THE LAST RUNAWAY by Tracy Chevalier. A review by Adèle Geras

On March 29th of this year, Tracy Chevalier herself wrote on this blog, all about how she researches her novels. It was a fascinating piece and I said in the comments box at the time that I was longing to read the novel. Now I have read it, and I enjoyed it very much and would like to draw it to the attention of those people who love a good historical novel which manages to convey a whole lot of interesting information about a period (pre Civil War America) which we don't know terribly well, but who also want a rattling good story, which will involve them in the lives and loves of its protagonists.

Chevalier is drawn to the artistic or craft process. In her most famous book, The Girl with the Pearl Earring she goes into some detail in order to show us the way Vermeer mixed his paints; the way the paintings were set up and you closed the novel knowing a great deal about what it was like to be a painter at that time, as well, of course as what it was like to be his model. In perhaps my favourite of Chevalier's novels, The Lady and the Unicorn, the subject is the weaving of the famous set of tapestries presently in Musée de Cluny in Paris.

Here, our heroine, Honor Bright, leaves England to accompany her sister Grace to Ohio, which might just as well be on another planet. When Grace dies, Honor is left to make her own way in this strange new world, and the story of her adventures is full of romance, trials and tribulations, discoveries and awakenings. The book moves along swiftly. We see most things from Honor's point of view and there are her letters scattered through the text. She becomes aware of the existence of the Underground Railroad, a way of helping black slaves escape from their servitude in the South to safety in the North. The historical detail is very accurate and we hold our breath with Honor, who, towards the end of the book is hiding her part in the Railroad from her husband and family.

For me, though, the most beguiling aspect of the novel is the quilting. Reading about 'quilting frolics' and the different roles that quilts then played in a woman's life was enthralling. The different styles, the variations and nuances and colours and fabrics are cleverly mirrored in the patchwork way the book works: a bit of farm life, a bit of a letter, a memory of home, a whiff of a love story, a threat of great danger, and someone at the centre of it trying to make sense and harmony of her life as best she can. The characters in this novel, from milliners, to bounty hunters, to all the worthies of the Quaker community, and the (mostly) women who surround Honor most of the time, are all very well brought to life. The black characters too, strange to Honor, are given their fair weight in the story and one of the best moments is when Honor sees a quilt made by one of the Negro (sic) women and remarks on the difference between the two styles of quilting she has met in America, both of which are different from what she was used to in England.

I don't know whether Tracy Chevalier will take it as a compliment, but I intend it as one when I say that I think The Last Runaway is a perfect teenage novel, too. I think that anyone from about the age of 14 who likes an exciting, romantic, historically accurate novel will enjoy this book and I would urge fans of, for instance, Celia Rees's Witch Child, to try Tracy Chevalier. I am wondering where her curiosity will take her next.

Black Swans and the Value of the Unknown – Katherine Roberts

black swan

Not that long ago,  Europeans assumed all swans were white. Until the sighting of the first black swan in 1697, when Willem de Vlamingh explored the Swan River in Western Australia, nobody other than the Australians thought a black one could ever exist. Now we know black swans do exist, and they are beautiful as you can see.

Apart from this post being a good excuse for some pretty swan pictures, I'd like to introduce you to a book a friend recommended called Black Swan. In it there's an interesting concept called an “anti-library”, which argues that the unread books in your library are more valuable to you than those you have read.

Now, I know all the history lovers out there are going to say wait a minute! Surely the more books you read, the greater your knowledge, which makes all those books you have read valuable? Books, after all, define our history.

But even if you have read all the books in the world, then what about the knowledge – the “anti-history” if you like – that has not yet been discovered, or has been lost/burned/suppressed/forgotten along the way? Isn’t this anti-knowledge just as important? In fact such undiscovered knowledge, when it comes to light, can often change what was once widely accepted as true. Once, remember, everyone believed all swans were white. Now that black is known to be just another colour of swan, the current “anti-swan” is the pink swan nobody has yet seen… which is not the same thing as saying a pink swan does not exist, of course.

