'An Unsuitable Job for a Woman?' by A. L. Berridge

A few months ago I visited a military museum as part of my research for ‘Into the Valley of Death’. The wonderfully obliging curator showed me every detail of the uniforms, but when I asked when the regiment’s smooth-bore muskets were replaced with the Minié rifle I saw for the first time he was unprepared. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, hastening to look in the records. ‘I thought you’d be writing a historical romance.’

There was no need to ask why. Several members of the Crimean War Research Society had already asked ‘Are you writing a romance?’, and I somehow don’t believe they’d have put the same question to a man. Yet before I start ranting about sexism, there’s actually good statistical foundation for these assumptions. If you browse the authors in the Historical Novel Society, there’s no doubt ‘romances’ are written overwhelmingly by women, while ‘action and military’ are very firmly the province of men. There are exceptions, of course, and writers like Robyn Young, Philippa Gregory and M.C. Scott have all proved women can more than hold their own in a military world, but in general there’s a truth to the expectation that women don’t write war. What I want to know is – why?

The best explanation I can think of lies in the adage that we should only write what we know. As someone with imagination I’m not sure I agree with that, but when I read the novels of men like Douglas Reeman or George MacDonald Fraser, it’s impossible not to recognize that someone who has actually fought in a war will have far greater knowledge and understanding of it than I can aspire to.

It’s also true that the one place where nobody bats an eyelash at the nature of my research is the Crimea itself, and when I attended the parade on Sevastopol’s National Day it was easy to see why this was.

(Is it just me, by the way, or is that poor lad in the middle struggling to find somewhere safe to put his elbow?)

We can see this kind of scene everywhere now, but women in the Ukraine have been an essential and active part of the military since the days of Russian rule, and I was moved to see so many of them marching with the veterans of WWII.

Here, at least, is one place where no-one thinks it strange that a woman should be interested in the business of war.

 

But I don’t believe military service is the only factor. Many of the foremost male writers in this field have no more experience than I do, but still no-one queries the credentials of Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden, Robert Fabbri or Simon Scarrow – and I doubt anyone asks if they write romances. There’s something else at play here, a long-standing perception that the subject of war is somehow unsuitable for women.

I first encountered this at the age of 8, when my sisters and I were so fascinated by the film ‘Zulu’ that we not only ‘played’ it relentlessly, but even wrote an appalling series of ‘Zulu Weekly’s about it. All might have been well had our poor parents and schoolfriends remained the only unwilling recipients of this dross, but we also sent one to the actor Stanley Baker himself, and the next thing we knew the Cambridge Evening News was at the door. An article about our insatiable blood-lust appeared the next day, and a week later they were back with a camera.

Yep, that's me with the plaits. Sorry.

We were too excited by the glory to recognize the tone of the previous article, and when the BBC asked my father to participate in a discussion about the impact of cinema on impressionable minds while we performed Zulu dances in the background, we were devastated when he said no. Apart from the insanity of actually wanting to be filmed frolicking in nothing but gym knickers and cotton wool, we simply didn’t get what it was all about. I thought it was our age that made us exceptional, but my mother pointed out wearily that boys much younger than us played at violent westerns all the time. What made this a story was the fact that we were girls.

I should have seen it, really. We should have known when the reporters wanted us to wear skirts for the picture, and when the photographer wrapped one plait round my shoulder to make sure it would show. We certainly should have suspected it when the question we were repeatedly asked was ‘And are you all really bloodthirsty?’ We weren’t, actually, and the one shot of the film we none of us liked was the (now ridiculously tame) close-up of a spear plunging into a soldier’s chest, but we could see what the nice adults really wanted and obediently gave them a resounding ‘Yes!’ They wanted freaks – nice little girls who liked blood and gore – and I’m afraid that’s what we gave them.

