We wanted to tell you!

by several & sundry History Girls

Mary Hoffman writes:
The History Girls don't make a habit of reviewing one another's books on this site but we are making an exception today. Louisa Young can't post today for personal reasons, but there has been a spate of positive comments among us about her title My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, recently read on Radio 4 as a Book at Bedtime, and a Richard and Judy pick for Spring. The audio version read by Dan 'Downton Abbey' Stevens, won the Galaxy Award. So we are going to post a few History Girl reviews here today, to cheer Louisa up and because we think she wrote a really good book!

Caroline Lawrence writes:
I started to hear the buzz about Louisa Young's My Dear I Wanted to Tell You and downloaded the audiobook to my iPhone. I walked for hours, completely captured by this compelling love story. Brilliantly read by Dan Stevens (left), the story gripped me from the beginning and wouldn't let go. I was especially in awe of the amount of research Louisa must have put into this. Yet the research never intrudes. It does what it should do, it makes the world utterly real and gave me great confidence in her authority. The plot, too, is compelling and carried me to places I did not think it would go. But what impressed me the most were the brilliant internal monologues, especially those about how the mind shrinks from the agony of protracted battle and shell-shock. I can't remember reading such imaginative and accurate descriptions of a person's interior mental state. Brava, Louisa, for writing a superb historical novel.

Adèle Geras writes:
Most of the time, if I want to read a newly-published hardback, I order it from the library. In the case of Louisa's book, I read a review of the novel, and wrote to her on email (we'd never met, but I'd met her daughter at the Edinburgh Festival) asking for some research advice I needed for a story of my own. She was very kind and helpful and  I bought her book immediately. There was a great deal in it that fed into my short novel for 8-12 year olds, believe it or not, but as well as that, I loved My dear... for its unusual  and  perceptive look at aspects of the First World War that I hadn't seen tackled before. There is great sadness in the story but also inspirational courage and unswerving love which overcomes obstacles in a very satisfying way. The afterword, where we learn that much of the book is based on real events that happened to real people, is a revelation. For my part, the work done by the medical profession and the insight into the beginnings of plastic surgery is what I remember  best from the novel and what makes it different from almost everything I've read about this period.

Barbara Mitchelhill writes:
This was a book I wanted to read but as I was in the throes of research for my next book, I had little time for ‘treats’. So I bought the unabridged CD version and listened to it in the car. This did nothing for global warming as I often took ‘scenic routes’ so that I could listen for longer. The story, which is beautifully written and filled with detail of life before and during WW1, is a love story without sugary sweetness and with characters that are unique and believable.  When I came to the end, I had to play the last two CDs over again before I could bear to let then go. I must mention Dan Stevens (the gorgeous one in Downton Abbey) whose reading is a delight to listen to. Thank you so much for this book, Louisa. I loved it

Catherine Johnson writes:
I have been looking after my Mother, post heart attack, in North Wales. I always find it hard to work away from home, and resort to reading two for fifty pence thrillers from the local charity shops. But I saw this book in Sainsbury's; it was by the checkout, and I thought a 'History Girls book' and put it in with my mother's shopping. I read it in two nights sat up in bed. I would have read it in one but had to stop as soon as I realised something horrible was about to happen to Riley and Nadine. How old am I? Too old to care this much about fictional characters surely.
What a beautiful, wonderful, transporting novel.

Sue Purkiss writes:
Just after Christmas, I went into my local Waterstones and saw that there was a half-price sale. I picked up My Dear I Wanted To Tell You because it looked interesting, and didn’t click for some time that it was by Louisa, and that Louisa is one of the History Girls. (Yes, I really am that dense!) I began to read it last Friday, and it was so good that, when that evening we had a power cut, I carried on reading by the light of a candle.
The book is set mostly during the First World War. I think this is a difficult period to write about. How can you say anything new? How can you get past the classics written by veterans – All Quiet On The Western Front, Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer, Wilfred Owen’s poetry – let alone the many successful novels which have been written more recently? But Louisa makes familiar territory seem completely fresh – read the book to find out how. However, it’s the characterisation that really draws you in. Riley, the hero, is charismatic, endearing, and utterly human. Nadine is richly painted. Relationships lurch and jolt and soar and stutter, just like real ones do. I can’t wait to meet these characters and others again in the promised sequel.

