The Road Goes Ever On... Celia Rees

So begins The Walking Song, composed by Bilbo Baggins and sung in J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit and sometimes in the Lord of the Rings. They do a lot of walking in both, so a walking song must have come in handy. Both books are quests and quests often involve a lot of journeying, often on foot, sometimes on horseback. Quests never seem slow moving, although the characters might move slowly. That is because being on the move allows things to happen. Journeying allows the characters to have new experiences; to learn more about the world and about themselves. 

Quests and journeying are most often associated with fantasy but they are the mainstay of all kinds of fiction. If you want things to happen, send your main character on a journey, voluntarily, or not. If they don't want to go, have them kidnapped.

I often take my characters on journeys. It gets them out of the house, out of their comfort zone, puts them on their mettle, presents them with new challenges, new places to see and new characters with whom they can fight or fall in love. In Witch Child, Mary goes to America and then off into the wilderness in Sorceress,. In Pirates! Nancy leaves Bristol for the West Indies and in the company of her friend Minerva, she sails the seven seas. In Sovay, the eponymous heroine journeys first to London and then to Paris.  In The Fool's Girl, Violetta travels from Illyria to London. I don't write about stay at home kind of girls.

Sending your heroines (or heroes) on journeys demands a certain kind of research: modes of travel (beyond shanks's pony), travel times - how long to x from y using z transport, where to stop on the way.  This, in turn, leads the writer to a certain kind of writing, in particular travel journals. It is always best to read a contemporary account of the kind of journey that you want your character to make if said account is available, particularly if it is written by an excellent writer, as these accounts often are. Daniel Defoe's  A Tour Thro' The Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies , for example, or Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary, Being the Diary of Celia Fiennes

Memorial to Celia Fiennes

Even if the intrepid traveler is not an exact contemporary of your fictional character, I always reason that, until quite recently, travel didn't change markedly for quite long periods of time. Fifty years here or there doesn't make a whole lot of difference. The detail and insights such writers provide are far more important than a slavish adherence to dates.

Research has introduced me to a whole new area of literature and one I have come to thoroughly enjoy, especially since I don't have to stir from chair or study to have the most fantastic adventures, visit places, landscapes, cityscapes, even countries that are not there any more. Books like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her account of her travels in Yogoslavia before the Second World War, or Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water where he describes his journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, allow us to time travel, which is what the writer of historical fiction wants to do most of all.

 Books like these, or Robert McFarlane's The Old Ways make me want to pack an old knapsack like Bilbo Baggins and be on my way, off to find my own adventures, but if that's not possible,  and it rarely is, then reading about someone else doing it is the next best thing. The other best thing is writing about it: taking the journey in your own head, with someone like Patrick Leigh Fermor or Celia Fiennes guiding your every step.

Does anyone else have favourite travelling companions of a literary kind?



Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Mother of the More Famous Mary – Celia Rees

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 - 1797

I always like women who are ‘vilified’. They have usually lived unconventional lives and have done something, or written something not to the liking of the (male) establishment. That makes them interesting on two counts:  interesting anyway, I like people who break rather than make the rules, and interesting to me as a writer of historical fiction.  When I’m writing in this genre, girls are my main characters. I make no apologies for this. It is a conscious decision. Boys and men have enough coverage. I want to broadcast voices less heard, give life to stories disregarded, unrecorded or forgotten. I search out women who led unusual and often transgressive lives. I’m not looking at the average. I’m looking for what it was possible for women to do.  For Witch Child and Sorceress, it was the ‘Unbridled Spirits’ of the English Revolution, and their sisters in America who settled the land there, or were captured by Native Americans but lived to tell their tale as redeemed, or unredeemed, captives. For Pirates! it was those Female Sailors Bold, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. For Sovay it was Mary Wollstonecraft. It annoys me when critics, as they sometimes do, dismiss my books as ‘rollicking good reads, but not history’. All I can do is give an ironic smile, shrug and mourn their woeful ignorance of the history of their own sex.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s life was unconventional in the extreme. She had affairs, she lived with men while still unmarried, she bore a child out of wedlock, and perhaps most shocking of all, she wrote pamphlets challenging the views of her male contemporaries. She took on the major thinkers of the day, both conservative and radical. She wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790, as a riposte to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Two years later, she answered Tom Paine’s Rights of Man with A Vindication of the Rights of Women, putting the case for the other half of the human race. She even took the sainted Rousseau to task for his dismissal of women. Burke was a pillar of the establishment; Tom Paine the leading radical thinker of the day; Rousseau wrote the Social Contract on which the American and French Revolutions were based, but Mary Wollstonecraft was determined to have her say and did not regard her relative youth, her lack of formal education, or her sex as prohibitions. She demanded to have her opinion heard. She saw it as her right.

