EVENTS, DEAR BOY, EVENTS..... by Adèle Geras

 There really is no excuse, so I am going to come clean.  It's been so long since I posted on this blog that I had forgotten completely that it was my turn to write a piece for yesterday and I am grateful to the eagle-eyed Sue Purkiss for reminding me ....I have dropped everything and run to my laptop, desperately trying to think of something interesting to put into this intimidating expanse of white. I apologise for this lapse. Lord knows, there's been enough going on in the world over the last few weeks to make everyone forget most things, but I am not going to write about Current Events. 

Rather, I'm going to put up a few photos of what I've been doing over the last six months: the time that's elapsed since my last post. 

Apart from Covid news, which everyone knows and which I'm also not going to write about, this last six months has been concerned with launching a book in the middle of a pandemic, and trying hard to get back to work again on the novel that comes next. 

So on March 4th, 2021 Dangerous Women, by Hope Adams (my pseudonym) was published. 

I had a wonderful bouquet of flowers from my publishers, Michael Joseph, and a very lovely Zoom Launch, complete with  tins of cocktails sent in advance. I had signed lots of tip -in sheets and stickers to go in the fronts of books, but when the shops opened on April 12th, no copies of  Dangerous Women were visible in Cambridge. Since then, I've seen one copy in Heffer's, (who had stocked five copies) but that's the only one I've seen in the wild. It's true that I haven't been around much visiting other shops but I hear it's  selling reasonably well, so I'm hoping that someone somewhere has seen it. All the reviews I know of seem to have liked it so I'm happy. And the paperback is due early next year, I think, with a different striking cover. I adored the hardback cover, too but the paperback is lovely in its own way too!

My mind is now turning to my second novel as Hope Adams. It's based on the work of the Scottish artist, Phoebe Anna Traquair. 

At first, I thought I would have the artist herself as a character in my novel, much in the same way that I put the read Kezia Hayter and Captain Charles Ferguson into  Dangerous Women, but I soon realised that because of the demands of my plot,  I needed to create a fictional character based on the artist, while using her beautiful work for my purposes in as faithful a way as possible.  The book will be set in Edinburgh in 1899, so I hope will have elements of the Gothic about it. Here is one example of Traquair's work: 

This is the Mortuary Chapel in the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh. Children figure large in my novel....I think. I have yet to write a single word though I've been planning for a very long time.

For the rest, I've had a very pleasant summer. In the Cotswolds, in a Spa where my daughters took me for a weekend, (last year's Christmas present!) along with my granddaughter....that was  real treat. I've looked after my granddog for a week, and kept on walking and reading and watching far too much television.  I've been up to London to  see Leopoldstradt by Tom Stoppard and that was lovely: a real pleasure to be in a theatre again. 

I hope very much that the next time I write on this blog I'll have a more considered post to regale you with! I will put the date in giant letters on every calendar....

Phoebe Anna Traquair by Adèle Geras

This is a self -portrait of the Scottish artist,  Phoebe Anna Traquair.  Until about eighteen years ago, I had never heard of her and when I mention her name, very few people in England know who she is. Although she was born in Dublin in 1852, she's associated with Scotland and in particular with Edinburgh where she lived with her husband, Ramsay Traquair, a professor of palaeontology  She is an artist of the most astonishing variety and as well as her murals, she illustrated books, designed jewellery and created the most beautiful embroideries. She died in 1936.

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Many years ago, I received a Christmas card, with a beautiful image of angels on it. I made a note of Traquair's name, and of the fact that the image was from the Song School of a Cathedral in Edinburgh. And I put it in the box where I keep all images I can't bear to throw away. Then, in 2009, I was a speaker at the Edinburgh Literary Festival.

 To cut a long story short, we found the Catholic Apostolic Church. It is now a wedding venue called the Mansfield Traquair Centre and I do urge anyone who can to make every effort to see it in real life. 

When we visited, the place was quite empty. Only the building itself was there to wonder at. The walls were covered with most beautiful murals, illustrating for the most part, the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. I fell in love with Traquair's images at that point and determined to find out what I could about the woman who painted them.

Flash forward many years. Much happened. We moved to Cambridge. My husband died. I decided to write a different sort of novel under a pseudonym: Hope Adams. My first novel under this name, Dangerous Women, comes out from Michael Joseph (and Berkeley in the USA)  in February next year, and that's about the Rajah Quilt. I have written about it on this blog.

What I do in the Hope Adams books is: I superimpose a fictional story, invented entirely by me, on to what's known about a real artist. In the case of Dangerous Women, it was Kezia Hayter, and when I began thinking about what I could do next, my thoughts immediately turned to  Phoebe Anna Traquair.

I bought a book by Elizabeth Cumming, called  Phoebe Anna Traquair, 1852-1936,  published by the National Galleries of Scotland and in 2019, I made a trip with Helen Craig to Edinburgh and met Elizabeth, who showed us round the Mansfield Traquair Centre and told us  much both about the artist and the way she went about the work. She has been enormously helpful to me throughout the process so far and I'm very grateful to her.  Traquair was a small woman and used a scaffold to reach the enormously high spaces.  The thought of her, in her overall, and with her red hair bound up in a cap, covering that vast space with beautiful images was fascinating and moving. 

