THIS MONTH I'M ON ABOUT SIX-PACKS – Elizabeth Fremantle

Matthew Macfadyen as a smouldering Mr Darcy

For some weeks now we've been bombarded with images of a sultry Aidan Turner, topless, with a tanned and rippling six pack. Now personally, enjoyable though Poldark has been on a Sunday evening, I'm not one of those multitudes who finds Mr Turner's phwoar factor off the scale. So I was rather pleased to find Matthew Macfadyen, a regular costume drama hero, speaking out about the narcissism and the inaccuracy of the historical drama six-pack.

'But all those men from the past were doing manual work, even the posh ones were riding and generally doing manly things, weren't they?' I hear you say. But Macfadyen rightly points out that a character in a period drama wouldn't have done crunches. A six-pack is something that can only be achieved in the gym with specific exercises – it is a modern phenomenon.

He talks of being expected to sculpt his torso for his role as Mr Darcy and also having acted in a series about soldiers in the former Yugoslavia and working with the Royal Greenjackets –  some of the fittest men he had ever encountered and none of them sporting a six-pack. Macfadyen is taking a stand against the vanity of it all and I thoroughly approve.

Some gratuitous nudity – not a sculpted calf in sight!

The ideal body changes over the years, but filmmakers are hamstrung in needing their heroes to appeal to modern audiences. We know that Henry VIII was inordinately proud of his manly calves but I can't imagine the people who produced The Tudors requesting lingering shots of Jonathan Rhys-Meyer's lower legs instead of his ripped abs.

It is the female body that has been scrutinised for centuries and wilfully shaped to meet the desires of  men and now our inherently narcissistic culture is forcing a similar set of expectations on men. It's tempting to say as women that we have been subject to the male gaze for long enough and now its our turn to shift the gaze onto men. But this makes me uncomfortable; I feel it is something we should resist as it is reductive and shallow.

If Macfadyen can manage to be a sex symbol and remain fully clothed then more power to him and, if truth be told, I'd take him over Turner any day.


Elizabeth Fremantle's novel WATCH THE LADY will be published in June.
To find out about her Tudor trilogy go to ElizabethFremantle.com
Twitter – @lizfremantle
Facebook – Elizabeth Fremantle Author

Hijacking History or the Alarming Burglar Alarm of Ye Olde Cornwall Catherine Johnson

OK I'm starting with Poldark. Yes the new one. Calm down ladies this isn't Aidan Turner topless. This was in the paper. It's a screen grab. Cast your eye up to the house in the background. No, not Aidan Turner, the house. There between the down pipe and the shiny shiny modern glass window a boxy, twenty first century, burglar alarm.

BBC's new Poldark rescuing Demelza

No I didn't notice it ether, but I did read an article about the fabulous teeth of the lead characters and how the screenwriter  - congratulations Debbie Horsfield - argued that at least the peasantry should have some visible decay. I think we're all used to the glaring teeth on TV and I can forget most things if the story is good. (Although I was wondering about the bridles). And I thought Poldark with it's galloping and frocks and more galloping and tricorns was actually pretty enjoyable Sunday night fare.

So that got me thinking about the liberties I take with history. I expect most of you know my I am crap story by now, but yes, history lessons and me? Not a good mix. My report for History, aged 14 said;

'Catherine's written work is completely inadequate and disorganised...'

I did so poorly in what is now Year 9, I was barred from taking the O level. In fact, my mark for the end of year exam was the worst in the year. I am not a historian. So I can be excused if I don't get everything absolutely spot on, can't I? 

Well, let me say loud and clear I'm not talking about the big stuff, it's a matter of pride that mostly, nearly, almost, everything is as it should be, is as near to how it was as I can possibly make it. It irks when reviewers argue you got your facts wrong when you didn't. 

But I cannot lie. There are times when I have bent historical facts to my will. 

In The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo, out in July (I am sorry but you'll get a lot of this from me over the next few months) I took a real story and sort of riffed on it. Mary Willcox was real, but the story I've told has meant messing about with her age, shifting the time line around, in order to reference Frankenstein since you ask, and making up people who did not exist. I wanted so to tell her story as a novel but I ended up reshaping (crafting?) and embroidering and downright inventing so much that it is almost complete fiction. There is a disclaimer in the book, so that's OK, isn't it?

And the script I'm working on at the moment set in the latter half of the eighteenth century. I've stuck to the truth of the background facts. My characters are all inventions, but it could have happened. I'm worried about boats and sailings and desperately making sure it really could have actually worked.

I think that's all I aim for. Could have been. I wouldn't stick Queen Victoria on the mobile phone in the background or put someone in a regency frock with platform heels. I like to do the right thing.

But I have to admit in Sawbones there was one anachronism I couldn't get round. It wasn't revolvers rather than pistols, it wasn't any of the medical science. It was that most unremarkable piece of door furniture the letter box. Paris had them in 1790 but they weren't commonplace (note common place it could be argued that a modern man like William McAdam - my hero's master would have had one fitted) in London until the start of the nineteenth century. I tried to get around the letter box but couldn't. I needed one. So I kept it in.

Are there any things in your books that shouldn't be there? Have you noticed anything in your reading that's bought you up short?