Ok, before you get too excited, I’ll admit to some digital fakery here.

 

But what in the green river, I hear you ask, do coloured swans have to do with the History Girls?

Once upon a time (i.e. 15 years ago, when I started my professional writing career), there was no blogosphere. Authors wrote books, and – if they were lucky or talented or persistent enough – got their books published, after which the publisher did all the PR, and booksellers did the bookselling. The author had very little to do with this side of things, except for turning up to do a reading now and again. I even remember my late agent telling me that I couldn’t write an article about my first book for a magazine, in case this clashed with something my publisher was doing, such as selling an exclusive extract to a national newspaper (er...in my dreams).

Over the past few years, all that has changed. Authors are expected to have an online platform and be available to their readers online. Fine maybe if those readers - like the lovely reader who has made it this far through my post - come to them. But not so fine if the author seeks out potential readers and hammers on their virtual doors (just think how you feel when a pushy double-glazing salesman calls!). I think publishers can just about get away with this, especially if they are giving away freebies such as review copies of hot new titles, but authors doing their own PR need to take care not to put their foot in it - the virtual door, I mean.

white swans

Let's go back to the swans. On publication day, that exciting debut author you know nothing about and are therefore rather curious to find out about, must become known - in the process losing some of their value. Whether this value is to booksellers in the form of actual sales figures, to their fans in a less-than-airbrushed photograph showing the odd wrinkle or two, to school librarians who might be disappointed to see their hero is actually shorter than they thought and wears glasses, or to potential readers exposed to a thousand and one blog posts, tweets and Facebook pages... the author is now part of the white swan crowd, doing the same things all the other white swans are doing. And as we all know, beautiful as white swans are, only the black ones (or the pink ones?) tend to stick in people’s memories.

So - paradoxically - unless you are a celebrity of some sort or have written a best-seller the world already loves, perhaps the best way to remain valuable as an author is to stay as mysterious as possible. Retreat behind a pseudonym, write under initials, use a digitally-enhanced photo, wear sunglasses, maintain online silence, paint yourself green, whatever it takes.

 

green swan anyone?

 

Which is why this post talks about swans and contains only a tiny bit of history. Please express your horror below.

 ***

Katherine Roberts has just finished her Pendragon Legacy series published by Templar, where King Arthur's daughter sets out on a quest for something that should not exist in this world... no, not a pink swan! Watch the trailer HERE

For more details of this series and Katherine's other books visit www.katherineroberts.co.uk

China and My Mum - A Story in Pictures - Joan Lennon

Jean Alaithia Lennon was born in 1921 on Mount Emei (one of the four Holy Mountains) in Sichuan Province, China.  By the time she was three, her father (a medical missionary) had died of typhus and malaria.  There was unrest in the province and it was not considered safe for her or her mother or baby brother to remain. They were taken down the Yangtse on an American gunboat, back to Canada.  They didn't return.

Those are the bones of the story, but I have very little flesh to lay over them.  My mum didn't remember that time at all, and her mother was my ghastly grandmother (to distinguish her from my lovely grandmother) who didn't talk about it, or at least not about my mother's part in it, which was the part I always wanted to know.

And yet, and yet ...  Look at the photos.  Hints of the story are there.  You can see the seeds of the woman in that little girl.  And that fierce finger in the last photo as my mum is poised to run.  An entire relationship in a single gesture.

Joan's website.
Joan's blog.

"The Black Loyalists" by Ruth Holmes Whitehead, reviewed by Katherine Langrish

“They had a passion for freedom, and they acted upon it.”

