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.

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When the Old becomes New Again, by Gillian Polack

 

I have been saved from a post I didn’t want to write by an email on 1 January. Today, you see, is a national holiday in Australia. Australia Day embodies so many dreams and so many conflicts and so much hurt that it would be a very good subject to write about. Not this year. This year too many people hurt and I don’t want to write about people hurting. Or I could talk about the Birthday of Trees, which has just finished. Not this year, either. The Birthday of trees is a wonderful day, but it’s Jewish and it’s not that easy to be publicly Jewish in the world right now. Besides, that email changed everything. It gave me something good to write about, where no-one gets hurt. Except trees… some days I cannot win.

That email concerned a novel (Chocolate Redemption) that had been announced a few years ago. It had been delayed by COVID and by crises and by the world being generally Very Difficult. To start my year (literally, on New Year’s Day), I received the edits from the publisher and the knowledge that it’s finally emerging into daylight. I don’t know yet if the title will remain, but until the release date is announced, then I shall refer to it as Chocolate Redemption, because this is its name in my heart of hearts.

Chocolate Redemption is not just any novel. A long time ago, about the time The Middle Ages Unlocked was on its way, my readers asked me “Why don’t you write more fiction that uses your knowledge of the Middle Ages? You have a PhD in Medieval History and we like to read stories set in the Middle Ages. Write them, please.”

I wrote a time travel novel (Langue[dot]doc 1305) and my readers said, “That was great, but we need more. And it should be different to the time travel novel.”

I answered them, “Maybe one day, when I’m ready to explore the Middle Ages from a different direction.”

I had, to be honest, already started writing this novel. I was on a retreat in the Blue Mountains, at the wonderful writer’s house, Varuna. I finished Ms Cellophane, the novel I went there to write, and I began another. I wrote the first chapter there, and did a ll the research, and wrote an outline. After that, it took me a long time, because life kept getting in the way.

I hesitated to talk about it, too. It wasn’t really a proper fantasy novel. It wasn’t really fully a novel about our world, either. It broke so many genre models. I finished it, and then I put it on hold because I was worried about it. I didn’t think it worked. So I sat on it. And I sat on it. And I sat on it some more. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t always trust their own ability to carry a dream through. With this novel, which (just to be really clear) had amazing support from beta readers, I felt I had failed. So I sat on it some more.

While I sat, I refined it. I was worried about the black dye in one section. I’d included dying because of the place it was set (a town that produced much glorious fabric) but also because I wanted to make the same pun I’d made in Poison and Light. If one has a tenterfield and one is Australian, then the tenterfield needs a saddler. There are bad jokes like this in all my novels, little Easter eggs for readers who enjoy spotting them. Except that in Chocolate Redemption, the tenterfield uses the original definition and is for cloth dying. I wanted the black dye to be accurate, so I asked my textile archaeologist friend, Katrin Kania. I did this throughout the novel. I made sure that there was a basis of historical fact underlying all extrapolation and all whimsy. The invented world for the fantasy side of the novel is mostly Medieval rather than mostly invented, and even the inventions are based on extrapolations: that cloth was my reminder of how I had achieved this. I do that with all my novels. I leave reminders in of the path I travelled to get there.

Then I sat on it some more still. Along the way, I wrote a short story about dancing in a churchyard after the Great Plague, then I wrote another that was a finalist for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, so my patient readers were not left without any of my Middle Ages. They were just missing this one novel I had written and about which I was unaccountably shy.

Really, there’s nothing scary about this novel. I should not have put in on hold for years. It’s what a novel would look like if half of it were a fantasy Middle Ages with the fantastical was grounded in our actual knowledge of the Middle Ages, rather than in the Medieval themes we often read in fantasy literature. And yet it wasn’t an historical novel at all.

