‘The past is a foreign country: they do things
differently there’ is the
opening line of ‘The Go-Between’, a novel by L.P.Hartley.
By this, he meant that
the world of the past is as strange and unknowable to us as a country to which
we’ve never been and whose language we cannot speak.
Yet that it is what
historical fiction authors do – we bring the world of the past to life, we bridge
that abyss of the unknowable. To do this, we not only have to
re-create places and times that are long gone, but imagine ourselves into the
minds and hearts of people whose mindset were very different from ours.
A difficult challenge
for any writer.
Imagine then, if an
author set out to not only illuminate the past, but also to write about a
foreign country whose language she doesn’t speak.
Not yet enough of a
challenge for you?
How about writing a
book that is set in TWO different foreign countries, in TWO different
historical periods?
That is just what I did
in my latest novel.
‘Bitter Greens’ is a
retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale, interwoven with the true life story of
the woman who first told the tale, the scandalous French noblewoman
Charlotte-Rose de la Force.
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| 'Bitter Greens' by Kate Forsyth |
The sections told from
her point of view are set in Paris and Versailles in the late 17th
century, during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV.
The Rapunzel narrative
is set in Venice and Lake Garda in the 1590s.
And then, just to make
things more complicated, I wrote a third strand of the story, told from the
point of view of the witch, which is set in Venice in the early 16th
century.
Three different
narrative threads, three different time periods, three different points of
views.
Was I mad?
Sometimes I truly
thought so.
My task was complicated
by the fact that I speak very little French or Italian, and that one of my
characters had truly lived, yet but was nothing but a footnote in history.
Every reference to her in every book I could find was no more than a line or
two long.
And I wanted to write a novel about her.
At times the challenges
seemed insurmountable.
Apart from anything
else, I needed to keep all the historical minutiae straight. For example:
In 16th
century Venice, women wore stiff, long-waisted bodices and heavy skirts over
cone-shaped farthingales, with gabled hoods on their heads. On their feet they
wore totteringly high, wedge-shaped, wooden chopines
to protect their fragile silk slippers from rising water.
In 17th
century Paris, women wore loose mantuas with unboned bodices, the skirt pinned
back to show lacy petticoats, and towering fontanges
on their heads made of lace and ribbons sewn over wire. The height of one’s
heel was strictly controlled by sumptuary laws – the king’s heels were the
highest, and then the queen’s, and so on down to the peasants who were allowed
no heels at all.
In 16th
century Venice, latrines emptied directly into the canal.
In 17th
century Paris, women employed pages to carry their own personal close stool to
parties.
In 16th
century Venice, people drank rough red wine and ale (beer brewed without hops
which were not yet commonly grown).
In 17th
century Paris, pink champagne was all the rage.
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| Character development - sheer hard work behind the scenes! |
So how did I do it?
Quite simply, the
answer is I wrote each narrative thread in its entirety before moving on to the
next.
I began with the story
of Charlotte-Rose de la Force, who was a maid-in-honour at the court of her
second cousin, Louis XIV. Her story begins in 1660 and ends in 1697. I read
everything I could find about the court of the Sun-King – its fashions, its
food, its customs, its etiquette – and I hired a French translator to help me
since many of the first-hand accounts of the Versailles court had never been
translated into English. Similarly, the only book ever written about
Charlotte-Rose’s life was written by a French academic, and never translated. With
her help, I was able to read the letters and diaries of noblewomen at the
court, and I was able to read Charlotte-Rose’s own writings – her fairy tales
and her autobiography. I wrote her entire story from beginning to end,
indicating where I thought I could break to insert the other narrative threads.
Then I wrote the
Rapunzel sections. My heroine was called Margherita and her tale begins in
Venice in 1590 and ends in Florence in 1600.
Once again I immersed
myself as fully into the historical period as I could. I began a new notebook,
keeping all my notes, ideas and research separate from the notebook about
Charlotte-Rose de la Force. I read books with titles like ‘Daily Life in
Renaissance Italy’ and ‘Inside the Renaissance House’. I studied books on early
opera and Venetian beauty regimes. I read articles about Rapunzel syndrome (a
life-threatening illness caused by tricophagia, or the eating of one’s own
hair). I cooked Italian food.
When Margherita’s story
was told in its entirety, from first word to last word, I wove it into
Charlotte-Rose’s story, making sure the chapters echoed each other in same way,
and were balanced in length and pacing.
Only then did I begin
to research and write the story of Selena de Leonelli, the courtesan who locks
Margherita away. Her tale begins in 1504 and ends in 1582, and features the
great Italian Renaissance painter Tiziano (known in English as Titian). This
time I immersed myself in the world of the Venetian courtesan. I read up about stregheria, Italian witchcraft. I spent
hours examining Tiziano’s paintings minutely for every hidden symbol and
painted-over brushwork. I read about the Venetian Inquisition, and the practise
of castrating young boys to preserve their youthful voices.
I wrote Selena’s
story, and then found the exact right place to put it – in the very middle of
the book. It became the dark heart of the novel. Charlotte-Rose and
Margherita’s story weaves into it, and then weaves out of it, the whole
understanding of the novel inverted and changed as a result.
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| Dedication to accuracy: Kate in Florence |
It was like writing three separate novels - each one
its own small foreign world, with its own language and laws, customs and
conventions.
I’ve always liked a challenge, though.
Kate Forsyth
http://www.kateforsyth.com.au/
