Liz Hyder, author of The Gifts, talks about her own writing process and her love of history, and celebrates the “fascinating, brilliant, inspiring joy” of writing historical fiction. Her book has just been published in paperback.
I’ve always been interested in history ever since I can remember. I grew up near the edge of Epping Forest, not far from Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge, a grand Tudor building with sturdy beams and a great view.
I remember being told as a small child that Henry VIII demanded the stairs be built extra-wide so he could ride his horse up to the top floor. How outrageously decadent! Imagine being that wealthy and powerful that whole buildings can be designed around your whim!
I was lucky too in that both my parents are interested in history, so we were often dragged around a castle or a museum in the holidays and they often told us stories of the families they came from, the Hyders with their smugglers’ roots in Kent and the Westons with stories of farm labourers and pioneering photographers in Bristol and the West Country.
As I grew into my early teens, suddenly tall like a flower seeking the light, I fell in love with theatre, thanks to a brilliant drama teacher at secondary school, and history was still ever-present – how could it not be in a country that so reveres the past? I saw Alan Howard and Anastasia Hille bring Macbeth to life at the National Theatre, marvelled at Stoppard’s Georgian-set Arcadia, and felt the steamy seductiveness of the early 1960s in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana.
History, both distant and more recent, lingered in the corners of my vision. I wrote during this time too and, later, through university. I wrote and wrote, everything from short stories to plays, films to poems and novels, soaking up influences from all around. Every now and then I’d get longlisted or shortlisted for A Thing and I kept on writing, edging closer to knowing the sort of stories I really wanted to tell.
But then came a turning point – 12 years ago I moved to Shropshire. Having been a Londoner all my life, bar three years at university in Bristol, it was a change that felt serendipitous in more ways than one.
I live in a small medieval town, Ludlow, surrounded by a ring of hills topped with hillforts. Layers of history wherever you look, Neolithic and medieval, Victorian and Georgian, and further back still, valleys and flats carved out by long melted glaciers where herds of mammoths once used to roam. It’s a place of hills and valleys, gorges and holloways, a landscape transformed by people over thousands of years. A place where stories linger in the air if you only listen…
I carried on writing, of course I did – it’s a compulsion – but I walked too, walked like I hadn’t done for years. It’s hard to walk in a city with all the roads and traffic lights, no sooner do you pick up pace then you’re forced to stop. Here though I can walk for miles, pacing out thoughts and stories, tales and scenes, with nothing to stop me bar the limits of my own stamina (and the occasional bull).
And I wondered as I wandered, I read about local history, I visited museums, and I unpicked the past.
I journeyed over to the Welsh coast and, on a rainy day, I ventured down an old slate mine, a trip that sparked the idea for my debut young adult novel, Bearmouth, a dystopian thriller inspired by real-life children working down mines in the early Victorian era.
I loved researching and writing it but I knew the next story I told would be very different, something epic in scale, something wildly ambitious, something that had its roots in places that meant a lot to me, London and Shropshire, possibly Orkney too.
I knew it would be Victorian-set, that it would start with a woman growing wings in a forest in autumn, and I fast realised how woeful my knowledge of the 19th century was outside of the enclosed world of the mines. So I started from scratch.
I read endless books about and from the time, everything from food and clothing to education and politics. I read archive newspapers, sought out first-hand accounts and visited numerous galleries and museums. I took inspiration from all over, both before and after The Gifts is set.
From the brilliant artist Annie Swynnerton to the rakish surgeon Astley Cooper and the anatomist and intellectual John Hunter, from George Eliot and Harriet Martineau to the talented botanist, Mary McGhie, a woman of colour who lived in Ludlow in the early 19th century.
My research took me all over, from the extraordinary living art that is Dennis Severs’ House on Folgate Street in London to the haunting atmosphere of The Judge’s Lodging in Presteigne. I stepped into the wonderful Old Operating Theatre near London Bridge like a time traveller, and revisited the archipelago of Orkney, listening and talking to storytellers.
I walked as my characters, wearing them like a costume, seeing the world through their eyes. I strolled through the City of London at weekends when it is emptied of workers, imagining away the glass and steel towers, peeling back the layers of time to see only what might have been there in 1840.
I stitched buttons onto card, a tedious and mind-numbing job that Mary, my youngest character, does in order to earn some coins. I felt the clothing in museums, tried on outfits (who doesn’t love a hat?), and breathed in the stifled air from gas-lit basements, the flickering light throwing shadows in unexpected places – no wonder the Victorians reinvented the ghost story!
I used all of these experiences, places, and more in The Gifts. Like a jackdaw, I stole the shiniest things from my delvings into the past and repurposed them for myself. My tales are exactly that, for I am of course a storyteller, not an historian, but I always want them to feel real. I want to write immersive, visceral stories that pull you into the world within the pages and leave you reeling when you emerge back into the real world.
All of my research, whatever it is, feeds into the world of the book, often in ways barely perceptible to the reader, a detail, a brushstroke to add colour. But I love all of it, that sense of feeling like a detective, tracking down the elements that will help you crack the story.
Writing historical fiction, or ‘historical-adjacent fiction’ as a friend calls what I write (given the growing of wings!), is such a fascinating, brilliant, inspiring joy of a thing, embarking on a journey of exploration into the past, following my own lifelong love of history, to bring you, the reader, on a storytelling journey alongside me.
What a gift of a job! I only hope I can carry on doing it for as long as I have breath in me.
The Gifts by Liz Hyder was first published on 17 February, 2022, and came out in paperback on 1 September, 2022.
For more Victorian-set stories, you might enjoy:
Gothic writers choose their favourite chilling books by Anna Mazzola
Top ten films set in the Victorian era by Kate Griffin
The Victorian theatrical world of mystery and illusion by Essie Fox
Images:
- The former Angel Hotel in Ludlow by Ian Capper: Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge by Stephen McKay: Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Ludlow, with the tower of St Laurence’s Church; Brown Clee in the background by Ian Capper: Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Water tunnel inside Cambrian Slate Mine by Andy Davis: Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Inside Dennis Severs’ House by Heather Cowper: Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