I had not quite emerged from The Middle Ages Unlocked (a non-fiction guide to Medieval England I wrote with <drumroll> Katrin Kania), so my approach to the history was precise. Where else did I get my knowledge? It helps, sometimes, to work with other writers and learn from them. I was working, at that moment, with Felicity Pulman, a marvellous Australian writer of Young Adult novels. She asked me for advice on Medieval Winchester for a detective series she was writing (the Janna Mysteries), and it was that advice that led me into my own approach. The town in Chocolate Redemption is loosely based on Winchester, as me doffing my hat to Felicity. If you’ve not read her writing before, Ghost Boy is particularly clever in its emotional force and its use of history.

Eventually I got over myself and Odyssey accepted the novel and then COVID hit and life went awry again. On January 1 this year I read the edits. Odyssey’s editor was ecstatic about the story and the characters and especially one particular love scene and… I felt very stupid about my lack of confidence.

The novel is about women’s lives. Small lives. Lives that the rest of the world fails to see properly. I love the richness of women’s lives. It was a lot of fun to write about an apothecary in a Medieval town and her Jewish best friend and her love and all her professional concerns, and her kitten, and floods and fury and all the stuff a town goes through in a year.

The Medieval section is about the lives of younger women. Old enough to be independent, but young enough to have big decisions in their immediate future. The Katoomba (modern Australian) section is about an older woman, whose daughter is in the middle of the big decisions and whose life has reached a quietly impossible point.

The novel includes chocolate, and it’s about mapping our streets and our lives.  

For me, it’s a bit of an oddity. It falls between genres. Lives of women do this, all the time. The mapping others do of our lives doesn’t actually match with the way we live. That’s the heart of the story.

I’ll put out an announcement on social media when Odyssey settles the release dates. In the meantime, if anyone wants to be included on the review copy list, send me a note and I’ll forward it to my publisher. Because Odyssey (the publisher) is in New Zealand review copies will be ebooks only. New Zealand is a long way from anywhere other than Australia and islands in the very south Pacific. Postage costs and time for the post to reach far-distant places are other aspects of those small lives I so enjoy writing about.

In the meantime, my January gift to myself is finally being able to talk openly about Chocolate Redemption. Bringing it out of hiding was a difficult thing. Watching others read it and form opinions is going to be exciting, but even more difficult. I shall buttress the emotions with chocolate.

The Ten Best Witch Historical Fiction Novels – by Anna Mazzola

Witches are, in the perhaps unfortunate words of Grazia magazine, ‘hot right now’, both on screen and in books. Stacey Halls’ The Familiars is spending its third week in The Times bestselling fiction list, Laura Bates’ YA debut, The Burning, is making waves, and A Discovery of Witches is now an international bestseller and a TV series.

Several other recent novels feature witchcraft including Caroline Lea’s superb The Glass Girl (set against the backdrop of the 17th-century Icelandic witch trials) and E.C. Fremantle’s brilliant thriller The Poison Bed. “‘Witch,” says one of her characters. “That’s what happens to women who don’t do as they’re told.”  Each novel uses witchcraft to highlight the misogyny and fear of women’s sexuality that remain relevant today, together with the terrible power of false accusations. As Willow Winsham says in her fascinating book Accused: British Witches Throughout History, ‘if anyone could be a witch, then literally everyone was suspect.’

A coven of other witch books are due out in the coming months including Katie Lowe’s haunting debut, The Furies, Carla by Laura Legge, Her Kind by Niamh Boyce, Remember Tomorrow by Amanda Saint and Witchery by Juliet Diaz, which will explain ‘how to connect with the power of your inner witch’. There is, it seems, something potent in the air.

Here, in no particular order, I list ten of my favourite witch-based historical novels, followed by several others that have been strongly recommended.

1. Corrag, Susan Fletcher 

It is 1692 and Corrag, a wild young girl from the mountains of Scotland, has been condemned to death for her role in the Glencoe Masscare, accused of witchcraft and murder. In her filthy cell she is visited by Charles Leslie, a young Irishman with his own motives for questioning her.