But it’s not the ‘gore factor’ that militates against us now. The Patricia Cornwell school of pathologists analyses mutilations to the human body even Jack the Ripper didn’t imagine, and no-one says women shouldn’t write crime. Nor is it the horrors, and no-one reading Karen Maitland’s ‘The Gallows Curse’ or Michelle Lovric’s ‘The Book of Human Skin’ ever doubts the ability of women to ‘write dark’. It’s just war.

And only real ones. We can write fictional or legendary ‘maybe’ wars, as in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’, but real wars that people died in – no. There's perhaps a fair point there, in that such wars should never be trivialized or glorified – but why would a woman be more likely to do this than a man? No-one could read Louisa Young’s beautiful ‘My Dear, I Wanted To Tell You’ and fail to be moved by the truth and poignancy with which she conveys the real tragedy of war.

But there is a difference. We’re allowed to write about war as a background to a love story or a setting for a tragedy of human endurance; it’s only the day-in day-out action of it that’s not apparently our business. ‘Into the Valley of Death’ is my first full-scale venture into writing about war, and while it’s concerned with the pity and horror of the Crimea I can’t deny there's excitement and adventure too. Yet there’s plenty of that in the work of Bernard Cornwell, and I doubt many would question his suitability to write it. It’s just women who shouldn’t go there. Just us.

The closest women should get to war

It seems there’s a perception that women must always be dilettantes, that their involvement trivialises what should be a very serious masculine rite. I felt this first when researching for my novels set in 17th century France, and approached a local fencing club for help checking the choreography of my sword-fights. The very helpful Secretary duly forwarded my query to one of their experts, but I don’t think I was meant to see the reply. The man responded to the Secretary without seeing I was copied in, and all he said was ‘Tell her to watch “The Mark of Zorro”’.

Yet whatever one may think about that man (and trust me, I have), the fact remains that somewhere under the sexism is a real and legitimate point. War may at times seem a world of almost masonic mystery where women shouldn’t tread – but how would women feel if a man wrote a novel set in a community of nuns? War is different. There is a kind of unique brotherhood forged between men who stand under fire together, who face death and privation, who have to maim and to kill and stay sane. There is a kind of comradeship very different from that normally enjoyed by women, and if I can’t even acknowledge it then how on earth can I write about it? I do acknowledge it, I’ve talked extensively to modern day veterans to attempt to understand it – but why should I even try?

Perhaps because I write about people: my ‘men’ are as important to me as my ‘women’, and my interest is almost wholly in character. If we’re considering gender stereotypes, then there may be some truth in the idea that men are more interested in facts and women in emotions, but that’s a lousy reason for a woman not to write about an event when emotions can never be more heightened, friendships can never be more intense, and the personal stakes can never be higher. It’s a rotten reason for saying women shouldn’t write about war.

Why they should is another matter – and seeing how long this already is I’ll have to save it for another post. All I’ll say here is that if there’s one thing we History Girls all have in common it’s our ability to care about characters who lived a long time ago and went through experiences we will (hopefully) ourselves never know. Among many others, I care about men who were soldiers.

Is that so very wrong?

***

A.L. Berridge's website

'Into the Valley of Death' comes out May 2012.

As if! by Theresa Breslin

I was more amused than outraged when those words "As if!" were used as a complete sentence by one of the characters in Downton Abbey. For me it was just another of the many idiosyncrasies of a series which takes a look at a supposed aspect of life at the beginning of the previous century. But when I heard the same sentence uttered during Spielberg's version of War Horse I was startled. Did I mishear? And if not, am I wrong in thinking this to be an anachronism?

