This coming Sunday, 30th March, 2.00 pm, I'm heading for the Oxford Literary Festival to join my fellow authors Mary Hoffman, Penny Dolan, Leslie Wilson and Celia Rees who will be talking about this book, 'Daughters of Time'. We're all founding members of The History Girls blog, created by
Mary Hoffman to celebrate historical writing, fiction and non-fiction, from a
female perspective. We were thrilled when she suggested that some of us might
get together to write a series of children’s stories centred around significant
women in British history. In the end, thirteen of us took up the challenge: too many to fit on one panel! So I've got the easy job of sitting in the audience - but I'll be there to help sign books at the end.
Why did we feel this book was important? Growing up in the 1960’s, the history taught to me at school
was mostly about men. I heard of few women role models. When sibling rivalry
between me and my younger brother descended a level or two, we might wrangle
about whether ‘girls are as good as boys’ or ‘boys are better than girls’, but
if he challenged me with ‘Why are there more famous men than women, then?’ my
arsenal was small. Queen Elizabeth the First.Grace Darling. Joan of Arc (though being burned at the stake was hardly something to
aim for). Um. Queen Victoria?
– a dull old lady who wore black and was not
amused?Not very inspiring to a child.I knew of only one woman scientist, Marie
Curie (culled from the pages of my Grandma’s ‘Reader’s Digest Book of Famous Lives’, I was a child who read everything).Famous authors? – well, I knew about the Brontes. And
that was about it.
True, I devoured the historical
books of Geoffrey Trease who usually had a brave, cross-dressing heroine
adventuring alongside the young hero.But that wasn’t real. Rather
gloomily I supposed that women didn’t have adventures.
How wrong I was.And ‘Daughters of Time’ amply demonstrates it. When we came
to decide who we should pick, we were spoiled for choice: we had heated
discussions about which women to include: we could have written three
anthologies, never mind one! (Some of the names which had, inevitably, to be
left out are listed at the back of the book). Among us, we wrote about queens, visionaries, reformers, political thinkers, dramatists, scientists, pilots and activists. And I knew immediately who I
wanted to write about: Lady Julian of Norwich.
Lady Julian, a medieval visionary and anchorite who spent
perhaps thirty years of her life walled up in a small stone room or ‘cell’ at
the back of St Julian’s Church in Norwich, may seem a strange character to
offer to readers of nine plus. But she was an amazing person, strong, sane and
compassionate.She is the author of the
very first book known to have been written in English by a woman – ‘Showings of
God’s Love’, in which she vividly recounts her visions. It’s a very good book,
too – full of imagery drawn from everyday life, as when she describes how God
showed her ‘a little thing, the size of a hazelnut’ on the palm of her hand,
and when she asked what it was, told her, ‘It is all that is made’.And she has a wonderfully feminist take on religion, describing God as a Mother who
tenderly cares for us: ‘for when a child is in trouble or scared, it runs to
its mother for help as fast as it can’.
Julian’s message down the centuries is one of hope.‘All shall be well,’ God promised her. We
still need to hear that message, and that was why I chose it as the title of my
story in which twelve year-old Sarah, Lady Julian’s new little maidservant,
battles with homesickness and grief.
Mary Hoffman writes about a poignant tale of love and sacrifice...
My copy of The Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins 1948, 1960
edition) has my name and “Newnham” written on the flyleaf so I must have had it
at university. But we never studied Wilde on my Eng. Lit. course and I know I
fell in love with him while still at school so I think I think I had it then
and must have put my stamp on it when I left home.
It would have been typical of me to pack my Oscar Wilde when heading off for
the adventure of university because it had by then become a bit of a comfort
blanket, the one book I would have saved in a fire. The plays, including
Salome, for which Aubrey Beardsley did those splendid illustrations, The
Picture of Dorian Grey, the fabulous Portrait of Mr W. H. and above all the
Fairy Tales, were my absolute ideal of what writing should be.
Everyone knows The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant, many have heard of The
Canterville Ghost and Lord Savile’s Crime but I have never seen anything
written about The Nightingale and the Rose.