As Corrag begins to tell her story, an unlikely friendship develops between them that will change both their lives. Compelling, atmospheric and exquisitely written.

2. The Witchfinder's Sister, Beth Underdown

Beth Underdown’s clever debut is a historical thriller based on the life of the 1640’s witchfinder Matthew Hopkins. Alice, Matthew’s fictional sister, is forced to return to her childhood town of Manningtree where she becomes entangled in her brother’s crazed pursuit of what he believes to be justice. Underdown brilliantly weaves fact with fiction to illustrate the disturbing paranoia and obsession behind the Essex witch hunts.

3. The King's Witch, Tracy Borman 

Historian Tracy Borman’s debut novel tells the fascinating story of Frances Gorges, a healer who is dragged to the court of James I, a man who has already condemned many for treason and witchcraft. There she becomes enmeshed in a world of intrigue and betrayal - and at great risk from the twisted machinations of Lord Cecil, the King's first minister.

The follow-up, The Devil’s Slave, is out June.

4. The Vanishing Witch, Karen Maitland

In Lincoln during the reign of Richard II, Caitlin, a dark-haired widow arrives in John of Gaunt's city with her two beautiful children. At first, Caitlin is considered a godsend, helping merchant Robert of Bassingham care for his sick wife. But when Robert's wife, and then others, die seemingly unnatural deaths, the accusations of witchcraft commence. Masterful storytelling.

5. The Familiars – Stacey Halls

17-year-old Fleetwood Shuttleworth, desperate to survive her latest pregnancy, crosses paths with Alice Gray, a mysterious young woman who agrees to become her midwife. When Alice is accused as part of the Lancashire witch trials, Fleetwood takes huge risks to try to save her – and her own unborn baby. But is Alice all that she seems?

Fast-faced, twisty and immense fun.

6. The Witch of Blackbird Pond – Elizabeth George Speare 

In 1687 orphan Kit Tyler arrives as a stranger in colonial Connecticut and feels entirely out of place. When she forms a friendship with a Quaker woman called Hannah Tupper, believed by the colonists to be a witch, Kit is forced to choose between love and a sense of duty. Old, but gold.

7. Circe, Madeline Miller 

In this epic and magnificently written novel, Miller retells the story of the mythological witch Circe. Increasingly isolated by her immortal family, Circe turns to humans for friendship, leading her to discover a power forbidden to the gods: witchcraft.

We follow Circe from the halls of Helios to exile on the remote island of Aiaia, where she learns to harness her power.

8. Witch Child, Celia Rees

In 1659, after 14-year-old Mary sees her healer grandmother hanged for witchcraft, she escapes to Massachusetts Bay Colony with the help of an unknown woman. Through Mary's journal, we learn of how, though Mary hopes to make a new life among the pilgrims, she, like her grandmother, quickly finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice, and once more she faces important choices to ensure her survival. A powerful read for all ages.

9. The Glass Girl, Caroline Lea

The Glass Girl is an atmospheric and beautifully written debut set against the backdrop of the 17th-century Icelandic witch trials and sagas. Rósa is sent to join her new husband in the remote village of Stykkishólmur, where the villagers are deeply wary of outsiders.

As she grows increasingly isolated, Rósa's suspicions grow. Her husband buried his first wife alone in the dead of night. Is her own life in danger?

10. The Poison Bed, E.C. Fremantle

In 1615 Lady Frances Carr, considered by many to be a witch, is accused of murder and imprisoned, together with her newborn baby and a wet-nurse. As Frances tells the story of her life with her first husband and manipulative uncle, and of a society full of superstition and lies, a picture begins to form. But her husband Robert Carr has his own story. Which one will save its teller? A twisty, perfectly paced thriller.

Witchy 'To be Read' Pile 

A host of other witch and witchcraft-related books have been recommended to me and I set out here a few of those which are going on my towering ‘to be read’ pile:

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. In 1666 villagers turn to sorcery, herb lore, and witch-hunting.

