Taking my hat off to millinery: when an historical novelist puts the art at the heart of her new book - Michelle Lovric

One of Casanova’s famous anecdotes dates to his time in Turin, where a milliner was fatally obsessed with her lover, the Comte de la Perouse. When she lay dying, the priest arrived to administer the last rites. Rather than take the Eucharist, the milliner swallowed a miniature of la Perouse. Casanova was inspired to write two poems about this gothic extravagance of romance.

I too wrote a poem about her. It was published in my first novel, Carnevale.

So, 25 years ago, I already earmarked milliners as women of interest.

I like a woman who can weaponize silk, art, gesture and love.

For the last few years I’ve been writing a milliner in early 19^th century Venice. In doing so, I fell into my own obsession with hats and feathers. You won’t be beaten over the head with hats in my novel, The Puffin. But you won’t be able to finish the book without learning something about the historical millinery trade: its language, its tools, its colours, its creative and even military possibilities.

I have been lucky enough to have superb partner in this enterprise – Tina Giuntini, who is both a millinery historian and modern-day milliner. Tina and I met by chance – but meeting her changed my writing life. (Photo of Tina below right by Kelly Lemon). 

Where do I begin to thank her? For the lessons in millinery in person and in correspondence? For the antique and vintage millinery tools she lent me so I could feel their weight and simulate their work? For the lexicon of millinery – toliker, awl, egg iron and more.

Tina shared her image library and directed me to the books I needed to read. She has also made hats that substantiate the roles they play in my novel’s plot. She even created little hats for the puffin who is the catalyst of the story.  

She took a model puffin back to her studio in Seattle, where she photographed it with her historic forms and tools.

Forget AI; I had Tina in 3D. Best of all, I knew she was checking my invented milliner against her real self, and I felt that the works of my imagination were somehow verified.

In The Puffin, the hats, tools and feathers in the book are not just decorative; they are also plot mechanisms. They are used to thwart the vigilance of Venice’s Habsburg masters. My protagonist Alva is a brimstone milliner making combustible hats. But she can protect herself by trading on the notion that hats are the merest feminine frippery and that no one needs to give them a second glance – rather like milliners.  

POEMS FROM HATS AND TOWARDS HATS

I started work on this book by writing poems about hats, straw, feathers, feather-curlers (gleaned from their trade cards in the London Archives), female places of work, colour. I used poems to explore ideas about the language and geography of hats and about the women who created them. The character of Alva emerged from somewhere between the lines of this poetry. So did the excellence of her millinery. To protect her modesty, it became appropriate for the poet Tommaso to explain the enchantment cast by Alva’s hats. Here is one of his descriptions:

Poetry erupted out of Alva in hats. Her bonnets told stories and sang lyrics in an irresistible accent.        Like a storyteller, Alva threaded pace through image. Like a poet, she could evoke the mist around a     spice-ship’s mast, using just a coil of net. She could swoop joy into the contour of a brim. She’d     sometimes let me sit behind a screen in her studio to witness her recasting women’s biographies with her hats. Straw was the least thing Alva worked with. She worked with luminosity, awling holes through brims so light exploded like a blown dandelion on the skin. Like weather, she could make the air different under a hat. A writer and the weather must bend the knee to a milliner of Alva’s genius, for she also illustrated her tales in a whole lexicon of colours: Dust of Ruins, Pomona Green, Barbel Blue, Nankeen Yellow and a cavalcade of reds. She had texture. She had fantasy. What if everyone had their own flower? – that’s what Alva made happen: scooping worlds into a single face. Her hats could steal the breath of strangers. Isn’t that intimacy? Isn’t that poetry? Stolen, intaken breaths?

Alva has a more pragmatic view of her profession, partly because she has other things going on. She speaks thus of her studio in Cannaregio:

Once upon a time the Calle della Pegola was the street of the caulkers, the men who keep ships afloat, attending to the risk of leaks with tar and wooden pegs. When I was sixteen, it became my street, where I fashioned hats to set women at full sail, keeping them safe upon the salt-sweet sea of encroaching age and lovelessness that might otherwise engulf them.

So what else does Alva have going on apart from astonishing millinery? She is also a member of the sect of the Carbonari, a variant of freemasonry.  The Italian Carbonari plotted liberation from the Habsburg empire, which occupied Venice from the early 19^th century until 1866.

Alva hosts the  secret ‘baracca’ of the Venetian Carbonari in her studio. She is more than their landlady. In fact Alva is the ‘Mother Tongue’, the musa ispiratrice of the Venetian movement. She makes hats for fashionable women who love to talk – and are happily indiscreet in front of a mere milliner, a tradeswoman, a person who is socially invisible. Information is life-and-death for an outlawed sect. So Alva makes sure her client include Austrians and aristocratic Venetians. 

Her least favourite client is Portia Saukalt, the daughter of an Austrian banker.

I came to know her face as well as my own. La Sau’s features were crude, like an imprint in a stale pillow. Her hair was dulled by thirty Habsburg winters. Her voice grated. Portia Saukalt’s enormous ears needed to be hidden inside bonnets and turbans of intricate inner construction. A small thorough blue eye she had, with a great appearance of stoniness about it. Missing: any trace of empathy. Yet I’ll never know anyone to match Portia Saukalt for seeking out your glance and forcing it to stay on her. She confused you with her singular intensity; your aesthetic sense was destabilized by her.

With her small head and lumpen shoulders, my newest client was a story even my hats struggled to tell gracefully. She was from the start a constant trial to me, not least because a woman who wore a hat of mine should look like a woman who deserved to wear that hat. And it was precisely for this reason that la Sau made me rise to the highest expression of my art, that is, of composing hats to make you forget an ugly face. More, Portia Saukalt needed hats to intimidate the enemy and everyone was the enemy. 

