November Competition

If you read Anne Rooney's fascinating post yesterday about researching for historical non-fiction and fiction, you'll want to enter our competition with a chance to win one of five copies of The Story of Maps. Just answer the following question:

"Is there a map or atlas that has meant a lot to you, led you astray, or inspired you? Describe it and its impact in the comments below."

Then copy your answer to readers@maryhoffman.co.uk so you can be contacted if you win.

Closing date 7th December

Our competitions are open to UK Followers only.

Filling the cracks with gold

Our November guest is Anne Rooney, appropriately enough since this has been Non-fiction month - did you know? - and Anne has written around 200 books, many of them non-fiction for both adults and younger readers. 

In fact "guest" is a bit misleading, since Anne is here all the time. She is "tech support" for The History Girls and if you have ever seen a post that looked a bit peculiar and checked back later to find it perfect, it's because Anne has been working behind the scenes. We are very glad to have her as a "back room History Girl" and so we welcome her as perhaps a house guest for November.

Photo credit: Luki Sumner-Rooney

Anne began her working life as a medievalist but turned to writing after deciding the academic life was not really for her. She has been writing children’s books for about 15 years, though still makes occasional forays into adult writing, mostly in the area of the history and philosophy of science.  Much of her non-fiction has historical content. She has written fiction with a contemporary setting but featuring historical figures who have endured beyond their sell-by date (did you know that Louis Pasteur, Joseph Guillotin and Elvis Presley were all vampires?) and has specifically historical fiction in the pipeline (Forever, forthcoming 2016).

Anne is a contributor to the History Girls' anthology Daughters of Time. She is Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. 

Welcome to Anne, polymath and workaholic.

The cracks are fertile!

Like spies, terrorists and moss, writers of historical fiction occupy the cracks.

It's easy to assume that as we make things up fiction-writers do less rigorous research than writers of historical fact. Why would we spend as much effort as a historian finding out what actually happened and what life was really like, if we're going to write about what didn't happen and what we imagine life was like?

The best historical fiction wears its learning lightly, so it's not surprising readers imagine there's little research. The historian will say, 'look, this is what a Victorian baby-bottle looked like, this is how it was used, this is what the mother put into the bottle to make the baby sleep.' The research is all there, in the foreground. The historical novelist will mention the baby-farmer removing the twist of rag from the neck of the bottle and pouring in a glug of the evil Godfrey's cordial (opium and treacle), but as a reader you won't be thinking, 'ah, that's how a baby was fed when there was no lactating mother.' You'll be waiting to see what happens next. You don't notice the research - it slips down as easily as Godfrey's cordial.

Indeed, much of the research that goes into historical fiction never reaches the page. It informs the writing, but a lot of it is preventing mistakes rather than making a positive appearance. The reader's willing suspension of disbelief will be curtailed pretty quickly if a 13th-century feast includes potatoes, or a lady from the 1700s wears a mauve dress. Research keeps potatoes out of novels set in the Middle Ages. Or sometimes half a day's research will contribute a single word to the book - perhaps one dish in a meal, the colour of a flag or the price paid for a suitable drink.

I write some historical fiction and a lot of historical fact. The research for both starts in the same way, with a broad sweep, picking up all the main events, trends, issues and characters. Then it homes in on the most important areas. Many of the sources are the same: academic and popular history books and articles; museums; archives; talking to experts.

Booth's map, colour coded to show levels of
prosperity and poverty in Victorian London

I’ve been working (slowly) on a story set in Victorian London. My research has been about everyday life, particularly the living conditions of the London poor. The most important primary sources have been Charles Booth’s poor map and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Beyond the textual sources, I've been to the Museum of Childhood to look at baby-bottles, the Museum of London to see contemporary photographs of street life, and the London Aquarium to look at objects found in the mud of the Thames.

