The Ten Best Witch Historical Fiction Novels – by Anna Mazzola

Witches are, in the perhaps unfortunate words of Grazia magazine, ‘hot right now’, both on screen and in books. Stacey Halls’ The Familiars is spending its third week in The Times bestselling fiction list, Laura Bates’ YA debut, The Burning, is making waves, and A Discovery of Witches is now an international bestseller and a TV series.

Several other recent novels feature witchcraft including Caroline Lea’s superb The Glass Girl (set against the backdrop of the 17th-century Icelandic witch trials) and E.C. Fremantle’s brilliant thriller The Poison Bed. “‘Witch,” says one of her characters. “That’s what happens to women who don’t do as they’re told.”  Each novel uses witchcraft to highlight the misogyny and fear of women’s sexuality that remain relevant today, together with the terrible power of false accusations. As Willow Winsham says in her fascinating book Accused: British Witches Throughout History, ‘if anyone could be a witch, then literally everyone was suspect.’

A coven of other witch books are due out in the coming months including Katie Lowe’s haunting debut, The Furies, Carla by Laura Legge, Her Kind by Niamh Boyce, Remember Tomorrow by Amanda Saint and Witchery by Juliet Diaz, which will explain ‘how to connect with the power of your inner witch’. There is, it seems, something potent in the air.

Here, in no particular order, I list ten of my favourite witch-based historical novels, followed by several others that have been strongly recommended.

1. Corrag, Susan Fletcher 

It is 1692 and Corrag, a wild young girl from the mountains of Scotland, has been condemned to death for her role in the Glencoe Masscare, accused of witchcraft and murder. In her filthy cell she is visited by Charles Leslie, a young Irishman with his own motives for questioning her.

As Corrag begins to tell her story, an unlikely friendship develops between them that will change both their lives. Compelling, atmospheric and exquisitely written.

2. The Witchfinder's Sister, Beth Underdown

Beth Underdown’s clever debut is a historical thriller based on the life of the 1640’s witchfinder Matthew Hopkins. Alice, Matthew’s fictional sister, is forced to return to her childhood town of Manningtree where she becomes entangled in her brother’s crazed pursuit of what he believes to be justice. Underdown brilliantly weaves fact with fiction to illustrate the disturbing paranoia and obsession behind the Essex witch hunts.

3. The King's Witch, Tracy Borman 

Historian Tracy Borman’s debut novel tells the fascinating story of Frances Gorges, a healer who is dragged to the court of James I, a man who has already condemned many for treason and witchcraft. There she becomes enmeshed in a world of intrigue and betrayal - and at great risk from the twisted machinations of Lord Cecil, the King's first minister.

The follow-up, The Devil’s Slave, is out June.

4. The Vanishing Witch, Karen Maitland

In Lincoln during the reign of Richard II, Caitlin, a dark-haired widow arrives in John of Gaunt's city with her two beautiful children. At first, Caitlin is considered a godsend, helping merchant Robert of Bassingham care for his sick wife. But when Robert's wife, and then others, die seemingly unnatural deaths, the accusations of witchcraft commence. Masterful storytelling.

5. The Familiars – Stacey Halls

17-year-old Fleetwood Shuttleworth, desperate to survive her latest pregnancy, crosses paths with Alice Gray, a mysterious young woman who agrees to become her midwife. When Alice is accused as part of the Lancashire witch trials, Fleetwood takes huge risks to try to save her – and her own unborn baby. But is Alice all that she seems?

Fast-faced, twisty and immense fun.

6. The Witch of Blackbird Pond – Elizabeth George Speare 

In 1687 orphan Kit Tyler arrives as a stranger in colonial Connecticut and feels entirely out of place. When she forms a friendship with a Quaker woman called Hannah Tupper, believed by the colonists to be a witch, Kit is forced to choose between love and a sense of duty. Old, but gold.

7. Circe, Madeline Miller 

In this epic and magnificently written novel, Miller retells the story of the mythological witch Circe. Increasingly isolated by her immortal family, Circe turns to humans for friendship, leading her to discover a power forbidden to the gods: witchcraft.