As a woman, laughably, she also hunted admiration and lovers. My hats expounded on the structural differences between men and women, each of whom naturally craves what he or she is not and has not. The more I succeeded with her millinery, the more heat Portia Saukalt knew she could raise in men who wouldn’t understand they were actually falling in love with a hat.

WOMEN’S WORK

Writing Alva gave me a chance to look at women’s work … how it is persistently undervalued even to the point of being unseen. No one thinks that Alva could be a member of the revolutionary Carbonari movement, because her work has the ephemerality and triviality of fashion, and because it is to do with women. The plot shows how women and women’s work are underestimated … and not just by men. Women also underestimate each other. By the end of the story this is going to prove deadly to one of them.

There was a real-life example from the period for me to follow. Alva takes as her model the Colombian seamstress Policarpa Salavarietta (image from Wikimedia Commons). Poli (as she is still known) spied on Spanish aristocrats of Bogota while sewing their clothes, gleaning information that was used to fuel the fight for independence. None of her chattering high-born ladies suspected that Policarpa was working to destroy the Spanish hold on her country. In my novel, Alva reaches out to her heroine. But Policarpa was betrayed and executed by the Spaniards. It’s only at the end of The Puffin that Alva finds out what happened to the letter she sent to her sister in needles and revolution.

FEATHERS  & EMPIRE

Alva works with feathers obtained by her merchant brother at the famous London auctions. Here Favaloro secures exotic sought-after feathers such Quetzal tails from South America, which was at that time rising up to throw off the shackles of Spanish domination. So hats also gave me a path into my other chief theme of Empire. Feathers also worked for me in the exploration of the predatory, wasteful, misconceived relationships between humans (the word ‘humanity’ doesn’t work here) and birds –  and indeed between humans and all too many animals.

The novel’s eponymous bird comes from Norway where it was and still sometimes is a perilous thing to be a puffin. Norwegians not only eat puffins but also use their feathers for soft furnishings, their leather for shoes and even burn their oil in lamps. And a raw fresh puffin heart is apparently still considered a delicacy in some parts of Scandinavia. 

In my novel, the way people react to the puffin serves as a useful index of their humanity. 

The villain captures the puffin, exploits it for commercial gain and even imagines the profit in a stuffed puffin as a hat ornament.

At a key point in the book, Alva has a close encounter with the puffin. Lost in his eyes, she has an epiphany about her own place in the complex international business of murdering birds.

I try to be less human, more bird.

  … And that’s how I fall. That’s how I know.

In the puffin’s eyes I see dying ranks of egrets, their heads and shoulders meat-raw to the bone from feathers ripped out. I hear the slow, hoarse screams of ostriches as their throats are cut by Tuareg horsemen. Until now, the birds died invisibly. If their dying moments had crossed my mind, it was quickly and silently. I bethink my own stake – as a milliner – in the life of birds. Literally it’s a stake in their hearts.

 … How many birds have died so I could give the illusion of lightness to a heavy piece of womanflesh? Many, many. To lure the Contessa, I knowingly used the Barbary plume of an ostrich that was murdered for it.

 I think about the puffin-bellies in which Favaloro has always hidden our carboneria before tucking it between cod flesh and its skin. I tell myself those puffins were dead anyway; this way they too made their sacrifice for Venetian liberty. Yet, looking at this living puffin, I fail to believe myself. I despise my own sophistry. Guilt grows worms in my gut.

Still, there’s a road to goodness.

Palabra, my word on it – from this day forth, no bird on this whole earth shall be killed again so I may decorate a hat. Not even for a precious Barbary plume will another ostrich be hunted on my account.

I shall keep faith with feathers. It’s fitting that I do.

Alva’s solution: she stops using feathers and instead makes flowers from fish skins. (Thank you, of course, to Tina for alerting me to this practice.)

MILLINERY IMAGERY

The Puffin is a book built out of hat imagery.

The humble egg iron of the millinery trade is the novel's most visible murder weapon and is used in other ways too, including an attempt to rescue the puffin from captivity.

Perhaps the chief totemic object is a Barbary Plume –  a miraculous ostrich feather –  with a biography that Alva recounts. Both one of the characters (an enslaved boy) and that plume are brought to Venice from one of the famous Livornese feather traders in Tripoli.

A hatbox hides the liberated puffin. Even the milliner’s etui, an ostrich shell holder for sewing implements, comes into play. 

A dragonfly ornament on a hat warns people of a woman who is dangerous, relating to the Venetian superstition that the breath of the insect is fatal to humans. 

Finally, hats are the heroes of a climactic scene towards the end of the book when Venetians gather to watch a poet and his poetry go to the scaffold.

A TALKING HEAD

Another key millinery element is Alva’s marotte or tête à chapeau. A milliner spends a lot of time alone. It seemed to me natural that Alva – who has a lot to say but few who want to listen –  would have an intense relationship with her marotte. I’ll let Alva explain …

When Favaloro was away, I practised the lingua franca on my têtes à chapeau, the life-size busts on which I, like all the sister hood of milliners, displayed my wares. The têtes were modelled in painted cartapesta stuffed with horsehair. Ranked on hollow tree trunks fluttering with silk shawls, these neat bodiless ladies were my own little army. I added one more tête with each year of success, ordering them from Brussels. I myself animated and made singular their bland faces with watercolours, adding highlights to their eyes and character to their eyebrows.

Tommaso once observed that my favourite tête looked like me, with her small mouth, light eyebrows and narrow cheeks. After that, I kept a sharp eye on her pretensions to beauty. Her eyes were equally intent upon me and were not uncritical. It was to this tête that I addressed my most extravagant flights of the lingua franca. I knew what she was thinking. She called me ‘Mistress Tongue’ or, in sarcastic mode after Tommaso visited, ‘Glass of milk-water’ and ‘Afraid-of-your-own-heart.

I have owned an early marotte ever since I became interested in millinery.  I have been known to address a few words to her. She sat on my desk keeping company with the model puffin (and yes, also the skeleton of a puffin) all through the writing of the novel. As a novelist, you need to know what lies beneath ...

