Many fine writers have taken the leap into the unknown to fictionalize little-known history. Ann Baer’s
The novel is set in Selsey Island, near Chichester, a place which was my home for several years in the 1980s. I revisited it for research for this book and once again found a small place of extraordinary richness and beauty. The main character, Alinor, is entirely fictional but representative of the working women of her time: excluded from power, from wealth and education, but nonetheless making lives for themselves as best as they can. Women had no formal political power when the whole country was deciding for or against a monarchy, but we see from the debates, from the public demonstrations, from civil disobedience, and from the massive women-only petitions presented to the parliament that they were opinionated, active, and vocal. When we honor women who demanded the vote, sought rights over their own money and their own bodies, we should remember that even before them millions of ordinary women simply assumed the rights they wanted and lived their lives in quiet defiance of the law and of convention. Their successes are rarely recorded (except in specialist studies) because they chose discreet personal victory to acknowledgment. These were not exemplary feminist victories: by one woman for the benefit of all women. They were personal triumphs: one woman for herself and perhaps her daughters. But we see in these individual stories the pattern of female perseverance and success which, in practical day-to-day experience, defies and defeats the oppression of their times. For much of English history women have been legal nonentities. But they always lived as if they mattered.
Alinor is a woman like this. To outside appearances—which at the end, are all that James can see—she is in a hopeless state. The best she can wish for is survival without falling into poverty in a period where poor people died of hunger and want. But, even poor and shamed, Alinor is of interest to herself: she has hopes, she has ambition, she is not fatalistic, she plans a better future. Her terrible trial was not unusual for women of her time—there were uncounted witch trials up and down the country in the seventeenth century; more than three thousand people were named as witches and executed in Britain; many more were questioned and tested, mostly women.
But the rumors about Alinor do not define her, neither does the hardship she endures. She continues to insist on an independent moral judgment and on her own independent thinking and feeling. Dependent upon her neighbors for a living, dependent on a man for her status, she nonetheless thinks, feels, and lives for herself. At a time when women counted for nothing, she values herself. She is—if only to herself—a heroine. Certainly she and all the other women of history who have found their way through unmarked, treacherous times are heroines to me, and