We follow Circe from the halls of Helios to exile on the remote island of Aiaia, where she learns to harness her power.

8. Witch Child, Celia Rees

In 1659, after 14-year-old Mary sees her healer grandmother hanged for witchcraft, she escapes to Massachusetts Bay Colony with the help of an unknown woman. Through Mary's journal, we learn of how, though Mary hopes to make a new life among the pilgrims, she, like her grandmother, quickly finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice, and once more she faces important choices to ensure her survival. A powerful read for all ages.

9. The Glass Girl, Caroline Lea

The Glass Girl is an atmospheric and beautifully written debut set against the backdrop of the 17th-century Icelandic witch trials and sagas. Rósa is sent to join her new husband in the remote village of Stykkishólmur, where the villagers are deeply wary of outsiders.

As she grows increasingly isolated, Rósa's suspicions grow. Her husband buried his first wife alone in the dead of night. Is her own life in danger?

10. The Poison Bed, E.C. Fremantle

In 1615 Lady Frances Carr, considered by many to be a witch, is accused of murder and imprisoned, together with her newborn baby and a wet-nurse. As Frances tells the story of her life with her first husband and manipulative uncle, and of a society full of superstition and lies, a picture begins to form. But her husband Robert Carr has his own story. Which one will save its teller? A twisty, perfectly paced thriller.

Witchy 'To be Read' Pile 

A host of other witch and witchcraft-related books have been recommended to me and I set out here a few of those which are going on my towering ‘to be read’ pile:

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. In 1666 villagers turn to sorcery, herb lore, and witch-hunting.

The Daylight Gate, in which Jeanette Winterson creates another view of the Pendle Witch Trials.

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s first novel about a young woman who believes she has sold her soul to the devil in return for freedom from her tiresome family (fair enough).

Widdershins by Helen Steadman, based on events from the Newcastle Witch Trials of 1650.

The Magpie Tree by Katherine Stansfield, exploring the relationship between witchcraft and foreigners in 1840s Cornwall.

Witches Trinity by Erika Mailman, set in Germany in 1507 when a visiting friar suggests that witchcraft is to blame for the failing crops and famine.

The Witches of Eileanan by Kate Forsyth, a historical fantasy trilogy in which the young Isabeau leads a horde of persecuted witches.

The Witches of New York by Ami McKay, a mystery set in Manhattan in 1880.

The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent, set in Salem in 1692.

The Boy Who Drew The Future, by Rhian Ivory. Set in present day and 1863, when the last witch in the UK was swum in Sible Hedingham, Essex. You can read more about it here.


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Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime and Gothic fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, is a tale of superstition, dark folklore and missing girls on the Isle of Skye.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

The Best Historical Fiction Set on Islands - By Anna Mazzola

Islands, with their closed communities, their remoteness, their uniqueness, have a special place in an author’s heart. Sometimes they become not just settings, but characters in themselves. I chose Skye for my second novel, partly because I wanted somewhere cut off (as it once was), and somewhere with its own folklore, its own beliefs. Others have gone a step further and created fictional islands: Atlantis, Azkaban, Atuan, Fraxos, Hedeby, Svalvard.

Once I’d started thinking about books set on islands, and asking others to give me their recommendations, I realised that there are in fact hundreds of excellent books set on islands. These include plenty of classics (Swallows and Amazons, Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, To the Lighthouse, The Old Man and The Sea) and so many crime novels that I’m beginning to think going to small islands is a serious health risk.

There’s also a glut of brilliant historical novels set on islands. Here is a list of my top ten favourites, in which both ‘historical fiction’ and ‘island’ are given a broad interpretation. There will be many I’ve missed, so do comment below.

1. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, 1966

The novel in which Rhys gives voice to the ‘mad woman in the attic’. Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress and the wife of a man who, though he is never named, we understand to be Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester. He renames her ‘Bertha’, declares her mad, and relocates her from the West Indies to England. Written in the 1960s but set in the early 1800s, this is a key postcolonial work, which deals with ethnic and gender inequality, displacement and injustice.

2. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell, 2010 

Mitchell transports us 1799 and to Dejima, a tiny artificial island in the bay of Nagasaki where the Dutch East India Company established a trading post. Mitchell had been backpacking through the west of Japan looking for lunch when he stumbled upon the Dejima museum. ‘I never did get the lunch that day,’ Mitchell said. ‘But I filled a notebook with information about this place I'd never heard of and resolved one day to write about it.’

In the novel, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his name but falls in love with a midwife, who is spirited away to a sinister mountain temple cult. It’s a fascinating work of ideas, longing, power and corruption.

3. Secrets of the Sea House, Elisabeth Gifford, 2010

Having fallen in love with the Hebridean island of Harris and its legends, Gifford came across an 1809 letter to The Times about a Scottish schoolmaster who claimed to have seen a mermaid. From this sprang her brilliant debut, a dual-timeline novel that tells the tale of a newly-ordained priest, Reverend Alexander Ferguson in 1860, assigned to a parish on a remote part of the island. Over a century later, Ruth, raised in children's homes after losing her mother as a young child, discovers the tiny bones of baby buried beneath their new house, the legs fused together like that of a mermaid. A beautiful story of love, hope, healing and stories.

4. The Light Between Oceans, ML Stedman, 2012 

Tom Sherbourne returns home from the Western Front trenches of World War I. He and his wife, Izzy, move to an isolated lighthouse on Janus Rock off the coast of South West Australia. One day in 1926 a boat washes ashore, containing a dead man, and a crying baby. What happens next leads to a gripping exploration of grief, temptation and love.

ML Stedman said: ‘The island of Janus Rock is entirely fictitious (although I have a placeholder for it on Google maps). But the region where the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet is real, and the climate, weather and the landscape are more or less as I’ve described them. I wrote some of the book there: It’s a very beautiful, if sometimes fierce, part of the world.’ And that is very much reflected in the novel.

5. The Book of Night Women, Marlon James, 2013 

Marlon James’ searing second novel, The Book of Night Women, is set on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 18th century.  It tells the story of green-eyed Lilith, born into slavery and orphaned at birth by her 13-year-old mother, one of the many slave girls raped by their white masters. Forced to grow up fast, Lilith begins to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman. By no means an easy read, but an essential one, it’s a story that culminates in slave revolt, blood and atonement.

‘I don’t consider myself a historical novelist,’ James has said. ‘But I am obsessed with the past. And I am obsessed with stories that weren’t told, or that weren’t told in a good way.’ As the African proverb goes: ‘Until the lion’s story is told, the story will always belong to the hunter.’

6. The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge, 2015

 

The Lie Tree, Hardinge’s seventh novel, opens with 14-year-old Faith Sunderly and her family leaving their home in Kent for the isolated (and fictional) island of Vale. Faith, forever spying, discovers they have fled to escape the growing scandal around her father’s recently published scientific findings. When her father is found dead, Faith sets out to find out what has really happened and discover the nature of her father’s investigations. This leads her to a tree that feeds off lies.
Supposedly YA, but really for all ages, this is one of my favourite Victorian-era novels, and definitely my favourite one about lying plants.

7. The Winter Isles, Antonia Senior, 2016 

Antonia Senior plunges us in to the raw and often vicious world of 12th century Scotland where Somerled, son of an ageing chieftain, must prove his own worth as a warrior. It’s a compelling story of action, warfare, love and sacrifice and one which is clearly rooted in Senior’s love of the West Coast of Scotland.

‘All my favourite places are islands,’ she says, ‘From Corsica to Mull, Iona to Ponza. As a visitor they offer a manageable, enclosed world to explore. As a writer there is something magical about islands: a world within a world. There is often surface beauty, and a sinister underbelly. They are enclosed spaces, in which people are too close to each other - that strange interplay between isolation and oppressive familiarity.’

