Why I Love Domestic Detail by Katharine McMahon

We are pleased to welcome Katharine McMahon, author of The Crimson Rooms to Historical Tapestry with a Why I Love guest post today.

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Why I Love Domestic Detail

Two reasons: because I’m short-sighted and because I’m nosy. I’ll begin with the first. I am very myopic, always have been. As a child of about six I was put into hideous free specs with wires round the ears, pink or blue or brown plastic - actually quite fashionable now if you peeled off the plastic. Of course I refused to wear them except in dire necessity and went about half-blind instead.

As a result, the outside world was very intimidating because I couldn’t see it; I couldn’t make out people’s faces, I couldn’t play ball so I preferred to be in. So there I was with a book, tucked up in the adult world, snuffling my way round the insides of houses as children do, so that each had a smell and textures indelibly printed on my mind: my grandparents’ house smelt of oil paints and pipe-smoke and baking, oh the smell of my grandfather’s tobacco pouch when I was allowed to fill his pipe. Afterwards my fingertips smelt delicious and I can still feel the rough inside of the bowl as I tamped the tobacco shreds down – he was very careful and I wasn’t allowed to drop a single speck.

There were three great aunts in a house in Wembley - an inner suburb of London (the aunts became known as the Wembles) - and I remember dark corners, cologne, big, old furniture. There’s a lot of those Wembles in The Crimson Rooms because they were maiden aunts, born at the end of the nineteenth century, bereaved during the First World War or deprived of men they would never meet; brave , witty, career women. As I wrote The Crimson Rooms I had one toe in that vivid childhood world of teas and knitting and talk.

The Crimson Rooms, although a murder story, is a very domestic book, because Evelyn Gifford, its heroine, like all career women, shifts between the professional and the domestic. And in her case, because she’s a lawyer, and a very lowly one at that, she has to enter other people’s domestic worlds. I love finding the perfect detail. Somewhere in my memory is a small, damp, terraced house we rented once, with a kitchen in the back full of woodlice, and when my newly wed victim, Stella Wheeler, is murdered on a picnic, I imagined her emerging from just such a kitchen because she’s a slovenly housekeeper who loves fashion, so I gave her that dank kitchen, a dishcloth hanging out of a bowl, but upstairs rows of cheap but immaculate frocks. And I remembered how my old bedroom in my parents’ home had felt after I left it - not mine at all - so that when Evelyn goes to look at Stella’s old rooms, she finds just a hint of her; a scent in the sleeve of a dressing gown, some unloved toys, an unslept- in bed.

I find in fact that the only way of writing about the really big things, is to concentrate on the really small. In The Rose of Sebastopol, when one of the heroines, Rosa, goes missing in the middle of a war, she leaves a very domestic box containing a needlebook and a few other momentoes. Her cousin, Mariella, a Victorian miss, finds that her skill with a needle is in fact a valuable commodity, given that the army was totally ill-prepared for the vicious Crimean winter. The plight of the army is encapsulated by Mariella’s attempts to sew its uniforms back together. When Stella Wheeler, in The Crimson Rooms dies in mysterious circumstances, she leaves an oilskin sponge bag with a wet toothbrush, because of course, having no upstairs water, she’d have had to carry her toiletries down to the kitchen each day. And when Evelyn Gifford, the heroine of The Crimson Rooms, falls in love, the setting of her affair is teashops and courtrooms, where she becomes entranced with the angle of her beloved’s knee or the turn of his head. Like I said... it’s the small things we notice.

And I’ve also been told that my novels are unusually full of smells. But then life is, don’t you find? But I do wonder if actually as a child I was hyper sensitive to smell because the visual world was so fuzzy. I think smell is a wonderful way of evoking the past. We can all do it, I bet, think of a childhood experience and smell it too. Imagining the past is to imagine a very different mix of smells; coal fires, bread toasted on a fork, over-cooked meat in basement kitchens.