Some sources I probably wouldn't have used for historical fact: the novels of Dickens; paintings, newspaper sketches and cartoons; the dolls' houses in the Museum of London which are exact replicas of real homes; films (for atmosphere); and I’ve visited the places, though they are much changed, and walked the routes my characters walk, felt the mud, and watched the tides of the Thames (thanks to History Girl Michelle Lovric for letting me stand on her balcony above the Thames for that!)

It's not just a matter of using additional sources, though. The historian and the fiction-writer look for different things. The historian looks for a coherent narrative in the chaotic remnants of the past -  threads that link events and people, one thing leading to another, explaining another, preventing another. The writer of fiction, as often as not, is looking for the gaps. The historian wants to answer questions; the novelist wants to ask questions. The historian uses the minutiae of lives lived to illuminate the bigger picture, while the writer of fiction explores what it was like living those lives against the background of the bigger picture.

Good historians know that history only comes to life when we see how it was lived. The details of lives and personalities offer the best way into imagining and engaging with the past. Social histories such as Sarah Wise's The Blackest Streets (2009) about the Old Nichol (a desperately squalid slum in Victorian London) are distilled from reports and personal narratives. They are ripe for plundering. As fiction writers, we can take a nugget of true narrative and spin a whole life-story from it. It’s like taking a spoonful of sugar and spinning it into candyfloss. The sugar tastes different when mixed with the air and the truth tastes different when expanded with imagination – the story adds texture and volume and specialness to the spoonful of truth.

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), before
the nose incident

Take Tycho Brahe's moose. Tycho Brahe was the last great naked-eye astronomer and the first to contradict Aristotle's (and the Bible's) notion that the heavens are fixed and there can be no new starts. So he has his place in the history of astronomy. But he is far more interesting than that. He ruled autocratically over the island of Hven off the coast of Sweden where he had his observatory. The more famous astronomer Kepler worked as his assistant for many years. Brahe wore a prosthetic metal nose, having lost part of his real nose in a duel over a mathematical formula. He died of politeness - refusing to leave a feast to urinate, he suffered a burst bladder. And he had a pet moose, which died after drinking too much beer at a feast and falling down the stairs. None of Brahe's eccentricity has much bearing on the history of astronomy, but it is exactly the kind of gift a fiction-writer is delighted to find in the historical record.

If you were to set out to write a history of Brahe and his moose, you'd find scant material. Its existence and death are recorded in Brahe's correspondence, but only briefly. For the historian, that's frustrating; gaps in the historical record make the job harder. Historians are not allowed just to make up something to fill the gap. They must work from the evidence around the gap and try to fill it, seamlessly, by extending from the edges. If the task goes well, the evidence criss-crosses the space representing our ignorance and supports a plausible structure of conjecture. It’s like detective work. It’s challenging, inspiring and sometimes frustrating.

Fictional historical writing, on the other hand, flourishes in the gaps in history. The fiction-writer can weigh up the evidence, choose a plausible narrative and treat is as though it were the truth without excuse, apology or accommodation. It's where we don't know what happened that we can let 'what if' run free. Like parenting, fictional history has to be good enough rather than perfect. It must be consistent with the facts – or honest about where it is not consistent – but can go beyond them without having to defend its choices. In parenting, if everyone is alive and intact at bedtime, it’s a good day. In historical fiction, if the dead are still dead and no worlds were destroyed – well, it’s a pretty good start.

Writing historical fiction, we focus on creating the world as experienced by the people we are writing about. What did they eat for breakfast? What’s it like to walk through streets full of horse manure and dog poo? How do you occupy yourself when it gets dark at 4 pm but you can’t afford lights? What is your attitude towards food if you eat tasteless gruel every day? How far will you go trying to keep warm in the winter? Do you believe in ghosts? Are dogs frightening? Is a baby more a burden than a treasure? These are rarely the questions asked by factual histories. The answers come from the exercise of empathy on the stuff of research. We share the same minds and bodies as people of the past, so we can put ourselves into their shoes – or bare feet – and imagine how they experienced life. The historian benefits from empathy, but must leave the larger part of imagination at the study door.