It’s a short story – no more than four and a half pages in my Complete Works –
and takes the form of a parable:
A Student is madly in love with the daughter of a professor, who has agreed to
dance with him at the Prince’s Ball if he brings her a red rose. But all the
roses in the Student’s garden are white or yellow; the only red rose is
frostbitten and will bear no flowers that summer.. The Nightingale overhears
the Student’s plaint.
“Here at last is a true lover,” said the Nightingale. “Night after night have I
sung of him, though I knew him not: night after night have I told his story to
the stars and now I see him. His hair is dark as the hyacinth-blossom, and his
lips are as red as the rose of his desire; but passion has made his face like
pale ivory, and sorrow has set her seal upon his brow.”
The bird decides to help him and, after seeking easier ways, chooses the bitter
path of sacrifice. The red rose tree tells her that she must construct a
blossom out of her music by moonlight, through singing with her breast against
a thorn. The thorn will pierce her heart and her life’s blood flow into the
rose-tree and produce one perfect flower.
“Death is a great price to pay for a red rose,” cried the Nightingale, “and
Life is very dear to all .....Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the
heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?”
The Student can’t understand the Nightingale’s passionate song in which she
tells him he will have his rose; he makes notes on her music – “ she is like
most artists; she is all style without any sincerity. She would not sacrifice
herself for others.”
But of course that’s just what she does, singing all night of love with the
thorn against her breast. A pure white rose springs from the frozen tree and
the Nightingale sings on in her agony until the thorn pierces her heart and the
perfect flower is stained crimson.
At noon (realistic detail) the Student looks out of his window and sees the red
rose, thanking his good luck, while the Nightingale’s body lies cold in the
long grass, the thorn still in her heart. He plucks the rose, runs to the
Professor’s house and proffers it to the beautiful daughter, claiming his
dance.
But the girl frowned. “O am afraid it will not go with my dress,” she answered;
“and, besides, the Chamberlain’s nephew has sent me some real jewels, and
everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers.”
The Student throws the rejected rose into the street, where it falls into
the gutter and it run over by a cartwheel.
“What a silly thing Love is!” is the Student’s conclusion and he resolves to
study Philosophy and Metaphysics instead, taking down a dusty book.
Why did this tragic story mean so much to a teenage girl? The unrequited love
theme (both Student and Nightingale) was bound to appeal and now that I look
back on it, the failure to recognise or appreciate the sacrifice made is the
same as in my other favourite Fairy Tale: Hans Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.
The Student is just as unknowing and ungrateful as the Prince. But at least the
mermaid gets to live on in the foam of the sea while the small brown bird with
the glorious voice rots unseen in the long grass. It broke my heart and it
breaks it all over again to read it for this blog post.
Maybe I thought that was what love would be like? That it always involved pain
and the willing giving up of the self for the beloved? After all this time, who
knows? The writing style is over-flowery in places; Oscar loved his
pomegranates and rubies throughout his life. And there is no place here for the
dry humour of there being no cucumbers available in the market, “not even for
ready money.”
But as a teenager who had already experienced the pangs of many “crushes,” I
preferred the sensuous and tragic to the warm and funny.
And now I think it was prophetic, part of Oscar’s own self-destructive streak
that brought about his downfall. (He didn’t have to prosecute the Marquess of
Queensberry (see below) and his friends begged him not to, knowing the risk of
Oscar’s – at that time illegal – homosexual practices being exposed).
Oscar’s years picking hemp in jail were the sacrifice he made for Bosie, who,
although he lived with his older lover in France in the latter part of 1897,
later repudiated him and married an heiress. Maybe Constance, Oscar’s wife, too
would have seen herself in the role of Nightingale with Oscar as Student and
Bosie as the Professor’s daughter.
I’m glad to say it wasn’t prophetic of my own later life: no trampled roses
there. But it still speaks to me with an incredible poignancy and I wouldn’t
swap it for any more robust story with a happy ending.
Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1856. His father
was a surgeon and his mother, “Speranza,” a hostess both Society and Political.