Go on, tell all....

Do we choose our historical periods or do they choose us? by Eliza Graham

We have an extra guest post today from Eliza Graham, who latest book is The History Room. She raises some very interesting questions for all writers of historical fiction.

I’ve just been rereading Winston Graham’s Poldark novels, set in Cornwall during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and memorably filmed by the BBC in the seventies. Sadly, despite our shared surname, Winston Graham is no relation of mine.



As a teenager I was smitten by Poldark: the dashing men galloping over cliff tops between shipwrecks, daring raids on prisons, and romantic encounters with women in daringly cut bodices. But there was so much more in the series: real historical understanding of the period and of how people related to one another.



Now I’m returning to the full series of twelve novels with a writer’s eye and rediscovering just how good they are, particularly the first seven novels. I’m addicted and I’m delighted about my addiction. My subconscious has latched on to something it badly needs. I own many books on the craft of novel-writing, but I learn most from compulsive rereading of someone else’s novels. But while I’m feeding my addiction and trying to learn from a master writer, I’m also musing on this point: what is it about particular historical people or periods that draws us to them?



Winston Graham wrote the first of the series, Ross Poldark, in 1945 and it’s the story of a soldier returning to his home, having spent time in America as a prisoner of war. It’s impossible not to see the parallels between Ross’s return from the American War of Independence and the period in which the novel was written. Ross struggles to regain the things he left behind to go to war: home, livelihood, love, just as returning soldiers in 1945 struggled to adapt to bombed and disrupted homes and lost family and friends. I actually wrote a novel, Jubilee, with a returning POW who can’t reintegrate to a quiet life on a family farm. It was a challenge to convey that sense of dislocation and alienation. I wish I’d thought to re-read Ross Poldark first.

Fast forward a little and I’m now reading Winston Graham’s middle Poldark novels, written in the seventies. The Four Swans is essentially a novel about four very different marriages. The protagonist in each of the marriages act out some of the hottest debates of the seventies: women’s rights, the nature of an equal marriage, what happens when a partner is attracted by a third party, whether there can be rape in marriage. We may be reading about Georgian Cornwall but the observations are doubly interesting when simultaneously applied to the landscape of marriage in the late twentieth century.


Very occasionally I wonder whether anachronisms have crept into the books. A mauve dress is described; I believe the dye was a Victorian invention. A character talks about a ‘week end’, a term probably unfamiliar to the late Georgians. Occasionally the dialogue doesn't sound exactly of its time. But it’s the mark of a great novelist that none of these things matter: the essence of eighteenth-century Cornwall, its remoteness (at least three days away from London) its reliance on mining, fishing and agriculture, the fear of invasion by the French, the start of the Industrial Revolution and the early sparks of the Romantic movement, they’re all there.



I’d forgotten how much of the industrial life of Cornwall in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is in the books. Family fortunes ebb and flow as mines are closed or reopened or as fresh lodes are discovered. The miners work in dangerous and unpleasant conditions: fatal accidents are common. But they can do well, far better than farm labourers. When the economy slumps and the miners are laid off they don’t behave like saints: a number take to armed robbery and over-enthusiastic plundering of shipwrecks. As Winston Graham wrote on through the seventies he was entering a period of increasingly strident industrial stand-offs between the unions and various governments. Perhaps some anxiety about this failure to find a balance between workers’ rights and industrial efficiency transferred itself to the books. Ross Poldark is a ‘good’ employer: he tries to provide work in his mines as long as he possibly can, to the point of bankruptcy. But he doesn’t scruple to deal firmly with any challenge to his authority: sacking drunken and unruly servants and threatening homelessness to antisocial tenants. At the same time, he turns a blind eye to minor misdemeanours. He is the attractively humane face of capitalism and in great contrast to his arch-enemy, George Warleggan, with his compulsion to own and control everything and everyone.



I find myself returning my own work-in-progress, a novel partly set in the thirties and eighties and looking at it for the freshness I’ve found in these favourite historical novels. If I don’t find it, I will have failed.



This new book concerns itself inter alia with Kindertransport children. I’ve realized that the novel is actually the fourth I’ve written that contains refugee or migrant characters of some kind. Perhaps I’m writing about one of the big dilemmas for our country at the moment: how to be humane and enlightened, yet realistic when it comes to making and enforcing immigration policy; how to retain the prized parts of national and regional identity while welcoming newcomers. I’m an immigrant’s daughter myself and I’m possibly also writing about a part of my family history that I don’t consciously think about very much.



It’s not a new dilemma. Going back to the Poldark novels, I recall how Winston Graham describes the career of the incomer doctor, Dwight Enys, who painstakingly builds up the trust of the locals over a period of years, surviving an affair with a miner’s wife and a dental operation that goes badly wrong, resulting in death. Dwight isn’t ‘foreign’ in terms of being non-British, but he faces many of the issues of the immigrant in establishing himself in a community.



So, whether it’s eighteenth-century Cornwall, or seventeenth-century France, Thomas Cromwell or Charlemagne, my question is: what is it about particular periods of history, or historical characters, that draws us to them? And what do those choices say about ourselves as readers and writers?