Tidelands

In Tidelands I wanted to be able to describe the inner world of more than one person; I wanted to be free to describe events that happened far from the primary character. I wanted Alinor to live like an uneducated woman in a highly complex world—it was important that she was not present at great events. So if I wanted the reader to see James’s life at his college in Douai, I had to write in third person (or have a series of first-person narrators). Contradictorily, when it came to the execution of King Charles, I did not use third person! Instead I found it really useful to imbue the account with emotion by letting James and Ned be reporters.

How to tell the story is a huge decision when starting a novel, but since this is book one of a series, I knew that it would be less of a wrench if I did not change the narrator with each book.

Alinor and Alys are both very compelling women. The reader is able to see their problems from both their points of view. Was it difficult to write the scenes where they are at odds with how to fix the situation in which they find themselves?

No! Delightfully the mother/daughter conflicts were very fluent to write. I could see each one’s point of view. The development of Alys in the story came from her growing up so that she was more than her mother’s daughter but was someone with her own ambitions and opinions.

You have announced thatTidelandsis part of the Fairmile series, spanning 250 years and three continents. How long did it take you to write this first novel? How much of the series did you have plotted out before you started writing?

The joy of writing historical fiction, which is not fictional biography, is that I am so much more free to develop the characters and develop their lives as I wish. I knew at the outset that I wanted to tell the story of an English family which rises in prosperity, as so many English families did through the revolutions in agriculture, industry, and then especially empire. Beyond that, I didn’t really have a plan. This first novel developed as I wrote it, sometimes surprising me, and took two years to write—longer than usual. The next one is going to start in London but probably move to Venice and from there probably east. But I think that Ned is the sort of man who would follow his conscience to America.

You graduated from the University of Sussex. Had you always wanted to write a novel set in that area? Or was there something about this story that drew you back there?

The novel is set in an area that I lived in for several years, and was where I spent most of my childhood holidays. I love this undeveloped, unspoiled stretch of coastline. It’s very peaceful, very rich in wildlife, and incredibly evocative. It’s not very large, and it’s not very famous, so it’s very lovely to visit and write there. It’s not far from where I set my first novel Wideacre, so it is now both a fictional landscape and a real place for me.

Did the #MeToo movement affect how you wanted to write the character of Alinor? Has the persistence of this current women’s movement affected your plans for the series as a whole?

My commitment to feminism as a way of understanding the world and as a hope for the future goes back a long way, and the #MeToo movement has been an inspiration to me in seeing courageous women stand together. I have been guided in this fictional series by my simultaneous work on a new nonfiction book of history which is going to trace the lives of ordinary women (and the obstacles they faced) over a long study from 1066 to 1966 in England. I hope to publish this within five years. As a historian I am particularly interested in the roots of women’s oppression and ill treatment, and I think I can make the greatest contribution to the movement by showing how the past contributes to our lives now. It’s really shocking to understand how little improvement there has been in terms of assaults on women while we have made great strides in political representation.

You are very involved with the charity Gardens for The Gambia. Can you share how that came about?