Noble ladies in Venice had marottes made in their own likeness. I was delighted to discover one in the background of several Pietro Longhi paintings in Ca’ Rezzonico. The one below is called ‘la scuola di lavoro’ – see the marotte top right . (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A HAT FOR A SHIPWRECKED MARRIAGE

Here is the exotic millinery that inspired my character Tommaso, the poet. He’s at the centre of two painful love triangles in the book. Although he is passionately loved by good people, he throws in his lot with one of the worst, a hypervigilant narcissist who reels him in and spits him out, as they do.

Tommaso becomes a beggar, a mendicant, in his relationship with his wife. She is deaf to his plea for heart-alms, so he wanders Venice by night with a crude model of ship on crammed on his head. He wants to show the world the shipwreck she has made of their marriage.

Tommaso, with his crutch and his ship, casts the shadow of a monster in the moonlight. In fact, there is a real monster on the  streets of Venice, an assassin called the Hyena. (The Hyena is my invention. Extrajudicial murders were not characteristic of the Habsburg regime, which was more focussed on order, censorship, paperwork and taxation).

For the image of the ship hat (courtesy of Wellcome Images)  I am indebted to a contemporary text, Vagabondiana of Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London. Vagabondiana includes a beggar named Joseph Johnson, once a seaman, who in later life walked with a crutch and carried a model of the HMS Nelson on his head to signal his service to this country. Smith characterises Joe Johnson as a creative and ingenious beggar, who knows how to catch the imagination and engage the sympathies of those who behold him.

And that’s the poet’s playbook too, of course.

LANGUAGE OF COLOUR

The Puffin is a book about several different languages – even the puffin has his own lexicon. Alva is obsessed with the lingua franca, the language of the free world, as she sees it – the language of equals as opposed to the pidgin that infantilizes the subjects of empire. Alva smelts brief, shattering poems from the lingua franca. (Who is the better poet, Alva or Tommaso? – the reader will decide).

Alva’s work as a milliner gave me access to another language too, namely the fashionable colours of the day. Again, Tina made me a felt colour chart of the kind Alva would show her customers.

As all researchers of this period know, these hues are codified in a wonderful book Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1814) in which each fashionable Regency tint is aligned with incontrovertible values found in the colours of animals or minerals. To revivify those Regency colours in conjunction with the clothes that bore them, there’s Beatrice Knight’s Regency Color Compendium, a painstaking but joyful exercise in research.

I chose the colours in the book for their edible loveliness:

Pomona Green – apple & emerald with a touch of lemon

Drake’s Neck – a cerulean blue mixed with bottle green

Spanish Fly – a rich, blue-tinged green

Barbel Blue – the colour of a clement sky

Celestial Blue – an exalted cobalt

Maiden Blush – pale young flesh like the inside of a shell

Blossom or Rose Pompadour – a rosy pink

Aramanthine – a rich, purplish red

Pomegranate – a simmering terracotta

Coquelicot – poppy or puffin-beak red

Puce – a brownish purple made from blood-fed fleas

Parma Violet – a warm amethyst

Stifled Sigh – a faded despairing lavender

London Smoke – a pale choked grey

Skimmed Milk – the luminous white of the human eyeball

Isabelline – a dirtied cream

Oeil de Mouche – a slick sepia brown

Nankeen – a muddy wolfish yellow

Feuille Morte – a strident pumpkin-flesh amber

Orpiment – the orange of the neck ruff of the Golden Pheasant or the belly of the Warty Newt

Dust of Ruins (or camelopard) – a dull brassy gold

Jonquil – a fresh pure daffodil yellow

Habsburg Yellow – calamine and pus

REAL HATS FOR IMAGINED SCENES

Alva makes hats that carry secret maps and bullets in special compartments. She also makes the death caps for those who appear to have fallen foul of the Habsburgs: the anonymous drowned are rescued by the Company of Christ and the Good Death and given decent funerals. In the novel, the Company is part of the Carbonari conspiracy. 

While Alva is imagined, her most important client is a real woman who was implicated in the brief, disastrous Carbonari uprising that occurred on the Venetian mainland in 1818. Her name was Contessa Elena Cecilia Monti d’Arnaud. She was once lady-in-waiting to Marie-Louise, who was both Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife and also the daughter of the Habsburg Emperor Francis. Contessa Monti was devoted to her mistress even after she ceased service, speaking of her constantly. Arrested by the Austrians after the uprising was betrayed and suppressed, she was sent into exile but was found dead in Bologna not long afterwards under unexplained circumstances. (For information about Cecilia Monti, I am indebted to Christian Rossi, for his transcription of her interrogation in his doctoral thesis, MAGISTRATURA E GIUSTIZIA PENALE NEL VENETO DELLA RESTAURAZIONE (1813-1819).

Tina recreated two hats for Cecilia Monti that are particularly important in the plot.

The first is this bergère, a flat-brimmed straw hat featuring a very shallow, low crown and usually ornamented with flowers and ribbons. It can be worn a number of ways but this tilted view is traditional and flattering. This hat is woven from dense Leghorn straw, which is what Alva uses. The rim is sewn with old French lace. This one has knots in the ribbon round the brim. A musket ball could be concealed in each of those knots. And a map or letter could be rolled up and slotted into each of the stretches of ribbon in between the knots. The flowers are hand-folded. As traditional, the decoration is mostly on the right, and in this case designed to distract from the ‘loaded’ sections of the hat. 

The second hat is a pliable Milan straw. Its brim could be tipped upwards at the back to create a secret compartment for revolutionary matériel. Tina built a secret code into this hat. The colours of the ornaments are those of the Carbonari.

HATS & PUBLICATION

Tina and I have been enjoying ourselves on Instagram, doing a series of stories about our collaboration. Meanwhile, I have also been enjoying contact with the modern community of hat creators in London. I am looking forward to attending a Discovery Event in October as a guest of the 422-year-old Worshipful Company of Feltmakers.