Historical novels are prone to anachronisms. I would hesitate to take anyone to task about this and not just because I'm sure a careful combing of my own books might reveal embarrassing glitches. I respect my fellow writers who work extremely hard and labour over their craft, also writers of historical fiction have the particular hurdle of 'Time Truth' However I'll make an exception and share my recent "find" in a School Book Fair of a story that has Queen Elizabeth the first cycling ( yes, on a bike!) between Hampton Court and the Palace of Westminster. There's also the children's TV series that has Mona Lisa, disguised as a boy, working as an apprentice painter in the same studio as a teenage Leonardo da Vinci, and hanging out with a streetwise kid named Mac ( that's Machiavelli to you and me). I know it was a deliberate decision to 'modernise' the action but I find this quite painful to watch. Does it raise valid questions? I mean, how do we know that Leonardo and Lisa didn't run around Florence in ( the equivalent of) trainers and high-five each other? Is it as out of place as having a character curtsey before the 16th Century when this form of obeisance evolved at the French Court? I do believe the rightly revered Rosemary Sutcliffe did.

However its the language more than anything that intrigues me. The thrill, the fascination, the power of word, the literal meaning coupled with emotional resonance, the freight that a phrase can carry. A writer can lift the language above the ordinary, can corral emotions, create the illuminating shaft of light to send into a dark corner of the mind.

As Solomon, the dyslexic boy in Whispers in the Graveyard thinks:

Words, words are different.
I heard someone reading poetry on the radio once. The phrases stayed inside me for weeks, exploding in my head, thrusting and twisting in my gut.

I'm very disappointed that Garrow's Law has been axed from television as I loved the dialogue and the diction. So caught up in the sweep of the story and the skill of the acting I was unaware of any inappropriate words.

Ah indeed! Choosing the words is the challenge.

I discovered 'chaffering' in a 15th Century journal so I knew it was fine to have that in The Medici Seal. But.... To maffick or not to maffick? That was the question. I can't recall where I found this nugget but I knew I had to have it. It's such a decisive sounding word and I thought to deploy it to inject a bit of spit into a variety of situations. A quick dictionary looksee revealed that maffick is derived from Mafeking, the South African town besieged during the Boer War of the 19th / 20th Century and so I felt I couldn't use it in a book set in the Middle Ages. At home I whined so much about having to take it out that my family began to incorporate it into anything said withing my earshot, as in,
"Don't maffick about. Hurry up and eat your dinner"
"Someone's mafficked my tennis racquet."

When they were young, my children, like many others, often made up words. A day could be 'bilby' or 'gilp' vis. dull / overcast. I believed that one of my offspring had invented 'splendiferous' until I came across it in a thesauarus. I'm still not sure about 'horipillation'. It's coming up red on the Spell Check, but then quite a few of the Scots words I use do too. like 'dreich' (misty, drizzling day) but, strangely, not 'fleer'. In the present work-in-progress I have resisted the temptation to write that Mary, Queen of Scots, is surrounded by a fanfaronade of niddering mulligrubs, although her fate might have been less tragic had she realised this. 'Chortle' was coined by Lewis Carroll in the late 19th century, meaning something between a laugh and a chuckle. Can you Chorltle with a Wortle? Sorry. Wortle is definitely one of the children's contributions - haven't worked out yet whether it's a noun, verb, or adjective. Obviously people were chortling prior to the late 19th but is it OK for me to use that word to describe what they were doing?

Do all writers of historical fiction check the etymology of every word they use?

As if!

Theresa Breslin's latest historical novel PRISONER OF THE INQUISITION won the teenage section of The Historical Association, Young Quills Award, is shortlisted for the Scottish Children's Book Award, and was voted favourite book by the young people shadowing the Carnegie Medal Book Awards. WHISPERS IN THE GRAVEYARD won the Carnegie Medal.

January Competition winners

... are now posted up on the Competitions Page.

Sorry for the delay in notifying you all. This has been because of illness, jetlag, snow delay and insomnia on my part! (Mary Hoffman)

Meon Hill - A Valentine's Day Death - Celia Rees

For me, Valentine's Day is not just a time for cards and flowers. I grew up in the West Midlands and every Valentine's Day, the local T.V. (ATV Today, we had it on before Crossroads) had a feature about the gruesome murder of of Charles Walton up on Meon Hill, just outside Stratford-on-Avon. Walton was killed in 1945 but the case was unsolved and had overtones of witchcraft. Enough to fascinate my brother and me (we were both fans of Dennis Wheatley) and to stick in my head.

