeed be details I’ve missed
(for instance, the social knowledge of science, of which I’m sure Elizabeth
would have some idea of, considering her intelligence and learning), I do know
that what I have put in is accurate
as far as I could possible make it. My point? I would advise anyone, now, not
to be put off writing a story they want to tell, but they worry they don’t know
the period. Write the story, fill in the details after. Anyone can become an
expert if they put in the time and effort.
Have you ever been caught by a story you'd love to write, but didn't feel qualified to do so?
The Popish Midwife
(Oct 20 - Nov 11th)
Blog Tour Schedule
Wednesday, October 19
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