Hope Adams On The Bonds of Female Friendship & Cooperative Creativity

In 2009, Hope Adams visited the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and came upon The Rajah Quilt, which she learned was stitched by female convicts in 1841 aboard a transcontinental voyage via the Rajah. This ship transported thousands of women, convicted of petty crimes, from London to van Diemen’s Land (modern day Tasmania) in the 1840s. On this 1841 trip, a group on board under the guidance of chaperone Keziah Hayter, who taught the women needle-working skills, formed the tapestry. The quilt now hangs in the Museum of Australia, in Canberra. Fascinated by this quilt, Adams imagined the desperate lives of these female prisoners—including the crimes they committed and why—and the result is this stunning novel.

Your novel, DANGEROUS WOMEN, was inspired by the Rajah quilt, which was stitched by female convicts during their transcontinental voyage. When dealing with the historical account, women are often sidelined and details can be sparse. How did you go about researching for this book, and are your characters based on real convicts? 

There is an awful lot we know about the real convicts on this trip. Online, you can access the records that the Captain and the Surgeon Superintendent kept. Kezia Hayter kept a diary. The scene where the women are asked their details must be true because we have their heights, eye and hair colours and details of their crimes, all written down.  And we have every name too, but I decided to NOT use the names of anyone who actually sailed on the Rajah. It gave me greater freedom to do what I wanted and to put the characters I’d created on to that ship. I also didn’t use the real names because there are people living in Australia and especially Tasmania who are descended from these convicts.

Female friendships and fast connections play a large role in the story. These women have all been forced together by chance and shadowy pasts, yet they manage to form bonds as they would in any other situation. Do you think there is something innately female about these bonds? 

I do think that girls in general find it easier to chat and find out about one another and find things in common than boys do. There’s an experiment where doctors looked at 2 nine-year-old girls in a doctor’s waiting room and 2 nine-year-old boys in the same waiting room. The children had no idea they were being looked at. The girls asked one another questions from the get go. ‘Where do you live? Do you have brothers or sisters? “etc. Within minutes they were chatting away and ignoring all the toys left out for them in the waiting room. The two boys did not exchange a word. They just approached the Lego and began building something together…

I read something in the newspaper the other day which said that women were coping much better in lockdown, Zooming and chatting with their friends on Whats App etc whereas men tended to chat and bond mainly in bars etc and felt the lack of them hugely while they are shut. Women find it easier to natter, I think. Hope it’s not sexist in any way to suggest such a thing. They also find it easier to keep up a connection once they’ve made it. 

DANGEROUS WOMEN is very much a closed room mystery. Everyone is trapped, and no one is safe on board the ship. With that in mind, how much did you have to learn about ships and sailing in order to deliver this tale?

I did the bare minimum. I went to look around a very famous Clipper ship in London called the Cutty Sark and for the rest, I relied on accounts on the internet. I did have help from the Royal Maritime Museum at Greenwich about portholes…. there were windows on board ship in those days. I’m not very good at research…would much rather be making up things than looking into them.

The characters on board the ship have mostly been convicted of petty crimes--some even committed as acts of desperation to escape violent husbands. Why did you choose the title DANGEROUS WOMEN? 

The book went through lots of titles. For quite a long while it was going to be called CONVICTION. I never liked that title because Denise Mina, the Scottish crime writer, had a book by that name which appeared in 2020. My wonderful US editor, Amanda Bergeron, came up with Dangerous Women and we all latched on to that most gratefully. For a while, the name of the book in my mind was THE WORK OF THEIR HANDS which has now become part of the dedication. 

What do you hope readers can take away from this historical tale, and what elements still apply in today's world?