More has been lost from the historical record than has been preserved, and the further back you go, or the deeper into any particular area, the less there is. It’s often a frustration for the historian, but a gift for the fiction-writer. The unknown is where imagination has always played - 'here be monsters'.

Perhaps one of the differences between what a historian does and what a writer of fiction does with the slabs of research and the gaps between them is best illustrated by two approaches to mending broken things. If we think of the historical record as the broken fragments of the past, the historian is aiming for this:

This is one of three Qing dynasty vases accidentally broken by a visitor falling down the stairs of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 2006. After weeks of careful conservation work, the joins are invisible to the naked eye. You can see the process of reconstruction here.

The writer of historical fiction is aiming for this:

Hey Rosetta! album cover for Second Sight,
using Japanese Kintsugi bowl

The ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi aims to make something beautiful from broken objects by highlighting the breaks. The admirer is not asked to ignore the fractures but celebrate them. The cracks are often filled with resin enriched with gold. I think that’s what we are doing as we write historical fiction – filling the cracks in reality with gold.


Anne Rooney's latest non-fiction book is The Story of Maps:

Look out for the competition tomorrow to win a copy.

And thanks for visiting, Anne, and sharing your immense experience of the different uses of research.

Writing the (un)dead by Anne Rooney

Anne Rooney by Luki Sumner, House of Sharps

Our guest author for February is special in a new way. Anne Rooney has been helping behind the scenes since we started this blog last July. While not listed as one of us, she has performed the valuable role of Technical Support for the whole group, teaching us much and resolving our mistakes and muddles. And believe me, many of us were on a steep learning curve when we started!

So we were delighted to discover that, while not technically a historical novelist, Anne has been introducing some historical characters into her latest series - and a bizarre and fascinating mix they are!

About Anne:

Anne Rooney writes fiction and non-fiction for children and adult non-fiction on a bizarre range of topics. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow for several years, and blogs as Stroppy Author. Anne lives in Cambridge with one-and-a-half daughters, a pig, two ferrets, a population of chickens that varies according to the appetite of the fox, a tortoise and possibly a turtle.

Over to Anne:

Thank you, History Girls, for inviting me to guest here. I'm not a real History Girl - I just lurk behind the scenes, bullying the electrons when things go wrong in a digital kind of way.

Although I haven't published a historical novel, I've dragged a few historical characters  into the twenty-first century to feature in my forthcoming vampire series (stifle that yawn, please; these are a very different kind of vampire).

A historical novelist writing about a real figure does a lot of research into the person's real life and times. But what if you want your historical figures still to be alive? You don't need to know just what they were like hundreds of years ago - you need to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century and look at what they would be like now. It's all very well to know how Samuel Pepys or Henry VII behaved then, but how would they be after they'd witnessed the First World War and the Space Race?

Take a step back. Vampires live a long time. Conventionally, they live forever. Mine don't exactly live forever, but because vampirism is a disease that eradicates telomere* shortening, they live for at least ten times as long as non-vampires. Diseases strike at random, so although many vampires are just routine folk, some are not. Amongst my vampire coterie I have [spoiler alert] Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Louis Pasteur, Elvis Presley and Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper - well, I could do what I liked with him because no one knows who he was. But the others can't be made up.

Anton Raphael Mengs, self-portrait

That's not strictly true. I made up the character Ignace before I decided he was previously known as Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. I'd written the first book in the series and named the principal vampire Ignace. Then I was looking up Guillotin to see if he would fit into the second book, set in Paris, and discovered his second name was Ignace and I had sort of used him already. But I'd use the picture on the right while writing him. On the basis of this portrait, and not any information about the man (it's actually Anton Raphael Mengs, a painter born in Germany in 1728), I'd written a character who was slick, debonair, a bit of a rake, and - incidentally - the chief vampire of the western world. But by happy coincidence Ignace shared a name with Guillotin, and that's who he became.