In the 1880s and 1890s, mural decoration was an art form much admired by the Art and Crafts movement. Traquair was part of a thriving artistic community in Edinburgh and beyond. 

Between 1885 and 1901  she worked on the decoration of three Edinburgh Buildings: the Mortuary Chapel of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, (later moved to a new hospital and repainted), the Song School at St Mary's Cathedral and lastly, the Catholic Apostolic Church in Mansfield Place.


This is an image from the Song School and when I saw it,  I recognised the scarlet-winged angels from that long ago Christmas card. 

I am now in the process of  working out my fictional story with which the work and life of this marvellous, under- recognised artist will be entwined. The title is there already, I think, though nothing is ever fixed till it's fixed. Her Scarlet Wings is what the book is called at this stage....I'm looking forward to spending the next few months with these images in front of my eyes. 

The Rajah Quilt and I....by Adèle Geras

There will be very little by way of illustration in this post. I am unsure of what's in copyright and what's not, so unless I'm quite certain of  not contravening any laws, I'm going to leave this piece with no pictures of the very thing I'm writing about: The Rajah Quilt.  Below is a photograph of the cover of a  book I have, published by National Gallery of Australia and given to me by Carolyn Ferguson, of whom more later.... 

In 2009, I visited an exhibition called QUILTS at the V&A in London. Among the many astonishing and beautiful pieces of patchwork, there was one that particularly caught my attention. This was a coverlet made by some of the transported female convicts on the ship Rajah, which set off from London in April, 1841 bound for van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania).  I stood in front of it for a long time, amazed at its beauty and struck by its interesting  history.

On this voyage, the convicts were accompanied by Kezia Hayter, a young woman of 23, who was a relative of George Hayter, one of Queen Victoria's court painters. She had been helping the Ladies of the Prison Committee to make life for women prisoners in London's gaols more bearable and she was appointed as a Matron to accompany the women on the Rajah and help them acquire  needleworking skills which would come in  useful in their new lives on the other side of the world. 

I realised, as soon as I left the V&A, that one day I would write about this story: the voyage and the making of the patchwork.  

More than a decade later, in early 2021, a novel by me, called DANGEROUS WOMEN, will be published simultaneously by Michael Joseph in UK and Berkley in the USA. It will, however, not appear under my name but under my pseudonym: Hope Adams.

I have three reasons for adopting a pseudonym for this book. The first is: it's not the sort of book I have ever written before (a historical novel for adults, inspired by a real event) Secondly, Hope Adams is the name I used to submit the book to publishers. I didn't want anyone who read it at that stage to be influenced one way or another by knowing about my other books.  And thirdly, it feels right to have a new name for what has been a kind of reinvention of the sort of book I write. I chose Hope because I was living in hope all the time I was writing the book over the last few years, and Adams because it's at the beginning of the alphabet and because, unlike Geras, you don't  have to tell people how to pronounce it. The pseudonym is not a secret. I've already done events under that name, and I will be putting up tweets from and about Hope Adams' progress and the publication of the novel on Twitter. 

Between 2009 and 2017, I thought about the book and picked it up and put it down from time to time. In 2010 we moved from Manchester to Cambridge. I wrote two novels Cover Your Eyes and Love or Nearest Offer (pub Quercus pbk) which could be described as 'women's fiction.'

In 2018, I wrote the first 20,000 words or so of what became Conviction. I submitted it to an agent (Nelle Andrew) under my pseudonym and felt very lucky that she offered to represent me. 

A lot of hard rewriting then followed and in early 2019, the novel was bought in a two- book deal. This is a link to the  piece about it in the Bookseller: 

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/michael-joseph-snaps-devastating-debut-inspired-convict-ship-1175156?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=Morning%20Briefing%20-%20280120

I was much relieved to see this appear, because almost from my first sight of the Rajah Quilt, I've been worried that someone might beat me to it, and write a novel about this historical event before my own book appeared.  My next novel, which I hope to be writing this year, is inspired by the  work of the  Scottish artist, Phoebe Anna Traquair.

I said I would mention Carolyn Ferguson again. When we moved to Cambridge, I met her again after not seeing her for several decades. We were at school together but had lost touch entirely. Then she emailed me and it was a happy coincidence that we'd both ended up in Cambridge. But even better....and ever so slightly spookier...Carolyn is not only a gifted quilter herself but also an expert on 19th century textiles who has written quite extensively about ... the Rajah Quilt. I felt as though I'd been gifted a cross between a wonderful resource and a special guiding light for the novel: someone who was as struck with Kezia Hayter's achievements as I was. I cannot overstate what a  great help to me she's been. If the book has any historical authenticity, it's thanks to Carolyn.

I've not said much about what happens in the story, apart from the one fact we know: that the patchwork coverlet was made. I've  is constructed a fictional narrative around what is known about this very well-documented voyage. I hope that readers will enjoy the book and give Hope Adams  a welcome when she appears in the shops next year.