8. Mussolini’s Island, Sarah Day, 2017 

In 1939 a series of Sicilian men were taken from their homes and imprisoned on the island of San Domino in the Adriatic Sea. Their crime? They were gay. Out of this little-known slice of history, Sarah Day has created a fascinating novel.

Francesco, a young gay man from Catania who grew up without a father, is one of those arrested and herded into a camp on the island. Meanwhile, a girl called Elena dreams of escape from her island home, imagining Francesco will save her.

‘It’s such a beautiful, peaceful place,’ Day says of San Domino, ‘and yet was used for such a dark purpose. As a visitor, arriving by boat, the island seems so idyllic, but as soon as you put yourself in the mind of a prisoner being brought there against your will, you realise how terrifying it must have been to arrive somewhere so isolated and stark. That context was really important to me when writing the book-an island can be a paradise or a prison, depending on who you are and the time in which you live.’

9. Sugar Money, Jane Harris, 2017 

Martinique, 1765. The charismatic but damaged Lucien and his more cautious older brother Emile are tasked by their French master with returning to Fort Royal in Grenada to bring back the slaves stolen by the English. Emile knows this to be a reckless mission, but, as with most things in their lives, it is something in which they have no choice. What follows is part adventure, part tragedy, and entirely compelling.

Harris has created a setting we believe in and characters we desperately want to survive. There is nothing sweet about Sugar Money, nor should there be.

10. Mr Peacock's Possessions, Lydia Syson, 2018 

It is 1879 and Mr Peacock and his family are struggling to scratch a life for themselves on a tiny volcanic island off the coast of New Zealand. At last, a ship appears, bringing six Pacific Islanders who have travelled across the ocean in search of work. All seems well until Mr Peacock’s son, Albert, goes missing.

This is a gripping mystery is woven from strands of real history. As Lydia Syson explained in her interview with History Girl Adèle Geras, the story came from her husband’s ancestors, Tom and Federica Bell, who in 1878 decided to take their six children to make their home on an uninhabited Pacific Island called Sunday Island. ‘The captain who brought them sailed away, promising to return in three months. They found their provisions were rotten and they never saw that ship again.’

Again, the island setting is crucial to the story, as Syson herself makes clear. ‘The island – so beautiful, so fertile and yet so treacherous - was a gift in terms of setting, plot and metaphor.’

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Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, set on the Isle of Skye, will be published in July 2018.

https://annamazzola.com 
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

How we talk about history - Gillian Polack

Last month you had a light post. This month you have a more solid one. This is because I want to talk about the effects the effects of the worlds writers create. I was in England for a few days at the end of October. It was entirely unexpected, and this was the reason I forgot half my blogpost. I took a ten thousand mile return trip with only a few days warning and quite a few things were affected by it.

The English branch of my family has been in Australia since the middle of the nineteenth century. This means that my relationship with England is mostly through literature and history. Given I’m a writer and also an historian (an historian of England, to boot) it’s not a simple relationship, but it’s not the same relationship that locals have. I noticed this when I walked through the streets of Exeter and when I talked to people at the university. As an Australian, I’m a favoured visitor, but I’m definitely not a local.

Exeter, autumn, 2017 picture: Gillian Polack

I’m giving you pictures I took in Exeter to remind you of this, for it’s important. Very important.

I teach writers how to write about people who come from different cultural backgrounds to themselves. Many writers have no idea how to do this. They write everything from their own viewpoint, as if another viewpoint is impossible to tell a novel from. 

One thing I love about History Girls and why I am delighted to be writing for them is that these writers are aware of who they are. They write in a complex world. This means they’re less likely to fall back on stereotypes due to lazy thinking. 

Exeter's Halloween 2017, picture: Gillian Polack

All fiction writers use stereotypes and tropes. It’s essential to make a novel work. The problem is when we use them unthinkingly. This is why I have such respect for writers who write about others with that bit of care. 

The thing about historical fiction is that it’s ALL about others. We bring the past into the present in a very personal way. We’re bring the lives of others into our lives. This is why respect is so important. 

