The Golden Hour by Kate Lord Brown

Reviewed by Stephanie Williams

I must have been about thirteen when my imagination was first captured by Akhenaten, the legendary pharaoh who brought the revolutionary idea of one god to Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE.   His wife, rumoured to be his sister, was even more romantic:  the beautiful, powerful and mysterious Nefertiti.  

 

Bust of Nefertiti, Nofretete Neues Museum

My source was a wonderful historical novel by someone like Mary Renault, who I was devouring at the time — but it wasn’t … whatever the book was, it is long gone, leaving me with an enduring fascination with Egypt.  Last year, I was lucky enough to float down the Nile to see the Valley of the Kings and the temple of Karnak at Luxor — where, in the days when it was ancient Thebes, Nefertiti may once have walked.

‘Fair of face, great of charm,’ Nefertiti represented the female element of creation, while her husband was a living god — their source, the sun, worshipped by holding up a disc to the sun.  Through your prayers to them, you would have access to the true god. Together Akhenaten and Nefertiti overhauled the state’s religion, based on a pantheon of gods and their henchmen.  The king’s feet never touched the earth, their whole life, from daily worship, to the marital bed was a religious act. 

A house altar showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti and three of their daughters. 18th dynasty, reign of Akhenaten

After 17 years, Akhenaten died. What happened to Nefertiti afterwards is a matter of dispute.  Did Nefertiti rule briefly as a female pharaoh? Oversee the kingdom as regent? Akenhaten’s son – DNA testing suggest Nefertiti was not his mother -- was the legendary child pharaoh, Tutankhamun, whose golden sarcophagus has entranced millions around the globe.  He repudiated his father’s sun worship, and reinstated the old gods.  

 

When did she die?  One thing is certain, despite generations of strenuous efforts, her tomb has never been found.  

 

The quest to find Nefertiti’s tomb is the inspiration behind Kate Lord Brown’s new novel, The Golden Hour. 

Archaeologist Dr Lucie Fitzgerald has travelled to the Lebanon in March 1975, to visit her dying mother, Polly.  Beirut is emptying; it is the eve of the civil war. Polly, whose life has been consumed breeding Arabian horses on a farm west of Cairo, and after the war, outside Beirut, knows that it is time to tell her daughter the truth about her close friendship with Lucie’s godmother, Juno Munro.

 

The narrative weaves back and forth between 1975 Beirut and 1939 Cairo and the Valley of the Kings where Juno, an archaeologist, is part of a team searching for the tomb of Nefertiti.  Juno has a particular gift for recording hieroglyphs and scenes from the walls of the tombs they uncover. Disaster intervenes, war descends on Egypt, the dig is closed.  Thirty-five years later, Lucie too is on the track of Nefertiti’s tomb. Professor Brandt, who oversaw Juno’s dig, turns up at Lucie’s lecture on the myth of Osiris in London on the eve of her departure for Cairo.  And we wonder...

 

But the centre of the action is Egypt, and the louche life of the European communities in Cairo at the outbreak of the Second World War.  It is a period which Olivia Manning brought so vividly to life in The Levant Trilogy, later turned into The Fortunes of War, a BBC series from 1987, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson – still out there on DVD.

 

Manning, of course, had lived what she wrote.  Kate Lord Brown has absorbed Egypt. The details of how you run a dig.  That as a pre-war archaeologist you draw, not trace hieroglyphs.  The scent of rosewater, sandalwood, men smoking shisha, coloured glass, carab rings, the golden light at sunset.  Dust. She’s good on horses, the backstreets of Cairo, the old clubs and the Mena House and the vanished quarter of Ezbekiyya.  But I wished for more of a sense of war-time tension. 

 

This is a quick fun read, full of romance, the friendship of women, mysteries and tragedies.  Love and desire:  Polly and Fitz, Juno and Max, Lucie and her handsome Australian, David.  At its heart is the secret on which Lucie’s life turns.    

 

Take it on holiday and enjoy.

 

Stephanie Williams is the author of Olga’s Story,  and Running the Show, The extraordinary stories of the men who governed the British Empire.  Her latest book, The Education of Girls, will be published in the US on 23 May and in the UK later this year.  For more see www.stephanie-williams.com and https://stephaniewilliamswrites.substack.com/

 

Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick - feeling hot, hot, hot

Typical. I started writing this article a couple of days ago, at 5.30am after yet another sticky, close night. In the end I gave up trying to sleep and decided to do something useful instead. It is now Sunday morning and the weather is cool and grey and rainy, making this one of the most poorly timed blog posts ever.