I shall myself be talking about hats, feathers, puffins and revolution at an event at Southwark Cathedral on October 26^th:

Faith, Feathers & Human Skin: introducing The Puffin Tickets, Monday, October 26  •  6:30 PM - 8 PM | Eventbrite

See you there perhaps ...

Michelle Lovric’s website www.michellelovric.com

Instagram @apuffininvenice and @Bea-Evie

Other hattish links:

www.ballardmillinerystudio.com

Feltmakers Today & Our History – The Worshipful Company of Feltmakers of London

The Development of Medicine in 17th Century Italy

 Deborah Swift

My fourth book in the Giulia Tofana series, The Cameo Keeper, focuses on medicine and healing in the 17th Century, a time of significant transformation in Italian medicine. As Europe shifted from the Renaissance towards the era of scientific exploration, Italy became a key centre for medical thought and innovation, blending ancient traditions of healing and herbalism with new discoveries. The old medicine and the new were less-than-happy bedfellows, and the advent of printing meant that men’s version of remedial medicine was more often promoted in written texts than the women’s traditional remedies. Men’s thought was widely disseminated in printed books, whereas women’s cures were left in the kitchen notebooks.

The Old Tradition

At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Italian medicine was still deeply rooted in the classical theories inherited from Greek and Roman scholars such as Galen and Hippocrates. Universities such as Padua, Bologna, and Pisa were renowned for their medical faculties, teaching aspiring physicians from these ancient texts. In my novel, Jacopo has studied at Padua University, but he is now intent on a career in the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. Medical education was still emphasising the balance of the four humours—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—as the foundation of health and disease.

Above: Early Italian Pharmacy

Below: Anatomy Theatre

But in the new age of medicine anatomical dissection became increasingly important, with doctors such as Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Marcello Malpighi leading the field. Malpighi, celebrated as the "father of microscopical anatomy" for his pioneering use of the microscope, was able to observe capillaries, organs, and tissues, thus advancing the study of physiology.

Surgeons were often required to show off their skills in public demonstrations, and anatomy theatres were popular entertainment for the rich. Some of these were experiments on the dead, but there were also ‘trials’ on the living. These took the form of ‘competitions’ or ‘trials’ where those competing for a surgeon’s position would have to demonstrate their abilities before a hospital board.


The 17th century was also marked by recurrent outbreaks of plague. The outbreak in Rome in 1656 led to stringent quarantine measures – isolating affected neighbourhoods and the fumigation or burning of infected items. City states established boards of health, enhancing the management of infectious diseases. Quarantine hospitals on city outskirts became a hallmark of the new Italian public health strategy, and in Rome one of the quarantine hospitals that features in The Cameo Keeper is one run by monks, and isolated on an island in the middle of the Tiber.

Herbalism and Pharmacy

During this period, women’s role in healing changed. The old tradition of herbal remedies persisted, but influenced by the new science of chemistry, apothecaries began incorporating chemicals and metals into their preparations. Paracelsian ideas, which promoted chemical remedies over traditional humours-based treatments, began to gain ground. Italian pharmacists and physicians experimented with compounds such as antimony and mercury. (see picture below)

Although women were largely excluded from formal medical education, they played crucial roles as midwives, herbalists, and caregivers. Some women, especially in religious orders, managed hospital wards and contributed to nursing and patient care.

The common people still relied on the cheaper, more available care from the women in their households, and care in hospital depended on how much you could afford to pay.

The seventeenth century in Italy was a time of great experimentation, with the three kinds of treatment offered intersecting - herbalism, pharmaceuticals and surgery. For the first time, documentation existed because of the invention of printing and the ability to disseminate the results of experiments more widely.

The Cameo Keeper takes this experimentation as one of its themes and I thoroughly enjoyed researching the 'new' medicine of the era.

The Lifeline - The Shetland Bus in WW2

I’ve always been interested in untold stories of WW2, especially stories from overlooked outposts, such Shetland (The Lifeline). Although The Shetland Isles are a long way from the mainland it would be a mistake to think that the islanders of Shetland were little involved in the war effort against Germany. As one of the furthest flung points of the UK, Shetland was in an ideal position to act as a staging post between the mainland and Nazi-occupied Norway.

The idea of the Shetland Bus originated when a marine base was being established in late 1940 at Lerwick, and caught the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE), who realised that the base could be used as a staging post for arms and information in the fight against the Germans.

David Howarth’s excellent non-fiction book The Shetland Bus describes how small fishing boats acted as go-betweens for the Norwegian Resistance, supplying arms, personnel, and intelligence in their fight against their fascist invaders, and this was my starting point for the novel, which draws on various true-life incidents. This clandestine route across the sea was in operation between Scotland and German-occupied Norway from 1941 until the surrender of Nazi Germany on 8 May 1945, and it grew from being just fourteen fishing boats to a much bigger operation once the US got involved in the war.

 

To reconstruct these journeys across the North Sea for The Lifeline, I drew on memoirs and real accounts from men who made the crossing. The Shetland Bus Memorial is located at Scalloway in Shetland, and the local museum has a permanent exhibition relating to the activities of the Shetland Bus and information about those who manned it.

Although the boats pretended to be regular Norwegian fishing boats, they were ingeniously equipped with machine guns and ammunition hidden in boxes of fish, or oil barrels, as the men often had to defend themselves from enemy fire. Once the Nazis discovered this route was being used to support Resistance activities, they patrolled the coasts regularly with boats and reconnaissance planes, which would strafe the boats if they were spotted beyond Norwegian waters. If the men on board were captured by enemy patrols, they were tortured then executed.

Leif Larson is the most famous of all the Shetland Bus crew and the most highly decorated Naval Officer of the war. Known in Norway as ‘Shetland’s Larsen,’ he escaped from Norway in February 1941 in a fishing boat and trained with the military unit called the Linge Company. During WW2 he made over 50 trips to Norway including one trip where on the way back his boat was attacked by the Luftwaffe and six of his crew were hit. The surviving two men made it to the Alesund area and were picked up by a ship that took them back to Shetland. 