Those we write about are dead: they can’t argue back. I wanted to argue with a writer all this afternoon, for she wrote Jews into her fiction in a negative way, as if there is no good in our existence. She’s still around and maybe, one day, I’ll get that discussion. I can’t ask any medieval Jews how they feel about work that associates them with the blood libel, for they’re gone.

‘Respect’ doesn’t necessarily mean being nice. It means understanding. It means taking intellectual and emotional steps and working past stereotypes and past hate and past tradition and finding out as much as we can about the real person.

Respect is complicated, Exeter 2017 picture: Gillian Polack

How does this apply to English history? 

I want to talk about two key points here.

First, England is one of the most written-about places in historical fiction, and certain periods are written about more than others. Regency England, Victorian England, the Middle Ages: these all have their own character for us. This character doesn’t come from the actual places and times, but from the number of novels written about them. All the themes and character types are brought together in our minds and create a fictional England.

The England of our dreams picture: Gillian Polack

This is a subject that’s been really well studied for Regency England in particular. Scholars have traced the differences between the actual England of that time and the influence of Georgette Heyer in creating the way we think about these things fictionally. 

I’m one of a number of Medieval historians who work on understanding these things for the Middle Ages. I’m also part of a number of historians who spend time teaching writers how to look beyond the fictional view and to see the people hidden beneath the stories and stereotypes. This is why The Middle Ages Unlocked exists. Writers said to me “We like it that you want us to think harder and do more research, but it isn’t easy – write us a reference book.” Katrin Kania and I did that. That was a much earlier stage in a conversation between historians, readers and writers that will probably last my whole life.

The stage I’m at now is a more troublesome one. 

When I teach world building to writers, I teach them how to think about and research the world for their novel. Traditionally, world building is a subject taught to writers who use fantastical worlds: science fiction and fantasy, for the most part. I teach it to all writers. Novelists who are setting a story in their own street are not actually setting it in the precise world they live in. We write fiction, after all. I use world building techniques as tools to help writers sort this out and create a better story.

Many writers who use history in their fiction tend to ‘own’ the history. They’ve built it for their novel, with a great deal of heart and a truckload of work. This is not a problem if they see it as building a world for their novel, for they’re owning the history for the world of their novel. It can be close to us, but it isn’t us. It can be based on real history, but it’s not the same thing. 

When they say it’s real history, a writer claims deep and special insights into the lives of others. Some of these claims are genuine: they share their characters with us. They don’t share all interpretations of historical people, however, only their own. 

Going back to where I began, this is important in another way, which is my second point. When I or someone else from outside England write about England, when any of us write about a place and time that’s not our own, we need to remember that our special ownership, as writers, doesn't have a more important cultural place than the lives of people who live there. 

Real people lie in our dream places   picture: Gillian Polack

If I were to write a story of Exeter or even a history of Exeter, I’d be writing it as an outsider. This isn’t actually a problem. Outsiders have special insights. Our responsibility is to remember that those who live in a country are connected more strongly than we are. That we write about their home. 

Even our special insights should never be permitted to eradicate their relationship and understanding of their own homeland. 

We entertain. We enrich. We create. But we should do all this with respect.

Treasuring history through fiction, by Gillian Polack

This month other History Girls are writing about favourite books. I did that recently, so I thought, to balance those posts, I’d give you some context. Those books that we read and that we treasure and that we remember are part of a gorgeous cultural pattern. Right now, that cultural pattern means that historical fiction is changing. I want to look at what exactly is happening. 

Photo: Gillian Polack, Sydney 2015

Two decades ago there was a vast gulf between historians and fiction writers. This hasn’t always been the case. It wasn’t so much the case in the time of Walter Scott. And it’s not the case right now. It’s now socially far more acceptable to read certain types of fiction as part of enjoying history. The way history is written into many novels has changed: it’s more sophisticated, more aware and far more researched.

Writers have changed. Some of the writers who changed are here, in the History Girls. They looked at the history they fell in love with and they said “We can do this better.” They researched and they learned and they understood and they brought to their novels a greater depth of understanding. It didn’t happen overnight, but if you look at any of the established writers here, you’ll find that, over the years, their work has developed.