I said at the beginning I loved detail because I was nosy. I always want to know what things mean. I first became addicted to theatre not because of what was happening on the stage but because I wanted to know where the actors went once they’d mysteriously disappeared into the wings. If we visited an old house - my mother loved to take me to see the houses once belonging to the Brontes or Florence Nightingale or Churchill – I always wanted to see into the locked rooms. And I can never understand people at parties who have no questions or curiosity but are happy to talk endlessly about themselves. What a lot you can learn by asking the right questions (or the wrong ones). Actually, this is exactly the process of building plot and character – what happened? Why? What is she wearing that for? She’s working as a lawyer. Why? How did that happen? Who is ringing her doorbell at two in the morning? Writing a novel is posing a million questions, and then finding the answers. Lucky I’ve had a lifetime’s training in looking for clues.

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Katharine McMahon is the author of several historical fiction novels including The Rose of Sebastopol and The Crimson Rooms, which is being released in paperback in US on 4 January 2011.

You can find out more about Katharine and her books at her website.

The Rose of Sebastopol by Katharine McMahon

Britain, 1854: the Crimean War captures the imagination of young men eager to do battle with the new enemy, Russia, but as winter closes in, the military hospitals fill with the sick and wounded. In defiance of Florence Nightingale, Rosa Barr - young, headstrong and beautiful - travels to the battlefields, determined to be useful. Her cousin, Mariella Lingwood, remains at home with the sewing and writes letters to her fiance, Henry, a doctor working within the shadow of the guns. But when Henry falls ill and Rosa's communications cease, Mariella finds herself drawn inexorably across the Black Sea, towards the war. Following the trail of the elusive and captivating Rosa, Mariella's journey takes her from the domestic restraint of Victorian London to the ravaged landscape of the Crimea, and prompts a reckless affair with a cavalry officer whose complex past is bound up with her ordered world, but reveals a well of unexpected strength and passion that may help her to survive against the desolation of war.

Last year I read The Alchemist's Daughter by this author and quite liked it, so when I saw that she had a new book coming out I was pleased. What made me more pleased was that the novel was set in a period which I hadn't really read much about about (The Crimean War) and seemed, from the blurb at least, to feature one of the more iconic female historical figures (Florence Nightingale). I say seemed to because in actuality, Florence Nightingale was a shadowy figure very much on the edges of the storyline.

What the book was actually about was two young women, Mariella Lingwood and Rosa Barr. There are two separate threads of storyline within the novel. One focuses on the relationship between the cousins from their initial meeting, to a summer vacation that goes terribly wrong, and how it is that Rosa came to be living with Mariella and her family. In some ways, some of this background seemed a little superfluous, although I guess that it was supposed to show us that Rosa had always been rebellious and headstrong.

The other thread of the storyline is initially a trip for Mariella to locate and care for her fiance, Henry Thewell, who is a doctor serving in the Crimea. He has however been invalided back to Italy, and Mariella and her companion are shocked to find him in a terrible condition. It transpires that he has crossed paths with Rosa whilst in the Crimea because she has gone off to become a nurse. After Mariella somewhat shockingly comes to realise that Henry is not exactly the man that she thought he was, she makes her way to the Crimea to try and search for Rosa because there has been no correspondence from her from some time. Rosa has left her supervised post, and appears to have made her own way to work more closely with the injured soldiers and it seems as though something very terrible may have happened to her.

The girls (or I should say young ladies) seem to have a somewhat obsessive preoccupation with each other. They are very different creatures, and yet love each other deeply - the main word that I could come up with to describe their relationship was besotted. Mariella is a the very model of a middle-class young lady. Her time is taken up with family, sewing and charitable causes, whereas Rosa is brash and impulsive, involved with people and causes that are not acceptable in polite society. Even Rosa's decision to go off and nurse is not quite above board. She initially was rejected by Miss Nightingale as a nurse, and so filled with determination that she would go, even if it is on her own, she has to find another way to get taken to the Crimea.

Where this novel is good is in the descriptions of the siege conditions and battles. The author does not sugar coat the horrors that accompanied warfare in the 1850s, let alone sanitise the suffering that was caused by cholera and Crimean fever that was rampant amongst the nurses and troops who had the misfortune to be posted to the siege at Sebastopol. She also did a great job at describing the indignation of the British people when they learnt that their young man were being sent to a place where there wasn't enough medical equipment to cover the most basic of war injuries, despite the promises made otherwise before the conflict began.