Arguably worse than the threat of Nazi attack, was the other enemy – the winter weather. Sorties had to take place in winter when enemy patrols were less likely to spot them. The mountainous seas and wintry conditions of fog, ice and storms made the journeys perilous. My fictional narrative features Jørgen Nystrøm, a Norwegian wireless operator who retrains to crew on The Shetland Bus. 

My other main character is a female teacher, Astrid Dahl. Her story centres on the Norwegian Teachers’ Strike. When the Nazis try to force the teachers to join their Fascist teachers union, Astrid refuses and persuades others to join her in defying them. This rebellion leads her into danger, and eventually forces her to try to escape Norway, via her only lifeline – The Shetland Bus. The stories of the two main characters coincide, and I hope provide both an insight into Norway in the war, and a satisfying story.

 

One of the pleasures for me as a writer was to be able to describe the wind-blown Shetland Islands and the majestic mountains and fjords of Norway, so I do hope some of you will take the journey with me!

 

Listen to a BBC podcast about the Shetland Bus. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028vd4

THE LIFELINE mybook.to/LIFELINE

Website www.deborahswift.com

Twitter @swiftstory Bluesky @authordeborahswift

Pics: Wikipedia, Pexels, my own.

Judging the Crowns by Maggie Brookes

Have you ever said yes to something without really knowing what you were agreeing to? I've just taken on a marathon, though it also resembles a sprint. I was honoured to be asked to be one of the 9 judges for this year's Historical Writer's Association Gold Crown award for the best historical fiction novel published between 1st April 2024 and 31st March 2025. Lots of lovely books to read, I thought. I've been reading historical fiction all my life. I've had two historical novels published world-wide by Penguin. I have opinions. How hard can it be?

The coveted HWA gold crown award.

Well, first of all, there are 131 entries, from more than 40 publishers, big and small. And I know that each one of those novels has been meticulously researched, painstakingly written and rewritten, edited, proof-read and finally published. I sympathise with all that effort, angst and joy. At a modest estimate of 2 years to research and write each one, that would be 250 years of work. A more realistic estimate of 4 years per book is a staggering 500 years of labour! It's a big responsibility, but also a opportunity to learn so much – about history, about publishers, about structuring and pacing narrative, about stories that jump out at readers, and also about what's being published right now.

The hard copy books waiting to be read.

The first thing I notice is gender. Judging by the first names of the authors, more than 95 of the 131 appear to be women (and perhaps some of the tantalising initials are women too.) History girls are alive and flourishing! Are women writers particularly drawn to history, I wonder? The judges are also predominantly female, with 8 out of the 9 of us being women. (Are women more inclined to agree to take on these kind of roles?? Answers on a postcard.) We are Louise Hare (Chair), Ellen Alpsten, Mark Ellis, Louise Fein, Alison Joseph, Amy McElroy, Carolyn Kirby, Linda Porter and me. Louise says: 'I love seeing how broad the category of historical fiction is, encompassing so many different genres. This is my third time of judging the Crowns and I’m always fascinated by the trends that emerge within each cycle. I see our role as vital in rewarding literary merit within historical fiction, but really it’s about celebrating great reads, those books you want to tell all your friends about.' Under her guidance, we  have until September to agree a longlist, October a shortlist, and November to choose a winner. Yikes!

Louise Hare, chair of judges, with HWA member Jim Burge at the award ceremony.

Gender is also noticeable in the protagonists of the novels. Taking a straw poll of the 93 books I've been sent so far in hard copy, there is a massive predominance of books about women, particularly pioneering women whose names have been forgotten, but also enslaved women, witches and detectives. Perhaps this isn't surprising when a Guardian article from 2019 says that women readers account for 80% of sales in the UK, US and Canadian fiction markets – far more women than men are literary festivalgoers, library members, audio book readers, literary bloggers, and members of literary societies and evening classes... and form book clubs.  

MA Sieghart's book The Authority Gap found that 'men were disproportionately unlikely even to open a book by a woman. For the top 10 bestselling female authors (who include Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood as well as Danielle Steel and Jojo Moyes), only 19% of their readers are men and 81%, women. But for the top 10 bestselling male authors (who include Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, as well as Lee Child and Stephen King), the split is much more even: 55% men and 45% women.  In other words, women are prepared to read books by men, but many fewer men are prepared to read books by women.'  I suppose that's just as well for male writers! Ian McEwan once wrote: 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.'

The books I've received seem to divide into four main sub-genres: 1) extraordinary women from the past, both real and imagined; 2) crime / mystery / thriller / gothic (some a mixture of those) ; 3) mythical re-tellings and fairy-tale inspired historical fantasy. And then there's 4) war, from the Trojan wars to the Napoleonic wars; WW1; the interwar years; WW2 and the cold war. I've written three novels about women in war not because I'm interested in war but because war brings out the worst and best in people, and that gives plenty to write about.  Writing about the past has always seemed to me to be a way of writing about the present.

There are also stand-alone stories from across the centuries, which can't be slotted into those categories. All human life is here.  Authors too, range from the ultra well known to debut novelists. Only three of the books I've received so far have been in translation, though many are set in other countries, from the Americas to Africa and Japan. I'm learning so much! There are several dual or triple time-line stories. The biographical fiction shows the historical range of the first 85 books I was sent in hard copy, from the first century AD to the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 18th and 20th centuries.  Many are about powerful women in royal families, perhaps because there is more about them in the historical record. Just one of these books has a male protagonist, although at school I was only taught history about men. The bias of history is being slowly re-written, page by page and book by book.

The HWA flag.