This wonderful book is by my friend Ruth Holmes Whitehead, a distinguished historian and ethnologist who worked for over forty years at the Nova Scotia Museum. Ruth is the author of several books on the history, culture and stories of the Mi’kmaq, the Native American nation which still inhabits New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. We met while I was writing my third book for children, the story of a 10^thcentury viking ship’s landfall on the coast of North America and the crew’s encounters with Native Americans. I approached Ruth for guidance after reading her collection of Mi’kmaq tales: ‘Stories from the Six Worlds’. She lent me the benefit of her years of study, and helped me escape many a pitfall.

Now she has turned to a different but equally fascinating subject: the “more than four thousand black men, women and children [who came] to Nova Scotia as a direct result of the American Revolution (1755-1783).  They came as freeborn persons, as former slaves who had seized freedom from the chaos of war, or as indentured servants. Some came still chained to their enslavers. They came fleeing the British surrender of the thirteen American colonies… [As] these colonies fell to the Americans, mass evacuations of British forces and supporters to their remaining centres of power began to take place.”  The book concentrates on the South Carolina Black Loyalists, many of whose names survive in ‘The Book of Negroes’, a record of black people evacuated from the port of New York.

Early in the war, the British government had offered emancipation to any slaves who would desert their rebel masters.  This was no moral imperative, but a pragmatic attempt to impoverish the American economy and weaken the rebel war effort. Motives aside, however, freedom was on the table, and many enslaved men, women and children took advantage of the offer, escaping behind the British lines, or to the British ships patrolling the east coast from Maine to Georgia.

Runaways risked much.  There were severe punishments on recapture – up to and including death:

“Whoever apprehends the said run away, and delivers him to the warden of the workhouse, shall have Three Pounds reward…” wrote William Harris in 1752, “but whoever brings his head alone, shall be paid Ten Pounds.”  The price of murder continued to rise. Three years later, Thomas Smith offered £10 for Frank, alive, but promised £20 for his head. By 1770, William Waight was offering £10 for a man named May, alive, and £100 for his head alone.

Such savage penalties were clearly designed to terrify.  Ruth Whitehead describes how the wealth and economy of the Carolinas depended upon slaves; many slave-owners were extremely rich. The estate of Thomas Shubrick, a South Carolina landowner, was valued at his death at “the Sum of two Million, one hundred three thousand, eight hundreds Pounds Currency”; this sum was inclusive of over three hundred enslaved people, whose names are tersely recorded in a seemingly endless list: “Dye, Will, Moll, Peter, Philander, Ammon, Dick, Attus, Duke, Richmond, Mingo, London, George, Cuff, Bram, Cato, Molly, Castalia, Jemmy, Mary, Phillis, John, Tony, Nancy…”

A pass issued by the British to Cato Rammsay: illustration from the back cover of the book

The Black Loyalistsilluminates a fascinating and moving episode of history which I’d known nothing about. There are so many paradoxes, not least that black people should fight on the side of the King – for the promise of freedom – in the very war which Americans fought for independence. It was not an easy transition. Many of the men joined the Loyalist armies as soldiers. But what about families, what about the women? The children? And what happened when the British surrendered? The American forces under George Washington demanded the restoration of property, including slaves, and it fell to individual British commanders to interpret orders and make decisions on whether to honour early promises. Some Black Loyalists were abandoned, but for those who made it to Nova Scotia, there were still many challenges to face: home-building, earning a living, and coping with often hostile attitudes from local communities.

Each and every one of their stories, if we could fully know it, would be an adventure. What about Savinah Miles, twenty-five years old, who “ran from John Miles’s plantation in the Indian Lands of South Carolina, taking her daughter, Venus, with her. Venus was only nine years old when she escaped with her mother, who kept her free for the next nine years, before boarding L’Abondance [the Royal Navy transport which took the largest complement of Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia].”

‘Kept her free for nine years.’ If only we could know more.

