Frances Hardinge
About Author
Frances Hardinge says that she and her sister were "lucky enough to be brought up in an environment infested with books". Even when scarcely crawling, their mother would prop up little cloth books for the girls to look at. "I can't remember a time when I wasn't reading, and trying to write," she adds.
Hardinge went to school at Tunbridge Wells Girls' Grammar and then Ipswich High School, before taking a BA degree in English Literature at Somerville College, Oxford University. She got a 2:1 and took a year out to earn money as an editorial assistant. She then completed a Master of Studies in English Literature, again at Somerville.
After finishing her Masters, she started work as a technical author for Tao Group Ltd, in Reading, where she began to take on more and more of the company's artistic work. Within a few years she had made herself the company's graphic designer, rather than a technical author.
She used her free time to write - short stories for writers' circles, online writing projects, episodic narratives for a 'play by mail game', etc. Nearly all of this was for adults.
In 2002 she began regular "writers' meetings" with her friend Rhiannon Lassiter, who had been a children's author for years. Hardinge says, "We had been contributing to the same on-line narrative project and she suggested that we try writing something together. The idea of a joint book was quickly aborted, but we decided to keep meeting each week, so that we could provide feedback on each other's latest writing project." On Lassiter's suggestion, Hardinge started writing a children's book.
Through a mixture of cunning and persistence, Rhiannon finally overcame Hardinge's shyness about the manuscript and persuaded her to let her show it to her editor. That was when Macmillan offered her a contract and the first draft of the book was completed at the end of 2002.
In March of 2005, Hardinge was made redundant and then threw herself into the rewrites of her book before packing her rucksack for a year-long trip around the world. She was in New Zealand when Macmillan offered her a contract for a further three books!
Hardinge's immediate family includes her mother, father and younger sister Sophie, who is a hardened traveller and has spent the last few years working all hours for charities in Madagascar and London.
She says that a number of influential figures have inspired or helped her to write, including her grandfather who was an author, her parents who always encouraged her efforts, and her partner Martin. Her friend the author Rhiannon Lassiter was a particular inspiration in encouraging Hardinge to start writing a children's book in the first place.
The inspiration for her first book, Fly By Night, came from a number of different directions. She has always enjoyed detective stories and was probably influenced by the works of Conan Doyle, which she enjoyed as a child. She'd also enjoyed adventure stories like Treasure Island and the works of Leon Garfield.
Many of the ideas in Fly By Night came from a holiday in Romania, which left her with memories of cannon-scarred walled cities, tiny weather-worn shrines, fortified churches, the practice of celebrating a 'name day' instead of a birthday, and the rural ceremony 'the wedding of the dead'.
A chance visit to Chester gave Mandelion its geography and some of its war-torn history. She says, "I had learnt of the Stationers Guild during my Masters, and re-imagined them a new and sinister aspect. And my membership of the Duelling Association, a group performing Regency era murder mysteries for the public in stately homes, had shown me a 'period' world full of humour, wickedness and intrigue." She hunted down books about the eighteenth century for her research.
Mandelion is a mixture of several old Rumanian towns, Chester, and early eighteenth century London. While writing the book she was living in Oxford, which is of course another city with a heavy sense of history hanging over it.
She said, "Researching the book meant reading a lot of books on the early eighteenth century in search of the weird, whimsical, grotesque, comic and macabre - and then altering them to appeal to my own sense of humour. I was aware that I was writing a rather odd children's book, but decided to embark on a project that I knew I would enjoy even if nobody else did."
Author link
Interview
A SKINFUL OF SHADOWS
MACMILLAN CHILDREN'S BOOKS
SEPTEMBER 2017
Costa Award-winning author Frances Hardinge's latest novel, A Skinful of Shadows, takes us back to the time of the English Civil War (1642-1651), and the destruction of the old world order as King Charles 1 and the Parliamentarians fight for power.
