Wideacre, The Favoured Child and Meridon

Wideacre was the first novel I ever wrote and it came out of my experience of writing my PhD thesis, and the research I did for the thesis. It came out of the experience, because I took four years to write the thesis and adopted the habit of working alone, without any support or external discipline. I have to say, I think this is an essential skill for a successful writer - you can have all the ideas in the world but if you can't be bothered to sit at the desk then it won't do you much good. When I finished my PhD and could not get academic work I had - in a sense- the discipline of working and the time to work, and yet no work to do. In the time that was now empty, I started to write Wideacre and found it the most enjoyable work I had ever done. I loved writing it, and the high-speed high-intensity flavour of the novel comes, I think, from the excitement and high-energy that I brought to it.

It also comes out of the research, as does the whole trilogy. My thesis was on the popular fiction of the eighteenth century and I read more than 200 eighteenth century novels. I was reading in order to write authoritatively in my thesis about the content of the novels, and what the readers enjoyed. As a side-effect, I had given myself a wonderful apprenticeship in the writing of the novel. The eighteenth century was the period that the modern novel was invented; by reading more than 200 of them I had taught myself how a novel was put together, the technique of novel writing, and little technical things - like how to shift the scene from one place to another, and how to play with readers' expectations.

Another thing that came up from my research was the importance of enclosure in impoverishing working people and destroying the traditional rhythms and rituals of rural life. Enclosure took place over something like two centuries, but individual estates could experience rapid and traumatic change if the landowner suddenly decided to try to profit from the new ways of farming. This is what happens on the Lacey estate and though the events are dramatised and exaggerated, there was tremendous hardship in the real events of the time. Riots and threat were regular occurrences during the period of change, the poor people were well aware that they would be impoverished by the changes. They were right: driving people off the land forced them into the cities and the factories and their day to day lives were immeasurably impoverished.

Beatrice Lacey's resistance to the limited life of a young woman of the eighteenth century was suggested to me by the historic evidence of a number of women who found their lives trammelled by their family's rising standards of female manners and repression. The rise of the smaller nuclear family meant that for the first time, unmarried or widowed women had no function in the family. For single working women there was hard labour and a high chance of sexual assault. For ladies there was only the choice of work as a governess which was poorly paid (and also carried the risk of sexual assault from an employer) or marriage. There was no work regarded as suitable for ladies. In circumstances such as this, women, like my great great great great great aunt the eighteenth century novelist Mary Hays started to criticise the society. My fictional character Beatrice Lacey took direct action to improve her circumstances.

Some readers found the incest theme in the novel surprising and disturbing. I found incest to be a recurring theme in the eighteenth century novels. It came about, I think, because of the rise of marriage for choice. For the first time ladies were able to vet their proposed partners and, at least, reject them if they did not like them. Some liberal parents allowed their daughter to actively choose their partner. In an age when divorce was not possible this put a lot of anxiety into the courtship and I suggest that -perhaps subconsciously- girls felt that they would be safer with someone they knew, someone like a brother. Equally, once the choice of a marriage partner became something that the younger generation could share, brothers started to suggest their friends, or veto men that they did not like. They started to participate in their sisters' choices. In Richardson's Clarissa the heroine objects very strongly to marrying "her brother's man" almost as if it is a surrogate marriage to her brother.

In many novels there is a prevailing theme of an engaged couple discovering that they are in fact, brother and sister. The happy ending is that they discover that one of them is a changeling and they can marry after all. Often the couple have been wet-nursed by the same woman, or even at the same time, a sort of sibling relationship, the 'brotherhood of the breast'.

In these and many other ways the eighteenth century novelists played with the idea of sibling incest and I think I picked up this theme from them and used it both in Wideacre and in The Favoured Child, though in both novels there is a significant power struggle being enacted through desire.

Research for the final novel of the trilogy Meridon, was a great pleasure. I spent three successive summers with a travelling circus working the towns of the south coast of England in order to get an insight into circus life and - to tell the truth - because I loved the life and had the greatest fun. The community was tremendous, the work was an extraordinary mixture of the thin glamour of the show, the arduous technical training of the entertainers, the danger of the acts, and the hard grind of pulling down and moving on every week.

Never achieving more than a very low amateurish level, but loving every minute, I learned bareback riding, trapeze work, and finally, lion taming. It was a wonderful experience and my joy in the life comes through ever page of Meridon.

For cardsharping and cheating I consulted the very many admonishing books of the time and modern day books about card cheating tricks. I also consulted close-work magicians.

I bought a 17th century map of London and walked around the streets calculating where Meridon would live, ride, and how she would finally escape home.