Mary Hooper
About Author
Mary Hooper has been writing professionally for over twenty years. She started by writing short stories and serials for teenage and women's magazines when her children were small. Having done a few hundred, and thinking it would be good to see something more permanent on the shelves, she wrote and had published fifteen teenage novels. Following this, she wrote another fifteen novels or so for younger readers, all humorous.
Mary left school at 15 with no qualifications. She worked as a secretary for some years, then got married and had two children, Rowan and Gemma, both now grown up. She took an English degree at Reading University as a mature student and graduated in 1990. She now writes full time.
She describes her hobbies as "pottering, doing things with dried flowers, being nosy, moving pictures around on walls and collecting china rabbits."
By Royal Command, published by Bloomsbury in February 2008, is an atmospheric and thrilling sequel to At the House of the Magician, full of authentic historical Elizabethan details and spine-tingling thrills.
Mary's other books for Bloomsbury include Amy, Holly and the ever popular and award-winning Megan series, as well as hilarious younger fiction, including the revolting KATIE series. Her historical novels include: At the Sign of the Sugared Plum, Petals in the Ashes, The Remarkable Life and Times of Eliza Rose and At the House of the Magician, and also have a huge fanbase.
Author link
www.bloomsbury.com www.maryhooper.co.uk
Interview
THE DISGRACE OF KITTY GREY
PUBLISHED BY BLOOMSBURY
MAY 2013
When Mary Hooper read about a ship that sailed from London to Australia with only women and sailors on board, she knew she wanted to write a story that would explore what it must have been like for the female convicts, and their children, aboard this ship. The Disgrace of Kitty Grey is the result, although the convict ship forms only a part of the story.
Hooper's story follows Kitty Grey, a dairy maid working in a large country house in the early 1800's. Daisy volunteers to travel to London to collect a copy of the newly-published Pride and Prejudice for her master's daughter, but on arrival her bag and money are stolen and she and the child she is travelling with are left to fend for themselves.
A series of unfortunate events lead to Kitty being accused of arson and a sentence of transportation to Australia; the ship she briefly sails on is full of women convicts.
Hooper explains, "I always look out for things that would make good subject matter and when I read about this ship I thought I could use it and set my story into a similar time frame. There were other ships transporting women at the time, but only one recorded voyage of a ship with just women and children on board."
As well as a compelling story, The Disgrace of Kitty Grey provides a detailed account of the period, from the cramped and impoverished London landscape to the rhythm of a country house dairy, as well as a reflection on how quickly a small misfortune - such as losing one's travel case - could lead to destitution and a criminal sentence. It was an unforgiving time.
Kitty the dairymaid lives and works at Bridgeford Hall, a house that Hooper has made up as "an amalgam of all the National Trust houses" she has visited. "Some of these houses would have simple dairy annexes where they would milk cows, make cheese etc purely for the use of the house."
She turned to a book called 'Dairying Bygones' for information about how dairies of the time operated and the implements they would use. Hooper says, "I needed this kind of detail for the story, but you also find when you are writing historical fiction that you do far more research than you need to to get to where you want to be. When it comes to writing the story, you use the tip of the iceberg of your research, but it's fun finding out all these things and having the information ready in your head does help the story to flow."
Hooper often use real people from the period to cement her story into the period she is writing about, but this time she decided to use a real book - Pride and Prejudice - which was published in 1813. It is this book that Kitty sets out to London to purchase.
When Kitty finds herself alone in London and with a five year old girl to look after, having had all her contacts and money stolen, she begins to look for work and quickly discovers how different town life can be from the way of life she is used to in the country. "I wanted to make a big contrast between her life in Devon and how people lived in London," says Hooper. She does this by focusing on the working and living conditions of the dairy maid.
Having seen Kitty's disciplined but comfortable life as a dairy maid in the country, we are shocked by what we see of the London scene. Hooper says, "I read that at a particular dairy in Islington, the cows were lowered into the cellar at the start of their milking career and didn't go outside again until they stopped producing milk." Hooper also goes into detail about the conditions the animals were kept in, how the milk was watered down and how the dairy maids would also be responsible for delivering the milk to customers.
Through Kitty's distressing adventures, readers can reflect on how life was then lived by many - on a knife-edge, with impoverishment and disaster hovering ever by. Hooper explores many real life instances of families who found themselves in penury and ended up in Newgate Prison. She explains in the notes at the back of the book that 'Conditions (at Newgate) were either bad or terrible, depending on how much money you had to help your way through prison. Women were allowed to take their dependent children into gaol with them, and there were several tragic incidents of women being taken to the scaffold with their babies in their arms.'
Hooper started writing historical fiction some ten years ago after "dipping her toe in the water" and discovering how much she loved it. "I think if you're a writer, you're nosey and I love finding out things and there's so much to find out," she says, adding, "I would be no good at writing fantasy because I see no point in making up a world when there's an interesting world in front of you that's ready for the taking".
If she could choose a time to go back and visit, Hooper says she would like to find herself at the Royal Court of Charles II with its flowering of poetry, theatre and the Arts - as well as plenty of scandal. "As long as you have some money, it doesn't matter where you end up but the contrasts between rich and poor were so great." She adds, "I love London, I never tire of thinking what it was like then and you can still find traces of what the old London would have been like."
Next year is the 100th anniversary of the start of WW1 and Hooper is currently writing a book about the period, based on a volunteer nurse who goes to the front to nurse. The book is based on 'VAD's', or 'voluntary aid detachments'. Hooper explains, "Because they needed so many nurses during WW1 they recruited young women, trained them for about six weeks and then sent them to hospitals to bind wounds etc." She adds, "Many of them were from quite well-to-do families and of course it was a real shock to them to face up to the terrible things going on. However, it also gave them a certain freedom as they had been so shackled before, so it was the start of women's emancipation."