I discovered how this happened when I started researching historical fiction writers. Historical fiction writers have always loved history (why would someone write a novel on a historical theme if that someone didn’t enjoy history, after all) but what I discovered was that their attitude to research is at the heart of the sea-change in historical fiction. Some talk to scholars on their specialist subjects. Some frequent specialist archives. So many historical fiction writers do site tours and understand the place the novel is set. 

When I looked at the different attitudes towards research that writers of different kinds of novels have (for a book, which is still a new release and which I am still celebrating), the attitudes of historical fiction writers were closer to those of academic historians than those of science fiction writers, even of science fiction writers who write time travel or alternate histories. There’s still a big difference between history and fiction, but in recent years, historical fiction writers have worked to diminish that gulf.

Next came the readers. I discovered this very personally when I suddenly became more popular at conferences and conventions. Readers wanted to talk about my fiction with me, but they were even more interested in understanding history. These active and questioning readers of novels don’t just pose their technical questions to the historians: readers can be a lot tougher on the history fiction writers use than they used to be. 

There have always been some readers who knew a lot and questioned a lot and thought deeply about the subjects of novels, but the sea change means that there are a lot more of them. I meet them when they want a signature for the Beast (aka The Middle Ages Unlocked, which I co-wrote with Katrin Kania), for they love checking out the sort of background their favourite writers might use. Their favourite writers are usually those same writers who have done so much extra work on the history for their novels.

Some readers will spend as much money on books related to the history in their favourite fiction as they spend on that fiction itself. I’ve been asked about my sources for Langue[dot]doc1305 so often that I put a list of them on my blog, and written articles about them. And I’m not alone in this. So many writers end up talking about their experience in archives or in exploring primary sources or establishing an accurate date for an event as much as they talk about the characters their readers love and love to hate.

Readers do not work alone. They often join groups with similar interests. The Historical Novel Society has been a critical component of this change in historical fiction, and so have organisations like the SCA and the Richard III Society. 

Popular history and serious history are no longer as deeply divided. This opens the door to readers who want to approach novels with more insight into the history and more of an understanding of what possibilities it holds.

Writers respond to their readers. Often, they share similar interests. Elizabeth Chadwick, for instance, is a member of Regia Anglorum, a re-enactment group. She doesn’t just write the Middle Ages: she researches it, performs it and comes to understand it on many levels and from many angles. She is not alone. I can think of at least a half dozen writers who delve into the past during their spare time and whose novels reflect this. The tales these writers tell are still easy to read, but the history in them is better understood and more carefully thought out. It’s part of a complex feedback loop that has led to where we are right now, where historical fiction is successful commercially while its readers and writers see its historical contexts more clearly. They create possibly the best bridging between history and the general public that we’ve had since Walter Scott.

Compared with the demands of writers and readers, the critical world is a step behind. This is because the critical world is undergoing changes of its own. As I love saying, this is another story for another time, but it’s worth noting here. It’s also worth noting that blogs like the History Girls will help the world of criticism catch up, as it becomes clearer and clearer what audiences demand from historical fiction and what writers are willing to give.

Yesterday the History Girls turned five years old. I’m hoping it has many, many good years ahead because it’s very much a part of these changes in the way we see history and think about the past. It helps bring the work of scholars out of the university and gives it directly to the reader, whether the reader is on the train, on the beach or sneaking in a few pages of a favourite book on an e-reader.

Memoir vs fiction, by Y S Lee

Over the past two years, I’ve been reading memoirs from survivors of the Pacific War – that is, the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. Nearly all of them are awe-inspiring, and I’ve already blogged here about Freddy Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral and Nona Baker’s Pai Naa: The Story of Nona Baker.

Refresher: historical sources are typically divided into two categories: primary (artifacts from or documents created during the time of the events in question) and secondary sources (an item that interprets and analyzes the primary sources). It’s a broad-strokes sort of distinction that makes putting together a bibliography more straightforward. Although memoirs are typically written after the events in question, they are generally classed as primary sources because their authors were involved in the relevant events.