The details of the murder were, indeed, bizarre. Walton was murdered on 14th February, a significant date in itself, but associated by the old calendar with the Celtic Festival of Imbolc. He was an old man, in his seventies, and out on the hill hedging and ditching. He was a farm labourer, living in a little cottage in the small village of Lower Quinton. When he didn't come back for his dinner, his niece went to look for him. She found him with his throat slashed with his own bill hook which was still embedded in his neck. He was pinned to the bank by a two pronged pitch fork and a large cross had been carved into his chest. It looked very like a ritual murder and Walton had a reputation for witch craft. The only thing that was missing from his body was an old tin watch. He was rumoured to carry a scrying mirror, a piece of mica, in the back of it which he used to overlook people and ill wish them.

Whatever the motives, the locals shut up like clams and eventually the famed Fabian of the Yard was brought in to try and crack the case. He never did, It was his only unsolved murder. It was said that he came back every year to walk the hill, re-visit the site, go for a pint in the pub and remind the villagers that he had not forgotten. He always believed that they knew the perpetrator but held to a code of silence. The village of Lower Quinton, which lies beneath the hill, is a small place, a few farms and a collection of cottages clustered round a green and a pub, the College Arms. It must have been quite isolated back in 1945 and, even now, it often seems eerily deserted. It's rare to see anyone about and it is still impossible to find anyone willing to talk about the case.

On one of Fabian's visits, he encountered a black dog. When he asked a boy if he had seen the beast, the child ran away. Later that day, a black dog was found hanging in a tree. This might just have been an incident of macabre cruelty, perhaps to warn him, but there were long associations with black dogs in the area. Walton himself was known to have encountered a black dog nine times in his youth. After the last occasion, he learnt that his sister had died. These black dogs were not regarded as ordinary hounds, but manifestations of the Barghest and the other black dogs of British Folklore. Meon Hill was said to be hunted over by the Cwn Annwn, the spectral hounds of the Mabinogion; another legend says it was the Yell Hounds, the Devil's Dandy Dogs, following Herne the Hunter, harrying the souls of the unshriven down to hell. Meon Hill itself is rumoured to be the haunt of fairies - and of witches who still gather there. It is a place regarded with superstition, even dread, by some living thereabouts. There are those will not walk on the hill in the daytime, let alone at night.

The stories are many and odd and exert a fascination. I've revisited the place several times in fiction. The first time was with Colour Her Dead, now long out of print. I changed the name of the hill, the village beneath it, the details of the case, but kept the unsolved nature of the crime. What interested me was the missing watch. With so much time elapsing, I began thinking: what if it turned up in a junk shop somewhere - in nearby Stratford, say? Put there by someone clearing somebody's effects with no idea that this is vital clue to an unsolved murder. What could happen then? So are books born. I changed the victim to a child and the watch to a handful of beads found in a junk shop by 17 year old Jude who likes to make her own jewellery. It has been out of print for ages, but I was pretty proud of Colour Her Dead. Very Ruth Rendell, even though I say it myself.

The next time Meon got a mention was in The Fool's Girl. Shakespeare coming home on May Day, after Beltane. I took a bit of poetic licence, but the hill is visible for miles around and he might just have been able to see it from the old road between Stratford and Oxford. He would certainly have known it and its reputation. The hill even appears in my new book, This Is Not Forgiveness, under the guise of Beldon Hill, casting its spell, exerting its powerful natural magic in a whole new way.

STEPPING INTO BLEAK HOUSE by Penny Dolan

I’ve just finished reading “Bleak House”,  almost hard on the heels of Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens. It is the first time I’ve read all the way through,although I have begun it more than once and my head is cram-full of questions and ponderings.