A review which may contain 'spoilers':

Linda Buckley-Archer writes:
The premise of My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, rooted as it is in solid historical research, is deeply compelling.  For most us, thankfully, our experience of war is second-hand. We view the casualties of war through the filter of what the public can reasonably be expected to cope with on the large or small screen or when leafing through the newspapers. Logic tells us that injuries are not restricted to ‘emotionally acceptable’ parts of the body:  an arm in a sling, blood seeping through a jacket, a missing limb.  Yet it is rare that we are asked to confront serious facial wounds – not the odd character-forming scar – but disastrous injuries, a jaw blown off, flesh reduced to pulp, features that a close relative could not recognise. The face identifies us, communicates emotion, attracts us to others.  What would you do if your face was destroyed?  Would you want to die?  Would you want to tell the person that you loved?  And what would you do if you were that man’s lover? Louise has written a moving, page-turning novel, in lyrical prose, that tries to answer these questions, and in so doing highlights some of the pioneering work in the field of plastic surgery in the aftermath of the First World War.

My Dear I Wanted to Tell You is available in hardback, paperback, ebook for Kindle, unabridged CD & unabridged audio download.

You can read a fascinating post about the research Louisa put into the novel HERE, but again, beware of spoilers. 

Nancy? Yes! Nancy! by Louisa Young

I don't, of course, being a lady of dignity, respond to reviews. But one point came up which filled me with such fury that I cannot let it lie.

A character in my novel My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, set during the First World War, has a homosexual experience, fraught with drink and misunderstanding. He - Riley Purefoy, a heterosexual semi-educated working-class eighteen-year-old in 1914 - is upset. He reacts badly, and refers - in thought - to his seducer as a 'nancy'. My reader was shocked by this and called it homophobia.

Ai ai ai!

It is so simple. That was then. This is now. In that other country, the past, they did things differently. We, the novelists, have a responsibility at least to bear that in mind, while we work out our own relationship to it and how we are going to write about it. Are we going to get the underwear and the numbers of the busses right? Or are we going to invent a fantasy history that works for us and the story we are telling, where we make up the rules, it being, after all our book? That's our choice, and our job. In this particular novel - which is for adults - my history is pretty spotlessly factually accurate (and I say that as a history graduate, a former sub-editor and a grotesque pedant).

So: one of the first things you notice, when researching, is how difficult it was for certain things to be spoken of or portrayed at different stages of human development. At the time I was writing about, homosexuality was 1) against the law, 2) socially unacceptable, 3) unmentionable in respectable society and 4) probably just as prevalent as it is today. And it was absolutely not referred to directly in novels.

Theodore Winthrop, in Cecil Dreeme (1862), can only mention 'a friendship I deemed more precious than the love of women'.

Radclyffe Hall had only to write

(in The Well of Loneliness, 1928)

of her female protagonists that

'that night, they were not divided', for the editor of the Sunday Express to announce that he would 'rather give a healthy girl or boy a phial of prussic acid

than this novel'.

E.M. Forster's Maurice was not

published till after his death.

This was the background. It was the love that dared not speak its name.

Now, in our freer times, we have opportunities that our ancestor-writers did not have: not only to address things in our society, but to address things in theirs which they could not. We have a chance to cast modern open eyes over a closed society, and wonder what might have been going on in people's minds and hearts and beds, and write about it, with modern openness. And we may also want to remain historically accurate.

And isn't this a most wonderful and fascinating area of what we do? To work out those relationships and balances, across the centuries? Of course it is.

Look at, for example, Pat Barker and Sarah Waters, mistresses of the art.

'How would I have been, if I had been then, and there . . . ?' is one of our basic questions. Of course we're all certain we would have been Resistance not Nazi. We like to think - or tend to assume, if we're not thinking - that we would never have shared any of the sexual or racial or class prejudices of other times and places. But why wouldn't we? Chances are, we would have. I read the words 'little jew' in my own grandmother's diaries and winced - but she was far from anti-semitic, he was little and Jewish and it was 1927. We grow in the garden where we are planted.

