Writing Historical Fiction by Celia Brayfield

We have a huge extra treat this month from Celia Brayfield, whose new book with Duncan Sprott, Writing Historical Fiction sounds like a must-read for all History Girls - and Boys.



A bit about Celia:


Celia Brayfield’s first novel, which began in Malaysia in 1938, was written when historical fiction was the love that dared not speak its name. She subsequently smuggled revolutionary St Petersburg, Paris with the Ballets Russes and the Barbary Coast in the eighteenth Century into some of her nine bestselling novels. Her next novel is about the love affair between a French man and an English woman that finally brought Mary Queen of Scots to justice; in retelling this tragic episode in English history, she has used recent research to follow the lives the ordinary people trapped Mary’s doomed court-in-exile. Celia also tutors award-winning students on two of Britain’s leading Creative Writing programmes, at Bath Spa University and Brunel University in London. She is the author of Bestseller (Fourth Estate) 1996, one of the very few guides to writing successful popular fiction from a bestselling author.

She is also the guest editor of the winter 2013 edition of Mslexia.

Here she muses on why anachronistic attitudes to love and sex have sometimes given historical fiction a bad name.

Bodice-ripper. Shall we just think about this for a moment? Yes, it’s publishing slang for popular historical fiction for women and it tells us about the mindset, fixed in the Mad Men era, that put historical writing beyond the literary pale for decades. Bodice-ripper believers are sure that that our ancestors were randy as stoats, at it like crazed weasels and permanently breathless with passion.

I think not. The eminent historian Lawrence Stone thought not, in his tome The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) which transformed thinking about relationships in the early modern period and in which observed that people had far less sex at that time than we imagined they did.

Likewise with love. History certainly offers us epic romances – the love of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, which endured thirty years and his first two highly advantageous marriages to other women, or the coup de foudre which led Eleanor of Aquitaine to dump the King of France for the unprepossessing Duke of Normandy – later Henry II of England. But the writer who tries to tread a path between accurate history and engaging fiction is confronted by the fact that neither love nor sex have meant the same to our ancestors as they do to us today.

Worse, we have very little evidence to tell us how ordinary people felt, thought and acted about love, and what we do have – the poetry, the erotica, the court testimonies – was not created to provide a record, but to serve a purpose at the time. Finally, worst of all, many authors have made considerable fortunes by ignoring these facts and having Tudor noblewomen act like Essex girls.

Love is the stuff of fiction, particularly popular fiction, but love has not always been the intense, intimate and sexual emotion we recognise today nor was it always considered the best foundation for a marriage and family. History is not on the writer’s side. Mostly, love has been an anarchic challenge to the social order.

Love and the novel have a shared history. Romantic love was defined by the romantic movement of the late eighteenth century, in which the idea that emotions should be all-powerful and should triumph over reason was central. The novel itself emerged at the same time and their linguistic origins are intertwined, with the word romance having double meaning – a love affair or a story. The sociologist Anthony Giddens has suggested that romantic love introduced the idea of a narrative into an individual's life and reinforced the link between self-realisation and freedom.

It is ironic that the period of English history that is currently such a focus of fiction was one of the least romantic. To modern readers, the true Tudor attitudes to love and marriage e are depressingly pragmatic. The immense dynastic marriages of the time, such as that of the Earl of Shrewsbury and Bess of Hardwick, a three-couple alliance which included four of the couple’s adult children, seem cruel and incomprehensible to us.

Equally hard to understand is the story of Lady Catherine Gray, heir to the English throne, who fell in love and married Edward Seymour, the Earl of Pembroke, in secret while negotiations for a diplomatic alliance for her were under way. Within months Catherine’s young husband was sent abroad and his sister, the only witness to their marriage, died. Catherine lost the legal document that proved their marriage, and the priest who married them disappeared. She found herself pregnant, with a child that was, to all intents and purposes, illegitimate. Queen Elizabeth suspected a plot and Catherine was imprisoned for the rest of her life. To modern readers, and to fine novelists including Alison Weir and Ella March Chase, this is a tragic story of true love. To an Elizabethan audience, this is a tragic story of an unbelievably silly and disloyal young couple. And to male historians, alas, it has been proof that Queen Elizabeth was an embittered spinster.

Does it matter that a novelist in pursuit of more readers makes a Tudor lady act like an Essex girl? To me, yes. Surely the reason we explore the past is to find out what human nature really is. If we traduce our ancestors’ feelings, there’s no reason to get to know them at all. And besides, a bodice meant exquisite fabric imported from far-off lands, jewels, gold thread, skilled embroiderers, weeks of work for dozens of people – the man who ripped it wouldn’t be anyone’s favourite.

