Maps and Chaps - Celia Rees

When I was at school, this was how one of my teachers defined Geography and History. Of course, the scope of both subjects expands far beyond this narrow definition (what about Chapesses?) and neither are they mutually exclusive. I don't know about other History Girls, but I spend an enormous amount of time poring over maps. I have them in my notebooks, pinned to my noticeboard. They allow me to track my characters' journeys and to get to know the places where they are living. 

In Sovay, the journey was from the English Midlands (it was possible to us a modern map for this - avoiding the M40) to 18th Century London and then to Revolutionary Paris. 

Just looking at the maps is exciting, an adventure in itself. The lettering, the illustration, the way the maps are set out, give a feeling for the time when they were created. The maps differ from period to period, just as countries and counties change and cities grow and develop. The 18th Century maps I referred to for Sovay, are very different from those that I looked at for The Fool's Girl, set two hundred years earlier.

Vissher Panorama

Agas map

The Agas map gives a unique bird's eye view of the Elizabethan city and the Vissher Panorama is just that, a panorama in almost photographic detail. A magnifying glass reveals tiny, accurate  visual details, not just of landmarks but of the everyday life of the people going about their business, where they would be going, what they would have seen and witnessed, all this is a priceless resource to the writer.


Useful as maps are, there is really no substitute for visiting a place, following the streets and alleyways of the old cities makes it much easier to imagine your character there, to bring the place and the period to life. Much of what was marked on the historical map will have been swept away by the intervening centuries, by fire, war, continuous and continuing development, but some things remain. When I'm walking a town or a city, or travelling though a landscape, I remember fellow History Girl, Adele Geras' advice to write about what is still there, rather than what has disappeared. It is always possible to find an old building, a cobbled courtyard, a narrow alleyway that holds something of the period that you are hoping to discover.

In Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography, he describes a continuity of use that can stretch back for many centuries. A walk along modern Bankside won't show much that is left from Shakespeare's day but there are pubs, theatres, restaurants, street performers and beggars, the vibrant life of the river, different vessels on the choppy waters, the rubble strewn foreshore, a cormorant drying its wings. Much has gone, but some things are still there.

A page from The Fool's Girl Notebook

Celia Rees
www.celiarees.com

Interview About a Vampire and other Gothic Topics - Celia Rees

I've been thinking about all things Gothic. I am taking part in a panel event at the Lancaster Festival on 17th October with Cliff McNish, Chris Priestley and Dr Catherine Spooner from Lancaster University. I hope I pass muster.  By the time you read this it will already be over. Being asked to do something like that concentrates the mind. One has to think of something intelligent to say about what drives one's fiction and that involves delving down to find the roots of it.

I have visited the Gothic many times in my writing and it is through the Gothic that I began to write Historical Fiction. I can trace my fascination back to adolescence. When I was a teenager, I used to 'borrow' my brother's books. Most (if not all) would have been considered unsuitable reading, so I would 'borrow' in secret. When I think about it, nearly all my interests, from hard boiled American Crime Fiction to Ian Fleming, stem from these books. One of the books I purloined from under his bed was The Pan Book of Horror Stories.

I scared myself witless, but I was hooked.  The cover makes the book look lurid and trashy, but that's one of the things about Gothic, Dark Fantasy, or Speculative Fiction (posh words for Horror); quite often reputable, serious writers want to write in the genre and their stories are anything but trash. Inside the covers of this and the others in the series are stories by L. P. Hartley, C. S. Forester, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Edgar Allan Poe. From there, I progressed to the works of Dennis Wheatley. Mr Wheatley is not quite in the same Literary League but as a teenager, that did not concern me. I devoured his novels voraciously.

I must have realised that Mr Wheatley's fiction left something to be desired because by the time I was seventeen, I was reading the classics of the genre: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.

I didn't think about writing this kind of fiction myself, or any kind of fiction for that matter, but all reading is reference, a conscious or unconscious resource lodged in the mind to be used at a later date.

I didn't become a writer until I was an adult. I was an English teacher in a secondary school when I began writing and it seemed natural to write for teenagers. Not just because I taught them and knew them, but I liked the same kind of fiction they did. Perhaps a part of me had never grown up. I began by writing crime thrillers. Then I saw Francis Ford Coppola's film,  Bram Stoker's Dracula. I came out of the cinema knowing that I wanted to write a book about a vampire. My current publisher didn't want me to do it, so I found a publisher who did.  I re-read Dracula. I'd last read it when I was seventeen.  I remember being seriously scared by it (and I don't scare easily) but I'd forgotten that it is entirely written as a series of 'found' documents: diaries, letters, reports of various sorts. This kind of metafictional device was what interested me now, that and how small, unsettling details scare people (if I was going to write in this genre, I had a craft to learn). I decided to set my vampire book, Blood Sinister, in two time frames: the Present and the 19th Century (crucially, before Dracula was written in 1897 and preferably about the time of the Ripper Murders - why stop at one gothic horror when one could have two?). The 19th Century episodes would be written in the form of a diary that would be discovered and read by a girl living now. A girl with a serious blood condition who is staying with her grandmother who just happens to live opposite Highgate Cemetery...