After studying at Trinity College, Dublin, Oscar won a scholarship to Magdalen,
Oxford, where he took Firsts in Mods and Humanities and won the Newdigate Prize
for his poem, Ravenna.
Although an avowed Aesthete at Oxford, he was of powerful build with hands like
hams. So when some Hearties decided to dunk him in the Cherwell as a punishment
for effeminacy, they came off rather worse. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd,
who bore him two sons. In 1888, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales.
The last decade of the 19th century was enormously productive for him: his only
novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890); Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892); An
Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
1895 also saw his imprisonment with hard labour for two years for the crime of
gross indecency, resulting from his unwise decision to prosecute the Marquess
of Queensberry for libel, the Marquess being the father of Oscar’s lover Lord
Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”). In prison Oscar wrote the Ballad of Reading Gaol
(1898) and De Profundis, published posthumously. Oscar Wilde died, a broken
man, in 1900.
Mary Hoffman is the author of numerous books including the best-selling picturebook Amazing Grace (1991) , and the well known ‘Stravaganza’ series for young adults, beginning with ‘City of Masks’, Bloomsbury 2002, which are set partly in our modern world and partly in an alternate universe’s 16th century Italy. She has also written YA historical fiction like the highly acclaimed ‘Troubadour’.
Her website is http://www.maryhoffman.co.uk/, her personal blog is The Book Maven and she is the founder of the collective blog The History Girls
Picture credits: 'The Nightingale and the Rose', copyright PJ Lynch, is shown here by kind permission of the artist. More of his lovely work can be seen at pjlynchgallery.blogspot.co.uk
'Single red rose' by Kate Greenaway, at Wikimedia Commons
I’m a great believer in the idea that everyone has their own personal myth or, if you like, fairy tale. It doesn’t mean it’s your favourite or that you particularly admire it. It’s more the case that it speaks to you, possibly uncomfortably, about an aspect of your own character or personality, so that you think perhaps the originator of the tale knows you, or someone very like you.
'The Fisherman and his Wife' Arthur Rackham
For me this story is The Fisherman and his Wife. I have re-told it myself, in The Macmillan Treasury of Nursery Stories, which I was invited to write for the new millennium. (This was a huge treat in itself, let alone getting a chance to re-tell my “signature tale”). I went back to the original in the Brothers Grimm but then, as with all the stories, allowed myself to expand and embroider it a bit.
This is the basic story:
A childless couple – a fisherman and his wife – were so poor they lived in a pigsty. Every day the man would try with his rod and line to catch a fish in the sea; if he succeeded, they had a fish supper, if not, they went to bed hungry.
From 'The Mammoth Book of Wonders'
One day he caught a flounder who begged to be thrown back, because he was a prince under an enchantment. In my version, the fisherman says, “I wouldn’t eat anything that talked anyway.” He goes home fishless but tells his wife about the adventure. She upbraids him for asking nothing in return for sparing the enchanted prince’s life. “Oh of course we have everything we could wish for, living in a pigsty!” she rants and sends him down to the seashore to ask for a cottage.
The magic flounder grants her wish and the fisherman’s wife is contented for a while but soon wants a castle and gets that too. There is a progression from real estate to personal glory for the wife, who becomes in turn King, Emperor and Pope. Every time the fisherman has to ask the flounder for something grander, he feels more wretched and the sea becomes stormier and of a more livid hue.
Finally, the wife demands control over the rising and setting of the sun and moon – to be, in fact, God.
‘There was a huge clap of thunder and then the storm stilled and the sea was like clear glass.
“Go back,” said the flounder, “and you will find her in the pigsty, as before.”
And there in the pigsty the fisherman and his wife are living to this day.’
'The Fisherman calls the Flounder' Arthur Rackham
So, ambition, greed and an inability to know when to stop on the part of the wife and a certain supine biddability on the part of the husband. How could this be my personal motif story?
It’s about living in the moment, appreciating what you’ve got and not wishing your life away. All of us who write are hungry for a certain amount of fame and fortune. We want people to buy and read our books in large numbers; we’d be happy to be offered film deals; if people recognised our names and said “I LOVE your books – I have all of them!”, we could cope.