Extracted from Writing Historical Fiction:The Writers’ and Artists’ Companion, by Celia Brayfield and Duncan Sprott, published by Bloomsbury Academic, December 5 2013.

How the baccalà got its tale – Michelle Lovric

After all these years of writing about Venice, my list of must-tell tales from her past just grows longer and more tantalizing.

One of my current favourites is attached to something I look at every day – the pink palace just opposite. This story, like all the best ones, is about food and sex, and it also has some wine and shipwreck thrown in. As it simply cannot end up in a children’s book, and since it all unfolded 400 years too early for The Book of Human Skin, my latest adult novel, where better place to share it than in a History Girls’ Blog?

So pour yourself a prosecco, or a glass of freshly squeezed blood-orange juice, and I'll you the story of the way in which celebrated Venetian dish of baccalà mantecato arrived in our city.

Baccalà is the Venetian word for stoccafisso, meaning stockfish or cod. To make baccalà mantecato, dried salted cod is boiled and whipped up to a fluffy consistency with olive oil, salt and pepper. It’s served on rounds of bread or with polenta. These days it’s so popular that there’s even a Confraternity of the Baccalà with its own website. But neither the fish nor the recipe is native to Venice. Venetian baccalà, to quote numerous punners, is the piece of cod that surpasseth all understanding.

So what’s this to do with the palace opposite ours? Well, that pink palace once belonged to a branch of the Querini clan, patricians from the early days of the Venetian republic. I’ve spent a lot of time with this family over the last few years, as Marco Querini was the father-in-law of Bajamonte Tiepolo, the villain of my two children’s novels, The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium. In 1310, Marco Querini conspired with Bajamonte to kill the Doge and take over the state. They failed, comprehensively. Their palaces were razed to the ground (this was the Rialto branch of the Querini family) and the Querini and Tiepolo crests hammered off every building in the city.

But our current story starts more than two hundred years later, by which time both families were somewhat rehabilitated. In April of 1431, sixty-eight Venetians set sail from Candia in Crete. Their vessel was the Gemma Quirinia, laden down with barrels of sweet Malvasia wine and spices for trade with Flanders. Their leader was the merchant nobleman Pietro Querini. All went swimmingly until some days out of Cadiz, when a terrible tempest broke the Gemma’s mast, ripped her sails and blew her off course. The ship was doomed. Querini boarded his men into two tenders – one of which was immediately swallowed by the sea. Seven weeks later, the survivors found themselves near the Lofoten archipelago inside the Arctic Circle. The Venetians were rescued by local fishermen and taken to the remote island of Rost. Querini described it in his diary as in culo mundi, the backside of the world.

But he soon changed his mind. The 120 islanders proved exceptionally hospitable: they fed, clothed and housed the Venetians. And their wives offered a quite outstanding amount of hospitality.

The men of Rost would depart before daylight on their fishing expeditions, leaving their wives in bed. Everyone slept naked on Rost in those days. It appears that when the husbands had vacated those beds, the Venetians were welcome to take their places. And they were expected to take part in the weekly communal hot bath, every Thursday, also, naturally, naked.

Not surprisingly, the Venetians tarried quite some time on Rost – four months’ worth of Thursday baths, it seems – and meanwhile became quite fond of the local cuisine. The islanders fed on a kind of codfish that could be eaten fresh or dried. Perhaps the Venetians had an interest in sending those Rost fishermen out to sea to replenish stocks as often as possible.

Eventually – in October 1432 – Querini and his friends returned to Venice, bringing with them some pleasant memories, including a recipe for whipped-up dried codfish.
Perhaps, for these men, the baccalà had the same evocative and synaesthetic texture as Proust’s Madeleine cake?

Of course the returning sailors still had to convince the Venetians of the joy of stockfish. The ripe smell was initially a little strong for their delicate nostrils and refined palates. But Venice came to love its baccalà. And a year later Querini returned to Lofoten with a shipful of wine and spices to trade for dried cod.

The success of baccalà was reinforced by the Councils of Trent in 1545 and 1563, when the dish was decreed an acceptable item of consumption on Wednesdays and Fridays during the lean days of Lent.

And now you'll find it on every counter of every bar in Venice.

I hope you enjoyed this little taste.



LINKS

Michelle Lovric’s website

The Book of Human Skin will be featured on the TV Book Club on More4 July 24th and Channel 4 July 25.

Video trailer for The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium on YouTube

I’m grateful to the elegant Alberto Toso Fei for alerting me to the stockfish story, and many others.

plate pictured