Ruth Holmes Whitehead took eighteen years to write and research this book which is both a work of scholarship and a labour of love, gracefully and clearly written with some poignant personal touches. Ruth herself was born in South Carolina and has found slave owners among her own ancestors; her co-researcher Carmelita Robertson has “multiple Black Loyalist ancestors who escaped … during the American Revolution.”  As Ruth says:

I sat beside a dying woman once, at Remley’s Point, South Carolina.  She liked the sofa in the living room where she could gaze out all night long through her open door. “I lies here,” she said, “and dead people come and put their hands on my head.” Dead people come and put their hands on my head: a really good metaphor for living in the Carolinas. The weight of a past that includes slavery lies heavily on the landscape, yet there have always been moments of grace and basic goodness. Those who were enslaved here experienced that dichotomy of good and evil.

Black Loyalists

Southern Settlers of Nova Scotia’s First Free Black Communities

by Ruth Holmes Whitehead, Nimbus Publishing 2013

Builder's bum or housemaid's knee? by Eve Edwards

This October, the builders of Britain have been issued a challenge by a new health minister, Jane Ellison: they are to shape up, pull up and stop displaying so much cheek, so to speak.  I had to chuckle: a kind of feminist revenge for years of wolf whistling perhaps on Ms Ellison's part?

However, with my History Girl's thinking cap on, it started me wondering about all those sins against posture and more serious ailments that have a profession attached to them.  What happens when the profession no longer exists as a big enough class to have its own illness?  The ailment travels on to find a new host, just like a virus.

Take housemaid's knee - proper name prepatella bursitis.  Wiki tells me it has also been known as nun's knee, coal miner's knee, carpet layer's knee etc etc.  I imagine the predominant term depends on who does what in your area.  I remember that term being used by my grandmother (born 1910).  She was not of the social status to have a maid herself but born in a time when there were plenty around to make it a recognisable tradition.  Mrs So-and-So down the road had 'housemaid's knee'.  We all understood she did not have to be a maid to get it, just to have a dodgy joint.  Go to the GP today and it would seem odd for her to say to you if you had sought advice for the same problem 'oh yes, you've housemaid's knee.'  The condition is moving on to attach to a new profession.

Poor old miners have lots of illnesses named after them.  Pneumoconiosis, miner's lung, is caused by inhaling particles.  This is also sometimes called Potter's rot when the stuff breathed in is silica.  Miner's white finger is caused by vibration from using power tools.  The list goes on. Googling the term, I was interested to find many personal injury firms advertising their services to take on claims.  Clearly there is still enough of a mining heritage in this country to make it a recognisable term but in another few decades, will that too have passed on to a new profession?  Will it become road menders finger or something like that?

For the posher folks there is the refined tennis elbow (inflamed tendons) and golfer's knee (a twisting problem rather than a kneeling one so different from housemaid's).  Odd how illnesses come with social status attached.  Miss Joan Hunter Dunn might have tennis elbow but never miner's lung.

So when setting a novel back in the past, I think it perfectly fair to speculate what earlier times may have called their problems.  Did the Romans have charioteer's back?  Did the Greeks suffer from sculpture's lung?  Were castles of Europe manned by guys complaining of archer's elbow? If you have any real or imagined ailment to add, please do so below.  I've got a little list (note to self: add Executioner's wrist for Tudor stories).

I've spent much of my time with trench foot and shell shock recently so I am sure you know what I have been writing about.

Eve

'A Welch rarebit and a pot of beer'. Georgian Debating Societies - Lucy Inglis

Yesterday I went to Bristol to film with Lucy Worsley for next year’s BBC4 series Georgian Revolutions. We were talking about debating societies, their effect on society as a whole and the move to what is called, rather vaguely, ‘sociability’. Sociability is one of those academic terms that don’t really mean much and encompass a whole slew of ideas, but we managed to pick it apart from various angles and extract lots of Georgian goodness in the process.

Filming is one of those strange processes where you become both subject and object. Because, usually, most of us history girls sit behind a screen or in a library or archive for a lot of our working day it can be a bit intimidating. You have to remember all your facts whilst the cameras are on you and be placed, mic’ed, repositioned, herded and posed repeatedly whilst you ask each other about what words like ‘enlightenment’ really mean and whether your noses looks shiny.