It’s not really about material goods and power (although I, for one, would not turn down a villa in Tuscany); it’s more about validation, I think. We pour our creativity and imagination into creating new worlds for readers to inhabit. If we are lucky, a publisher likes what we do well enough to launch it on the world in the form of a printed book.
And what happens after that is subject to vagaries of the market and of Marketing, the trends making up the zeitgeist, the whims of fortune and the lucky spin of the wheel. So we tend to crave more and more. Yes we have a lovely review in the Times or the Guardian but what are the sales figures like? We get short-listed for a prize but don’t win it. We have a publishing advance we feel happy about until we hear someone else has one twice the size.
Worse still, a fellow-author, whose work we think secretly (or not so secretly) is inferior to our own, gets loaded with plaudits and has their books turned into hugely successful Hollywood films. We smile warmly like an Oscar nominated also-ran but really inside we are like the fisherman’s wife: we want more!
And we forget that there are literally thousands – possibly millions – of would-be writers who would kill for just one contract, or to be represented by an agent. That, for the long-term published writer is about cottage-level in terms of flounder gifts.
So I try to go back into that little cottage, which I made as cosy and desirable in my version as I could, with an orchard of fruit to turn into jam and a flower garden in front. (I wrote this round about the time we left London and bought our present barn-conversion in Oxfordshire. It’s bigger than a cottage but it does have roses round the door and a plum tree whose annual crop gets converted by a kind of alchemy into something you can spread on a crumpet).
Artist unknown
My lovely illustrator gave the couple’s cottage a thatched roof, which I wouldn’t touch myself, but I bestowed on them green and white crockery, of which I am inordinately fond, and a yard full of ducks and chickens, which I am not allowed.
Yes, a castle might be nice, but would I really want to choose all the curtain-poles and light-fittings for so many bedrooms? The fisherman, who is also me of course, feels very uncomfortable about the castle and all the servants and the four-poster bed.
I have several pacts with different friends about how we would not let success – I mean wild, ridiculous millionaire-style success – go to our heads and change how we behave to other people, especially other writers. We have seen it happen.
Not perhaps the desire to be Pope but a tendency to pontificate. Not a demand to stop the sun in the sky but perhaps a forgetting that we are poor creatures of dust, whose life on this earth is but a speck viewed in the context of eternity.
So that’s why The Fisherman and his Wife is my signature tale. It is a reminder to stop and enjoy the distance I have travelled from the scholarship girl who scribbled plays and stories in school exercise books, to bask in my cosy cottage stage of life and be excited by glimpses of distant castles but not to let ambition prevent me from living in the moment and taking a proper pride in my achievements without constantly hungering for more.
After all, in my line of work, next year could see one back in the metaphorical pigsty, even if one didn’t want to play God.*
*A little secret for non-writers: when you create worlds and people them with characters, you do have a certain Godlike power. Maybe that’s why most of us can stop short of going too far in our ambition. We have all we need in our heads and hearts and count ourselves kings of infinite space, even though we have had dreams – because we have had dreams.
Mary had her first book published in 1975, which would have provided her with a fish supper had she not already been a vegetarian. She and her husband have never lived in a pigsty, though it was a long time before they could afford carpets in the house they bought to raise their three daughters in.
She has now had over ninety books published, with more in the pipeline, including the successful but not quite castle-providing Stravaganza sequence for Bloomsbury, stand-alone historical novels like The Falconer’s Knot and Troubadour. She also writes picturebooks like Amazing Grace and its sequels, which are reputed to have sold over a million and a half copies, which you would have thought might be worth a turret or two.
She has never had a film deal or won a major prize but is not bitter.
In a brief departure from 'Fairytale Reflections' (which continues this Friday) I'm delighted to welcome back to Steel Thistles the award winning writer Mary Hoffman. Mary writes not only historical fantasy (the marvellous 'Stravaganza' series, published by Bloomsbury) but also 'straight' historical fiction for young adults. I loved her last such book, 'Troubadour' (nominated for the 2010 Carnegie Medal): so it's a pleasure to be part of the blog tour for her new novel - the hero of which is perhaps the most beautiful young man in the world, the model for Michelangelo's famous statue, 'David'.