Joseph Ignace-Guillotin

The task then became not to recreate Guillotin as he would have been in the late eighteenth century, but to develop him as he would be now, in 2012, if he were still alive. So we have a man who invented the guillotine and is a vampire. Why did he invent it (or refine it, actually, though he's generally credited with its invention)? The usual reason given is that he did it to make execution less painful. Why did he care? He needs a motivation. And here it is, all laid out ready in real history...

The mother of Marie Antoinette was Maria-Theresa of Austria. In 1755, Maria-Theresa sent her private physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate vampirism in Moravia. He (being a vampire, in my world) reported back that vampirism is a load of b******. So MT outlawed all those vampire-killing tactics people were using. This naturally led to a surge in the number of vampires, and something had to be done. That something was the French Revolution. (And you thought it was all about oppressed peasants and a broken system? LOL! That's what they wanted you to think!)

Guillotin's eyes and nose on Mengs

Because all his aristocratic vampire friends were being killed in rather unpleasant ways and he couldn't stop them dying, Guillotin invented (refined) a way of killing them that would be relatively painless - the guillotine. (Because we all know vampires can be beheaded, staked or burnt.) Indeed, three of the six articles he presented to the National Assembly serve the purposes of vampire dynasties extremely well:

• Article 4: No one shall reproach a citizen with any punishment imposed on one of his relatives. Such offenders shall be publicly reprimanded by a judge. [So you can't persecute the relatives of a vampire, assuming they are vampires, too - which they probably are]
• Article 5: The condemned person's property shall not be confiscated. [Vampires have built up enormous wealth over their centuries-long lives; vampire families are not about to hand it over to the state]
• Article 6: At the request of the family, the corpse of the condemned man shall be returned to them for burial and no reference to the nature of death shall be registered [goes without saying...no staking, and if they were not beheaded, it might be possible to fix them. And we don't want doctors looking too closely]

What can be extracted from his story to draw Guillotin as he would be now, if he'd continued to live? Well, he took credit for inventing something he only appropriated and improved, so that suggests a certain degree of self-importance, selfishness, opportunism, even arrogance. He has turned his not-inconsiderable intellect to the task of working out how to kill people with minimum pain. Though the aim is compassionate, the task is gruesome. Perhaps it takes a certain amount of detachment to tackle this problem? Perhaps it takes so much detachment that this character is rather lacking in empathy. And from this, I developed Ignace as he is now, two hundred years later.

Ignace is a psychopath. Using Simon Baron-Cohen's Zero Degrees of Empathy as a handbook to  psychopathy, I made him type zero-positive: someone whose psychopathy is not deliberately turned to harm, and often produces flashes of inventive, scientific or mathematical genius. The interest in solving the logical problem of how to kill people with minimal pain that he showed in the 18th century has become, in the 21st century, an obsession with discovering the scientific nature of vampirism. He runs a research centre in Russia; he is ruthless and some of his methods are less than ethical. But - like many psychopaths - he is superficially charming and sexually attractive. He seduces the Jack Wills model vampire when she is newly-turned vulnerable (and 350 years his junior). He excuses the awful things he does (such as buying slaves from the flesh markets of south-east Asia for his experiments) with a cool logic. He wrong-foots his wife into killing her lover to prove a point. And he keeps a very high profile prisoner in his castle for 800 years. (The prisoner's identity will be revealed in series 2, but HG readers will guess from the clues.)

So much for Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur is also a vampire, working in Ignace's research centre near Yakutsk. In life, Pasteur was a passionate scientist. He was so keen to find a vaccine to protect people against rabies that he sucked the saliva from the mouths of infected dogs with a pipette. I took this passion, and his portrait (right), and made a man who is jovial, compassionate, has a sense of humour and is fiercely intelligent. He is still dedicated to science, but he's a realist. He's found that he can't prove vampirism is a virus, and is biding his time, doing pointless experiments so that Ignace continues to fund his research while he hopes for inspiration or luck. Luck comes in the form of a young Iraqi refugee and Pasteur instantly recognises the boy's brilliance. Pasteur doesn't look very jovial in this photograph, but of course people didn't smile for photos in the 19th century.