This was my first excursion into the Gothic and also my first serious attempt at writing historical fiction. I really enjoyed writing in both genre. I moved on from gothic 'horror' fiction but most of my subsequent fiction has been tinged with it because I still find it interesting. Witch Child dealt with witchcraft and witch persecution, transatlantic emigration and european interaction with native peoples but it is written in the form of a 'found' journal and has slightly more than a hint of potent and active folk magic. Pirates! has a diabolic villain in the form of Bartholome, the Brazilian, and his totemic ruby necklace.

I made a more thorough excursion into the realms of the Gothic when I was writing Sovay. I set the novel in 1794, the year Mrs Radcliffe published Udolpho.  Quite apart from the gothic excesses of the French Revolution and the city gothic of 18th Century London, I wanted my heroine to spend at least some of her time in a gothic abbey, Thursley, based on the fabulous Fonthill which was built by the wonderfully eccentric William Beckford who wrote gothic novels and was so stupendously wealthy that he built his very gothic pile to such exaggerated and monstrous proportions that the 300 ft tower fell down three times. I wanted her to undergo suitably gothic experiences there before escaping, as all truly gothic heroines do, so that she might wreak suitable revenge on her dastardly foe.

I have a feeling that whatever I am writing, the Gothic will be there somewhere. It is hard to escape  one's roots and the ideas and images that have always fed one's imagination and will continue to do so. The Gothic is part of history, just as history is part of the Gothic. 

Mother of the More Famous Mary – Celia Rees

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 - 1797

I always like women who are ‘vilified’. They have usually lived unconventional lives and have done something, or written something not to the liking of the (male) establishment. That makes them interesting on two counts:  interesting anyway, I like people who break rather than make the rules, and interesting to me as a writer of historical fiction.  When I’m writing in this genre, girls are my main characters. I make no apologies for this. It is a conscious decision. Boys and men have enough coverage. I want to broadcast voices less heard, give life to stories disregarded, unrecorded or forgotten. I search out women who led unusual and often transgressive lives. I’m not looking at the average. I’m looking for what it was possible for women to do.  For Witch Child and Sorceress, it was the ‘Unbridled Spirits’ of the English Revolution, and their sisters in America who settled the land there, or were captured by Native Americans but lived to tell their tale as redeemed, or unredeemed, captives. For Pirates! it was those Female Sailors Bold, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. For Sovay it was Mary Wollstonecraft. It annoys me when critics, as they sometimes do, dismiss my books as ‘rollicking good reads, but not history’. All I can do is give an ironic smile, shrug and mourn their woeful ignorance of the history of their own sex.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s life was unconventional in the extreme. She had affairs, she lived with men while still unmarried, she bore a child out of wedlock, and perhaps most shocking of all, she wrote pamphlets challenging the views of her male contemporaries. She took on the major thinkers of the day, both conservative and radical. She wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790, as a riposte to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Two years later, she answered Tom Paine’s Rights of Man with A Vindication of the Rights of Women, putting the case for the other half of the human race. She even took the sainted Rousseau to task for his dismissal of women. Burke was a pillar of the establishment; Tom Paine the leading radical thinker of the day; Rousseau wrote the Social Contract on which the American and French Revolutions were based, but Mary Wollstonecraft was determined to have her say and did not regard her relative youth, her lack of formal education, or her sex as prohibitions. She demanded to have her opinion heard. She saw it as her right.

‘It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity – and make them, as part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.’

Mary Wollstonecraft was arguing for equal rights, for men and women alike. She was the first to make such a radical claim and her audacity catapulted her to fame. It earned her the title ‘hyena in petticoats’ but she would not be intimidated or bullied into silence. She was well before her time. It would take close to a hundred years before men gained the right to vote, let alone women, but the call she made for equality would echo down from one century to another, to be taken up by the Pankhursts and the Suffragettes in Britain and by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and The National Woman Suffrage Association in America.Her voice would not be, could not be silenced.

Her intellectual daring was matched by her physical courage. At a time when most people were heading in the opposite direction, she went to Paris at the height of the Revolution to witness events for herself. She arrived barely a month before Louis XVI was guillotined and joined a group of expatriates which included the British writer Helen Maria Williams. She fell passionately in love with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, and had a daughter, Fanny, by him.  She stayed in France through the height of the Revolution, even though foreigners were interdit, subject to arrest and the threat of the guillotine. Her An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was published in 1794.

 

















She returned to England in 1795. She continued to travel and to publish. In March 1797, she married fellow writer and philosopher, William Godwin. She had only a few months left to live. Being a woman got her in the end. She died in September 1797, a few days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary. The placenta failed to come away cleanly and she died in hideous agony as her doctor tore it out of her, piece by piece, thereby introducing the septicaemia which would kill her.

She described herself as ‘the first of a new genus’. I’m proud to belong to the same family.