Many of the History Girls will be far better acquainted with the The Inimitable, so all I am offering are my currently swirling thoughts, with apologies to any scholars.

To begin with, Dickens is not exactly a perfect writer. He often shows what, in current view, a writer should not do. He creates over-long descriptions. He creates puffed-up elongated scenes, admittedly for the entertainment of a different historic time. Read now, some of these needed more attention than is available on insomniac nights.

As my eyes slid along such paragraphs, I conjured up Victorian fathers reading onward, aloud, while the not-entirely-rapt listeners drifted into a doze or played with the cat or concentrated on a particularly troublesome embroidery stitch during such passages.

I felt Dickens glorying in the sound of his own prose, of his own voice. I hear him reading his work aloud to his trusty Foster. Dickens must have killed some of his darlings - but it doesn’t always feel so. Can the relationship between writer and chosen reader or editor get too close? Do all writing critique groups fall into self-perpetuating attitudes? Maybe there is an acoount of these meetings?

Besides, Bleak House veers and slides from one genre to the next. Is it a mystery? A ghost story? A crime novel? A romance in response to Jane Eyre? Possibly a historical novel, set as it is before the arrival of the railways? The novel has a jackdaw quality, as if Dickens picks up an attractive idea and runs with it for a while before pulling another out of a more interestin hedge. Aren’t we all given to worrying about writing the next new thing?

Published in instalments, there’s a definite creaking to his planning at times. I’d almost heard strains of "Thank God I had that idea!” at times. Not quite the Robert McKee story structure method, set out with cards or diagrams or planned by Scrivener.

There’s an emotional randomness about the characters, even though I’ve now seen notes that show  this character is the mirror of that character and so on. I don’t know enough to feel convinced Dickens worked like that, not at first, although the Romantic element of the novel insists he pull everything together tightly the end. 

The written cast, with their eccentric names, burn on the page unevenly and plentifully, from the main characters to those like Miss Flyte with her caged birds of doom to the wonderful woman that is Mrs Bagnet. I feel I shall shall strive to be Mrs Bagnet in future.

It is hard to read Dickens freshly now. Having seen early episodes of the BBC’s most recent Bleak House, Mr Guppy will ever be Burn Gorman.

I’m also sure that Anna Maxwell Martin’s intelligent and sensible face was the one image that helped me cope with Esther Summerson’s almost impossible first person account this time. 

I can see what Dickens intends to do through Esther's Narrative but I am not sure I like the way he is doing it.

But above all, what stood out for me was that Bleak House has another quality too. It is offensive.

It is offensive and offended about much of his society, as if Dicken's eyes and heart are worn out with what he has seen.

 

Over the course of the 380,00 words, Dickens castigates the whole working of the legal system. He shows it feeding of itself, existing only to multiply costs and empty pockets into its own coffers. Not, I thought, unlike some no-win-no-fee scams, or some of the consultancy firms involved in government projects or those saviour companies that arrive to asset-strip after takeovers. Entirely legally.

Dickens started Bleak House in 1851, after a year’s break, not that the whirlwind man ever had such a thing. In that period, as well as items of journalism, he had helped Angela Burdett-Coutts plans for slum clearances. He had was instrumental in setting up her home for fallen women, even to suggestions for decoration of the rooms. He helped to set up a Guild of Literature and Art, intended to help poor writers and artists, put on huge theatricals to raise money for charitable causes and more besides.

He had been watching the dark and dreadful side of Victorian England - poverty, unemployment, disease, squalor, harsh working conditions, jobless soldiers, the burden of the elderly, quarrels over public and private rights, the content of education, the lending and borrowing of money, the divisions and inequalities in society - just when the Great Exhibition was prominent in every paper and journal as “a showcase for Britain”, although those words might be taken from a more recent time. 