Hooper's research for this story is now underway. She says, "I have several books to read about the period. As I read I'll jot down lots of things that could happen in my story and then pick up the ones I want to include. You don't want to bog down historical fiction with a lot of information about battles etc; it's still the characters that are important."
Hooper says she keeps "office hours" for her writing day, including handling emails and Facebook in the morning before stopping for a break and then beginning writing in earnest. This starts with going over what she had written the day before beginning on that day's writing. "It's like being in an office but with more biscuits," she laughs, adding, "The highs of being a writer are definitely being able to take days off when you want for domestic emergencies or because it's a nice day; the lows are that you only get paid twice a year, with royalties. But it beats any other job I've ever done!"
Her top writing tip is to "read the conversations you've written aloud, so you can hear if they are true to life or not". She also recommends "writing through" writer's block; "write anything to fill the gap and rewrite it when you go back over it the next day. Sometimes you have to get it wrong to get it right."
VELVET
SEPTEMBER 2011
PUBLISHED BY BLOOMSBURY
Velvet, which is set at the turn of the last century, explores the era's fascination with mediumship and spiritualism, and the ease with which fraudsters benefited from these beliefs.
Mary Hooper says, "I had the idea to write something about mediumship when I was writing an earlier book called Fallen Grace, which is very occupied with death, and I came across information about mediumship when I was researching that book. Fallen Gracet is set in an earlier period and that book is about death whereas Velvet is about after death.
"Fallen Grace is set in 1861 but I wanted to set Velvet about 40 years later. Times had changed by then so I could make use of that and move into the Edwardian period.
"I often like to have real people make an appearance in my books and for this one I particularly wanted Arthur Conan Doyle, so that set the date for it. This was the period when he was visiting mediums and he maintained his belief in mediumship for the rest of his life. In fact a group of mediums had a great big sance after he died to see him off (but apparently he never appeared).
"When you're writing historical fiction you can end up doing an enormous amount of research. You then just have to sift out the most interesting bits and the parts that are the most plausible, but you have to fit it into your book without snatching at everything; it's only the experience of writing that will help you decide what to put in and what to leave out.
"To find out more about mediumship in this period, I used research from the Old Bailey which is all available online. I targeted fraudulent mediums and up came these cases I could use. Ridiculous as it seems today, I came across one case where a woman handed over her jewellery because she was told the magnetism in it could take her too quickly over to the other side, and I used this example in Velvet. I can't believe people would believe it but even a fairly intellectual person like Conan Doyle believed in spiritualism.
"There was a huge resurgence in interest in spiritualism after WW1 because of the great number of people who had died and so the percentage of people using mediums to contact the dead rose. Most of my research, however, was based around the 1900's.
"At this point in history there were jobs beginning to be made available to women so gradually girls began to work in shops and office work was also a possibility; things were changing following the death of Queen Victoria. In my story, Velvet is working in a more traditional setting for girls, the laundry industry, to begin with.
"I found pictures of laundries on the internet and saw a couple of photos, but there wasn't much written about what it was like to work there. I guess it was because they were working class girls and no one thought their stories would be of any interest but there are some mentions in books, saying how dreadful conditions were; they worked long, 12 hour shifts in these huge aircraft-hanger type rooms, six days a week.
"Another historical fact I used for Velvet was the existence of baby farms in this era. I first heard about this in a programme on television and I stored it up in my head and when I knew that a baby was going to be needed to be stolen, I checked if they were still in operation during this era.
"Sadly, I found that they were in fact there was one in Reading, near me, and it was easy to find out about the woman who ran it, Amelia Dyer. I have used her as an example in Velvet although in reality she was ten times worse than I have said in the book. It is shocking to think that baby farms still existed just 100 years ago. I won't be writing about the subject again, it is too distressing.
"Apart from writing about the baby farms, the only thing I found difficult to do in this book was to imagine myself in the position of the main character, Velvet. It's hard to get into the sensibilities of a nineteenth century parlour maid.
"I keep the speech of characters like Velvet as authentic as possible. Because I am reading individual accounts from that period, I do get a sense of how they might have spoken. If you go and see a few Shakespearean plays one after the other, you start rephrasing your sentences, speaking in a similar way, or if you live with someone with a strong accent you start to pick it up.
"As long as I were rich, I wouldn't mind finding myself back in time in any of the periods I have written about. I probably have a preference for the seventeenth century; the Victorian period was a bit dull but in the seventeenth century you have Charles II and you know he had a jolly good time. The Restoration Court must have been quite fun.
"I can't see myself writing about anything more modern than the 1900's, though. After that there is no glamour attached to those years and then you have WW1. For me it seems a bit too recent to set a story then.
"I try to stay in touch with my readers through school visits - although I don't do so many of those now - and I have a Facebook page and I contribute to a blog called The History Girls. I write one blog a month for that and every month have to think about something new to write; one of them is about mediums and the inspiration for Fallen Grace and a bit behind the titles.
"My next book is set in 1813, the Regency period, and it's about a milk maid who lives and works in Dorset, but she ends up as a prisoner on one of the hulks that were used as prison ships on the Thames in the mud flats just outside London. She's about to be sent to Australia as a convict.
"I love writing historical fiction and I never want to go back to writing modern stories with mobile phones and iphones, it's so much more exciting and romantic and evocative writing historical novels. You've got events like the great fire of London and plagues taking place - the scope is so huge!"