Into this chaos steps 12-year-old Makepeace, who discovers that she has a special gift - or a curse - that enables her to 'house' ghosts inside her own body. The Fellmottes, a powerful family, want to use her abilities but their greed for power at any price would condemn Makepeace to a life in the shadows...
We asked FRANCES HARDINGE to tell us more about A SKINFUL OF SHADOWS, which follows her Costa-winning book for teenagers, The Lie Tree.
Q: What impact did winning the Costa Award for The Lie Tree last year have on your writing career?
A: It has definitely changed things for me, and it's been a strange time. I try to avoid the term 'it's been a roller-coaster ride', but there has been that same sense of exhilaration, mild terror and struggling to tell which way is up...
I also had to learn how to say 'no' to things because I had been saying 'yes' to everything. In 2016 I had never been on television and now I have been about a dozen times and it still feels weird, and I've been to festivals like Cheltenham and Hay that I had never been to before. I've also been to festivals abroad, in Auckland, Los Angeles and Mantua in Italy.
I like travelling so this is all good, but it has impacted on the amount of time it has taken me to actually write the next book... Like a lot of authors I'm essentially an introvert so while we can learn to enjoy public speaking, it does take it out of us and it's so hard to concentrate on anything else before an event.
Because of the award, I was also aware of there being more expectation for my next book...
Q: A Skinful of Shadows is an historical fiction, like The Lie Tree, and like that book also has a strong element of fantasy. What inspired the ideas behind it?
A: It's very hard to work these things back. I know with The Lie Tree exactly when I got the core idea of a tree that lives on lies, but with a lot of my books it's more complex than that. It's a bit like how a river forms, it starts with lots of ideas trickling away at the back of your mind and then they join with others and develop a momentum and then you have the river.
The idea of having a ghost bear, which is central to the story, had been hanging around in my head for a while, since I found out how badly dancing bears were treated, and that made me very angry. So I had the idea of a dancing bear coming back for revenge and making a connection with someone who empathised with its anger.
Q: Why did you decide to set this idea during the Civil War in England?
A: I am very interested in time periods that are times of change, of transition, where you get revolution and the aftermath. I don't set out to find these times but they appeal to my imagination and I can visualise characters being stretched in some way and having their lives disrupted. The world is changing all the time but how people cope with the larger and more sudden changes interests me.
The idea of using the Civil War for this story was probably because of seeing a play a few years ago called 55 Days (leading up to the execution of Charles 1) that brought home to me how much things changed for people across all parts of society because of the war.
It also reminded us that, while the Civil War was won by Parliament, they were totally unprepared and have won, they had to ask, 'What do we do now?'. It was unprecedented, a lot of the old rules simply didn't work anymore. It made the time more relevant to me and so I had a latent interest in it.
Q: How did the ghosts come into the story?
A: This was the other piece of the puzzle, the Fellmotte family, which has some ideas around inheritance and right. So part of the idea was to explore their interesting rules of inheritance, which was probably partly inspired by a film I saw when I was 14, The Haunted Palace starring Vincent Price. That follows a young aristocrat who starts to go through some strange personality shifts when he inherits his title and a palace. It obviously made an impression on me.
I had this idea of some very ancient spirits who would have an edge over their younger, living opponents because they had so much experience that they could predict the tug and flow of politics. I wanted them to face a situation where they think the outcome will go one way and it doesn't; their experience and their refusal to change makes them complacent and the world moves on without them.
Q: Your protagonist Makepeace can have spirits or ghosts live inside her and one of these is Bear. Why did you want your idea of a wounded bear to be in this story?
A: In a way the idea of this wounded ghost bear started to make more sense once I saw him as part of a partnership. I saw him in a secret alliance with this wounded girl, someone who is a bit of a loner and whose confidence in her own species has been dented. He becomes an ally and a friend, and an aspect of her self that she feels she has to suppress, but he also helps to represent her gut instincts, her sense of rebellion.