Bleak House, as a book, works despite its difficulties because, so often, the pages ring with emotion and indignation. The personality of Dickens – his “good character” – comes through so strongly that one is held to the story despite the onslaught of relationships and relations and the effusive paragraphs.

The book is just as “offensive” now, making the reader brood on what has changed, if anything, and what has not. Only a few of his fifty-nine characters end up with happiness and often hard-bought.

I want to discover more about how Dickens actually wrote this novel. Are there any History Girls who have studied the Dickens archives, I wonder?

Arthur Calder-Marshall's unabridged edition has notes suggesting that Dickens drew his characters from real people. Was John Jarndyce as a kinder portrait of his father? Georgina the model for Esther? Leigh Hunt the sponger Skimpole? No doubt there are more real people and places offered as inspiration.

 

However, what fascinates me is how on earth did he weave it all together? How did he hold it all in his mind? The scope and the content of Bleak House is unsettling.

Dickens is not always a perfect writer but somehow he makes himself a most, most memorable one

www.pennydolan.com

Penny Dolan's novel for 9-12 year olds, A BOY CALLED M.O.U.S.E., is published by  Bloomsbury

Mind the gap! By Sue Purkiss

At the moment, I'm grappling with a structural problem in the book I'm writing. My story is set in World War Two, and most of it takes place in a prisoner of war camp. My problem is that the significant events of the story  occur in the first two years and the last few months of the war. One of the worst things about POW camps was that from one month to another, very little changed; nothing much happened in the intervening two years, so I have a desert to cross.

A similar thing happened when I was writing Warrior King, about the earlier part of the life of Alfred the Great. (I was going to make a note to myself at this point to choose my subjects more carefully - but a) sometimes the subject chooses you, and b) I guess that actually, this must be a common problem for writers of historical fiction as history is decidedly inconsiderate in the way it spaces out events.)

Anyway, to return to the magnificent Alfred. (Just look at him on the cover there. Isn't he gorgeous?) The problem here was that the bits that interested me occurred when he was growing up, and then ten years or so later, when he was forced to flee to Athelney and take up baking. There was another problem too: Warrior King was a book for young people, and so it would be better to tell the story from a child's viewpoint. After trying out one or two possibilities, in the end I divided the book into two parts. At the end of the first part, Alfred has just become King. He goes into the room where his small daughter is sleeping, and he makes her a promise.

      It seemed to him that he had never seen anything as lovely as the curve of her dark eyelashes resting on the softness of her cheek, and he touched her hair very gently, letting one golden curl wind itself round his finger.
      "Up till now," he said very quietly, "everyone I've ever loved has either died or gone away. Now my last brother's gone, the best of all of us. And so I'm king. And from this day on, so help me God, I'm going to keep the people safe, and I'm going to keep you safe. I will find a way. No matter what it takes."

The second part begins with the great crisis of his reign, when his ability to fulfil that promise is tested to the utmost. And the story is told now by that same daughter, Fleda, who is determined to be part of her father's struggle.

My last post sparked off a discussion in another forum about historical fiction books we knew and loved as teenagers. Frances Thomas reminded us of Desiree, by Annemarie Selinko. Thanks to Kindle, I was able to download it in the wink of an eye, and I'm re-reading it at present. It interests me to see whether old favourites stand the harsh test of time. An earlier, huge favourite, which I borrowed from the library time after time, was The Amazing Mr Whisper by Brenda Macrow.. I was thrilled when I eventually managed to track down a copy a couple of years ago, only to find that it's been superseded by subsequent books in a similar genre (ie, real children find their way into a parallel world which owes much to myth and legend) and the magic was tarnished.

As far as I can find out, Annemarie Selinko was an Austrian journalist and political writer, married to a Danish husband. They were living in Denmark when the war broke out, but fled from the Gestapo to Sweden, where they worked with the Swedish Red Cross assisting refugees. She used aspects of her experiences in Desiree, her last novel, which tells the story of a silk merchant's daughter who  was once engaged to Napoleon and later married one of his Marshals, subsequently becoming Desideria, Queen of Sweden.

