Elizabeth I’s Virginity, the Fate of the Princes in the Tower and Other Things We Know We Don’t Know in Historical Fiction – By Elizabeth Fremantle

It is rare that a definitive truth emerges from history, like that of Richard III’s remains, proving that he did indeed suffer from scoliosis. But he also suffered from Tudor propaganda that, through writers like More and Shakespeare, sought to depict him as monstrous. As sixteenth century beliefs regarded deformity as the Devil’s work a crooked shape must have been a convenient way to describe his inner wickedness.  But much recent fiction has attempted to rehabilitate Richard of York. Philippa Gregory in her Cousins’ War series is clear: Richard is the good guy (give or take a little ruthlessness) without even the slightest crookedness about the spine – the antithesis of Shakespeare’s black-hearted crookback. Gregory’s agenda is, I suppose, to articulate an opposing story to the one that has endured for five hundred years – the York story – as a way to illuminate the lives of the women of the period and her straight-backed Richard is an intrinsic part of this. Fiction gives us license to explore the possibilities thrown up by fragments in the historical record. But the king in the car park is an undeniable truth, creating a shift of knowledge, which perhaps works to devalue Gregory’s fictional perspective – make it seem incomplete or less based in truth.

                                     Anthony Sher as Richard III – Royal Shakespeare Company 

What Richard III’s bones cannot tell us though, is whether the princes in the tower died at his hand or by his order. This story is perhaps the most enduring of the historical mysteries and has been explored endlessly in fiction. Emma Darwin in the excellent A Secret Alchemy cleverly creates a fictional scheme wherein both the Richard III camp and the Lancastrians are equally culpable, whereas Gregory’s villain is unequivocally a Margaret Beaufort driven by a combination of blind ambition and religious fervour. But her story has a further complication, which leaves one son alive to reappear later as the pretender Perkin Warbeck. Weir however, in A Dangerous Inheritance, keeps us in the dark, something that Amazon reviewers found frustrating, as if somehow they were expecting a definitive truth to emerge from her fictional story. Even genetic tests on the boys’ suspected remains would not shed light on the murderer. We would however, learn where and at what age they died and whether one of them did survive to potentially return as Warbeck.

                                                             The Princes in the Tower

There are many truths we will never know. I have been asked surprisingly often whether the Virgin Queen was truly a virgin and I’m always surprised that people think I might know something that historians have not got to the bottom of in hundreds of years of poring through the historical record. Such a question was even posed during Elizabeth’s lifetime when rumour and scandal ran rife and many sought to discredit her by destroying her reputation. As she plays a large part in my Tudor trilogy, which covers her life from girlhood to old age I had to engage with the problem of how to convey an unknown in a convincing way in my fiction. Had Elizabeth been a central character I would have been compelled to take a position on the question of her love life, but as she inhabits the margins of my novels and is only seen through the eyes of other characters it was possible to show her from a perspective of partial view.

When, as a fourteen year old, and living in the household of the dowager Queen Katherine Parr, Elizabeth had something on the spectrum between a flirtation and a full blown affair with the man in the position of stepfather to her, Parr’s fourth husband Thomas Seymour. We know a certain amount about this ‘affair’ thanks to Elizabeth’s close companion and mother figure Katherine Astley’s testimony at Seymour’s subsequent treason trial. Astley describes in detail the mornings when Seymour would visit Elizabeth in her bedchamber in which a certain amount of slap and tickle took place, sufficient for Astley to have words with Seymour. It is also suggested that Parr joined in some of these ‘games,’ in particular a puzzling scene in which Parr is said to have held Elizabeth down while Seymour cut her dress into ‘a hundred pieces’. Finally we learn that Parr discovered Elizabeth and Seymour in ‘an embrace’, which precipitated the girl being sent away from the household.

                                                  Elizabeth I as a girl – the Royal Collection

In describing this episode in Queen’s Gambit I chose to take the liberty of setting it in a bed with the guilty couple naked, but deliberately held back from showing the sexual act as I wanted to leave it up to the reader to decide what had really happened. The only evidence we have from the horse’s mouth, as it were, is in a reported conversation in which Elizabeth confesses to Jane Grey that she ‘lay with’ Seymour, another statement that remains open to interpretation by the reader.  Alison Weir, however, in The Lady Elizabeth trod an entirely different path, fully exploiting contemporary rumour, and depicting the Seymour affair as ending in a secret pregnancy. Interestingly, as Anna Whitelock points out in Elizabeth’s Bedfellows, Elizabeth left strict instructions that she was not to be disembowelled or examined after death, fuelling notions that she had something to hide, and most sources agree that her wishes were obeyed. I occasionally wonder whether, if some evidence should emerge of an early pregnancy, my own interpretation in Queen’s Gambit might seem incomplete.

                                                      A depiction of Amy Robsart's death

The death of Amy Robsart, who was discovered with a broken neck at the foot of a flight of steps in 1560, is another Elizabethan story riven with uncertainties: was it suicide, was it an accident, was it murder and, if so, by who’s hand? Fingers at the time pointed towards her husband, Elizabeth’s favourite, Leicester, who, people believed, had his sights set on marrying the Queen; but then all sorts of dreadful deeds were blamed on Leicester, who was deeply resented in court circles. A TV mini series has an ailing and beleaguered Emilia Fox, playing Amy Robsart, throwing herself into a stairwell – so suicide. In my second novel Sisters of Treason I have forwarded the possibility that perhaps it was the Queen’s loyal statesman William Cecil, Leicester’s enemy, who had the most to gain from Amy Robsart’s death – so perhaps murder. It is only a suggestion mind, and born of gossip and speculation amongst my characters, because I firmly believe that, though readers often hope for the satisfaction of finding the loose ends of history neatly tied, there is certainly a place for ambiguity in historical fiction.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novel Queen's Gambit, about Katherine Parr is out in hardback now and paperback early 2014. Sister's of Treason will be out in spring 2014.