Beautiful and famous in his day he must have been, but anonymous now. In this novel, Mary has recreated him, led him out of the shadows of history to step forward as Gabrielle, a naive, good-hearted country lad who becomes embroiled in the politics and violence of 16th century Florence and loses his innocence in more ways than one.
Perhaps the very heart of the novel is the chapter in which Gabrielle and his 'milk brother' Angelo journey together to the great quarries of Carrara, to source new marble. For this is not only the story of Gabrielle. It is the story of Michelangelo's stern young 'David', symbol of hope and rebellion: and of the beauty and strength of stone in the hands of genius. And here is Mary to tell you more...
Marble
“Stone! I was born to it, my father, my uncles, every male I knew worked in the quarries. My childhood and youth passed in a haze of stone dust. Even Angelo used to boast that he got his calling from imbibing chisels and mallets with my mother’s milk!”
This is what Gabriele says in chapter fourteen of David. He is talking about marble and he and his “milk-brother” Michelangelo are on their way to Carrara to choose twelve pieces of marble for the great sculptor to turn into statues of the Apostles. We can know with hindsight that these statues were never made but neither the younger or the older man has any idea of that when they set off from Florence to the Apuan Alps in search of the pure white blocks they needed.
“They led me inside the mountain, along the sloping floor. The deposits of marble towered on either side of us, like cliffs. Or like the walls of a vast natural cathedral. Walls veined with grey, red and green where minerals had stained the rock. If you half-closed your eyes you could imagine it as a church interior with worked marble columns and floors.”
I tried to put myself into the mind of an uneducated country boy from Settignano, who knows about almost nothing but stone, the material he has worked with since he was strong enough to pick up a hammer. The quarries at Settignano are nothing like the famous ones at Carrara and I wanted to convey Gabriele’s awe at what he sees, alongside his understanding that they are the very best version of something he already knows.
In the book, this young stonecutter has a bond with the sculptor, not only through the fact that his mother was Michelangelo’s wet-nurse but because they both work with stone. I say that neither of them could bear their hands to be sticky or greasy but were content with the chalky, dusty deposits from working with marble. They also have an enormous unslakeable thirst and Michelangelo has a “stonecutter’s cough.”
In other words I tried to get inside what their daily lives might have been like.
But Gabriele also learns about what is made from those great intractable blocks of marble and the alchemy by which inert matter is translated into art. That is genius. It is a modern use to call someone “a genius.’ What would have been said in the Renaissance is that they “had genius” and Gabriele realises that his milk brother does have it.
There is a lot of imagery about stone and marble in the book, not all of it intentional. I found it had just crept in without my realising. I bought a little cube of white Carrara marble in a shop in Pisa and I treasure it for its smooth polish and its satisfying weight. It gives me a glimpse of what it must be like to work this material; much labour and skill went into producing my little cube. How much more into carving the seventeen-foot Giant that is David?
After two days escaping into the Brecon Beacons (the weather was glorious and the views from the top of Pen-y-Fan, which is nearly 3000 ft high, sublime) - I feel almost as though I really have been on an adventure like Bilbo's or Frodo's, journeying up mountains... and so it's lovely to reach the Homely House of the Book Maven, presided over by wise, welcoming, and magical writer herself, Mary Hoffman.
It seems a suitable point to stop, sit down in a comfortable chair, and chat about trolls and fearsome Viking warriors. But don't worry, we're safe here, they can't get in.
Many people imagine that writing fantasy must somehow be easier than writing realistic or historical fiction. After all, you don’t have to do any research, do you? You just make it all up out of your own head, don’t you? Well, um, no. To be convincing, any fantasy world needs roots in reality – and Mary Hoffman’s wonderful books are an excellent example. A great deal of careful research goes into her fantasies, the well known ‘Stravaganza’ series – as well as into her YA historical fiction like the highly acclaimed ‘Troubadour’, set in the Languedoc at the time of the Albigensian Crusade.