I hope readers will enjoy this book on two levels. First, as a hopefully exciting mystery story with a really involving puzzle they can solve along with Kezia and the others.  I hope they’ll also see how important it is for everyone to realize that working together brings unexpected and sometimes extraordinary benefits. I think that cooperative work, and people doing something creative together (putting on a play, making a movie, or a podcast, or anything really…) yields amazing results which we often can’t achieve on our own.  I am also a firm believer in the message of George Herbert’s hymn Teach me my God and King  and I urge readers to find it online and read the whole thing. It’s the most beautiful poem. The message is: any work however humble is elevated if we do it for the right reasons…. not necessarily for the greater glory of God but to further the common good in some way.

Finola Austin on Stalking Dead People

by Finola Austin

It’s no secret that my generation—the much maligned millennials—is one made up of adept internet stalkers. Information about a new friend, a colleague, or that hot guy from a dating app is always just a Google search away, especially if the subject of your stalking has an unusual name, as I do. However, as a writer of historical fiction, I have to confess that, on an average Saturday night you’re much more likely to find me stalking...well, dead people. 

In Fall 2016, I came across the woman, Lydia Robinson, who would become the protagonist of my debut novel, the old-fashioned way—in a book. I’m a long-time lover of all things nineteenth-century; in fact, I have a Master’s in Victorian literature, and the Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne) have always been among my favorite writers of the period. I was reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte, the first Bronte biography, when I stumbled upon her paragraphs about Lydia, the older woman rumored to have had an affair with Branwell, the dissolute Bronte brother. Gaskell described her as “wretched” and as “tempting [Branwell] into the deep disgrace of a deadly crime.” She even blamed Lydia for Branwell’s death and those of two of his three sisters! Somebody, I thought, has to have written a novel from this woman’s perspective. So what was the first thing I did? Reader, I Googled it. 

I discovered that, while the ill-fated affair was mentioned in other works inspired by the Brontes, no one had thought to put Lydia and her perspective at the center of a novel. So began a year of intense (largely digital) research, as I stalked Lydia within an inch of her life—that is, I would have, had she still been living!

So how did I go about it? First, I read whatever I could find on the internet, sourced and unsourced, reliable and less so, about Lydia Robinson and the Branwell Bronte affair. I took notes on everything, especially when accounts differed (e.g. was Lydia’s second husband much older than her as many blogs claimed, or was in fact her peer?). 

At the same time, I consulted Bronte biographies—the compendious and scholarly, like Juliet Barker’s The Brontes, which had great endnotes pointing me to primary sources, and the older biographies, such as Daphne du Maurier’s book on Branwell, which did not cite sources and felt in some ways closer to historical fiction. I also searched JSTOR for all journal articles that touched on the affair, and asked an academic friend to send me countless PDFs. 

Digitized census records were another window into the world Lydia inhabited. Who were her servants and her neighbors? Where did her family live? Who were her friends? Using sites designed for family historians, and leaning on my mother, a family tree enthusiast, for support, I built up a sprawling web of knowledge that went far beyond what Bronte scholars had focused on. (Lydia’s second husband was her age FYI.)  

As luck would have it, a Yorkshire carpenter, George Whitehead, who lived near Lydia and her family, had kept four diaries (of births, deaths, marriages, and sundries) recording events in the local area. These had been published locally in the 1990s, but, thanks to the wonders of Amazon, a secondhand copy was soon winging its way to me in New York. I remember sitting in a Manhattan tapas bar, feverishly recording gems from this book, between mouthfuls of calamari. Bronte academics had mentioned rumors of a gardener uncovering the illicit affair, but now I knew who this gardener was, his name, how many children he had, where and when he died.

I could have stalked my growing collection of dead people forever, but I limited myself to a year of research. Then I had to start writing. And it was a joy! Part of the novel felt written for me, because of the spreadsheet of dates and details I’d compiled. I drafted the novel that became Bronte’s Mistress in under six months, before flying to England to do some more research on the ground. 