What do you teach in a workshop on historical fiction? - Emma Darwin

This time last year I was asked to give a workshop on writing historical fiction at Guildford Book Festival, and although as ever I was amazed by how much you can do in two hours with twenty keen writers, as ever I also came away with my head buzzing with all the other things we could have done if we'd had more time. So when the good folk running the York Festival of Writing asked what I'd like to teach for one of their four-hour mini-courses, I said immediately, "Please may I do Historical Fiction?", and they kindly said, "Yes, of course". The consequence is that at two o'clock on Friday 7th September, an as-yet-unknown number of aspiring writers will sit down, and I will stand up, and we'll be off. And with any luck, by the time the bar opens at six... well, I'd love to think that all the writers would skip the bar to go straight back to their rooms and get scribbling, but I know I'll be badly in need of a drink by then, so I should think they will too.

But now, of course, I've got to work out what to do in that four hours. The only qualification for attending a workshop like this is that you want to, so that's all that I'll know about them. What exercises, what ideas, what discussion, are most likely to lead each of them to what they need of greater confidence, understanding, excitement and knowledge about writing historical fiction? It's not just that there will be a wide range of writerly experience in the room (let alone a wide range of talent, which is the elephant in the room on all writing courses). Is that experience/talent in writing historical fiction, or simply fiction, or even just writing?

And although I've no easy answer for people who ask me what period of history I write in, you do have to have one, for the current project at least. I've had writers for whom their history is a period I remember; I've had others determined to set their novel in 12th Century China when they've never been further east than Vienna. Then there may be one or two, as at Guildford, who are writing historical non-fiction, but who feel that thinking like a novelist will make their history-writing better. That doesn't make a huge difference... or does it? What if your characters don't talk English - is that easier or harder than when they talk English, but it's Chaucer's? What if you can find very little material to draw on? What if you find too much? It can be even more paralysing: like trying to catch a waterfall in a cup.

I don't actually believe that, at bottom, writing historical fiction is any different from writing any other kind of fiction: characterisation, structure, prose, plot, process... We're writing for readers now, and so all those things must work for witers and readers Now. But the usual challenges come in different proportions, because of the fundamental definition of historical fiction - at least that of Margaret Atwood, which is the only definition which is useful for a writer.: "fiction set in a time before the writer came to consciousness."

It's useful for us because it's centred on the writer's relationship to what they're writing: a time, a place, voices, manners, mores, spirits and innumerable practical details that we can't know directly. Even if you're fifty and your historical novel is set in in 1946, your ninety-year-old neighbour who would love to help is not, quite, the same person now as he was when he was a bright young sergeant under Monty, or a file-clerk at the Nuremberg trials, so you can't quite borrow his knowing either. And his wife is - sadly - no longer with us.

So the first challenge is to learn to imagine - to inhabit - places you've never been (Victorian London, pre-Colombian Chile); to get inside faiths or morals you've never held (original sin, sun-worship); to hear voices that you've never heard (what would a tape recorder have picked up in Tudor Old St Paul's, or in St Paul's own study?)...

Places - from the hanging gardens of Babylon to a Jarrow privy (whether used by the Venerable Bede, or by Ellen Wilkinson) - aren't so hard: research helps - and we'd talk about how to do it. Google Earth helps too, along with old maps and contemporary accounts... and yet, would you only include what the people of the time would see or think of? Are we not 21st century visitors to that time and place? But still, if you add a substantial helping of common sense, you then just need a willingness to dream in all six senses.

Faith and morals are harder, perhaps. An unquestioning knowledge that God exists and has his eye on you is hard for some modern writers to truly live inside, so they find it hard to make their readers live inside it too. And if you're to write convincingly historical worlds you can't just export our manners and ethics - our understanding of sexuality or asceticism, say - backwards in time, unchanged. But it's difficult to strike the balance between your need for your sixteenth-century pickpocket or duke to be believably honourable and upright in his way, while giving him the views about Jews or dogs or Catholics or Protestants which are at least verisimilar to the real thing: convincing, if not (strictly) authentic. Many good decent, honourable men, and plenty of their wives, thought that errant wives should be beaten, for example. But if you want your reader to actually like your good, decent honourable man, and still more understand why his wife regards being beaten as no more than an occupational hazard (as their children also do) then you've got even more of a problem of balance. And yes, there was another split infinitive in that last sentence. It's only the late Georgians and Victorians who decided that splitting infinitives was a crime... and that's another thing that we'll need to touch on in my workshop: how do you deal with things you know are right, but which run counter to everyone's perceptions of history. All the research in the world won't make your novel come alive if your reader's trust in you is shaken, because you've failed to keep them willing to believe you.

The last thing, voice, is perhaps the hardest. It's partly because we don't know how people talked - Shakespeare's mechanicals are as stylised in their dialogue as his kings are, even if to a different end. For anyone whose novel is set before the novel itself came along, with its intention to be naturalistic, we have no models of how people actually talked, in conversation. And if we did, would it help? Voice in historical fiction is both message - part of the reader's sense of the historical world and its inhabitants - and also medium: it has the job of conveying the story, as well as being part of the story.

So a workshop on historical fiction has the dual focus of Now, and Then, because, as I argued a few months ago, the historical novel is in some ways the ultimate novel: it embodies all the opportunities - and so difficulties - of writing fiction, but in peculiarly acute form. Between now and September I've got to sharpen my pencil (or my keyboard) and plan exercises to tackle these things: how you research... and let go of the research; how you find the voices of history... and make them come alive to the modern reader; how you make us care so passionately about your characters that we'll stay up late reading about this strange and long-ago world... and yet be all wobbly by the end because these people we've lived with aren't Now, they're Then.
 
It's just as well that I've got several months in which to work it out but this is, sadly, my last post as a member of The History Girls. Before I take up a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Goldsmiths, next October, I've got a novel to finish, not to mention the workshop, and lots of other commitments of writing and teaching. I've loved being a History Girl, and I've been so delighted to see the blog going from strength to strength - I'll be reading everyone's future posts with pleasure and interest.

Great Cathedrals in Time and Space by Emma Darwin

If you dropped in at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern recently, you might have seen Tacita Dean's work, Film, which was the twelfth in the Unilever series. I was lucky enough to be asked by my cinematographer friend Sam Garwood to a private view for the film industry: the sponsors were companies like Kodak (sharp intake of breath), the BSC, and Arri. I assumed it would be the kind of event that I once described to my offspring as "just a stand-up and shout": long on polite shop-talk and short on cake and bouncy castles. The only difference from the book-industry equivalent would be the gender balance and the fact that I wouldn't know anyone. And, it being February in the dear old/new Turbine Hall, it would be cold: even the invitations had suggested that guests might like to Wrap Up Warm.