As I read, I bear in mind not only the effort of the writers, but also what it means to win these awards.
Elizabeth Fremantle, who won the 2024 Gold Crown Award with Disobedient, her extraordinary novel about Artemesia Gentileschi, says 'Disobedient, of all my novels, is closest to my heart, so it meant a great deal that it was the one to be recognised by the judges. I was truly humbled, and on the night utterly astonished, that my book was chosen from a short-list of such calibre.'

Disobedient by Elizabeth Fremantle

In 2022 AJ West won the Debut Crown award with The Spirit Engineer. He says 'Winning was a complete shock and – un-English as it may be to admit it – a source of proud vindication after years of struggle to get published. Recognition from the HWA prevents me from being too pessimistic when things feel heavy and impossible. It reminds me that, though I'm not yet a wealthy author, nor necessarily an author with his book in high street windows, nor even an acclaimed author, I am something much more smug and satisfying: an author who benefits every day from the support of his fellow writers, whom I admire in greater measure.'

And so I dive in. Eight weeks till the longlist. How hard can it be?

 Maggie Brookes, novelist and poet. Author of  historical novels The Prisoner's Wife and Acts of Love and War. As Maggie Brookes-Butt: Wish, New and Selected Poems.

Instagram: Maggie __Brookes 

Facebook: Maggie Brookes-Butt

The Aspidistra Radio Transmitter #WW2

by Deborah Swift

Harold Robin - WW2 Radio Engineer

The Shadow Network which forms the title of my latest book refers to the fake news radio stations set up by Sefton Delmer in WW2. These secret radio stations operating in WW2 pretended to be genuine German radio stations and employed German prisoners of war or other German speakers to make their broadcasts. The broadcasts were deliberately racy and were designed to capture the hearts of ordinary Germans and make them believe they were listening to a forbidden radio station from their own country. Their popularity spread, and they got wide audiences for their programmes.

The radio signal for these ‘fake news’ radio stations needed to be strong enough to appear as though it came from Germany and had to be more powerful than anything that was then available.

By coincidence, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had created two high-powered radio transmitters which could not be used in the US, because of a change in American law. The RCA were eager to sell them to Britain. So Harold Robin, (pictured above) a Foreign Office radio engineer, saw their potential, and travelled to America to examine them, and then worked to improve them. He adapted a transmitter so it was able to move frequency in a fraction of a second, at the flick of a switch.

The powerful ex-RCA transmitter, eventually installed in Sussex, England, was named Aspidistra, referencing the popular Gracie Fields song ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’, in which an Aspidistra houseplant grows until it ‘nearly reached the sky’.

In fact, most of the technology was buried underground at the site at Crowborough, though its antennae were visible – three guyed masts, each 110 metres tall, directing the signal broadly eastwards. The Art Deco–style transmitter building was housed in an underground shelter which had to be excavated by the Canadian army troops who were stationed nearby.

Intrusion operations

The Aspidistra mast was so powerful it could be used to intercept German frequencies. During Allied air raids, German radio transmitters were switched off so the Allies couldn’t use them to locate their installations.

As soon as the Germans switched off their masts, Aspidistra began transmitting on its frequency, just like the German station. The transition was seamless and German listeners believed the original station was still broadcasting. Aspidistra operators would then insert pro-British propaganda and fake news into the broadcast as if it was coming from official German sources.

Post War Use

After the war, Aspidistra was used by the BBC. It made its final transmission on 28 September 1982, before being finally switched off by Robin, the man who had been responsible, forty years earlier, for bringing the transmitter from the US and setting up the station at Crowborough.

In my novel based around the Aspidistra transmitter and the fake news radio stations, I include a fictional plot to blow up the transmitter. Although fictional, this is not unlikely as there were several attempts by the Germans to sabotage infrastructure and communications systems in England at the time.

If you’d like more information about Radio Aspidistra I recommend this Nuts and Volts Magazine article - The Raiding Dreadnought of the Ether.

‘Brilliant! Loved this novel about the input made by the Political Warfare Executive to WW2. The characters seemed so real and true.’ NetGalley Reviewer

‘A gripping tale of wartime subterfuge, spies, saboteurs and black propaganda’ NetGalley Reviewer

Read more about   THE SHADOW NETWORK mybook.to/RadioLies

Find Deborah: 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authordeborahswift/

Website www.deborahswift.com

 

History keeps changing - writing The Fortune Keeper

 By Deborah Swift

I was really interested to read this week, that the coded letters of Mary Queen of Scots have just been deciphered by modern computer scientists and decoders. Undoubtedly this will give us hitherto unknown insights into what we know about her and her life. Historians and historical fiction authors may need to change their views depending on the new evidence.

A similar thing happened to me when was writing the last book in the trilogy of books about Giulia Tofana, a woman who was renowned for inventing the poison Aqua Tofana, and was supposed to have poisoned six hundred men in Renaissance Italy. (See my Aspects of History article Poison and Power) I had already uncovered through my research that Giulia Tofana was probably an amalgam of three women, and not the single entity of legend.

Three women, not one

The mother, Theofania d’Adamo was executed for the crime of poison on 12th June 1633, but her daughter, Giulia (known as Tofana) survived. The third person in this triumvirate of poisonous women was Giulia’s daughter, known as Girolama Spara. Until recently very little was known about the daughter so as historical novelists do, I fictionalised her birth, assuming she was a blood daughter of Giulia Tofana and her (also unknown) husband surnamed Spara. I wrote about this before for Aspects of History

About half way through writing the third novel in the series, from the point of view of the daughter, new evidence arose about the women in Giulia Tofana’s family. In an old library archive in Italy, an American academic had unearthed the real-time transcript of the murder trial of Giulia Tofana’s daughter, Girolama Spara, (also known as Gironima Spara) and published it. The document was originally kept under lock and key by the Pope at Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, and from there ended up in the State Archive where it lay uncatalogued and undiscovered for generations. You can find the document translated by Monson at the end of this article.