Annemarie Selinko was clearly no lightweight, but the same cannot be said of her heroine. Desiree is appealing, bright, courageous and funny, but she is poorly educated and despite the position in which she finds herself, she is uninterested in politics. She is the narrator, so everything must be filtered through her. Somehow, Selinko has to convey through her the complexities of Napoleon's career and campaigns - because the story of Napoleon is at the centre of this book: Desiree's story, beguiling as it is, is a means to an end. How does she do it?

(Interesting, to see an old cover and a recent one!)

Well, sometimes a character imparts an improbable amount of information over a gossip and a cup of hot chocolate, and it doesn't quite work. But mostly, it does. Selinko uses Desiree's political naivety to her advantage: Desiree needs to know what is going on because it will directly affect her marriage and her family - so she nails someone in the know and makes them explain everything to her in words of one syllable. Or again, a political big hitter such as Talleyrand or Fouche explains things to her because they need to use her as a conduit to her husband. Or else she explains things to someone even less clued up, such as her sister or her son.. It's all very cleverly done: so we read a story which seems to be light and frothy, but in fact a vast amount of complicated history is being imparted. I remember 'doing' Napoleon at school, and learning far, far less.

All of which, I think, is suggesting to me how I should approach my current dilemma.. So - better get on with it!

A Forgotten Pioneer by Marie-Louise Jensen

One might think that the first woman in English literature to make her living as a professional writer would be an icon for us all. She blazed the trail for every one of us, after all. But does any one know her name?
Aphra Behn was the courageous and talented woman in question. I'm glad to say, her works ARE still in print - though she's not precisely a household name. Her plays, once so popular, are rarely performed now, though they did stay in the theatre repetoire for over a hundred years.


Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn, born Aphra Johnson in 1640, is a shady and fascinating character.  Little is known about her except that it's thought she lived for a spell in Surinam and was widowed after only a short marriage. In 1667 Behn served as a spy for King Charles II in Antwerp. This seems a daring and unusual thing for a woman to have done at that time. Unfortunately, it seems she discovered little of much use for the King. In the way of kings, he therefore considered it beneath him to actually pay her for her loyalty to the crown. This led to her being imprisoned in 1668 for the debts she'd incurred in his service.

In Aphra Behn's day, women had very few choices for earning money. Marriage or becoming some man's mistress were the two main choices for a woman of birth and education. Behn chose neither, opting instead to write her way out of debt. She wrote plays, stories and poems and became both highly regarded and successful. She was not the only woman playwright of the time, but she was the first and the most successful.

The era being the Restoration, the Comedy of Manners was the vogue. In the hands of Congreve, Wycherly and the like, these were bawdy, rather heartless romps of intrigues and betrayals. Aphra Behn turned the genre into something different. She was subversive and addressed the dire situation of women; both nobly born and courtesans.

In The Rover, arguably Behn's best known play, Hellena is a young girl ordered by her father and brother to marry an elderly man. She has plenty to say on the subject of young girls marrying old men; so much so that when the play was performed in the Georgian era, some of her best speeches were cut short, because they were considered too outspoken and shocking.

But Behn didn't restrict her concerns for women to the wealthy classes: the tragedy of the courtesan who gives her heart to a roving soldier only to be utterly betrayed is a moving part of the play. No wonder Behn is considered a feminist. Her life and her works shrug off the conventional, call for choice and openly criticize the restricted role of women.

I rediscovered Behn and her fabulous play whilst researching what kind of reading material my narrator might have had access to in 1715. Given that The Girl in the Mask contains both spies and girls who won't accept their place in society, it was simply too good to resist. Behn, her life and her play all have an important part to play in my own character's rebellion against social norms. She is quite simply an inspiration.