Yes, it was all those things but it was more significant than that. Thanks to the ease and speed of digital - and undeniably the particular advantages it offers, while analogue has other advantages - the industry for analogue film is dying. The big, commercial studios are convinced that the future is digital, and without their money flowing in, the facilities to deal with film from shooting to projecting are shutting up shop. Kodak have filed for protection against their creditors, and something like twenty-eight out of the thirty film processing companies in London have closed down in the last two years. And because there's no one to handle your film, film itself is going the way of... well, can you think of any other creative medium that has ever just ceased to be available? Evolved, shrunk, got more expensive, fallen out of favour, yes. But just, plain, vanished? So there's a campaign, of which Dean and the likes of Martin Scorsese are only the most visible parts, to get photographic film named a UNESCO World Heritage... um, Thing. That would open the door to all sorts of help and funding for those who want or need to use and support it, just as in our own industry National Short Story Week is the umbrella under which all sorts of good initiatives can then huddle, confer, publicise themselves, and make grant applications.

Tacita Dean says that she "needs film as an artist needs paint." So, unexpectedly, a routine standup-and-shout turned out to be something more important, though what that was, perhaps, was according to how you saw it. A call to arms? The mustering of an army? A battle-charge? The last rites? A wake? Or a re-birth of the medium into a new life in a rather different world, where it's no longer taken for granted as the medium of transmitting stories, but defined by and used for its particular, essential, physical and aesthetic qualities?

There are parallels with other industries, of course, although they all need to be prefixed by mutatis mutandis, because our eyes don't work in the same way as our ears, so the shift from cinefilm to digital moviemaking is not the same as the shift from wax cylinders to digital tape to mp3 files. And different again is the shift from manuscript to printed book, to e-book: the medium in which our words are transmitted is secondary to the message it carries, and the printed book is a near-perfect, and astonishingly cheap, technology when you compare it to the paraphernalia of even the most guerillerish of film makers or sound artists.

But still... Maybe it was the walk along the South Bank, through Borough Market, past Southwark Cathedral (which I blogged about recently) and the Golden Hinde, on a damp, mild-scented February evening, with the lights of London glittering and shifting on the water... Maybe it was the fact that I'd had a good day working on the novel, so that what Rose Tremain calls "the anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the novelist's mind" was wide awake in me... Maybe it was the wine, which was nicer than book industry bashes usually supply... Who knows?

The Turbine Hall is a cathedral of the early twentieth century, the era of big, grubby powerstations in the middle of big, grubby cities, the electrical age. You enter by the west door, and the party was on the upper deck, which spans the middle of it: we stood in the soft dark to watch the colours and forms in Film that flowed and flowered where the east window is. There's a west window, too: it gets a starring moment in Film, so there's a metaphysical but also physical link that runs the full length of the nave. Then we turned aside, to where the speakers were spotlit on the platform on one of the long sides of the hall, and heard each of them make a call to arms. 

And suddenly I saw us all as the ordinary folk of a Reformation world - the world of Galileo and Columbus, Newton and Harvey - the world that could turn the space inside a great, Gothic cathedrals on its axis, so that the people gathered round a pulpit to hear an argument rather than before an altar to witness an event. I heard what was said as something akin to Luther's and Bucer's argument: that we should return to the plain, unmediated origins of our experience, and keep hold of the raw, analogue, temporal business of being human creatures who exist in space and time and community, so that we can take it with us as we also grasp the new opportunities of the new age, for art and understanding.

I've no idea what the story is, in this moment - story in the novelist's sense, that is, not the journalist's. Those people in the Grote Kerk of 1673, above, were the first who could go home and read what we'd recognise as a novel: Tacita Dean's form and medium are a product of the electrical age as mine are of that humanist age:  But if ever there was a moment when the past was present to me and yet by being so present, filled me with the knowledge of how immeasurably distant it is, it was that evening in the Turbine Hall. Dean makes her art by running the film through the camera again and again, masking different layers, layering different colours and lights, stacking up images or leaving them alone. Historical novels get written in rather the same way.

Even the Ghosts are Reading Books - Emma Darwin

Everyone knows that writers are also readers, and by writers I don't (for once) just  mean novelists. We need books, and we need more books than we can afford or house, so we need libraries. But we also need books, as far as is possible, when we need them: not before (because working with too much research is like trying to catch a waterfall in a cup) and not after (because it can be hard to re-route a story which has gone off on mistaken rails). I have friends who almost live in the gorgeousness of the new British Library, which has moved out of the Victorian-neoclassical glories of the British Museum Reading Room to live next to the Victorian-gothic glories of St Pancras station. I have other friends who bring joy to their local librarian's heart by using every drop of all that professional expertise, but neither of those are quite what I need; the essence of my practice as a writer is that when I'm doing research, fact-checking is the least important part of it. The more important stuff is what I can't really know that I'm looking for, so certainly couldn't find in a catalogue.

One day back in the 1840s, the story goes, the great historian Thomas Carlyle was sitting in the British Museum, waiting for the books he'd ordered to be brought from the bookstacks. He waited for an hour and a half, unable to get any further with what he was working on, and when they arrived they were the wrong books. And because of how the Library worked and still does, even if he did re-order them, by the time they'd been retrieved and brought to him, most of the working day would be over. Up he got and walked out, and on his way home to Chelsea he vowed to found a library where scholars could go into the bookstacks for themselves, browse, find and retrieve what they wanted, and take it home.

The London Library began on the first floor of the Traveller's Club, in Pall Mall, and Thackeray was its first auditor. It grew fast, and soon moved to its current home round the corner in St James's Square; Eliot (George), Dickens and my own great-great-grandpapa were among its early members. Its current president is Tom Stoppard and you'll see many a face you recognise from a book jacket and many more that you don't, as you look up from where you're tucked in a corner in Science & Miscellaneous Quarto, digging among the early books about photography. (Why is Photography not in the Art Room? Well, the library was founded only four years after Fox Talbot patented the Calotype, so I'll forgive them.)