The Daylight Gate, in which Jeanette Winterson creates another view of the Pendle Witch Trials.

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s first novel about a young woman who believes she has sold her soul to the devil in return for freedom from her tiresome family (fair enough).

Widdershins by Helen Steadman, based on events from the Newcastle Witch Trials of 1650.

The Magpie Tree by Katherine Stansfield, exploring the relationship between witchcraft and foreigners in 1840s Cornwall.

Witches Trinity by Erika Mailman, set in Germany in 1507 when a visiting friar suggests that witchcraft is to blame for the failing crops and famine.

The Witches of Eileanan by Kate Forsyth, a historical fantasy trilogy in which the young Isabeau leads a horde of persecuted witches.

The Witches of New York by Ami McKay, a mystery set in Manhattan in 1880.

The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent, set in Salem in 1692.

The Boy Who Drew The Future, by Rhian Ivory. Set in present day and 1863, when the last witch in the UK was swum in Sible Hedingham, Essex. You can read more about it here.


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Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime and Gothic fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, is a tale of superstition, dark folklore and missing girls on the Isle of Skye.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

The Top Ten Gothic Novels - Chosen by Anna Mazzola

As the nights draw in and the spirits move closer, it’s time to huddle beneath your Victorian counterpane with an unbearably creepy book. Many brilliant Gothic reads are being released in time for Halloween: Melmoth, The Corset, House of Ghosts, The Lingering, and The House on Vesper Sands, to name but a few. All play with and develop ideas and tropes that have been ghosting about since the 18th century. Ever since Conrad was crushed to death by a giant helmet in The Castle of Otranto, the Gothic genre has been evolving strangely and blooming darkly.

Here, as a discussion/fight-starter rather than a definitive list, are my top ten favourite Gothic reads.

1. Jane Eyre (1847)

Sinister boarding schools, ghostly visions, eerie laughter, suppressed sexuality and angry women in the attic. Charlotte Brontë used Gothic elements in Jane Eyre to create a new female language. Critics of the time were not impressed, however. The Quarterly Review did 'not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.’

2. Wuthering Heights (1847)

Wuthering Heights was also controversial in its time because of its unflinching depictions of cruelty and its challenge to Victorian societal ideals. Even now, Wuthering Heights remains a raw and powerful read, and many authors cite its influence in their own work. Many of us have wondered what else this formidable author might have written, but Emily Brontë died at the age of 30, saying that she would have ‘no poisoning doctor’ near her.

Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey, were all published in the same year.

3. The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Henry James said he preferred to create ghosts that were eerie extensions of everyday reality: ‘the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.’ For nearly 120 years, readers have been trying to work out whether the ‘strange and sinister’ were only in the unnamed governess's mind, or whether the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are in fact real.

4. Rebecca (1938)

Though dismissed by many critics at the time as romances, novels such as Jamaica Inn, Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel (and many of Du Maurier’s short stories) are more akin to mysteries or psychological thrillers strongly embued with Gothic elements. As with Henry James, the real and the ghostly often elide, so that Mrs Danvers is part human, part malevolent ghost, and Rebecca herself haunts the imaginations of the characters, and also that of the reader, long after they’ve finished the book.

5. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

‘My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.’ 

It’s my favourite first paragraph so had to be quoted in full. We Have Always was Shirley Jackson’s last novel and, in my view, her best. In fact, it’s probably my favourite book on this list: deceptively simple, darkly funny and profoundly unsettling. Jackson's biographer referred to it as a 'paean' to the author's agoraphobia. If you haven’t discovered Shirley Jackson yet, you’re in for a rare and disturbing treat.

6. The Bloody Chamber (1979)

Angela Carter was hailed as the ‘grand-dame of the modern English gothic’, saying that she’d ‘always been fond of Poe and Hoffmann – Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious.’

The Bloody Chamber is perhaps her most gothic work. In her collection of stories about witches, forsaken castles, haunted forests and howling wolves, Carter gave fairy tales a fantastic, feminist twist.

7. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985)

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with an exceptional sense of smell. He survives his mother’s attempt to kill him at birth and grows up in stinking, extraordinary 18th century Paris. Grenouille becomes a perfumer in order to preserve that most precious of smells: his murder victims. Dark, brilliant and building in bizarreness to a climax you’re unlikely to forget. Kurt Curbain wrote a song about it.

8.  Beloved (1987)

Gothic fiction often connects with the fears and anxieties of its time. Beloved is the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver after their escape from slavery. Their home in Cincinnati is haunted by a revenant, whom they believe to be the ghost of Sethe's daughter, Beloved. This astonishing book uses the Gothic to expose the horrors and silence of slavery.

9. The Little Stranger (2009)

Sarah Waters has apparently said she did not set out to write a ghost story, but she seems accidentally to have written one of the best ones. It is the 1940s and, as Hundreds Hall decays, peculiar powers take hold. Superbly measured and deeply chilling. As with the best Gothic tales, we’re left unsettled and unsure. And probably wanting to see the movie.

10. The Loney (2015)

Of the many brilliant Gothic novels from recent years, The Loney stands out like a moss-covered tombstone. Both old and new and suspended somewhere between the supernatural, the strange, and the outright horrific, Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel is, as Sarah Perry has said, a real Gothic masterpiece.

And yes, I realise I’ve missed off many of the classics usually included in lists of this kind. But what would be the point of a Gothic list, if it conformed to expectations?


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Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, is a tale of dark folklore and missing girls on the Isle of Skye.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

An Historical Enigma: The Real Grace Marks and Alias Grace - by Anna Mazzola

                                    

In the 1960s, Margaret Atwood read a book called Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush, a 19^th century account of pioneer life by Susanna Moodie, an English emigrant to Canada. A chapter of the book is devoted to the Provincial Lunatic Asylum in Toronto, and to Moodie’s visit to the violent ward to meet the ‘celebrated murderess Grace Marks’.

Grace Marks was a Canadian maid who in 1843, when only 16, was convicted with fellow servant James McDermott of murdering their master, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper-lover Nancy Montgomery. Kinnear had been shot in the left side of his chest. Nancy Montgomery was struck in the head with an axe and then strangled. A post mortem revealed that she had been pregnant.

The Trial of McDermott and Marks

The trial took place in November 1843 and was a great sensation, the newspapers covering the proceedings with appropriate levels of gore and sexual intrigue. On the day of McDermott’s evidence, so many spectators packed into the courtroom that ‘some alarm was created by a report that the floor of the courtroom was giving way’ and a rush was made for the door.

 

During the proceedings, Marks and McDermott blamed each other for instigating the murders. They were both convicted of Kinnear’s death, but only McDermott was ultimately hanged. Before he went to the scaffold, McDermott insisted that Grace had strangled Nancy Montgomery herself with a piece of white cloth.

Murderess or madwoman?

There was much discussion at the time as to whether Grace Marks was in fact guilty. She is said to have displayed little emotion during the trial and, according to newspaper reports, arrived at court wearing clothes that she had stolen from the dead Nancy Montgomery. However, some believed she was innocent, the victim of McDermott’s lies. Others believed she was insane.

She gave three conflicting accounts of the murder, while McDermott gave two. In Marks’ last confession, published in the Star and Transcript, she said that after Montgomery had fired McDermott, he had determined to kill her and Kinnear. ‘He had made me promise to assist him,’ Marks said, ‘and I agreed to do so.’ Marks claimed that she had tried to run away from the house after Kinnear was killed, and that McDermott had tried to shoot her.

Toronto Lunatic Asylum

It’s not clear why Marks was sent to the lunatic asylum. It was suggested variously that she was possessed by the consciousness of her dead friend, Mary Whitney, or had some kind of personality disorder. Another theory was that Marks had in fact died and that Mary Whitney had adopted her identity. According to Moodie, ‘the fearful hauntings of her brain have terminated in madness’. She described her as ‘lighted up with the fire of insanity and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment.’ The asylum superintendent, however, believed that Grace Marks was faking.