But all is not lost. According to my phone, the heat is coming back. So, for those of you who love a heatwave - and those like me who just want it to be 20 degrees and cloudy LIKE NORMAL FOR JULY IN BRITAIN - here’s a quick overview of a few ways people have kept cool through history. At the end I’ll pick my favourite to go into this month’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

1. Caves. Ok, so they won’t fit into my cabinet, but many caves are Nice Cool Places. On holiday in Sicily this year, this was brought home to me in two different ways. The first was that my bedroom in our rented villa was one! It was by far the coolest (in both sense of the word) room in the house and despite the temperatures being well into in the 30s during the day, I slept well and long every night (and sometimes for afternoon naps too).

My bedroom in Modica, Sicily, 

always cool and comfortable! 

Photo: C Wightwick

We also visited the Cava d’Ispica, a series of caves which were inhabited from prehistoric times through to the middle ages. Obvious evidence of inhabitation ranged from soot markings, to stone-cut tombs, shelves and niches for lighting or possessions and the remnants of medieval frescos – a really stunning landscape detailing the different ways that people shape and use the natural world around them.

Cava d'Ispica, Sicily. 

Photo: C Wightwick

2. Air-con. Yup, it existed prior to electricity. Wealthy Romans, for example, pumped cold water through the walls of their houses in the summer months to keep things cool. And of course the Romans also had the Frigidarium at the Baths to plunge into…

3. Fans. So this is where the photos get really pretty. Used across different cultures for thousands of years (evidence dates from C4th BC in Greece and C2nd BC in China, for example), fans became a major fashion accessory in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Disappointingly though, the so-called ‘language of the fans’ is, apparently, just a myth (or rather a later marketing ploy). While I’m normally one for historical accuracy in my fiction, please don’t let that put you off, romance writers! 

C18th hand fan, showing Hector's 

farewell to Andromache, 

Victoria & Albert Museum London 

4. Back to Sicily. I seem inexplicably not to have taken any photos of the frankly vast quantity of gelato I consumed on holiday earlier this year (I can’t imagine why that would be) so you’ll have to imagine it. Ice cream. Mmm. Again existing in some form (at least for royalty) for thousands of years, it seems to have developed in Europe into what we would recognise as ice-cream in around about the C16th and was gradually popularised as ice houses and then refrigeration became more available.

So – my winner? Well, I can’t fit my bed-cave into even my imaginary Cabinet of Curiosities, so it will have to be a fan. Practical and pretty – it can act as a reminder of this summer’s heat wave long after we’re shivering in our beds and longing for summer again…

Romantic Heroes (and how we perceive them)

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I'm writing this post on St Valentine's Day having just run the gauntlet of the pink-and-heart-strewn aisle of my local supermarket. And as Catherine Johnson so rightly says, on the blog today what single person wants to be reminded of Valentine's Day?

But what with the day of romance and all that plus a great conversation I had on twitter yesterday, the thought of romantic heroes and how they've changed has been going over in my mind.

I'm a Georgette Heyer addict. I admit that without shame or excuses. Whenever the going gets tough, the tough hide under the bedclothes and read Georgette Heyer. I discovered her historical fiction novels (almost exclusively Georgian or Regency) at 14 and have returned to them in times of illness and trouble ever since. They've also influenced my own writing.

But rereading a few of them more recently with a more heightened awareness of gender and power balances within relationships, a few of the male protagonists, the way they are portrayed and the female responses to them, make me uncomfortable.

Heyer's female characters are, like most women of their time in fiction, entirely concerned with finding a husband; a genuine constraint in a society that doesn't allow women autonomy. The desirable husbands were a range of dashing blades, dissolute bucks, witty dandies, brave soldiers and the like. Quite a swoony collection of men, in fact.

The ones that make me uncomfortable are the 'masterful' men - and the women who like to submit to this mastery, because it's what they've secretly been desiring all along. What makes me so uneasy is just how close 'masterful' is to 'controlling and abusive' and how close this submissiveness is to 'she likes it really'.

There's a difference, I feel, between a strong male character and one who is imperious and dominating. It's a fine line, and just which side of it we tread and find acceptable has changed enough in the last few decades to make a few of these older books (Heyer was writing mainly from the 1930s to the 1960s) jar with the modern reader. Strangely there is more that jars with me in Heyer's historical fiction than there is in Austen, the Brontes, Gaskell, Burney or even Radcliffe - many of whose heroes are positive paragons of virtue.