But it is, very emphatically, a working library not a social club: this blog entry gives you a better idea and more pictures than I possibly can. There is now very nice room tucked up in the eaves to have coffee and eat the sandwiches you brought with you, as there wasn't when A S Byatt set the first scene of Possession there, but that's about the only visible concession to modern habits. Oh, and the enormous e-library you can get at from home, the wifi, and the Twitter account: just follow @TheLondonLib. It's recently somehow found space in a very crowded corner of the world to enlarge itself considerably, mainly thanks to the success of another member's little book of comic poems about Cats: Eliot (T.S). Essentially, though, it's just the nicest place in London to work, and the library that best combines practicality (once you've got the hang of its idiosyncratic classification system) and scholarship, and that's why I and thousands of other writers of every kind are members.

But none of all these delights would be worth the membership fee if it didn't do what I want. A central tenet of the Library's philosophy is that knowledge grows, develops, shifts, but it is never outdated. And so, unlike public libraries they never get rid of a book. This is particularly useful for the historical novelist, because the pre-siftedness of a history book may well not tell me what I need to know.

So, in The Mathematics of Love Stephen and Lucy drive along the north coast of Spain, from San Sebastian to Bilbao. Google Earth and a cheap plane ticket could tell me about the physical geography, but what about the human geography? I only found the answer by kneeling on the iron-gridded floor of the bookstacks, in Topography>Spain: an 1860s guide to travelling in Northern Spain, complete with engravings by Honoré Daumier. There was an overloaded diligence staggering along those mountain roads, the costumes of market women, farmers, sailors, priests and nuns, evocations of crumbling villages and bustling towns, the usual English horror of Catholicism and the pity for the picturesque peasants that they weren't allowed to know any better... even a picture of the writer preaching Evangelical Protestantantism to a group of urchins on the beach. And most delightful for me, were observations of the lingering scars of the Peninsular War. Perhaps the innkeeper the author found more welcoming than most in San Sebastian was the son of the man who welcomed Stephen fifty years before. For A Secret Alchemy the formal history books were essential, of course, as I was dealing with real historical characters, so some of the time my booklist looked more like a historian's, even though I'd hesitate to show it to the really proper historians around me in the Reading Room.

And the Work in Progress? All I'll say now is that not only has that shelf of very early photography books been well-explored, but the one I have on my desk at home has patches of chemical stains. And since the science, like the art, of photography, is eternally restless, I can probably narrow down those stains to about twenty years or so. I wonder who put them there? It's not really essential to the novel that the 1913 Baedeker to Southern France, which is next to it on my desk, has pencil notes in the margin about mountains climbed and hotels stayed in. It has a list in the back, in the same hand, as the scholars say: Photographs, and a plan for the week. Who was it?

You'll have gathered by now that for this historical novelist, at least, part of the joy of the London Library is that I'm walking (kneeling, writing, longing for coffee) in the footsteps of my fellow-members of and in the past. They have their stories too, and since the Work in Progress has real historical people in it, and some of them were members of the London Library, maybe all I'll have to do is sit there, at one of the quiet single desks in some corner of the stacks, and listen for the whisk of petticoats or the harrumph of a handsome pair of whiskers. In the London Library even the ghosts are reading books.

Bloodied Hearts & 1950s Underwear - Emma Darwin

When hanging out with my historical fictioneering friends, I sometimes feel a bit inferior. So many of them spent their student years reading Defoe, Joyce and Greene, or Clarendon, Elton and Schama, at least when the pubs were closed. I've dipped into both myself, a little, but I got my degree by pretending to be a tree.

The theatre, like any performing art, is devoted to tradition in a way that written arts don't have to be, so in the Department of Drama at the University of Birmingham our trees were rooted in the soil of this classic Stanislavskian exercise. Mind you, quite how the experience of being a silver birch or a cork oak helped Stanislavski's actors to play Uncle Vanya I've never been sure, although perhaps it was more fruitful when it came to rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard. But the more I write, teach and blog about fiction, the more I realise just what a good grounding a Drama degree is for a historical novelist.

I wouldn't dream of suggesting that just because we set our novels in the past, they're all about heaving bosoms. But when you've had to wear full, period costume for anything from Hamlet to Strindberg's Easter, you discover that the only way to breathe is indeed for your bosom to heave. Corsets work better than a Wonderbra for showing off your assets, but at the cost of 90% of your lung capacity. Racing up the spiral green room staircase to make your entrance through the audience, or running into the arms of your stage lover, shows you exactly why all those heroines keep fainting: sheer lack of oxygen.

Directors need to know this stuff, but so do novelists. Then there was Wardrobe. I not only know how to wear a corset, I've made one. And a straitjacket (Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty). I've realised how much sewing it takes to make a bodice, how much cloth to make a skirt and the petticoats beneath, and just how much mending it takes when you tread on the hem (A Doll's House). Even  a twentieth century show should have not just clothes but underwear actually from the period; fabrics have changed and so have erotic tastes in breasts, bottoms, waists, shoulders and makeup. And that goes for men as well as women, as I must remember now I'm writing a novel set between the wars. And have you tried getting out of a too-low sofa wearing high heels, a 1950s roll-on, and not much else? I have, because in Albee's The American Dream they switched sofas between the last dress rehearsal and the first night. Now, which of my characters shall I do that to?

Stage Management? I know how to research period weapons (Peer Gynt) and nurses' uniforms (Testament of Youth). I know that hiring real scaffolding for a Constructivist set (Meyerhold) brings in more dust than you'd thought existed in the whole of the West Midlands. I also learnt that if you fling a bloody heart to the ground it bounces, and reduces the entire cast of The Duchess of Malfi to giggles.

Some of what I learnt is useful for any novelist. There's Pinter: what's between the words spoken is as important as the words, so how do you make that happen in your reader's head? There's learning Shakespeare by heart and speaking it, to develop your ear for how character-in-action is embodied in the sound and rhythm of words. And it's useful for an author: after all those years of acting, I'm not too fazed at an event when the sound system goes down or the coffee machine starts up.

I also learnt that I wasn't much of an actor myself. Years later, as a beginner-writer, I came across the bizarre suggestion that you should "cut all adverbs". This is the bastard, tyrannical offspring off a good regime: fiction is built of character-in-action, so keep looking for the perfect verb for that action and don't settle for a bland one spiced up with an adverb. At which point, I had... well, I was going to say a lightbulb moment, but it was more of an olive-oil-and-wick-lamp moment, which sent me back to my undergraduate copy of Aristotle's Poetics:

For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse...if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.