The other ghosts came along because I wanted them to come from different walks of life - different social classes and different sides of the conflict because that would make it more interesting. I didn't want to write a book where one side of the conflict is right and the other is wrong, where one side is humanised and the other is not. We have quite a lot of that in this world already so I wanted a heroine who would understand and sympathise with both sides, mentally and imaginatively.
I called her Makepeace; she can't make peace in the greater conflict, but she can make some peace with herself and other individuals. Sometimes that's all we can manage, to create that bit of empathy.
Q: There are several examples in your book of brave women doing unexpected things. Why did you decide to explore this and were any of these characters inspired by real people?
A: The English Civil War was a very interesting time for women. There was, if you like, a bit of a gap between what was being promoted as the 'ideal woman' and what women were really like, and social norms for women were being disrupted by the war.
A number of women found opportunities to get involved in the war or impacted on it in some way through acting as spies or passing on intelligence. The character Helen in my book is a nod to Jane Whorwood, a Royalist agent during the English Civil War. She was remarkable and seems to have managed to smuggle quite a lot of gold into Oxford for the King - which I refer to in my book - and was involved in rescue efforts after Charles 1 was captured.
Then there are women spies for parliament like 'Parliament Joan' (Elizabeth Alkin), and prophetesses; it wasn't decent for women to speak in public but if you're a divinely inspired woman, you can say whatever you like, and women like Anna Trapnell and Lady Eleanor Davis did just that. With the men away fighting, some women also had to take on the role of protector of their castles against various sieges, as did the Countess of Derby.
Q: Did you feel you needed to do a lot of research into this period to accurately portray it?
A: I always do a lot of research because it pains me that I might get something wrong and that paranoia is still busy in my mind... It's possible to do an infinite amount of research but usually it's the things you think you know that catch you out.
One of the books that I found most helpful was Diane Purkiss's The English Civil War: A People's History. That was invaluable because it's very good at giving a human angle and contextualising all those events emotionally and practically. She provided details about things like the cures for plagues and different fevers that were found in people's recipe books after the war, or how people celebrated Christmas.
Q: If you, like Makepeace, could have some 'ghosts' come back to live inside you, who would you want to visit you?
A: The first would be Mary Kingsley, a Victorian explorer who was intrepid and who would be able to give me some good advice. Also Mary Frith, who was better known as Moll the Cutpurse in the seventeenth century. She was a pickpocket who wore men's clothes and smoked a pipe, so she would be a useful reminder to me that other people's opinions don't matter.
More recently, there's Nancy Wake, an Australian spy who served as a British SOE agent and who was on the Gestapo's 'most wanted' list; with her help I'd be able to lie my way out of any situation. I'd also like to have Tennyson because his way with words is so beautiful, and finally Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish bureaucrat who used dodgy paperwork to save thousands of Hungarian Jews. He was a remarkable man who unfortunately didn't survive the war. He was a truly gentle person from a country that wasn't involved in the war. It would be wonderful to have someone that brave and humane inside my head.
Q: Where is your favourite place to write?
A: I have a cluttered study upstairs, which has all the books in the world in it, and a nice view of a small park across the road. I'm not sure what I'll write next yet, I am still playing around with some ideas. I also make sure I have a hyperactive social life because being a writer is quite solitary.
THE LIE TREE
MACMILLAN CHILDREN'S BOOKS
PUBLISHED MAY 2015
THE LIE TREE has just been announced as the winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2015. Here, we talk to author Frances Hardinge about her award-winning book.
The Lie Tree is set in the Victorian era, during a period when geological discoveries were leading to profound changes in the way people thought about themselves and about religion. Publications by geologists including Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin were proving that the world was a lot older than most people realised, and that it had not been created just for humans.
Into this period Hardinge brings the 'Lie Tree', whose brooding presence permeates the story. The Lie Tree only grows with the spreading of lies and in return for the lie, grows a fruit that answers a question from whoever eats it.
