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When the idea came to me – a novel in Anne Boleyn’s words - I immediately dismissed it: I don’t do historical fiction. Then came another idea: Well, don’t write it as historical fiction. But what did I mean by that? I wasn’t even a reader of historical fiction, so how could I presume to know what the new generation of historical novelists were up to? ‘Prithee’ and heaving bosoms were what I meant but, to be honest, I knew that ‘prithee’ was long gone. Characters in historical fiction do, though, still talk in a stilted fashion – ‘do not’ instead of ‘don’t’ - and even that was enough to put me off. And this business of the bosoms: it’s not bosoms that I mind, it’s that they’re heaving. Historical fiction is too often costume drama, it seems to me, rather than real – human - drama.
Character is what I go for, both as a reader and a writer. My characters have to be more than the stuffing for some eye-catching dress. They have to feel real: really, really real. And a big part of how someone is, is how he or she speaks: that, too, has to feel real. Perhaps novelists who use ‘do not’ instead of ‘don’t’ are trying to remind us that their characters lived in a world very different from our own. And if so, fair enough: that’s certainly one way to do it. But it’s not my way. It’s not what I want. It’s exactly what I don’t want.
That’s how I’ve ended up with readers asking me why I don’t write dialogue as it was spoken in Tudor times (and that’s when they sense it’s a conscious decision; some seem to think it’s an oversight). I have to contain my sarcasm: ‘Oh, and you know how people spoke, then, do you?’ Because although we know how people wrote (correction: how some people wrote - those who could write), it would’ve been different from how they spoke. We all write differently from how we speak, much more so than we realise, and if you don’t believe me, look at a transcript of speech: it’ll be practically unintelligible. Consciously or unconsciously, we all do a lot of tidying up to make our words clear on a page. We translate the spoken word into the written word. Cod olde English is just a fashion in translation. No more than that. Just an idea. Take it or leave it. Well, I decided to leave it. Look at it this way: it’s acceptable (indeed, de rigeur) for translators not to give us a literal, word by word translation and instead to phrase things so that they’re as accurate as possible to the original but – crucial, this – give us the flavour. The problem, for me, is that the flavour of characters who say ‘do not’ rather than ‘don’t’ is one of quaintness. And the people I write about were anything but.
Take Anne Boleyn. My reading around had given me a clear picture of a woman who was thoroughly modern for her times, an outspoken woman with a provocative disregard for formality and tradition. That was the impression I needed to give my readers. That was – as far as I could discover – the truth. This was a woman who had diplomats leaving the room in disgust at her language. So, when it came to showing how she swore, ‘Christ’s foot’ wasn’t going to do it. (The language in The Queen of Subtleties is much more ‘in yer face’ than in The Sixth Wife and my current novel-in-progress, because that’s how Anne Boleyn seems to have been; the narrators of The Sixth Wife and the forthcoming novel are more restrained!)
I know that some readers don’t like my ‘modern language’ approach – and, I mean, really don’t like it! Well, I can understand that; I do sympathise with that. I understand that, for some readers, the modern language ‘gets in the way’, breaks the spell, even seems ridiculous. But that’s how the stilted dialogue of many other historical novels seems to me. I wanted to write a ‘historical novel’ that I’d want to read. When I’d finished The Queen of Subtleties, my agent and editor each compiled a list of words that had jarred, for them: words that had gone too far. I did study those lists (and was grateful for their efforts!), but in the end I decided to ignore them. Because, otherwise, I’d be writing by committee. I’d had a vision for the book, and I had to stay true to that. And you can’t please all the people, all the time.
Oddly enough, truth matters above all to me as a reader and writer of fiction. Most often when I put down a novel unread, it’s because I don’t believe in some or all of it. I’m thinking, ‘But he/she wouldn’t do/believe/say that!’ My job as a writer, as I see it, is to get to the truth of something or someone and then enable you, the reader, to see it, too. To that end, I’m always stopping myself as I write, and asking myself, checking, ‘Would he/she really think this/behave like this?’ And, now, with historical fiction, ‘Did they…?’
Because, of course, I’m now dealing with people who did live, who were once real. It matters to me that I do them justice. Reading as widely as possible gives me a picture of them that’s both broad and detailed. Yes, historians differ in their accounts, but not usually too much. I can weigh up what they say and come up with something that feels believable. Fictional and filmic portrayals of Anne Boleyn tend to have her as a harridan, but a bit of reading around will show you that she was a lot more interesting than that. Which, happily, in turn, makes for a more interesting read. She was, for example, intensely charming, quick-witted, and politically astute. And of course she was: it’s how she got to where she got.
What’s hard for me, funnily enough, is making things up. That’s my job, too, though. I need to tell you more than you know, and more than you could possibly ever know even if you read all the history books. I’m not a historian and I should do something other than merely re-tell history. I have to go beyond or behind what’s known and come up with a story. In The Queen of Subtleties, my invention was the king’s confectioner - not her existence (her surname and the kind of work she would have done is what we know of her) but her unwitting, tragic involvement with the innocent young man who was executed as the alleged lover of Anne Boleyn. In The Sixth Wife, the sad truth is that cautious, clever Katherine Parr survived her marriage to Henry VIII only to make the all-too-common mistake of falling for a man who wasn’t worthy of her and who messed around with her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. My invention is a central role for Katherine’s best friend in this sorry tale. In The Queen's Sorrow, the Spanish sundial-maker Rafael de Prado is fictional; and in The Confession of Katherine Howard, the sole aspect for which I have no evidence is the relationship between Katherine's ex-lover, Francis Dereham, and her close friend, Catheryn Tilney.
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