What didn't work so well for me was the never ending search for Rosa to try and determine what exactly happened for her. It seemed as though that part of the novel just dragged and dragged. Could she be here, maybe she's there. In the end, it was resolved but not until the last couple of pages of the novel.

Along the way, Mariella, who really is the main protagonist, learns a lot about herself, under going a physical and emotional journey that will leave her changed for the rest of her life.

This was a somewhat uneven attempt to portray a time that is not really all that commonly covered in historical fiction and yet is quite a fascinating time. This is one occasion where the two different time frames being told alternately within the narrative really didn't work all that well.

It is something of a surprise to me that such a romanticised figure like Florence Nightingale hasn't been given the HF treatment that I know of, or at least not all that recently.

The Alchemist's Daughter by Katharine McMahon

Dark secrets haunt the manor house at Selden in Buckinghamshire, where Emilie Selden, motherless, fiercely intelligent and more beautiful than she realises, has been raised in near isolation by her father.

John Selden, student of Isaac Newton, is conducting a bold and secret experiment. He aims to turn Emilie into a brilliant natural philosopher and alchemist. Secluded in his ancient manor house, with only their two servants for company, he fills her with knowledge while recording every step she takes.

In the spring of 1725, when Emilie is eighteen, father and daughter begin their most daring alchemical adventure of all - an attempt to breathe life into dead matter. But their work is interrupted by the arrival of two strangers, one a researcher into the life of plants, the other a dazzling young merchant. During the course of a sultry August, whilst her father is away, Emilie is caught up in the passion of first love and, listening for the first time to her heart rather than her head, she makes her choice.

Her father's spell broken, she is banished to London and plunged headlong into a ruthless and mercenary society. Emilie, the alchemist's daughter, discovers that for all her extraordinary eduction she has no insight into the workings of the human heart - and so begins her new and shocking journey to enlightenment.

I remember picking up this book a number of times when it first came out, but it was only when I noticed that this author had a new book out that I finally picked it up from the library to read. On the strength of this one, I have now borrowed the new one as well!

At it's core this is the story of a very sheltered young lady finding herself exposed to the world outside the laboratory and home that she has been bought up in by her father. Her father, and Emilie, are natural scientists, trying to prove things like what fire needs to burn. They are also alchemists, trying to produce something from nothing. One of his long term projects has been the raising of Emilie where he was trying to raise a child who could take over from him, with all the knowledge that he has already embedded into her mind from childhood. It is a somewhat sterile environment, except for those people in Emilie's life who take the time to show her a little affection.

For Emilie, the introduction of two men into their lives is completely life changing. The two men are as different as chalk and cheese. The first is Rev Thomas Shales, who also has an interest in the natural sciences, and the second is Mr Aislabie, who professes an interest in science in order to meet Emilie's father. With so little exposure to the ways of the world, Emilie is swept off of her feet and finds herself in trouble, and ultimately estranged from her father. Now living in London, Emilie finds herself not so much valued for her intelligence but rather as an object of curiosity to those members of society that she comes into contact with.

With her father's death, the true nature of Emilie's importance to her now husband becomes apparent. As he tries to create a stunning new and stylish home from Selden, it is clear to Emilie that to create something out of very little has a high cost, and that she is the one who must fight to protect the homes and families of the people who have served her family for generations as well as what little she has left of her past.

It is only towards the end of the book that the reader becomes aware just how successful her father was at his experiment, if you can call Emilie that, but Emilie needs to learn her own life lessons in order to find fulfilment and happiness.

There were times when there was a danger that the book could become bogged down in the science, but those moments were fortunately few and far between. Emilie is an interesting character, if somewhat naive. I am going to refrain from talking too much about the main male characters because to do so might lead to inferred spoilers, but I was glad in the end with the choices that Emilie made, even if the lessons she had to learn along the way were very painful.