So when we look back, however open and modern our eyes may be, we need to see through our characters' eyes too - particularly when writing things they would never have been allowed to write or to read. And then we have to work out how to deal with it. Not every hero or heroine can be a time-transcending neo-liberal vanguard-leader with 21st-century sensibilities. But that doesn't mean they're evil.

Dammit, of course he would have said 'nancy'.

Word of the Day: Still. by Louisa Young

Louisa Young's new book

I have been thinking about words again. Today's word: still.

I wrote a sentence about some ivory elephants still in a glass cabinet, which pleased me because of the double meaning: the elephants remain in the glass cabinet; the elephants are motionless in the glass cabinet. Both suited my purpose.

The connection is fairly obvious: if you stay still, you'll still be in the same place later.

By the time I've been thinking about a word long enough to be thinking that, I have generally reverted to Skeate. (We're on surname terms, Skeate and I, after many years of happy collaboration: its full name is of course Skeate's Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, first published 1882. My edition is 1927, and used to belong to one Rachel M. Thorpe, who wrote her name in the front in nice round handwriting).

'Still', Skeate tells me, is from the same route as stall: Middle English stille, to be motionless; and the verbs stillen, to remain in a place or stall, and Anglo-Saxon stellan, to place. And so on to Anglo Saxon stille, continually, ever. I like that when my car stalls, it is perhaps wanting to go back to its stable. This reminds me of an Italian farmer I used to know who thought motorbikes were no good, because they couldn't just refuel at any handy grass verge, like a horse.

Then - but why does stille mean silent in German? Is it because when you are still you make no noise?

And thus, mind leaping on, I came across a story for you.

There's a very fine writer, historian, and journalism professor at Columbia University, called Alexander Stille. An American, known as Sandro to his friends, he has written phenomenal books about the Mafia, and about Berlusconi. His father, a Russian Jew brought up in Italy, was originally called Mikhail Kamenetzky. Before Mussolini's race laws of 1938 prevented him from working and ultimately forced him to leave Italy, he too was a journalist, the editor of the Corriere della Sera, no less. He and a colleague, the Sardinian writer and translator Giaime Pintor, had adopted a shared nom de plume under which they could continue writing anti-fascist articles: Ugo Stille.

They got it from Rainer Maria Rilke, apparently - a misunderstanding in translation meant they thought Stille to be a proper name. But what a curious - or ironic? - choice! The language is that of the enemy, which to them was also the language of the poetry that they loved; the word means precisely what they were not prepared to be: silent. And they were hardly stationary, either - Alexander's family travelled in two generations from Russia to Lithuania to Italy to New York. Pintor, who may have been recruited by the British secret Service, was only stilled by a Nazi mine, which killed him in 1943. He was 24. After the War, Kamenetzky kept the name, Stille, in honour of his friend, and in due course it became Alexander's.

But then, in their way, these men are still. They are still there, still saying what needs to be said. They are consistent. That's their stall, where the son has set out the same wares as his father and his father's friend: recording and confronting the corrupt and the unjust.

I very much want to read that family history.

In the meantime, have a look at Alexander Stille's book Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism. But don't get any ideas from it. I want them.

Louisa Young's My Dear I Wanted to Tell You is now out in paperback, kindle & audiobook.

History's sole object is to ruin my sequel by Louisa Young

History is doing my head in.

I'm writing a sequel to my novel My Dear I Wanted to Tell You. That was set between 1908 and 1919; it started in 1917, went back, came forward again and overtook itself. It worked all right.

Why? Because History had given me a beautiful present, which brought with it period, setting, tone, character, plot and theme: a First World War field postcard, preprinted, for a wounded soldier to fill in as applicable. 'My Dear . . . , I want to tell you before any telegram arrives . . that I was admitted to . . . with a slight/serious wound in my . . . '. All I had to do was pick a battle, put my soldier in it, and then fill in the blanks, the untold story on that card. He lied, of course. You would. The story came beautifully, quickly, and easily: love and fear and lying to protect those we love, our great inability to communicate. The hideous, miraculous, disgusting origins of maxillofacial surgery. A slight wound in the stiff upper lip. It wrote itself, as they say. Time, in all senses, was on my side.