Dmitri Ivanovsky

Another 19th century scientist I've recruited is Dmitri Ivanovsky, the Russian biologist who first identified viruses. The Dutch scientist Beijerinck is usually credited with the discovery of viruses - but he did eventually concede Ivanovsky's prior claim. So I made Ivanovsky a modest man who is kind and helpful, unassuming and self-effacing. He's also rather fragile - as he looks in this photo. Maybe he wasn't like that - maybe he was very cross that Beijerinck got the credit first off, and should have been motivated by bitterness. But I don't read Russian, and there don't seem to be any accounts of Ivanovsky's character in languages I do read, so I reckon he's fair game. He and Pasteur are foils to Ignace's ruthlessness.

There's nothing much historical to say about Jack the Ripper except what we can deduce from his crimes. I've made him a zero-negative psychopath following Baron-Cohen again, as that seems fairly consistent with what he did. My editor wanted him to be a ridiculous,  figure - more a John Christie - but that didn't seem in keeping with the accounts of his crimes. So he's tall, strong, rather handsome and very frightening. He's also calculating and ambitious. There will be more of him in the second series. He started as a minor character, but - appropriately - has claimed a larger part and won't be pushed away. I'm not brave enough to mess with him.

Elvis Presley

How would Elvis Presley be if he were alive now? For one thing, he works in a chip shop (in Eastbourne). We know that because Kirsty McColl said so ('There's a guy works down the chip shop swears he's Elvis'). He's still a talented musician; overweight, with a tacky hairstyle and too much hair dye. Elvis has only been a vampire since the 1970s, so there was no need to consider how his character would have matured and crystallised over centuries. But he's still dealing with his fate.

Elvis is very resentful of Ignace, who insisted he disappear with a fake death because an Elvis who didn't age or die would be a serious embarrassment. (Vampires who refuse to disappear with a fake death have to be disposed of. J.F. Kennedy is a prime example of this sort of stroppy vampire, addicted to success.)

I don't think there's anything quite comparable to keeping historical figures alive and functioning until the present. It's not like a time-slip or having someone wake from a coma, as they have experienced all the intervening years. There's no surprise at modern technology, no ignorance of the social and political scene. (Indeed, the vampires have all the time in the world, so they're rather good at keeping up with developments.) Instead it's a question of intensifying the normal maturing of characters - finding the key traits of a person and distilling them far beyond what would happen over a normal lifespan. It's a very unique kind of challenge - and thrilling. I think I'll be trawling history for people to drag out of the grave for a long time. Just off to polish my spade...

* telomere = a bit of spare chromosome at the end each chromosome. It doesn't code for anything useful, but each time a cell divides and the chromosomes reproduce, a bit is lost from the end of the chromosome. For most of our lives, it's a bit of useless telomere that's lost, but eventually the telomere is all gone and the useful part of the chromosome starts to be eroded. That's why old people go wrong easily - their chromosomes are getting cut off.

The first six Vampire Dawn titles are published in March 2012 by Ransom Publishing: Die Now or Live Forever; Drop Dead, Gorgeous; Life Sucks; Every Drop of Your Blood; Dead on Arrival; In Cold Blood. They are short, intended for readers who can't tackle a full-length novel. (Age 12+)

Follow Anne Rooney on Facebook or twitter: @annerooney. Follow the vampires, if you dare, on Facebook or twitter: @vampiredawn.
Websites: Anne Rooney; Vampire Dawn

February competition

Two History Girls have new books out now and we have some to offer as prizes.


To win one of three copies of Marie-Louise Jensen's The Girl in the Mask, answer this question:


"If you were a notorious 18th Century highwayman (or woman in disguise), what alias would you give yourself?"



To win one one five hardbacks of Katherine Roberts' Sword of Light, try this one:


"If Lord Avallach gave you one of his fairy horses, what would you name it?"


Leave your answers in Comments below, mixed in with comments on Anne Rooney's blogpost.


Closing date 7th March.As usual, only UK entrants.