History evolves

Of course I trawled through the new information, discovering with growing concern that my fictional view of events differed widely from this new evidence. I was shocked to discover that Girolama Spara was a step-daughter, and not a blood daughter at all, and that Giulia Tofana had been married twice.

The ledger was in a poor state of repair, but Professor Craig A Monson had painstakingly resurrected it and translated it into modern English. The truth is less glamorous than the plot I had in mind for these characters, so what should I do? The past is both fixed and mutable. The two previous books were fixed, already out on shelves and readers were enjoying the story. The new information meant that I would need to be open to bending, or changing, the third book.

Would readers care? There are many schools of thought on this – on how accurate historical fiction should be, and it is debated endlessly by historians and novelists. From my point of view I was obligated to finish the story I had set up with the characters remaining consistent within the series, yet also to incorporate the new information. The rules I set for that world needed to remain in place so that the reader feels they are in a real and secure locale, no matter where the story went.

Whatever character I create can never be the real person. Anne Boleyn has had hundreds of interpretations of her character. The events I describe can never be ‘true’, just as contemporary witnesses to any crime will have different views. A novel can’t be ‘accurate’, just as someone trying to depict my life of yesterday could never be accurate, even with all the iphone technology and photography available now, and if my diaries were in front of them, because life is too complex to render completely. What I hope to achieve in my novels is a tantalising whisper of what it might have been like to inhabit another era.

History continues to fascinate

It is exciting that at last we know more about the actual trial and details of the life of Girolama. She is nicknamed Mia in my book, because having a similar name to her mother Giulia, she was often confused with her, and this led to many errors of attribution. Many of the crimes assigned to Giulia actually belonged to Girolama and vice-versa.

I used maps, academic articles and transcripts of primary sources to complete the book, as well as the translation of the trial documents by Professor Monson, and I like to include historical notes at the end of my books to make it clear where (for the moment) the historical evidence is pointing.

Is The Fortune Keeper a true re-telling of Girolama Spara’s life? Definitely not. Will it take you on a journey into the heart of a young woman in Renaissance Venice? I hope so. 

You may be interested in:

The Black Widows of the Eternal City: The True Story of Rome’s Most Infamous Poisoner by Craig A Monson

Coded Letters of Mary Queen of Scots https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64568222

THE FORTUNE KEEPER


Buy the Book – https://mybook.to/AquaTofana

#KindleUnlimited

Twitter https://twitter.com/swiftstory

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authordeborahswift/

Website www.deborahswift.com

Pictures of 17thC Venice, The Ridotto gambling hall, and the fight on the Bridge of St Barnaba in Venice, all from Wikipedia.

Inspiration and a Historic House Revisited by Sheena Wilkinson

I've had Covid recently and though officially 'better' I am distinctly tired physically and mentally, so this will be a short post.  

Last week I was in London -- not the most sensible post-Covid strategy in the world.  I was attending the Romantic Novelists' Association's annual conference (which included some historical novelists of course), and staying in Bow, East London. I blogged some years ago about the fascinating house where I stay, which belongs to a good friend, and as this was over five years ago, I'm suggesting you refresh your memory, as it's very relevant to this post: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-house-with-history-by-sheena-wilkinson.html

This visit, my friend had arranged for her book group, plus a few other interested readers, to come and meet me to talk about my recent novel, Mrs Hart's Marriage Bureau, set in 1934. It was only as I posed outside the house for a photo, that it occurred to me how serendipitous the house was for the meeting. Though set in a marriage bureau, the novel is about the different sorts of fulfilment women sought for themselves.

One character uses her marriage to help her set up a factory based on co-operative principles, allowing people, women especially, to learn new skills and become more independent. It's absolutely in keeping with the initiative of Sylvia Pankhurst in Norman Grove a generation before. I've been visiting this house since the 1990s, always fascinated by its feminist history, and on Monday night, as I sat in the kitchen chatting about Mrs Hart to twenty-first century readers, I wondered if, without being conscious of it, the house, with its toy factory and nursery, had influenced my writing more than I had realised? 

CATHERINE CALLED BIRDY by Penny Dolan

Ever since opening Karen Cushmans’ Catherine Called Birdy novel back in 1996, I have remembered the freshness, energy and rebellious joy of that first page. Her determined character has been stuck in my mind:

12^th Day of September. I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family. That is all there is to say.

13^th Day of September. My father must suffer from ale head this day, for he has cracked me twice before dinner instead of once. I hope his angry liver bursts.

14^th Day of September. Tangled my spinning again. Corpus bones, what a torture.

15^th Day of September. Today the sun shone and the villagers sowed hay, gathered apples and pulled fish from the stream. I trapped inside, spent two hours embroidering a cloth for the church and three hours picking out the stitches after my mother saw it. I wish I were a villager.

And so on. 

                                        

The diary begins in September 1290 but it does not focus on the intrigues of royal courts or famous historical figures, Instead, it gives us the thoughts of the writer: fourteen-year-old Catherine, nicknamed Birdy because of the number of pet birds she keeps in her chamber.

Birdy is the only daughter of Lord Rollo and Lady Aislinn, who live in a small manor house in Lincolnshire. She comments, with humour, puzzlement and rage upon her family, her friends, her everyday life and the annoying fact that her father intends to marry her to the wealthiest bidder.

Birdy does not want to be a lady, nor married. She prefers spending time with Perkin the goat-herd and her “heart’s brother”, and her other young friends in the village. She hates the needlework, restrictions and all the boring “lady-lessons” she is given by her nurse Morwenna, her mother and by various tutors.

However, her sympathetic brother Edward, a young monk in the scriptorium at the nearby abbey, has convinced their mother that Birdy should learn to read and write, even if she has to give up some of her needlework time. Reflecting on her daily life, he suggests, will help Birdy improve her character - and so the diary has begun.