There, I visited archives, graveyards, and the grounds of Lydia’s old house (sadly destroyed, though the building where Branwell slept is now a private home). And every step of the way, I was aided by my digital preparations. I’d emailed the local vicar, who introduced me to amateur historians, and the school, which now stood on the site of Lydia’s home, in order to win admittance. I’d emailed the Bronte Parsonage Museum so I could look at the Robinson Papers, which included eighteen letters penned by my protagonist—Lydia herself. 

The internet is often thought of as being very much of the “now,” but my digital literacy, learned from years of watching silly cat videos, sharing memes, and, yes, stalking with abandon, has been my window to the past. Digitization of records is the best thing that’s ever happened to historical fiction, and, as I know from the book I’m working on next, there are so many gems of stories out there, just waiting to be found.

Finola Austin, also known as the Secret Victorianist on her award-winning blog, is an England-born, Northern Ireland-raised, Brooklyn-based historical novelist and lover of the 19th century. Her first novel, Bronte’s Mistress, was published in 2020. By day, she works in digital advertising. Find her online at www.finolaaustin.com. 

Memoirist Neill McKee on Dealing with Tricky Topics - Giveaway Included!

Today I welcome Neill McKee, whose memoir, Guns and Gods in My Genes, which walks the through 400 years and 15,000 miles of an on-the-road adventure, discovering stories of his Scots-Irish ancestors in Canada, while uncovering their attitudes towards religion and guns.

Writing about your own family and history can become sticky. We all have the stories we want to tell... but maybe not everyone wants them to be shared. Did you run across any reticent family members, or those who preferred some stories be left in the shadows?

I began in 2013, after I retired from my 45-year career, to research and write two 200-page documents on both my fathers' side (the McKees) and my mother's side (the Neills). I collected stories, photos and dates from many cousins. One Neill cousin, to whom the book is dedicated, provided me with a lot of the American history she had found, including the Mayflower connection. She had never proved it or put it together though, just different finding is email messages. I sent out drafts of these documents for comment, corrections, and more stories. (Through my work as an international development communication expert, I knew that pretesting is important.) I put last appendices in these documents on my living cousins (my generation) and their families that could be updated easily. Then, in 2016, on the McKee side where there has been more division in my father's generation, I organized the renovation of our 2nd great-grandparent's tombstone and the ceremony and family reunion in Chapter 1. (I continue to manage the email list and news updates for both sides of the family, almost all in Canada, from New Mexico.) 

The point is, by doing these documents and the celebration first, I probably took care of most disagreements. There still may be disagreements about versions of stories that were passed on, like how the death of my grandfather McKee happened on that hay wagon in 1933, which is described at the end of Chapter 2. There, I took my Uncle John's side of the story against my father's. I did not check with my siblings in this case. I used my memory and imagination to try to understand why my dad was such a cautious driver. Since he passed away in 2007, I couldn't ask him. Anyway, that's the job of a creative nonfiction writer, I believe.

 You focus on your ancestors and their relationship with guns due to your own early experience hunting, which left you not-so-in-love with gun culture. Of course, gun ownership can quickly become a hot topic. How did you go about writing respectfully on something that can be so divisive?

This is true. In fact, one brother and his sons in Ontario are great hunters and don't like some of Canada's gun control laws. By doing this book, I hope to educate gun lovers on the evolution of how the people of North America have brought guns into their cultures, and the big difference between Canada and the US. In an earlier draft, I had quite a different last chapter. I read two good books on the history of the 2nd Amendment (Winkler, Adam and Waldman, Michael in the Suggested Readings p.332). But writer, Gayle Lauradunn and libertarian neighbor, Charles Rolison, both of whom endorsed the book in the inside front cover pages, commented on that chapter and advised me to change it. 

Disagreements over the true meaning and evolution of the meaning of the 2nd Amendment is too baked into present social division in America, and I am not an expert, so I decided not to go there. I'd focus instead of the tremendous difference between Canada and the US, two countries with similar gun ownership per household. I quote the mass shootings toll in the US in 2019 and mention the statistics, at the time of writing, in the US in 2020, which turned out even worse than I mentioned on the bottom of page 286.