In 1852, she was transferred back to Kingston Penitentiary (where the mini-series of Alias Grace was filmed). The records show she was suspected of having become pregnant during her time at the asylum. As Atwood points out in the afterword to Alias Grace, ‘the men with the easiest access to patients were the doctors’.

After almost thirty years in detention, Marks was pardoned and moved to New York State. After that, the paper trail runs out.

The Servant Girl to Alias Grace

Atwood would mull over Grace Marks for many years. In 1970, she published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a cycle of poems. In 1974 she wrote the screenplay for the film The Servant Girl, also based on Susanna Moodie's account. In 1979 she wrote a version for the stage (Grace). However, by the time she wrote Alias Grace, Atwood had changed her opinion of Grace Marks, having read a variety of sources and realised that Moodie had entirely invented parts of her account. ‘Moodie said at the outset of her account that she was writing Grace Marks's story from memory, and as it turns out, her memory was no better than most.’

Atwood never reached a conclusion about Grace, noting that ‘the true character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma’.  Hence the subtly and slipperiness of the novel. In the afterword to Alias Grace, Atwood notes that although she stuck to the facts where facts existed, she ‘felt free to invent’ details to fill in the gaps between irreconcilable versions of the murders.

At an interview at the Southbank Centre in October, Atwood recounted how she had seen, in the Inspector's Minute Book, the liberation questionnaire that Grace had completed upon leaving Kingston Penitentiary (confirming she could write). One of the questions asked of all outgoing prisoners was, ‘What has been the general cause of your misfortunes, and what has been the immediate cause of the crime for which you have been sent to the Penitentiary?’

Marks’s reply is typically non-committal. It reads: ‘Having been employed in the same house with a villain.’

The Old Kinnear Place, where the murders were committed on 29 July 1843

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The World’s First Novel by Lesley Downer

One day, a little over a thousand years ago, a Japanese court lady picked up her writing brush. In those days Japanese noblewomen lived in seclusion. The only men they could expect to see throughout their entire lives were their fathers, brothers, sons and, if they had one, their husband. The woman - no one knows her name but she has gone down in history as Murasaki Shikibu - was a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court.

Lady Murasaki at her desk
by Utagawa Kunisada (1786 - 1865) 1858

Some time around 1006 - sixty years before the Battle of Hastings, a couple of hundred years after Beowulf and a couple of hundred years before Chaucer - she started writing a story to entertain her mistress, the empress. Like the sultan listening to The Thousand and One Nights or the readers of the instalments of Dickens’s novels, the court ladies clamoured for more.

Murasaki Shikibu was unlikely ever to have a love story of her own, so - perhaps a bit like Jane Austen - she dreamt up the ultimate man and fleshed him out. Prince Genji, the result of her imaginings, was handsome and charming, but also kind-hearted. He was human and flawed. As she told his story he developed and changed and grew older. He suffered terrible losses and tragedies. What Murasaki wrote was amazingly modern, all about relationships and character and feelings. It is moving and gripping and spellbinding and reads like the freshest of page turners. It was the world’s first novel.

In The Tale of Genji Murasaki recounts Genji’s adventures, travels, love affairs and tragedies. A breaker of hearts and fatally prone to falling in love, he’s an adept in the arts of perfume mixing, poetry writing and calligraphy. In his society court ladies keep themselves hidden inside their palaces. He exchanges poems with women he’s never seen and decides if they’re worth meeting on the basis of their handwriting and the quality of their poems. It’s a world quite Proustian in its delicacy and beauty and eternal leisure.