Gradually, between one September and the next, Birdy’s diary shows her learning about the uses of herbs and the making of manuscripts, as well as experiencing love, jealousy and heart-break. She discovers the true story of where babies come from and drives away several suitors by tricks and bad behaviour. She sees the effects of sorrow, poverty and death and senses what her future role might be – even if early entries are laced with jokes about jakes, farts and bums, amounts of silly pranks and a quantity of curious information on odd saints. Catherine Called Birdy is an exuberant joy of a book with a character that was wonderfully “feisty” before publishers had even heard of the now overused word.

My copy of the novel had been sitting quietly on its shelf for over two decades when suddenly I heard that title again: Catherine Called Birdy has now been released as a full length film which, after a short cinema run, is streaming on Prime. 

                            

Written and directed by Lena Denham and starring Bella Ramsay as Birdy, the film a glorious medieval coming-of-age romp. Though there are moments of seriousness, the story is not solemnly told. I was reminded of “Will”, the film about young Shakespeare from the Horrible Histories team, and felt that Birdy might create a similar interest in that period of history for a young teen audience, in addition to much older persons.

Birdy, the film, starts with impact: before the opening credits, our heroine appears splattered in mud at a wild wattle-and-daub village cottage-raising, an incident shifted some way from its place in the original plot. In general, the film creates a picture of a close-knit medieval community, its seasonal festivities and the hard realities of life. This manor is a place where candles gutter, food runs scarce or goes rotten, where the privy is a public necessity, where parents expect to beat their children and Birdy’s bed is shared by her nurse Morwenna and any visiting females.

Although the film avoids the public hanging of the original book, Denham does focus on menstruation as the important indication of marriageability. Birdy’s first monthly flow is shown as a turning point in her life. Innocently fearing she might be dying, she is horrified by the kindly Morwenna’s practical explanation and determines to conceal her womanhood from her father. For a while Birdy’s ruse works but eventually, she is discovered. 

After she amusingly dissuades many suitors, Lord Rollo becomes determined and accepts the offer of a man she calls Shaggy Beard, a rich much older suitor from Yorkshire, who gives Birdy a purse of silver coins, By accepting the money, she is accepting her eventual marriage, although it is agreed that Birdy can stay with her mother until the newr baby is born. In the book, Birdy gives the money to Meg from the dairy so she and her husband can swain pay the death tax and live, with Perkins in his grandmothers cottage. In the film, the money is used in another way and has a different impact.

The film reshapes and slightly restructures the book, using modern multiracial casting, a modern soundtrack as well as making the ending larger and more emotional. Birdy’s father is given a stronger role and the ending is slightly adjusted (no doubt as a reflection of the star status of the actors Andrew Scott and Billie Piper) to allow for a couple of bigger scenes, which give Birdy a true insight into the complexity of adult life and relationships.

Although I enjoyed the film very much, and loved its energy, and sense of life and laughter, certain moments felt much more "unhistorical" than others. Though not enough to overpower the pleasure or fun, I had problems with film-Birdy’s attitude to religion, to books and to writing.

In the original, Birdy has a valued book of saints, a precious item that belongs to her mother, whose family was once wealthy. Her diary entries open with a reference to the saint of that day. For example, randomly I found:

27^th Day of November. Feast of Saint Fergus, an Irish bishop, who condemned irregular marriages, sorcerers and priests who wear their hair long and

17^th Day of December. Feast of Saint Lazarus who was raised by Jesus and afterwards went to France.

These headings were both based on facts I found elsewhere so I am assuming that many of Cushman's references might be accurate too. They are important as indicators of the strongly religious culture and mindset of the age. In the novel, although Birdy does not reveal a great devotion to the saints or religion, she does experience it as an everyday part of her life.

Yet the film, however, pushes this attitude almost too far. When Birdy goes on an errand, in her mother’s place, to her brother Edward’s monastery, she is overcome by the sight of the young monks. She stands, eyes wide, clutching at the body of a life-size crucifix in the middle of the cloister lawn. While this image was amusing enough in its way, that scene felt total at odds with what I imagine as the spiritual frame of the age. Even knowing of the wealth of almost erotic religious literature created by certain saints, for a moment, the gap in the “history” of the film felt too large. Was it simply my response to the blatant modern mix of sacred and profane? Yet the following scene, where Birdy goes to her brother’s cell amusingly concealed beneath his cloak, did not feel seriously confrontational at all. Is there a limit to how far modern historical fiction can be stretched on screen?

This leads me to my second problem: the reverence for the act of writing and the cultural value of books. In the novel, Cushman showed Birdy absorbed in the work of the scriptorium, deciding that she would like to be a monk.

“To spend the rest of my life making pictures instead of mending and weaving would be heaven indeed!”

This book-Birdy is interested in the process, noting the monks’ desire for lapis lazuli and other long-lasting colours and inks for their manuscripts. In her enthusiasm, she tries to make her own.

“I made a paste from bilberries that looks as blue as a robin’s egg but it grows sour and so sticky that I must add a task that the brothers have never dreamed of: picking bugs out of the heavenly sky or the Virgin’s veil.”

The book-Birdy would, I felt, have had a care in the way she used her diary and did her writing, even if the results were not perfect.

However, in the film version, Birdy’s pages are covered in careless scrawlings, even allowing for the difficulties of a quill pen. They look like the jottings of a modern child who believes that more sheets of paper or another exercise book will always be available. In my – yes, opinionated - opinion, her pages do not look like the work of a girl who has handled vellum and observed monks working on illuminated manuscripts or the reverence with which these books were treated. Birdy's scrawl and sketches clashed against my ideas of the respect for writing at that time - but am I wrong? Certainly, badly-done homework might be more meaningful to any of the young viewers than exquistite lettering and they will have time,ifthye choose, to form their own views on life in the medieval England.

Ignore my worries, because Catherine called Birdy is a treat, in either or in both its appearances. Do search them out, for yourself or your teens if you like history mixed with humour. 

Even better news: Karen Cushman, the original author is still alive. I do hope she is celebrating her memorable Birdy’s bright new flight

Penny Dolan

@pennydolan1