The story begins when Faith's father, a man of the church with a cultivated interest in geology, is shamed after a fossil he discovered is shown to be fake. He takes his family away to an island to escape the resulting gossip and to help with another geological dig but there, lies and truth become further intertwined. When murder follows, it falls to Faith to uncover the truth about her father and the real nature of the Lie Tree.
We asked Frances Hardinge to tell us more about the appeal of this period, her focus on women and change, and what inspires her writing.
Q: Why did you decide that the Victorian era was the best setting in which to explore the Lie Tree?
A: Once I had had the idea for the Lie Tree and what it does, I had to find out where it would be set and how I would treat the story. At first I was looking at fantasy settings for it but none of them quite worked. When I spoke to my publisher, Macmillan, I found that they were interested in having another historical fiction title because that had worked well for Cuckoo's Song and I realised that the Lie Tree could work in the Victorian period.
This period was a sensitive and pivotal time and I felt it would support the concept of a seductive lie - the lie that works because people want and need to believe it. I decided the story would be set at a time when people could take comfort from it and the ambiguous nature of the lie itself.
New ideas about evolution were circulating at the time. It wasn't just because of Charles Darwin, although he's the one we remember. The Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell was published earlier in 1830 and provided evidence that the world was much older than expected. This longer timescale meant that there had been time for evolution to have taken place, and thus it gave credibility to Charles Darwin's observations in On the Origin of Species, which was published in 1859
So the notions of evolution moved from the outskirts of common knowledge to being something that most people had to acknowledge as the truth, and that happened in a very short space of time. I set this book in 1868, nearly ten years after On the Origin of Species was published, when these new ideas were really taking hold.
Q: Why did you decide to make Faith's father, who finds the Lie Tree, a clergyman?
A: I have a very good friend who is an archaeologist and I went to talk to her about this book. One of the things she told me was that the heroine's father would probably be a clergyman. A lot of natural scientists were then.
These days the idea of the church and science are distinct but in those days they weren't because to get ordained, people had to go to university and all the courses were the same; they were training you to become an all-round gent so your course would have a bit of biology and science as well as other subjects; science was a gentleman's hobby.
Q: The Lie Tree is a wonderful metaphor for lies - the tree can't survive the light and its vines only grow and spread when a lie is shared - but how did it develop as you wrote?
A: It was fun to work on the idea of the Lie Tree. I had some questions about the tree, namely how weird it was going to be because if you tip it too far, it becomes a supernatural tree and if you tip it too far the other way it becomes too much like part of a gothic story.
I also wanted there to be a drug-like quality to its fruit. At this time you had 'opium eaters' in Victorian society and the opium industry was of course based in China, where the tree is brought back from. What was happening in China with the opium industry was the fault of the British, so I had this sense of something being sent away and then coming back to roost, which was very interesting.
Q: Why did you name your heroine Faith?
A: I called her Faith because a lot of her psychology is based on her faith in her father, and because religious faith is a major issue in the book. I also explore other kinds of faith; good faith and bad faith revolve around sincerity and insincerity. I also liked Faith because it is quite a tame, conventional Victorian name and I liked the irony in that.
Q: Faith, like many women of the day, says very little and struggles to experience life externally. How hard did that make it for you to progress the story?
A: That did make things difficult but I was trying to put Faith into the context of that time. While she is rebellious and she doesn't fit the general mold of how a Victorian woman should be, I wanted to make it clear how logistically and psychologically hard it is for her to rebel.
Believing what one does and behaving in a way that seems undutiful is really hard and behaving in a way that is scandalous and has repercussions for people near to you is really hard, and to see yourself continually and subtly undermined is also really hard.
There are a lot of historical fantasies set in Victorian period, especially Steampunk novels, and I love reading these, they are entertaining and enjoyable, but you need to understand the context of rebellion, and how hard rebellion is. It's all about context; if you read about heroines in the context of each other, as against the context of that period, then rebellion seems really easy when it is actually very hard.
Q: You also explore other women's lives in the story, how they coped with the constraints of the time and found their own small freedoms. Why did you want to give these other characters a voice?