That field postcard was displayed at the Wellcome Foundation in London, opposite a photograph of a soldier whose facial wounds had been put back together by the pioneering facial surgeon Major Harold Gillies. (This is the moment when people say: 'Oh! Yes - the Guinea Pigs!' and I say: 'No, that was Archie McIndoe. This was twenty five years earlier. Though Gillies was his uncle.') My grandmother Kathleen Scott worked with Gillies, in 1917. She was a sculptor, and widow of Scott of the Antarctic; she cast in plaster the faces of the wounded, for the surgeons to measure and practice on. My first book, twenty years ago, was her biography. Researching it, I read about those wounded men in her diary, and uncovered photographs and drawings of them, and I thought: I'll come back for you. If you're feeling strong, take a look at the images at www.gilliesarchives.org.uk. Number 17 of Tonks' pastels is Corporal Riley. I stole his name, his face, his wound, and an anecdote from his nurse's memoirs, and sent him to Passchendaele. My story had found all its legs, and stood strong.

The sequel starts out handicapped by the strength those legs. It's like being son of a famous father. So far I've attempted to start it in 1939, 1938, 1920, 1940, 1943, 1919, 1870, 1900 and (briefly, foolishly) 1964. But no matter where I try to start it, whichever year I go to, my former friend, history, turns up to confuse the issue, swishing in like Leonard Cohen's Waltz, with its very own breath of brandy and death, dragging its tail in the sea. History, lugging the entirety of human experience in the tails of its vast and capacious cape*, declares, between bouts of coughing, 'That won't work, you know'; or, 'That was five years before - why would he suddenly mind about it now?'; or 'You're completely ignoring the Spanish Civil War. Just thought I'd mention it.' History know just what I put in volume one, and that it is written in stone.

My starting point for this sequel was the realisation that there were only twenty years between the end of the first world war and the start of the second. Twenty years - a blink of an eye! But when you've zoomed in and placed yourself and your people in there, twenty years is a very very long time. I long to leap about, five years forward here, eight years back there, willy nilly as I please, making it up. But I can't.

Firstly, I don't want to confuse the reader. I already have nine protagonists. If they're all leaping about in time it'll be a bloody flea circus. I need to cull them, not send them flying in a great chronological leapfrog. (My sentences are also too long, and something of a flea circus themselves, if I don't keep them in line. You may have noticed.)

Secondly, I studied history at university, and I never got over it. I have a terrible attachments to facts. I accept that I have to get the bus routes and the underwear right, but I'm not putting all the bus routes and underwear in. If I'm writing about 1937, well, I'm sorry, history, but Italian Unification will not be getting its own chapter.

Thirdly, and this is the killer, my characters are already snagged in history and in their own pasts. This of course is what I want to write about. But at the same time I feel as if I'm trying to fly with something dragging on my own tail.

History, please, be my friend again. Send me the catalyst, the item, the image, which will make it all hang together. Shake something out for me, from your dusty velvet folds. I'm writing now. Please don't me wait another twenty years.

PS: *Hmm. Cape/Capacious. Connection? A cape as something you keep things in? Ohhh! Keep! Is that related too? As in, what is the capacity of your capacious cape; what are you capable of keeping therein? To Skeat's Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language: capacity, capable, capacious are all from the Latin capere, to hold or contain; cape, cope and cap are from old French. Hmm. Keep is not connected; it has a K and is therefore Viking. Cope the verb means to vie with, or to fight with - from the French couper, to cut. (See coupon. Aha! Something you cut out of the paper.) But is that what coping with something is? Vying with it? Fencing? Well no wonder we're all so tired. I went to the doctor and said, 'I'm feeling a bit you know,' and she said, 'Are you not coping?'. I replied, 'Doctor, it's worse than that - I am coping.'