I've become gradually more aware, over the years I've been writing, of the need to portray mutual respect between the genders and around issues of consent. This is especially the case writing for a young adult readership. Romance writing is a responsible business. The romances you read as a young person are likely to shape your attitudes to and understanding of romantic relationships.

The rise of teen 'dark romance' with its borderline-abusive relationships, including stalking, voyeurism, danger of imminent death and other unsavoury ingredients, portrayed as romantic, trouble me very deeply. I know I'm not alone in this.

I've reacted by making my own male protagonist in my most recent historical novel, Runaway, more respectful. I probably need to go much further down this path, in fact and make my girls more assertive, although this is harder to achieve convincingly in historical fiction, where social norms were different. But consent and mutual respect are vital to portray. In fact, I think I'll end this with the wonderful words of one of the university guides my eldest son came across a year or so ago: "Consent is setting the bar too low, guys. Hold out for enthusiasm."

OUR ISLAND STORY by Adèle Geras

My copy of this book is sixty years old. It was given to me as a leaving present by my teacher when I left my school in Lagos to go to Jesselton, North Borneo. I covered it back then in brown paper to preserve it and the paper has weathered the years very well.



The inscription inside the front cover reads: Adele weston June 1st 1951. Lagos.
I wasn't as fussy then as I am now about the accent on my first name and I'm not a hundred percent sure of my capital letters either.



Our Island Story is written by a woman, Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall. It was first published in 1905 and in 2005, after having been out of print for ages, it reappeared in a centenary edition. If any of you was a teacher at that time, you might remember your free copy of this book appearing in the post. It was distributed, apparently, to every school in the country as a kind of present and I have no idea of the way it was received when it arrived, nor what the children who read it in the 21st century thought of it. Marshall mixes legends in with 'proper history' and that might have made it seem a little more 'fictional' than your average history book.

I'm certain that the kind of history purveyed in its pages is full of dreadfully old-fashioned things: Colonial not to say Imperialist views and a storytelling style that was common in the kind of book read by children in the Enid Blyton days: bland and cosy to say the least. There are clear villains and heroes. The British are always the best, it goes without saying, but one thing can be said for Our Island Story: it had lots of great women in it: Elizabeth, Queen Victoria and Flora Macdonald, not to mention Florence Nightingale and the wonderful (no Boudicca nonsense here!) Boadicea.



Just get a load of that hair! This picture accounts for my passion for red-headed heroines. They feature in a great many of my books. Okay, Rita Hayworth and Anne of Green Gables can take their share of the blame, but Boadicea was the start of it. The caption under the picture reads: "Will you follow me, men?" - a feminist call to arms if ever there was one. I fell in love with the romance of history through pictures like these and the stories which accompanied them.

Look at this illustration showing the two Princes in the Tower. Was there ever a more heart-rending caption than the one under this picture? It reads: The days seemed very long and dreary to the two little boys.



And now see this. Look at the dresses accompanying the story of the Pipes at Lucknow. In the text, one of the women is described as being in a fever and crying out deliriously: "Dinna ye hear them? Dinna ye hear them?" and those are the words under this picture:



Well, if that was what one looked like while waiting in agonies of fever for the relief of Lucknow, it didn't seem to be such a terrible fate after all. The illustration led directly to years and years of very inadequate crinoline-drawing on my part. My rough book at school was covered in dresses just like these and these two outfits, the purple and the blue are what come into my mind when I think of someone in Victorian costume.

Here is Richard Coeur de Lion...oh, I loved his story! The caption reads. "Richard went away to Palestine."



Here, another favourite of mine to this day, is the tragic Mary, Queen of Scots. Her caption says: "For nineteen years, this poor queen was kept in prison." I found it heart-rending and cried whenever I read her story.



And here was a tale that bred in me a continuing love of romance. It's the story of Flora Macdonald and Bonnie Prince Charlie and the words under the picture say: "They took a sad farewell of each other." To me, when I was seven, it was total bliss, imagining that farewell. You can't see it very well in my photo, but that white blob at the lovers' feet is a pretty little sheep.



These photos were taken with my very low-tech camera and my non-existent photographic skills but I hope they've shown a little of the magic of this book. Almost every history book I've read since is 'better' in the sense of being more accurate or better-written or illluminating, but this will always be the enchanting one, the one that told me, loud and clear: There are brilliant stories in these pages of gallantry and tragedy and love. Come in, don't be scared you won't understand this thing called History. You will, and you'll love it.