A: I didn't want to elevate my main character at the expense of other women. I wanted to examine all of them and have Faith face up to gender-based prejudices that she has and of which she's unaware; she underestimates all these women.
By the end of the book, Faith is starting to be friends with some of them and the most important breakthrough is between Faith and her mother, Myrtle. I had a lot of fun with Myrtle, she's not an easy person and in some respects she's dreadful, but she has moments when she is admirable, formidable and strong - but history won't remember her. Faith might be remembered, it depends on where she decides to go so she might get a footnote somewhere.
Women today are in very different places depending on where they are geographically, socially and economically but we aren't there yet. I'm a feminist, I believe in equal rights and responsibilities and I believe that's in the interest of everybody.
I'm in a country where things are a lot better than they have been but in other countries, schoolgirls are being shot in the face for wanting to go to school. Here in the West we have female priests and bishops now. I think in future history lessons people will be boggling at the fact that it took so long, but it has happened.
Q: How much research did you do into Victorian life and society at this time?
A: I had previously read quite a few Victorian novels but was continually stumbling over things I thought I knew but didn't and I have chased down as many mistakes as I could.
One of the compromises you have to make when writing historical fiction, like I did in Cuckoo Song, is with language. I have made the language in The Lie Tree a bit more modern, timeless and accessible. When I started writing Cuckoo Song, I had planned to use a lot of slang from the period but it was all 'rather' and 'I should say so' and they all sounded like Billy Bunter, so they were linked in your mind with light, fluffy genres and I couldn't use that to explore the dark themes in the story.
There were also other areas I needed to research for The Lie Tree, for example, how photography was developing, and people's clothing. In the book I mention post-mortem photography, when they would photograph people who had died as they were lying in state but the fashion changed to take more naturalistic pictures. These tend to creep us out but our taboo around death began at the point when people started dying in hospital rather than at home. We have a panic about death the way that the Victorians once did about sex.
The way mourning was undertaken changed when Queen Victoria went so completely and thoroughly into mourning and that set the tone. After that, Victorians would go into full mourning which included wearing dark clothes made from crepe. This was a fabric created from silk threads glued together, a rough, non-glossy fabric designed to suck light and it was scratchy and unpleasant to wear. There was a superstition that you couldn't keep crepe in the house unless you were in mourning, so you'd have to buy it all over again if you needed to.
I read a book about the upkeep of clothes like these; we're used to putting everything into a washing machine and our clothes are designed for that and we don't have to make them ourselves. We are astonishingly cavalier with our clothes in a way that they couldn't be, because their stiffening would loosen or they'd lean against a whitewashed wall and get patches on their clothes.
Q: You are a full time writer; how does your writing day go?
A: I aim to write from 9am to 5pm and I mostly miss, I'm not intensely disciplined and I tend to just drink caffeine and to panic when a deadline approaches!
I am part of a writer's group which I joined to make sure that I have something to show them as well as to get feedback. I also make sure I'm active as I'm naturally a social person and writing can be quite isolating so if it's a beautiful day I'll go out for a walk with a friend.
I also try to get out as much as I can when I'm not writing; stimulus is important to me and I like to see new places and meet new people.
Q: How hard is it to make a living as a writer?
A: I've been lucky in terms of being able to make a living as a writer; most people can't because writers don't get paid much for the work they do, or they're not paid at all. There is research showing the bottom half of writers get something like seven percent of the income of all writers; there are some authors who are fantastically wealthy and people think that somehow this is typical but it's not remotely so.
It also comes with uncertainty; you're not sure if you're going to get your next contract and advance and royalties. Sometimes you get paid gigs and sometimes you don't and promoting your work takes more and more time out of the time you could be spending writing.
I love writing and I hope to keep going but it's not easy to make a living from writing and I'm clear about that when I visit schools. A lot of published authors either have another job or they are supported by a partner or spouse. Writing is the thing you do because you love it, not because it will make you rich!
A Skinful of Shadows
The Lie Tree