That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable, because it is. We were filming in a Georgian pub and the atmosphere was great, as was the conversation. The ‘Revolutions’ series doesn’t only look at the obvious changes during the Georgian period, but at the huge though gradual changes throughout society that happened over the eighteenth century, and this particular episode was looking at the revolution of 'politeness' from the angle of conversation and debate. At the beginning of the century, philosophical ideas about rationalism and the nature of what was ‘true’ were filtering down the people on the streets. Discussions in coffeehouses by the intellectual celebrities of the day, such as Isaac Newton were recorded by authors and journalists, who circulated them throughout the country and in Europe.

Coffeehouses were called the ‘penny universities’ because of their penny admission fee, including a cup of coffee, and were seen as a place to become educated, and not just because of the quality of the conversations going on. From the end of the seventeenth century, coffeehouses often kept libraries for the use of the visitors, as well as a stock of newspapers. These coffeehouses libraries were sometimes, and quite often in the case of Oxford, run by the coffeehouse owner’s wife. One writer noted that they were in fact, the ‘sub-Librarians‘ who had ‘usurped their Husbands in the execution of this office’.

But the coffeehouse debates weren’t limited to geniuses like Newton. Debating societies were emerging and, after initially meeting in each others’ houses, the members increasingly began to favour meeting in taverns where they could discuss pressing matters over a ‘Welch rarebit and a pot of beer’.

One of the most prominent of these was the Robinhood Society, which, after moving around in its early years, met at the Robinhood and Little John pub in Butcher Row near the Strand. It had initially called itself the ‘Societe for Free and Candid Enquiry’, before taking on the name of the tavern where it met every Monday evening, where, ‘After the fatigues of the Day, Men of Various Occupations in Life, meet to dissipate the Gloom...and either in Flashes of Wit or solid arguments improve their judgment and entertain their imaginations.’

The members took the matter of debate seriously, and drunkenness was disapproved of. There ‘are drinking clubs. This is a disputing one. At those places, men feed their bodies; at this they feed their minds’. Questions were written on slips of paper and submitted anonymously. The moderator then read out the questions and hands were raised to vote. The question with the most votes won and was the subject for the evening.

The members of the club came from all levels of society and included:

A baker

Doctor

Governor of the Plantations

Soldier

Author

Actor

Comedian

House painter

Genius (yes, he's down as occupation 'genius')

Cabinet-maker

A noted bug-doctor (pest controller)

A stockbroker

An illiterate brazier

A highwayman (called Bob Scamper - brilliant!)

The questions they debated initially didn’t cover religion or politics (to avoid charges of sedition), but by the 1740s they were discussing all subjects, including:

Whether the common methods of educating Youth in this Nation are not very defective, both with respect to morals, and a knowledge of the English tongue.

Whether a spendthrift or a miser is the most useless member of the Community.

Whether faith and belief are not one and the same thing?

Is a plurality of wives justifiable?

Should obey be removed from the marriage vows?

Whether it is consisted with the common sense of Mankind to believe that the Supreme Being could be born of a Virgin?

Whether the power lodged in a Prime Minister be not too great to be entrusted with any subject and if, in Time, it will not sap the very vitals of our constitution?

Women were largely excluded from debating societies until later in the century when their own societies such as La Belle Assemblee were formed, and by the 1780s the societies were meeting in halls and theatres so that the sexes could attend together, rather than taverns of coffeehouses. However, many women still attended the debates wearing masks, particularly those who would be contributing and not just listening. One advertisement announced the topic for debate as ‘Is it not detrimental to the world to restrain the female sex from the pursuit of classical and mathematical learning?’ and adds, ‘It is particularly hoped that Ladies will avail themselves of their masks and join in the debate’.