‘It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity – and make them, as part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.’

Mary Wollstonecraft was arguing for equal rights, for men and women alike. She was the first to make such a radical claim and her audacity catapulted her to fame. It earned her the title ‘hyena in petticoats’ but she would not be intimidated or bullied into silence. She was well before her time. It would take close to a hundred years before men gained the right to vote, let alone women, but the call she made for equality would echo down from one century to another, to be taken up by the Pankhursts and the Suffragettes in Britain and by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and The National Woman Suffrage Association in America. Her voice would not be, could not be silenced.

Her intellectual daring was matched by her physical courage. At a time when most people were heading in the opposite direction, she went to Paris at the height of the Revolution to witness events for herself. She arrived barely a month before Louis XVI was guillotined and joined a group of expatriates which included the British writer Helen Maria Williams. She fell passionately in love with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, and had a daughter, Fanny, by him.  She stayed in France through the height of the Revolution, even though foreigners were interdit, subject to arrest and the threat of the guillotine. Her An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was published in 1794.

 

















She returned to England in 1795. She continued to travel and to publish. In March 1797, she married fellow writer and philosopher, William Godwin. She had only a few months left to live. Being a woman got her in the end. She died in September 1797, a few days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary. The placenta failed to come away cleanly and she died in hideous agony as her doctor tore it out of her, piece by piece, thereby introducing the septicaemia which would kill her.

She described herself as ‘the first of a new genus’. I’m proud to belong to the same family.  

Writing Shakespeare - Celia Rees

I didn't make a conscious decision to begin writing Historical Fiction, but once I'd written Witch Child and its sequel, Sorceress, then other ideas popped up for further books set in the past. Like all writers, I found my own way of working, ways of researching, my own answers to the problems with voice and language that writing in this particular genre throws up. I also made some rules for myself.

1. Not to write about real people (to easily held to account).
2. To avoid the 16th Century (too well trammelled).

Then I saw a production of Twelfth Night. The viewing was accidental. The kind of serendipity that often accompanies the best ideas. A group of students were handing out fliers in Stratford for an outdoor performance down by the river. It was a lovely summer's day, so we stopped to watch. All through the play, I couldn't stop thinking, one idea sparking another: What if Illyria was a real place? What could happen there? And what happened after the end of the play? It never struck me that they were all going to live happily ever after. Three of the main characters leave, not happy at all, and the couples seem at best uneasy with each other. How did Shakespeare come across the story in the first place? The received wisdom is that he got it from an Italian source Gl' Ingannati, The Deceived One, but what if it didn't happen like that. What if someone told him the story some time after the main events? By the end of the performance, I could see Feste, the Fool, and a girl. Not Viola, but it could be her daughter. Let's call her Violetta. They are in London performing in the street, when Shakespeare stops to watch...

It was such a strong idea, I could see it so vividly, I had to do it even though I would be writing about a) the 16th Century and b) William Shakespeare, one of the most famous people ever. My rules had to go, but it was still a daunting prospect. How would I dare to do it? I had to get past my fear and find a way into him. First of all, I had to re-cast him in my head. I discarded all the portraits (disputed anyway) and decided that he would look like Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love (see above) a little older, maybe thinning a bit on top.

I had to be able to approach him as a person, so I decided to make him plain Will from Warwickshire trying to establish himself in the cut-throat world of the Elizabethan Theatre as part-time playhouse manager, writer and sometime actor, before he was that famous. Once I got started, I found the research rather re-assuring. There are whole libraries full of opinion and speculation but there are very few verifiable, known facts about his life because he wasn't important enough to leave much of an impression on the historical record - apart from his plays, of course, and there are plenty who would deny that he even wrote those. I was free to make him into my Shakespeare.

I followed the line of recent biographers, like James Shapiro in 1599; Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare the Biography; Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age; Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife, and set him into his time, his context. Above all, I saw him as a writer. There might be a quantum difference in talent, but he was a writer just like me. The Elizabethan theatre was hungry for plays. He must always have been on the look out for a likely tale to turn into drama, so when he sees a Fool and his girl performing in the street, he thinks: Where are they from? What are they doing here? He knows there is a story there. He stops to watch, his curiosity aroused, but there is a trade off. They will tell him their story, part of which will become the play, Twelfth Night, but it is not a free exchange. They will want something in return...