He's talking about theatre, and Tragedy (Comedy got lost, and lost again in The Name of the Rose), but it could just as well be a snarky TLS fiction review, couldn't it? Action - actors - act-ors... I remembered working on Stanislavski's idea of "intentions", from An Actor Prepares, where for each speech you have to decide what the character is trying to do, in speaking it. Not, "he's in love with her", "she's furious with him", "they're bored"; your idea must be expressed as a verb: "to seduce", "to scold", "to destroy". As Aristotle says, there's no point in having a crystal-clear idea of your character and their thoughts and emotions, if you don't know exactly what that makes them do. It's all in finding the right verb.

Of course, we historical fictioneers have a particular relationship to this basic truth about narrative; we write about the foreign land of the past, and it's too easy for us to get caught up in the "qualities", the "diction and thought", of that foreigness. But it's how our characters act in their Then that makes the connection with our own Now. We wouldn't whoop at a bear-baiting, or happily die for our faith. But if I start thinking, "to cheer on the team", or "to save my soul" I begin to get it, and so can write it. And what about locking up a sister so she can't run away with her lover? Is that "to protect", "to control", "to possess" or "to prevent evil"? Now there's a story...

CAUTION, NOVELISTS: historians at work - Emma Darwin

The other day I was talking to a writer friend about my current project, and she urged me to read a particular novel set in the same period, centred on the same sort of people. I made a polite but non-committal answer, because I can't tell you how certain I was that I'd do nothing of the kind.

The thing is, someone else's historical novel is their re-visioning and re-imagining of that time. How the novel is structured, how it's voiced, what historical material it uses, what it writes on the spaces between the facts, what it elaborates in the gaps in the record... all of those are the product of that writer's self. Their consciousness, their nature as a storyteller, is the creative engine and the organising principle, not mine. It's not just a question of not wanting to plagiarise unconsciously (and Heyer spotted Cartland's plagiarism in Cartland's taking things Heyer had invented as historical material). It's much more that while all writers of historical fiction are at one remove from the world they're trying to evoke, I don't want mine to be a third-hand world.

Charles Dickens' French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities is not the same as Hilary Mantel's in A Place of Greater Safety, or Marge Piercy's contemporaneous City of Darkness, City of Light. Georgette Heyer's Waterloo is not Thackeray's (she was shocked by how wrong many of his facts are!), and I avoided both when I was writing The Mathematics of Love. From the moment when I realise I want to write about a period, I stop reading historical fiction set in it.

What's less obvious is that a similar problem exists with the history books. What a historian writes is also - to an extent that historians haven't always been willing to acknowledge - filtered through that historian's consciousness: not just their personality but the biases and discourses of their time. Carlyle's French Revolution is not the same as Simon Schama's, and both will leave things out - different things - that I need to know about.

Mind you, History, as a discipline, has changed. J H Elliott's classic short study, Imperial Spain, was first published in 1963, and has been on syllabuses and reading lists ever since. For the second, revised edition, which came out in 2002, he points out that a book of this kind written now would never have so little to say about the experience of women. In the meantime, Women's History has brought us treasure troves such as Marilyn Yalom's History of the Wife. As someone who writes battles and politics, but also childbirth and cooking, that's not the only kind of book I need, but it helps a lot.

But there's a more fundamental problem. History, as a discipline, is about finding the larger patterns and forces which shaped lives in the past. An honest historian may acknowledge some evidence which exists but has yet to be fitted in. But still, the project will be to synthesise things to explain the whole picture. And yet always, as a novelist, I'm aware that the opposite was probably also true. You know that plan of a medieval village you copied into your exercise book, aged around ten? No one village looks like that because they all have their quirks, but that plan is more true as History, beause it presents the essence of the matter. If you think round your friends I'd put money on every single one of them having several characteristics which don't fit the norm for their job/background/class/ethnicity/gender/nationality. The essence of gender history is that husbands batter wives, but that doesn't mean that no wife has ever battered her husband, and my characters are individuals, not essences. If I want to put a battered husband in my novel, I shall. I'll have to work harder to convince the reader, but that's never a bad thing for me as a writer, or for my reader. As I was talking about on my own blog a while ago, the expected thing slips past the reader too easily: it's the surprising, the off-beat, the taking-aback thing, done properly, which catches the reader and holds them long enough for the story to come alive.

Of course ordinary, individual lives aren't ignored by historians: history "from below" is big business. We've got more sophisticated, too: a book such as Judith Flanders' The Victorian House starts with the evidence of books about etiquette and household management, but then the much more complex and slippery reality needs a different kind of teasing out. Even the absence of evidence can now have shrewd insights read into it, which is something at which novelists might be able to teach historians a thing or two: apparently Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is on several undergraduate History syllabuses, not because it should be read as History, but as an example of the kind of imaginative effort that should be part of any historian's practice.

And you can go back to original sources. If you're trying to bring to life a real, historical character then with luck there will be plenty of those - though again, you have to be wary of the biases and discourses forming anything with more creative input than an account book or a warrant of execution. As Alison Weir describes, Eleanor of Aquitaine's contemporaries didn't find her day-to-day presence, ruling the kingdom for Henry II, worthy of record: women were only good for sex and procreation, so that's what was written down about Eleanor, and you need to go back to charters and Privy Council records to discover otherwise. Yet (as I found, similarly, when researching Elizabeth Woodville for A Secret Alchemy), later historians still didn't examine, let alone challenge, the version of the Queen that was handed down from her own time: the discourse of their times wasn't so different. What we think of as History is, much of the time, just someone else's version of it.

So original sources are no guarantee that your apprehension of your period hasn't been pre-sifted, limited, interfered with, and that's always supposing that you can find the sources. If your novel's about a fishwife in 12th century Cumberland, the original sources will all be in Welsh, except when they're in Norman French, and they're extremely unlikely to be in any such woman's own hand or voice (the same is true for, say, accounts of ordinary soldiers before the 19th century.) What's more, one particular, real fishwife's experience may not be at all what you want or can use, because your novel isn't about her, it's about someone else. So you might well be better off with more general accounts: a History of the Wife, and a History of the Medieval Cumbrian Fishing Industry, and any number of other histories of religion, food, textiles, architecture, transport, politics. And then you do the maths - the listening - the imagining - the dreaming - in the spaces between all that history. Historians are in the business of synthesising a general picture from particular experience. Novelists do it the other way round.

