My TUESDAY TALK GUEST: Love Me Love Me Not by Carolyn Hughes

I’m absolutely thrilled that A Woman’s Lot, the second book of my Meonbridge Chronicles series, was published back in June! I do hope you’ll consider reading it. But not everyone loves historical fiction. Even a few reviewers of the first Chronicle, Fortune’s Wheel, admitted that they weren’t historical fiction fans…

Carolyn Hughes

“…I don’t normally opt for historical fiction, but Fortune’s Wheel was captivating… opened my eyes to a personally unexplored genre.”

“…I’m always a bit apprehensive when I start to read an historical novel because I can’t always cope with strategic plots involving kings and earls and knights of the realm and so on, especially when I know they are taken from real life. Also, I don’t want every book I read to be full of wars and bloodshed, again, especially when I know it’s real history. There was none of that in this book…”

“This book was recommended to me and, although normally I am not a fan of fiction about the middle ages, I was very surprised how much I enjoyed it. Carolyn Hughes has done a great deal of research and created wonderful descriptions of life for the working classes (and the elite) at that period in time….Well done – an excellent novel. I recommend it.” http://amzn.to/2qHheHu

So, did you notice? Despite not being “histfic” fans, these readers still really liked my book! How pleasing is that?

Personally, I love reading historical fiction – well, I would, wouldn’t I? But, obviously it can’t be everybody’s favourite read. However, I think it might be true that a few people do avoid it because they feel it is all about “kings and earls” or “wars and bloodshed”. Yet, of course, there isn’t only one kind of historical fiction.

When I came to write Fortune’s Wheel, I wasn’t immediately sure what sort of historical novel it would be. I knew in which period it would be set – the Middle Ages! I’d long been intrigued by the mediaeval period, for its relative remoteness in time and understanding and, possibly, for the very dichotomy between the present-day perception of life then as unrelievedly “nasty, brutish and short” and the wonders of the period’s architecture, art and literature. I wanted to learn more about the period myself and, through writing an historical novel, I would have the opportunity both to discover the mediaeval past and to interpret it, to bring learning and imagination to my writing, which is I suppose what all historical novelists do.

So, yes, a mediaeval novel… But which sort of mediaeval novel? I knew it wouldn’t be a mediaeval mystery, or crime, or romance (although mystery, crime and romance do all play a part). Nor would it be alternative history, or alternative biography, or dual period/time slip. But, if none of these, what would it be?

I wanted to write a “naturalistic” novel, one that portrayed the lives of mediaeval people – and, in particular, “ordinary” people – as realistically as possible. I soon became excited by the idea of building an imaginary mediaeval English village society and populating it with interesting and hopefully engaging, albeit “ordinary”, characters. As one of the reviewers of Fortune’s Wheel once said, it did have the feel of  “an everyday story of country folk”. (The phrase is an allusion, for those of you who don’t know, to The Archers, a very popular English radio “soap opera”, which is the longest running daily serial in the world, having aired it first episode on 1 January 1951 and which was originally billed as an “everyday story of country folk”.)

Dance Macabre by MichselWolgemut

And I think the epithet works well for the Meonbridge Chronicles.

Of course, to make a story, I have to give my characters challenges to meet and problems to solve, private agonies to bear and public disasters to face. But also pleasures and joys – it can’t be all misery and doom. Yet my novels are certainly more about the people than the events, more about their reactions to what happens and their interactions with each other than the mechanics of the situations I put them in.

Having said that, real historical events do play their part. My novels are not about history, but it does underpin the storylines and provide the contexts, and the challenges, in which the characters’ lives are played out. The context and challenge I chose for Fortune’s Wheel was the aftermath of what we call the Black Death, the plague that swept across Asia and Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, killing up to a half of all people, in the most hideous, terrifying way imaginable. It seemed a perfect starting point for a story about the lives of ordinary fourteenth century people…

Imagine the sheer turmoil that must have ensued, in society and at a personal level: women lost husbands, men lost wives, and both lost children. Workers were now a scarce resource and had some clout, while their masters clung to the status quo. As peasants rebelled against the old ways, priests railed against the upsetting of God’s social order, and preyed upon people’s fears of divine retribution. Yet, despite it all, normal life continued: fields were ploughed, crops harvested, meals made; people fell in and out of love; babies were born and children cherished.

In A Woman’s Lot, the story has moved on two years after the end of Fortune’s Wheel, to 1352. Life in Meonbridge has generally settled down a bit. But the modest growth in women’s influence that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the plague is resented by a few of Meonbridge’s more misogynistic men. The context for one aspect of this “misogyny” storyline is the Treason Act of 1351. I was intrigued to read that “petty treason” included a wife killing her husband (her “lawful superior”), and horrified to discover that the penalty for a convicted woman was “burning without drawing”. A challenge to be overcome indeed!

But, despite the horrors of the historical backdrops, I still always feel it is the relationships between the characters that typify the nature of The Meonbridge Chronicles. Indeed, I sometimes think of my Chronicles as a kind of “relationship” novel, but set in the fourteenth century. They do focus mostly on the relationships of women, and the stories are told (mostly) through the voices of women. We do hear the words of men – more so in the third Chronicle – but it was, and still is, the women’s viewpoints that interest me most, if only because women in history often do not get much opportunity to “speak”.

The people we encounter on the pages of historical novels are unlike us in many ways, in their environment, their habits, their attitudes and beliefs. But they are familiar to us too, with families and concerns and feelings very much like ours. And it is this familiarity, as well as the dissimilarity, that an historical novelist seeks to portray. Doing so is a challenge but also, perhaps, one of the principal reasons for writing – and reading – historical fiction.

© Carolyn Hughes

About Carolyn

Carolyn was born in London, but has lived most of her life in Hampshire. After a first degree in Classics and English, she started her working life as a computer programmer, in those days a very new profession. It was fun for a few years, but she left to become a school careers officer in Dorset. But it was when she discovered technical authoring that she knew she had found her vocation. She spent the next few decades writing and editing all sorts of material, some fascinating, some dull, for a wide variety of clients, including an international hotel group, medical instrument manufacturers and the Government. She has written creatively for most of her adult life, but it was not until her children grew up and flew the nest, several years ago, that creative writing and, especially, writing historical fiction, took centre stage in her life. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from Portsmouth University and a PhD from the University of Southampton.

A Woman’s Lot is the second of the Meonbridge Chronicles, her series of historical novels set in fourteenth century England. The first, Fortune’s Wheel, was published in 2016. The third in the series is well under way.

Links

Facebook: www.facebook.com/CarolynHughesAuthor/

Twitter: @writingcalliope

Goodreads: http://bit.ly/2hs2rrX

Website and blog: www.carolynhughesauthor.com

I also post a blog on the 20th of every month at http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com

On Amazon...

FORTUNE’S WHEEL: UK http://amzn.to/2f5UZD5 US http://amzn.to/2gmiNr4

A WOMAN’S LOT: UK https://amzn.to/2L5v0uv US https://amzn.to/2xD05nq

Why not join “Team Meonbridge”? http://bit.ly/joinmeonbridge