Sometimes we can get access to a kind of time machine. Reading good historical fiction can transport us to our social and political past, as Sara Sheridan says. But things like Covid lockdowns, when the streets are stripped of crowds and transport, can also open a time portal – which is how she came to rediscover Edinburgh’s New Town while writing her novel set in its heyday, the Georgian period.
Good historical fiction is a time machine that takes us back to where we came from. It has an important social and political function. If we don’t understand our past, how can we understand our present and, vitally, make informed decisions about our future?
When I was commissioned to write The Fair Botanists, the idea for the book was not mine. My editor, Emma Herdman, wanted to publish a historical novel set in a botanic garden and came to Edinburgh to find a writer. By chance, she found me.
I had never written specifically about the history of my home town before.
I’ve always been fascinated by late Georgian and early Victorian explorers so tended to set my novels in more exotic places than Scotland: that and the 1950s, which is the setting for the Mirabelle Bevan Mysteries (two of the series of nine books take place in Scotland, both written after The Fair Botanists.)
I knew a lot about Edinburgh already. I live on the fringes of the New Town, which was built in stages over about 80 years from 1767 onwards. Emma’s brief allowed me a lot of leeway, tying me to the Royal Botanic Garden at the centre of the story and enjoining me to write about the women of the city but not restricting my plot in any other way.
A couple of years before, I had remapped Scotland according to women’s history in a book called Where are the Women commissioned by Historic Environment Scotland. This meant I was well aware of how gendered our built environment is and the role that plays in forgetting the stories of our high-achieving foremothers.
I knew from the start that whenever a character reached for a book, walked past a painting or told an engaging story in this novel, I was going to showcase the city’s lost female heritage: writers like Mary Brunton (a bestseller in her day), and painters like Christina Robertson, only starting out in 1822 when the book is set, but destined to make portraits at the Russian Royal Court.
This is the real cultural heritage of our city and a lot more nuanced than is often represented.
Beyond this thrumming in the background, I drew some of my characters from real-life, like botanist Henrietta Liston, whose materials are held in her own archive at the National Library of Scotland. Others I made up using partial real-life stories, including Belle Brodie, a high-class courtesan for whom I trawled legal records in the city and beyond.
For centuries, Edinburgh has been a hotspot for sex workers (or ‘huurs’ as they were called in Scots, in court) with magistrates shriving women (sheering their hair) and banning them beyond the city boundaries when prosecutions were successful.
For that reason in the novel, Belle, an upper-class wild child, buys a house on Warriston Crescent, the first (and at the time only) row of houses beyond the Water of Leith – the contemporary limit of the city.
I also made up an eccentric, elderly lady called Clementina Rocheid whose memories of Edinburgh in its Enlightenment heyday connect the reader with the deeper history of the capital. Clementina was in love with David Hume when she was young. Every era springs from its own past.
I also used Clementina to explore the idea of Being Wrong. One of her main preoccupations is the dreadful mistake the city fathers made (in her view) in building over the farms beyond the Nor Loch where, in her childhood, a good deal of Edinburgh’s food came from. Clementina is convinced there will be a famine and in the style of a posh Regency prepper, makes household arrangements accordingly, stocking her cellars and making sure she will be able to barricade herself and her staff in when trouble hits.
In the main, these were characters sprung from knowledge I already had. However, I had no idea as I sat down to write at the start of the Covid crisis, what an escape the book was going to be for me personally.
During my permitted one hour’s exercise a day, I roamed the streets round my home, which were strangely quiet with almost no cars on the road. The offices, bringing thousands of people into town every day were closed. The centre of the city, the second most popular tourist destination in the UK, was reclaimed by its residents.
This allowed me to notice tiny details in the original paving stones – the way whinstone flake had been used behind some of the city’s grander residences – a cost-saving measure utilising the chips of dolomite left over by masons cutting regular setts for the street. The only people walking behind the houses, after all, were servants and delivery men, so why waste money?
It allowed me to understand the intimacy of living at close quarters, as my present-day neighbours sat on their steps and chatted out of windows in a way which would have been unusual in our normal lives. I instituted a weekly routine of shopping at the Farmers’ Market instead of the supermarket – another link to the way people bought their food over the centuries in the city and a connection to the local farmers, bakers and cooks who provide it.
At its heart the novel is a romp, its tone inspired by theatrical Restoration comedies and romance novels written at the time (Susan Ferrier’s novels in particular, published in real life, just after mine is set, would have been written amid my characters’ shenanigans.)
The lingua franca of Georgian Edinburgh was Scots as much as English and this chimed with the overall feel of the book.
During the course of writing with this in mind, I discovered that much of the Georgian city was still in place, bubbling up through the setts. The fact that modern life was as good as closed down helped to highlight it, but Georgian Edinburgh had been there all along: a continuum contained not only in the architecture but in the way we live within it.
That’s the value of writing about somewhere still standing, I suppose, and the experience has left me with an even deeper connection to the place I live.
The Fair Botanists by Sara Sheridan is published in paperback on 30 June, 2022.
Sara Sheridan is a Scottish writer and activist.
Find out more about Sara in our Q&A with her, or read her Desert Island Books.
The treatment of Edinburgh women seen as unacceptably sexually active in is looked at in Flora Johnston‘s Historia feature, Historical fiction’s role in giving a voice to women.
Read the historian and novelist Maggie Craig‘s feature on the other thing that happened in Edinburgh in 1822 – George IV’s unintentionally ludicrous visit to the capital.
For more about 19th-century explorers and the craze for exotic plants, have a look at Apples, Chelsea, and my route to the plant hunters by TL Mogford.
And if you have a taste for the dark side of Edinburgh later in the 19th century, you’ll enjoy Oscar de Muriel‘s Frey & McGray historical thrillers. Read his feature, The Darker Quacks – Between folklore and science, on the background to one of his books.
Images:
- Detail from town plan of Edinburgh To the… Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council… of Edinburgh this plan of… Edinburgh and Leith… is … inscribed by… John Ainslie, 1808: Signet Library maps of Scotland, 1580s–1950s via the National Library of Scotland (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
- Inside the Glasshouses of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh by Graham Robson: Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Self portrait by Christina Robertson, c1822: Victoria and Albert Museum via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Ground plan of the city of Edinburgh’s property on the north side of the town intended to be feu’d out for building upon, 1940, based on the Edinburgh Town Council survey of 1766: Signet Library maps of Scotland, 1580s–1950s via the National Library of Scotland (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
- Royal Circus, New Town, Edinburgh, by Billy Wilson: Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Engraving of Susan Ferrier after the 1836 portrait by Robert Thorburn: Wikimedia (public domain)