HISTORY YOU CAN LIVE INSIDE by Emma Darwin

A few weeks ago, my daughter's school Chamber Choir was singing Evensong in Southwark Cathedral, so I went along to listen. Many years ago, when I first crossed the Thames to live South of the River (which as all Londoners know is slightly more drastic than crossing the Channel to live permanently in France), in the daytime Bankside was busy with suits, doctors, and wholesale cabbages. But outside the working week it was Tumbleweed Town: anyone who could fled to the salubrious suburbs, and those few who couldn't had nothing to tempt them out of their grim blocks of flats.

Now the council blocks have been done up, there are university halls of residence, lofts and flats and family houses for urban living, there's Borough Market, the Globe, the Golden Hinde, the London Assembly, at least ten branches of Prêt à Manger, and you can walk along the Thames Path, from Deptford on your bank and St Katherine's Dock on the other, to Lambeth Palace and the Houses of Parliament. It's full of people living and working and drinking and talking. In becoming more modern, Southwark has become more ancient: it's once again the mirror-image of the city across the tide that gave birth to it.

Southwark Cathedral wasn't built as a cathedral, but as a church: St Mary Overey (as in, Over the Thames). So although it's a fine bit of Early English Gothic it's not particularly large or complex. But it still has that unity in difference which is the great joy of mediaeval architure: the pointed Gothic arches don't come just in large and small, but can stretch broad or high, vaulting above your head, or stooping to make a canopy over a baby's little tomb. Some of the columns are like bundles of saplings, others are great, ribbed tree-trunks; you walk through puddles of colours where the light from the stained glass windows splashes down as regularly as a wave.

There was a hymn, all solid, Anglican harmony, and then the Responsory: call-and-answer with the choir. And then the choir sang alone, weaving in and out of each other as pitched and patterned by Orlando Gibbons, and I remembered Peter Wimsey, in Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, saying to his Harriet, "Anyone can have the harmony, if they'll leave us the counterpoint".

As one of Gibbons' contemporaries nearly wrote: Licence my roving notes and let them go / before, behind, between, above, below... But I couldn't - for good manners' sake - rove on foot during the service, thought I've done so in many other churches. So I sat still, and allowed my mind's eye to rove instead, imagining how as you walk and look the clusters of saplings in the different aisles set to partners and then pass on, the ribs like branches stretching out to join those of another tree overhead; triplets of windows dancing between bigger trunks; the arch that opens to a whole new chapel of variations; the path that leads you on, curls you round the back of the altar and brings you to the centre again, under the still, pendulum point of the crossing.

They say that architecture is frozen music. In which case, I thought, gazing up the column by my shoulder to where it sprang up and out into the vault, music is surely liquid architecture. What I'm sitting in - what those nameless medieval masons built - is a fugue in stone; a fugue that you can live inside. And perhaps a piece of music is therefore a building that sings.

So where does that leave the reader and writer of fiction? Like music, writing can only exist for the reader in time but, unlike music, it can only sing one note at once. The Donne (mis)quotation suggests that poets may be closer to music: their words have explicit patterning, repetition and sound. But fiction does have architecture: a novel has pace, scale and proportion, as I found when I started thinking about writing a novel as building a bridge. Ian McEwan says the first thing he knows about a new novel is "the maths", by which, as Pythgoras and Stravinsky would have agreed, he also means "the music". In fiction we can play as we choose with echoes and repetitions of ideas and images, as well as with sounds, and build them into something which you can live inside: the world of the novel not just in the sense of setting and characters, but a structure of sound and rhythm and image.

And historical fiction? Well, there's your answer: Bankside. Many historical novels take the reader to live in the year and moment of the action: - steam trains screeching and puffing above Dickens' head as he tries to rescue a six year old prostitute; two monks turned out of their priory as Henry VIII's men pull the lead off the roof; families emerging from the Tube station air raid shelters to see if their homes are still standing.

Other historical novels are also novels about history. The Golden Hinde is a replica of Francis Drake's ship that he sailed round the world, and there are modern American schoolchildren clambering about on it, snapping each other on their mobiles. But in the 1970s it was moored across the river, and my sister was on it - only because the Tower queues were too long - when the IRA bombed the Tower, killing one and injuring forty people. The Golden Hinde is a world you can enter and live in, a world at once Now, and many Thens, a world built of ribs and beams: wood, tarred and caulked to sail as well as it did five hundred years ago, dancing over the waves with the wind singing in the rigging. The replica embodies the history that it hasn't actually seen but also what it has seen, as novels about history do: a historical novel is history you can live inside.

CROSSING OVER by Emma Darwin

In Tuesday's post, "Outside the Frame", A L Berridge was saying that while the physical presence that an old photograph records might be rather more historical-physical (smelly, sickly, unglamorous) than either writer or reader really fancy, a photograph can get a writer's mind going as few other things can.

I think one reason that photographs can be such a good jumping-off point for a story is that we know they are the product of a moment. Apart from trickery in the enlarger, on the re-touching table or now on a computer, a photograph is unmediated: the camera can only speak as it finds. And it's not only photographs - images - which get my writerly self dancing and thinking, it's photography itself.

Even if the sitter has carefully chosen to represent themselves in a certain way (and that, in itself, is revealing), another moment might have made them look very different - have you ever seen a handful of snaps of yourself up on someone's Facebook page after a party, and thought you almost looked like different people, depending on angle, light and so on? A portrait is painted in time and so it's a collection, a distillation, of the artist's conception of the sitter. But a photograph is a step out of time, and therefore - paradoxically - it speaks of Time, and how it moves, as few other artefacts can.

If you've ever stood in a church where your historical character stood (as I did with Elizabeth Woodville in A Secret Alchemy) or read a notice that said "George Washington slipped here", you'll know what I mean. There's a shiver you get when you realise that but for the thinnest possible veil of time the past is here with you or you've stepped into the past. And with photographs it does come down to physics. The controlled tarnishing of silver bromide (or silver chloride or one of the other silver halides) is all that actually records the image in the camera, even with colour photographs. Photons from the sun (or now from a flash) touched that real, actual person, and were reflected away to touch the photographic emulsion on the film or glass plate, and blacken it in proportion. Of course, we're most familiar with the negative/positive process, when the print in your hands may have been made any time from the next day, to a century later. But if it's a daguerreotype, or one of its descendants such as the tin-type beloved of fairground photographers in the 19th century, then the plate is the photograph, there, in your hands.
 