The Supreme Court's 2008 decision on making the 2nd Amendment an individual right, does not prohibit stricter gun control laws, like Canada's, and the majority of American's want it. It will happen with time. As I mention on page 287, “America, a relatively young country, is behaving like a grumpy old man, when it has so much more potential in the modern world.” The Constitution really needs to be revised in so many ways, in my humble opinion, after reviewing thousands of pages of North American history.

Genealogy is endlessly interesting... mostly to those of us who actually do it. Telling a riveting tale of finding that 1836 tax return that itemized how many cows your gr-gr-gr-gr-grandfather had might not be so entertaining to everyone else. (I know the feeling. I've combed wills to find out what happened to someone's hairbrush). How do you take such a niche topic and bring it to a larger audience? *Did you mean "not"? 

I only included two tables (2 and 7) on my ancestor's wealth, at the time of their deaths, to further the stories I told, and those were placed at the end of the book along with the genealogical tables, so as not to break up the continuity of the narrative. I wanted to write a book with wide appeal to anyone interested in genealogy and history, or searching their own family's roots. I decided to do it on the theme of "guns and gods" and by "gods" I mean different interpretations of religion - largely Christianity - in North American history, and my discovery of some "godly" ancestors in my genes, as well as a real "rowdy man" and some who killed and enslaved Indians in New England in the 1600s. So, I believe focusing on a theme or a couple of themes is important. There are a lot of family stories that I left out. They were entertaining but not part of the themes I chose. (Note that the number of cows or a hairbrush could be part of the larger theme a writer chooses. There may be important stories behind them.)

This story is obviously of a personal nature. Do you have any plans to continue writing? Or was this a one and done?

Since 2015, after I moved to New Mexico, I have been writing three memoirs. My first came of in 2019, Finding Myself in Borneo https://www.neillmckeeauthor.com/finding-myself-in-borneo.

It has won three awards. The second is Guns and Gods in My Genes. Simultaneously, I have been writing a memoir on my childhood and youth in a small Ontario town, and university years, by the working title of Kid on the Go! Memoir of my life before Borneo. (See description below.) I hope to release it in mid-2021. Now I have started writing a memoir with the working title of Memoir of an International Filmmaker: My Travels After Borneo. It's a good theme to write on while Covid-19 is still locking us down. When we are able to travel again, I hope to write some travel memoirs on the American Southwest and Rocky Mountains. There's a lot to write on here, as mentioned in the last few pages of Guns and Gods in My Genes. 

Kid on the Go! Memoir of my life before Borneo is Neill McKee’s third work in creative nonfiction. It will be a prequel to his first work in the genre, the award-winning Finding Myself in Borneo: Sojourns in Sabah. In this short book, McKee takes readers on a journey through his childhood, early adolescence, and teenage years, while growing up in the small industrially-polluted town of Elmira in Southern Ontario, Canada—now infamous as one of the centers for production of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Each chapter is set to a different theme on how he learned to keep “on the go” to escape the smells coming from the town’s chemical factory and other pollutants, including manure from surrounding farms. McKee’s vivid descriptions, dialog, and self-drawn illustrations, provide much humor and poignant moments in his stories of growing up in a loving family. In a way, the book is a travel memoir through both mental and physical space—a study of a young boy’s learning to observe and avoid dangers; to cope with death in the family; to fish, hunt, play cowboys; to learn the value of work and how to build and repair “escape” vehicles. The memoir explores his experiences with exploding hormones, his first attraction to girls, dealing with bullying, how he rebelled against religion and authority and survived the conformist teenager “rock & roll” culture of the early 1960s, coming out the other side with the help of influential teachers and mentors. After finally leaving his hometown, McKee describes his rather directionless but intensely searching years at university. Except for an emotional afterword and revealing postscript, the story ends when he departs to become a volunteer teacher on the Island of Borneo—truly a “kid on the go!” 

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