Ox carts - The Tale of Genji
by Tosa Mitsuoki (1617 - 1891) 

This was a society with a very different ethos from our own. Women were never openly seen by men. Noblewomen lived in vermilion-painted palaces (the aristocracy were the only people who counted, as far as Murasaki was concerned) and when visitors called, they received them hidden behind screens. When the women went out they trundled around the tree-lined boulevards of the capital, Heian-kyo, in magnificent ox-drawn carriages, hidden from view, though they made sure there was an exquisite silk sleeve dangling gracefully out of the window so the passing crowd could imagine just how beautiful and cultured the hidden lady was. There was much standing on tiptoe and peeping through lattice fences, not just by the men, trying to catch a glimpse of these elusive creatures, but also by women, when someone like Prince Genji passed by.

In The Tale of Genji men regularly enter ladies’ palaces at night, make love to them in the pitch dark without ever having seen their face and leave at daybreak. The servants, being well trained, studiously ignore the intruders though they are well aware of who they are, as each man wears a distinctive perfume which he has mixed himself.

Spot the lady - hidden behind the screens
Tale of Genji by Kano Hidenobu (late 17th/early 18th century)

Some of the most memorable episodes in The Tale of Genji are humorous. At one point, Genji hears about a princess who lives all alone (apart, of course, from her maids, who don’t count). One day he happens to hear her playing her zither with such skill he assumes she must be very beautiful. He sends her poems, but she is so shy she doesn’t answer, which only piques his interest further. Finally he sneaks in. There is a delicious scent of sandalwood emanating from her clothes, surely evidence of extraordinary beauty. But when he wakes up the next morning and finally sees her he discovers that, far from being beautiful, she has a huge red nose and, worse still, wears very old-fashioned clothes. He’s so horrified he doesn’t even send the customary morning-after poem until evening. But in the end his tender heart is touched and he takes her too under his wing.

Heian Shrine, Kyoto, modelled on Heian Palace 
(794 - 1227), which Lady Murasaki knew.

The early part of the tale is full of stories like these, poignant, sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, detailing Genii’s youthful indiscretions and misadventures, at the end of which he has gathered a brood of women who each live in an apartment in his palace. But as Genji gets older, the story gets darker; in all it is some 54 chapters and 1000 pages long. He suffers, he has terrible failures and disasters and in the end loses the person dearest to his heart - Murasaki, after whom the author is named.

By the time I sat down and read the whole novel I’d been living in Japan for several years. I knew Heian-kyo, Genji’s and also Murasaki’s city, very well. It exists like a ghostly presence underlying the streets of Kyoto, its modern name. The vermilion buildings and green-tiled roofs of Heian Shrine are an exact replica, scaled down a little, of the imperial palace that Murasaki knew, which stood until 1227. In spring the gardens, lake and delicate pavilions are swathed in clouds of cherry blossom. And you can still imagine the ox carts with their huge wooden wheels rumbling up and down the long straight streets of the City of Purple Hills and Crystal Streams, as the poets called it.

The Tale of Genji suffuses Japanese culture and Japanese society. It features in everything from art to the incense guessing game, and episodes from it form the plots of many Noh plays. It enormously coloured the way Japan looked to me. Japanese, I should add, are usually amazed to hear that I’ve read and love The Tale of Genji. For them it’s like Beowulf, so difficult that they too can’t read it in the original and rely on modern Japanese translations.

Lady Murasaki might have glimpsed
yamabushi mountain priests like these from
 the window of her oxcart as she passed
Yasaka Shrine, Kyoto (first built 656 AD) 

As a postscript, if you’re inspired to read The Tale of Genji, you should borrow, buy or steal the Arthur Waley translation. Scholars will tell you it’s not impeccably accurate. Waley took liberties, he changed details. If what you want is a precise, perfectly accurate translation, you could try Edward Seidensticker’s version or Royall Tyler’s magnificent two volume set with copious footnotes and a very interesting introduction. But if you read either of those you won’t be swept off your feet and fall madly in love with Genji and be transported away and unable to stop reading. For that you’ll have to go to Arthur Waley.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel,The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.