In The Mathematics of Love, my 1976 narrator, Anna, begins her story thus: 

It's an early daguerreotype, more than a hundred and fifty years old. That's a positive process, I usually explain, the plate exposed directly so that each is unique... If you tilt it towards the light, the image gleams and shimmers, so exact, so bright and so dark, that the moment of its taking seems to live inside the glass. The sun touches the pillars and chimneys of Kersey Hall and flickers among the dark, late-summer trees. Its light lies on the lawn, strokes the curve of the steps, slips through the half-open door to where a figure in a long dress stands. It was then - that moment - that the shutter opened, and snatched a scatter of the light and dark, throwing it on to this piece of glass, fixing the sun and shadow of those few seconds for ever. And the sun moved on and took the day with it, while the plate held those shadows and kept them, and carried them to other places and other times before it was found again. One of those times was mine.

And later in the novel, although much earlier in Anna's life, veteran photographer Theo - who I modelled on Robert Capa - says this:

"...all photographs are about death, really, and time: about preserving a moment in silver and chemicals, when life itself is never preserved, when every cell of everything is already decaying, and being replaced, and decaying again. The subject and the image co-exist for the moment that the shutter opens and closes. And then the subject decays but the image lives on unchanged."

"It makes it sound like a ghost."

He grinned at me. "Oh, Anna, does the idea give you gooseflesh all over?... but a photograph does prevent something - somebody - from being laid to rest."

I moved a little, and felt the slight, hot roughness where my shoulders were newly brown. I looked down and saw that the image of the dark straps of my top was printed pale by the sun.

The Mathematics of Love is all about ghosts, without really being a ghost story. And if I told you what I mean by "not really" it would spoil things, but the more I thought about light and where it falls, the more places I found - such as Anna's sun-tan - where it's part of how we experience time and our selves. I don't believe in ghosts - hence my "not-really". But I think what ghosts embody and express about our sense of the past is endlessly fascinating - and not just the past, but the dead and the still living and the might-have-been. And in that way, a photograph is like a historical novel as much as it's a historical record; it embodies the dead quite literally, in silver halides, in a way which lives absolutely in our moment. As A L Berridge was saying, it therefore embodies the might-have-been, just outside the frame. It's more like holding a letter written by that person, than it's like looking at a portrait painted of them. Writing historical fiction is all about using imagination (rooted in research, of course) to cross over from the present into the past. With a photograph, the past crosses over into our present.

Is the historical novel the ultimate novel? - Emma Darwin

As soon as you start researching a historical novel, you discover that the past really is a foreign country, and they really do do things differently there. That's part of the fear and part of the fun: you're the pioneer in this strange land, hacking back the jungle and getting the measure of the natives, before you go back to collect your readers, and lead them through it in their turn.

And yet they also say that the first person you meet when you travel abroad is yourself. We read and write historical fiction to experience our own time and our own selves from another angle and sometimes a more revealing one: to find out the constants in human nature, as well as the variables. When Rose Tremain wanted to write about Eighties Britain, she wrote Restoration, about the court of Charles II. When I wanted to conjure up the last, pre-digital generation of photojournalists, for The Mathematics of Love, I shared their story with the first stirrings of photography 150 years earlier. And it's because of this dual nature of historical fiction - the way that, like history-writing, it embodies Now, as well as Then - that I want to suggest that the ultimate kind of novel is the historical novel.

As philosopher and novelist Richard Kearney puts it, in all storytelling the storyteller works with bits and pieces of experience from their world: things the listeners know, and things they know about from others past and present. The storyteller spins the bits and pieces into a tale which makes sense of them and shows the world in a new and clearer light.

Non-fiction-storytelling confines itself to giving the reader a logical experience of the probable: the best description possible of how things actually are or were. Fiction-storytelling offers an imaginative, affective experience of how things might be, or may have been. Our minds' neural pathways can't tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real one, and so fiction also tells its tales "as if" they really happened, to give us the experience of other lives and worlds. You could say that fiction offers us the memories we don't have ourselves. And in her essay about her novel Alias Grace, which is based on a true story, Margaret Atwood says this:

Fiction is where individual memory and experience and collective memory and experience come together, in greater or lesser proportions. The closer the fiction is to us readers, the more we recognise and claim it as individual rather than collective. [Canadian novelist] Margaret Laurence used to say that her English readers thought [her novel] The Stone Angel was about old age, the Americans thought it was about some old woman they knew, and the Canadians thought it was about their grandmothers.

I think Atwood has put her finger on two important things. First, her "memory and experience" is clearly the same as Kearney's "bits and pieces": fiction is where particular stories can be shaped and related to general ones. Second, she's saying that being distanced from the world of the story helps us to see the general (old age) underlying the particular (grandmother's) life. She's talking about geographical distance, but of course temporal distance comes to the same thing.

Some literary critics hate historical fiction, because it doesn't deal "authentically" with the experience of Now, but by definition can't be authentic to Then, either. No writer now setting a novel in the mid-eighteenth century is seriously trying to convince the reader that it's a long-lost manuscript by Henry Fielding, whatever games she or he plays with us along the way.

And some historians hate historical fiction because History, as a discipline, depends utterly on being honest about the distinctions between a provable fact, a trustworthy record, a reasonable assumption, and pure speculation. But to tell a story "as if" it all happened, novelists must waltz to and fro between probable and possible, across the historians' all-important boundaries, without the reader ever feeling the bump.

But to me what these historians and critics hate are some of the greatest strengths of the historical novel: the kind of strength which comes from growing up on disputed ground. When you write about history in any way you have to work under the tension built into a story which is about "not only Then, but also Now". And when you write a novel you have to work under the tension built into "not only Is, but also Might Have Been". So, if Atwood is right about what fiction is, then historical fiction has to hold together all four poles. It has to stretch backwards as well as sideways, reach across time as well as space, evoking particular experience to bring us collective memories beyond our individual reach. A historical novel, in other words, is doing explicitly what other kinds of novel only do implicitly. The ultimate novel, you could say, is the historical novel.