PS Since I wrote the first draft of this post, it's emerged that fewer and fewer pupils are opting to study History for GCSE. Eve Edwards argued recently on this blog that historical novels should be used to enthuse children about history and she's right. She says, also, that History is being studied in all sorts of interesting ways today, when it IS studied. But I think there's also room for presenting it as a series of thrilling stories, just as H. E.Marshall did in her book.

Writing history: Is romance a modern concept?

By Eve Edwards

‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love’ (As You Like It, Act 4 Sc 1)

When I was contemplating this blogpost on the historical experience of romantic love, V.S. Naipaul burst into the news for his outstandingly arrogant views on women writers and their attachment to sentiment. In his view, women writers are always inferior because of their ‘sentimentality, the narrow view of the world’. ‘And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.’

Even Jane Austen cannot hold a candle to the masterful Naipaul, it seems, as her ambitions were also ‘sentimental’. Sorry, the History Girls, we have been dismissed without a hearing: if Jane is damned, then we do not have a hope!

Gosh. I have to take a moment here just to marvel at how many ways he is in the wrong. Picture me reclining on my daybed, wafting my heated forehead with a copy of Pride and Prejudice. If you need a boost to your blood pressure, do go and read the article in the Guardian here.

Now, I am tempted to think that Naipaul is purposely baiting the literary press to get column inches (he is no stranger to controversy), because surely he cannot be so dismissive of writers drawn from half of humanity? Has he not read Barbara Kingsolver, Anita Desai, Beryl Bainbridge, Margaret Atwood – to name but a few contemporaries? We cannot rule out the possibility that he is just a conceited fool. Yet he is useful for my purposes as he does give an extreme expression to the view that writing about love (by this I understand romance of the Elizabeth/Darcy, Emma/Mr Knightly kind) is somehow lesser than the masculine strength of…well, of what exactly? War? Political ambition? Existential crisis? Books as only V.S. Naipaul writes them?

Let us not waste too much time with Naipaul, but it is true there exists a distrust in the wider literary world that romance as we modern writers see it is somehow not properly historical. I offer in evidence the fact that historical romance is shelved separately in many bookshops from mainstream historical novels, almost as if there is a fear of contagion. This could be partly justified by some of the products that creep into this bracket – many novels in this genre are only very superficially historical, an excuse to indulge the ‘I was taken by a Viking/knight/highlander/pirate/regency rake’ (delete as appropriate) fantasy. But bundled along with this chocolate box of sexy day-dreaming, is a suspicion that somehow love is not an important ingredient in true historical experience, at best an episode in a human life hemmed in by the material realities of economics and social developments. As Shakespeare’s Rosalind playfully tells her lover: ‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love’.

And, of course, historical romances almost always commit the fatal error of ending happily. Few Man Booker prize winners would dare be so optimistic – wedding bells do not win literary bouquets these days.

Yet Shakespeare, of course, provides ample material on the other side of this argument, showing that an Elizabethan man was able to write seriously of love being the prime mover of lives as different as the young ‘starcrossed’ lovers of old Verona to the ‘dotage’ of Antony and Cleopatra who wreck an ancient kingdom in their obsession for each other. Love is a serious historic agent of change in lives both great and small in Shakespeare’s plays so it seems we historical romantics are not guilty of projecting back our modern concepts, just inheriting them and reinterpreting them for our own times and understanding of history.

In defiance of Naipaul, I should turn to a female writer for another example. George Eliot’s Middlemarch explores in one plot line how devotion to masculine academic study (Casaubon) with grandiose claims for wider importance turns out to be dry-as-dust and irrelevant. Compared to him, his wife, Dorothea, makes no great claims, content to be a helpmate, yet the novelist finds that admirable: ‘[h]er full nature…spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts’ (Finale, Middlemarch). Her love for Will Ladislaw is one of those acts that improves the world. In a novel by a woman that is often very unsentimental and far from narrow in its view of the world, Eliot makes a plea for the domestic and confined for that is where many of us, men and women, spend our ‘real’ lives away from the false glitter of the public stage.

So the next time I tap away, imagining myself back in the shoes of characters of the past, I need

not be ashamed that I often choose a moment in their lives where love is uppermost in their minds. After all, those historic markers of human lives – the gravestones – are usually graven in ‘loving memory’. Most of us prefer to go down in history as loving wives/husbands/mothers/fathers, not good workers, famous (infamous) politicians or, dare I say it, notable writers.

Eve Edwards' 'The Rogue's Princess' (about Elizabethan theatre and early English puritanism) is available in the UK from July 2011 from Razorbill (Puffin). 'The Other Countess' comes out in the USA, also this July, with Random House: www.eve-edwards.co.uk