The ‘Stravaganza’ series, beginning with ‘City of Masks’, is set partly in our modern world and partly in an alternate universe’s 16th century Italy: ‘Talia’, which can be reached by cross-dimensional travellers – ‘Stravaganti’ – who are in possession of certain talismans. Each book is set in a different Talian city, based closely on real Italian cities well known to the author. I love the blend of the modern and the exotic in these stories, which besides being magical fantasies also deal with strong emotional themes of illness and death, bullying and persecution.
I think my favourite of the Stravaganza books may be – by a squeak – ‘City of Stars’ in which the heroine Georgia, whose life is made all-too-believably unhappy by her bullying stepbrother, finds the talisman of a little winged horse which takes her to the Talian city of Remora where a dramatic horserace is run. (Anyone who has been to the real Italian city of Siena and experienced the crazy bareback horserace called the Palio will appreciate Mary’s skilfully woven mesh of reality and fantasy.) Here Georgia meets young Cesare – whose beautiful mare Starlight has just given birth to a foal:
The filly was not just dark with the waters of birth, but black, black as the night outside, where the bells of the city’s churches were striking midnight…
The stable door, left ajar by Paolo, moved in a sudden gust of wind. A shaft of moonlight fell across the stall. Cesare gasped.
The little long-legged filly, pulling at her mother’s teat, was rapidly drying in the warm night air. Her coat was a glossy black and she was clearly going to be a first-rate race-horse. But that was not all. As she tried her new muscles, gaining confidence in her spindly legs, she flexed her shoulders and spread out two small damp black wings about the size of a young swan’s.
Mary is an artist to her fingertips – and the most generous of colleagues and friends. Perhaps her choice of fairytale is a case of the attraction of opposites? At any rate, at the bottom of this post you’ll find a brief biography written by herself with characteristic grace and wit. You’ll see why it’s there (and not here) when you’ve read when she has to say about her Fairytale Reflection choice –
THE FISHERMAN AND HIS WIFE
I’m a great believer in the idea that everyone has their own personal myth or, if you like, fairy tale. It doesn’t mean it’s your favourite or that you particularly admire it. It’s more the case that it speaks to you, possibly uncomfortably, about an aspect of your own character or personality, so that you think perhaps the originator of the tale knows you, or someone very like you.
For me this story is The Fisherman and his Wife. I have re-told it myself, in The Macmillan Treasury of Nursery Stories, which I was invited to write for the new millennium. (This was a huge treat in itself, let alone getting a chance to re-tell my “signature tale”). I went back to the original in the Brothers Grimm but then, as with all the stories, allowed myself to expand and embroider it a bit.
This is the basic story:
A childless couple – a fisherman and his wife – were so poor they lived in a pigsty. Every day the man would try with his rod and line to catch a fish in the sea; if he succeeded, they had a fish supper, if not, they went to bed hungry.
One day he caught a flounder who begged to be thrown back, because he was a prince under an enchantment. In my version, the fisherman says, “I wouldn’t eat anything that talked anyway.” He goes home fishless but tells his wife about the adventure. She upbraids him for asking nothing in return for sparing the enchanted prince’s life. “Oh of course we have everything we could wish for, living in a pigsty!” she rants and sends him down to the seashore to ask for a cottage.
The magic flounder grants her wish and the fisherman’s wife is contented for a while but soon wants a castle and gets that too. There is a progression from real estate to personal glory for the wife, who becomes in turn King, Emperor and Pope. Every time the fisherman has to ask the flounder for something grander, he feels more wretched and the sea becomes stormier and of a more livid hue.
Finally, the wife demands control over the rising and setting of the sun and moon – to be, in fact, God.
‘There was a huge clap of thunder and then the storm stilled and the sea was like clear glass.
“Go back,” said the flounder, “and you will find her in the pigsty, as before.”
And there in the pigsty the fisherman and his wife are living to this day.’