BLOODY BATTLES & PLEASURE PALACES by Emma Darwin

It was 2007, and I was whizzing along the A64 in North Yorkshire because in the novel that wasn't yet A Secret Alchemy one of my narrators whizzes along it. A small sign suddenly said TOWTON. I stamped on the brake and turned left, and the whole structure of the novel changed.

Modern-day Una Pryor drives the A64 because she's researching another of my narrators, Antony Wydvil, uncle and guardian of the Princes in the Tower. He rode this way to his death in 1483, but I hadn't realised till I got there that the road might take him into his own past: to 1461 and the Battle of Towton. It's the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, and it was Antony's first. Towton battlefield, I found, is high and open and eerily silent, and you can see how, when the two armies wheeled in the blinding snow on Palm Sunday, soldiers tumbled down the slope to drown in Cock Beck. It was said the water ran red for days.

So that became the shape of Antony's story: one, long, midsummer day's ride from the bleak, private Plantagenet stronghold of Sheriff Hutton, to the squat yellow muscle of the great administrative centre of Pontefract - and from it I strung his whole life. For him it was a pilgrimage, and Elysabeth his sister also tells her story as a series of stops on her life's journey through this glamorous and violent world. She was left a widow with two small sons when her husband was killed fighting for Henry VI. Edward Plantagenet's victory at Towton a couple of months later made him Edward IV, and caused the Wydvils to change their allegiance. What was it like for them, I'd wondered? The historical record is largely made by the Wydvil's enemies, but I wanted to understand them from the inside.

And then I realised that Una, too, makes a pilgrimage almost the length of England; she's looking for the Wydvils, but she also re-finds her own past, and thus her future. Una's pilgrimage through the book, therefore, became mine. And what I found was how late medieval politics is all about roads. Battles happen on the roads which lead from the great lords' powerbases to London and Westminster:  Barnet, Northampton, Tewkesbury and two at St Albans. If it's not battles, it's still about land. Elysabeth's first husband, Sir John Grey, lived at Groby, just up the A5 (Watling Street) from her childhood home at Grafton, and their wedding consolidated their fathers' local power. I've stood in the church at Ratby where they were married; I've seen his childhood home too; I've glimpsed the burnt-out shell of the manor house where their two sons were probably born. It was from the royal hunting lodge at Stony Stratford that Edward IV rode out secretly to woo the beautiful widow Elysabeth Grey; it was at Stony Stratford twenty years later that his brother Richard of Gloucester took control of their son Edward V, and sent Antony to his death; the stones of Bermondsey Abbey keep turning up as they build smart new flats there.

One of the pivotal events of the novel is the siege of the Tower of London, and I gave Una a house just along the riverbank in Narrow St. It's actually an agreeable pub, half-hanging above the dark grey waters of the Thames; I had lunch there. And several scenes are set at Eltham Palace, the beautiful little late-medieval pleasure palace now in South London, then handy for the royal dockyard - and the brothels - at Deptford. And necessity is sometimes the mother of inspiration. For dull reasons of chronology I had to set Una's narrative a few years back, but in 1990 Eltham - the 14th century palace and the Art Deco country house it became - was being restored by English Heritage. So Una goes to see what's being done to make it come alive, and the whole of A Secret Alchemy came to be about how restoring a historic house is like writing a historical novel.

How, in telling stories, can we - and can't we - bring the past alive? When you're restoring a house, says Mark in the novel, it's not enough just to tidy up what's left of the original. If you want to evoke the lives that once lived there, then leaving out everything which would have been there, but is no longer visible, would be another kind of lie. "You have to make the story whole." And one way I did so was to show how the separate strands are wound together into that whole: to make explicit what the whole novel is doing implicitly. Mark and Una are being shown round the restoration at Eltham:

The craftsmen and builders have gone for the day. ‘I was involved with excavating Bermondsey Abbey in the sixties,’ I say, and Charlie’s eyes light up. I tell him what I remember about the dig while we walk along a wide, curving, sleek-panelled corridor that wouldn’t look out of place in a grand ocean liner, and into the huge quiet of the Great Hall.

The space seems to hum against me. The windows are high in the walls and so big their stone mullions shimmer against the light, and a great hammerbeam roof of age-darkened oak lowers above and between them. Charlie says proudly it’s the original. He’s talking about the firebomb that came through it in 1940: the burn-marks are there, on the stones of the floor, and must be kept, for they’re part of the history too. Mark’s asking him about the masons’ marks and carpenters’ joints, and what the principle of restoration is.

'Well, in art restoration the rule is that the new work must be visible at two feet, and invisible at four,’ says Charlie. ‘That way you’re not pretending it’s real, but there’s a sense of realness. Obviously here it’s a bit different. We might darken a new wooden beam so it blends in with the originals, but we wouldn’t falsify. No fake wormholes or smoke-marks. On the other hand, where you have to conjure up from nothing, it works better to do something completely modern, not faux-historical. Clean glass and steel, or whatever: something good in itself. The Courtaulds’ architect in the twenties mostly knew that.’

I’m not thinking about the twenties, I’m thinking that here Elizabeth and Anthony danced, here ambassadors were given audience and wedding feasts were held, nobles drank and fenced, and the children ran riot on wet days, perhaps, with the dogs barking around them. Did they come here when Edward’s sister Margaret of York had been safely married off to the Duke of Burgundy? What did it smell like, then? Velvets and flower-water? Sweet herbs and banquets? Latrines and fly-blown meat? Sweat and fear? What did it sound like? The court was famous across Europe for its music, but how did they hear it? Did it creep into Elizabeth’s ears as it does mine, and make her want to laugh, and cry, and love? She wasn’t in love with either of her husbands, it’s a fair guess. But there’s nothing – not a single whisper in a court full of her enemies – that murmurs of anyone else. Did she ever love someone so much that she hurt for joy, so much that it seemed beyond reason? Did she regret that she never had? 

There’s ancient dust gritty under my feet and outside a last late chisel rings like a bell on the stone. If I strain my ears enough, perhaps I might hear them. If I could only peer hard enough through this time-thickened, time-thinned air, they might come before my eyes.