However! Having recently read a fair amount of memoir, I’ve come to distrust its simple categorization as a primary historical source. This unease began with my first Pacific War memoir, Freddy Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral (1949). It’s a brilliant book, packed with adventure and anthropological insight. Freddy’s voice is distinctive and charming, and while he shies away from emotional and psychological insight, I finished the book with a strong appreciation for his character (possibly too strong: my husband took to calling him "your historical boyfriend”).

Freddy Spencer Chapman

Still, I wondered how Freddy could possibly recall the terrifying and chaotic events of his three years in the Malayan jungle in such impeccable detail. This is a challenge in all memoirs. I am hard-pressed to remember what I ate for lunch three days ago, and in times of conflict or high excitement I often question, after the fact, my memories of what went down. Yes, Freddy kept detailed diaries while he was in the jungle, but on several occasions he was forced to destroy them because they were at risk of falling into enemy hands. His surviving diaries are held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, but they cover only a portion of his time in the jungle.

After reading Freddy’s memoir, I turned to Brian Moynahan’s recent biography of Freddy, Jungle Soldier: The True Story of Freddy Spencer Chapman, for context. Moynahan is a biased biographer – a longtime fan of Freddy who wants to burnish and prolong his hero’s fame. Even so, at one point, Moynahan points out a significant discrepancy between Freddy’s surviving diary and an event he describes in The Jungle is Neutral.

For publication, Freddy altered the event, probably in order to make it feel more dramatic. Moynahan disagrees with this decision, believing the original diary entry to be superior in terms of tension and the sheer danger of the situation. Either way, though, we now have a primary source (diary) imperfectly converted to a memoir - which is still technically a primary source. Yet we already know that it’s been corrupted. And if we have evidence of this with just one of Freddy’s surviving diaries, how many other events have been elided or embellished or just imperfectly reconstructed? We’ll never know.

This question becomes even more complicated when memoirs are written long after the events they describe and are mediated through others. Pai Naa: The Story of Nona Baker was first published in 1959, fourteen years after Nona Baker emerged from the Malayan jungle, contributed source material to Freddy Spencer Chapman’s official report on local Communist organizations, and returned to England.

Nona Baker is not credited as the author of her memoir!

Baker doesn’t mention keeping a jungle diary. Her narrative voice is quiet, wry, self-deprecating. She doesn’t in any way seek to portray herself as a heroine: rather, she insists that she was only “busily saving [her] own skin”. Perhaps this is why it took her fourteen years to produce a memoir, and why she distanced herself from the story even further: even though her narrative is written in the first person, the book is officially "by" Dorothy Thatcher and Robert Cross. To what extent is Baker’s voice really her own, here? And what sorts of artistic license have Thatcher and Cross taken with the shape of the story?

My last example today (though I have many more!) is actually a novel by Han Suyin (best known for her 1952 novel A Many Splendoured Thing, which was filmed as Love is a Many Splendored Thing and was also later adapted as an American soap opera). And the Rain My Drink is set during the Malayan Emergency of the early 1950s – the last days of the British empire in southeast Asia.

Han Suyin, the pen name of Elisabeth Comber

While And the Rain My Drink is technically fiction, Han Suyin inserts herself (using a name that is itself a pseudonym) into the novel as a character. This is a postmodern move which ought to undermine the ideas of narrative voice and the conceit of “truth” throughout the work. But the character Suyin tells her story in the first person, in conventional and realist terms. Because of this, and since the character Suyin’s biographical details map directly onto those of the author Han Suyin, the whole novel reads instead like a memoir of Han Suyin’s time in Malaya, with a few imaginative excursions. It presses the genre of memoir into the services of fiction - an act that points up the highly contrived nature of memoir itself.

Perhaps this is only appropriate – that we should end up in such an ambiguous tumult. A wide view of history will always include competing voices, and the line between fact and fiction begins to blur immediately upon examination. I’m thrilled to be feeling my way, step by careful step, in the company of such splendid adventurers.

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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries/The Agency Quartet (Walker Books/Candlewick Press).