5 BOOKS THAT INSPIRED THE GIRL IN THE GLASS TOWER – Elizabeth Fremantle

Research for my novels comes as much from reading fiction as it does from reading historical sources. This was particularly the case when I was preparing to write The Girl in the Glass Tower. Here are five of the best:

ANGELA CARTER – THE BLOODY CHAMBER

As a teenager seeking ways to understand how society defined the roles of women, Carter's book of dark fairytales was a revelation. The biography of my protagonist, Arbella Stuart, with its themes of incarceration, escape and its wicked mother figure in Bess of Hardwick, seemed to me to chime with Carter's cruel world. I deliberately played up these ideas in my fictional scheme, imagining Arbella as a princess incarcerated in her tower, and also with my depiction of the poet Aemilia Lanyer (Ami) who, in my novel, is falsely accused of witchcraft.




STEPHAN ZWEIG – THE POST OFFICE GIRL

Zweig is a constant source of inspiration for me and this novel, which is a reworking of the Cinderella story, though without the happy resolution (Zweig is not by any stretch of the imagination a feel-good writer), gave me my epigraph that sets the tone of my own novel:
There's an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can't be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can't add to it.


HENRY JAMES – THE GOLDEN BOWL

James is perhaps a surprising addition to this list but as a writer who forces you to concentrate as a reader, I greatly admire him. His themes of blighted privilege, particularly for women, are ones to which I constantly return in my own work. The Golden Bowl inspired me to focus on the central idea of woman as a vessel for others' interpretations, and the glass vessel, which is a central symbol in The Girl in the Glass Tower, was a direct homage to the 'bowl' in James's novel. Where his vessel is invisibly fractured, making it no less beautiful, yet diminished in value, my glass vessel is too fragile to be of any use.



OVID – METAMORPHOSES 

It is the story of Philomela and Procne, in Ovid's extraordinary collection of myths, that runs through my novel as a kind of chorus. I first came to it reading T.S Eliot, who alluded to Ovid with great effect in The Wasteland. In the myth Philomela was raped by her brother in law who cut out her tongue in order that she wouldn't speak of the crime. She finds revenge but at great cost and is finally transformed into a nightingale. For Arbella the story represents freedom, whereas for Ami, the poet, it is about finding her voice in a world where women are meant to be silent.




CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN – THE YELLOW WALLPAPER

This powerful articulation of a woman incarcerated and at the brink of her sanity, made a great impression on me when I read it as a child. Though published in 1892 its themes remain prescient to this day. The idea of a woman infantilised and locked away, supposedly for her own good, until she loses her mind, immediately sprang to mind when I was preparing to write The Girl in the Glass Tower.  It offers in particular a vivid and intimate narrative of madness.





Elizabeth Fremantle's novel THE GIRL IN THE GLASS TOWER is published in hardback by Michael Joseph

Find out more about her work on elizabethfremantle.com