So, ambition, greed and an inability to know when to stop on the part of the wife and a certain supine biddability on the part of the husband. How could this be my personal motif story?
It’s about living in the moment, appreciating what you’ve got and not wishing your life away. All of us who write are hungry for a certain amount of fame and fortune. We want people to buy and read our books in large numbers; we’d be happy to be offered film deals; if people recognised our names and said “I LOVE your books – I have all of them!”, we could cope.
It’s not really about material goods and power (although I, for one, would not turn down a villa in Tuscany); it’s more about validation, I think. We pour our creativity and imagination into creating new worlds for readers to inhabit. If we are lucky, a publisher likes what we do well enough to launch it on the world in the form of a printed book.
And what happens after that is subject to vagaries of the market and of Marketing, the trends making up the zeitgeist, the whims of fortune and the lucky spin of the wheel. So we tend to crave more and more. Yes we have a lovely review in the Times or the Guardian but what are the sales figures like? We get short-listed for a prize but don’t win it. We have a publishing advance we feel happy about until we hear someone else has one twice the size.
Worse still, a fellow-author, whose work we think secretly (or not so secretly) is inferior to our own, gets loaded with plaudits and has their books turned into hugely successful Hollywood films. We smile warmly like an Oscar nominated also-ran but really inside we are like the fisherman’s wife: we want more!
And we forget that there are literally thousands – possibly millions – of would-be writers out there who would kill for just one contract, or to be represented by an agent. That, for the long-term published writer is about cottage-level in terms of flounder gifts.
So I try to go back into that little cottage, which I made as cosy and desirable in my version as I could, with an orchard of fruit to turn into jam and a flower garden in front. (I wrote this round about the time we left London and bought our present barn-conversion in Oxfordshire. It’s bigger than a cottage but it does have roses round the door and a plum tree whose annual crop gets converted by a kind of alchemy into something you can spread on a crumpet).
My lovely illustrator gave the couple’s cottage a thatched roof, which I wouldn’t touch myself, but I bestowed on them green and white crockery, of which I am inordinately fond, and a yard full of ducks and chickens, which I am not allowed.
Yes, a castle might be nice, but would I really want to choose all the curtain-poles and light-fittings for so many bedrooms? The fisherman, who is also me of course, feels very uncomfortable about the castle and all the servants and the four-poster bed.
I have several pacts with different friends about how we would not let success – I mean wild, ridiculous millionaire-style success – go to our heads and change how we behave to other people, especially other writers. We have seen it happen.
Not perhaps the desire to be Pope but a tendency to pontificate. Not a demand to stop the sun in the sky but perhaps a forgetting that we are poor creatures of dust, whose life on this earth is but a speck viewed in the context of eternity.
So that’s why The Fisherman and his Wife is my signature tale. It is a reminder to stop and enjoy the distance I have travelled from the scholarship girl who scribbled plays and stories in school exercise books, to bask in my cosy cottage stage of life and be excited by glimpses of distant castles but not to let ambition prevent me from living in the moment and taking a proper pride in my achievements without constantly hungering for more.
After all, in my line of work, next year could see one back in the metaphorical pigsty, even if one didn’t want to play God.*
*A little secret for non-writers: when you create worlds and people them with characters, you do have a certain Godlike power. Maybe that’s why most of us can stop short of going too far in our ambition. We have all we need in our heads and hearts and count ourselves kings of infinite space, even though we have had dreams – because we have had dreams.
Biography
Mary had her first book published in 1975, which would have provided her with a fish supper had she not already been a vegetarian. She and her husband have never lived in a pigsty, though it was a long time before they could afford carpets in the house they bought to raise their three daughters in.
She has now had over ninety books published, with more in the pipeline, including the successful but not quite castle-providing Stravaganza sequence for Bloomsbury, stand-alone historical novels like The falconer’s Knot and Troubadour. She also writes picturebooks like Amazing Grace and its sequels, which are reputed to have sold over a million and a half copies, which you would have thought might be worth a turret or two.
She has never had a film deal or won a major prize but is not bitter.
