Tracey Warr was born in London and lives in a tiny medieval house next to a river in southern France, where she is surrounded by spectacular castles, such as Najac and Penne, and fascinating stories about their medieval occupants. She draws on archeological sites, old maps, chronicles, poems and museum objects to create fictional worlds for her readers to step into. She has published six historical novels. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked as a contemporary art curator and art history academic. Find out more at: https://meandabooks.com
Biography of biographical historical fiction?
The 12th century monk chronicler, William of Malmesbury described the heroine of my first novel as ‘afflicted with a Godless female itch’. That seemed a good reason to me to write about her. Almodis de La Marche was married three times and was countess of Toulouse and then countess of Barcelona in the 11th century. Her third husband, Ramon Berenguer of Barcelona, kidnapped her from her second husband, Pons of Toulouse, possibly at her contrivance. Almodis’ three marriages were the reason for William of Malmesbury’s harsh words. The pope excommunicated Almodis and Ramon for that third marriage.
The count of Barcelona described Almodis as ‘radiant upon Earth’. She was a powerful female lord, who is documented as active in the rule of Toulouse and then Barcelona. She also found time to have eleven children. (She is the great great grandmother of Eleanor of Aquitaine.) Researching her life yielded rich material, and my dilemma was whether to write her biography or a novel about her. In the end, the fiction won out. Writing a novel gave me leeway to use the evidence about her but to imagine her personality and story into the gaps. She gave birth to two sets of twins and, in the novel, I made her an identical twin with her sister Raingarde, which may or may not have been true. I met a woman who was an identical twin, who told me about some of her experiences of twinness. In a novel, I was able to blend historical facts with incidents and experiences from my own life that chimed with the needs of the story.
Having the framework of a real life to work with in fiction gives me anchors and handholds in research. There are some facts, dates, relationships, events to find out about and imagine among, rather than being in a complete starting vacuum. Since my heroines are medieval women, there are scant facts known about them so there is plenty of space for imaginative roaming and creation.
Medieval birth dates were rarely recorded. I have to create credible timelines based on wedding dates when they are known, periods of pregnancy, dates of birth of children, and so on. And then I augment the evidence with a lot of secondary sources – biographies, histories, journal articles, genealogies and reading on particular topics, such as sex or food in the middle ages.
Of course a character in a novel, whether based on a real historical figure or not, is still a fictional character. In the case of a medieval women, what she looked like, how she responded in various situations, her desires, motivations, fears, affections are all coming from my imagination. I am aiming for credibility rather than authenticity.
Handholds for Research
The protagonists of my first five novels are real women who I found in medieval chronicles. They receive scant attention in these chronicles – often just a sentence, at most a paragraph – but that was enough to spur me into research about and around them and to fire my imagination to fill in the gaps. I am looking for women who buck the stereotype of medieval women.
The chronicler Ademar of Chabannes wrote that Emma of Segur, viscountess of Limoges, was kidnapped by vikings from a monastery on the coast of Aquitaine in the 10th century. She became the heroine of my second novel, The Viking Hostage. The vikings held Emma hostage for two years while her husband was struggling to raise the enormous ransom that was demanded for her return. What happened to Emma during those two years? Ademar has nothing to say on the subject, so I decided to imagine my way into an answer.
Debateable History, Reading People
Nest ferch Rhys was the daughter of the last independent king in Wales during the protracted Norman conquest. Unlike England, which was conquered in a day at Hastings, the conquest of Wales took many decades. Nest’s life was so turbulent that I had enough material to write a trilogy of novels about her (Daughter of the Last King, The Drowned Court, and The Anarchy).
Nest was the mistress of the Norman king Henry I and had a son with him. She was the wife of the Norman steward of her father’s former strongholds, Gerald FitzWalter. It was a common strategy for the Norman invaders to take Anglo-Saxon and Welsh women, the daughters of their vanquished foes, as their wives to lend credibility to their territorial appropriations. These wives provided a bridge to the conquered communities.
The Chronicle of the Princes (Brut y Twysogion) recounts how Nest was kidnapped from her Norman husband Gerald by the Welsh prince Owain ap Cadwallader. When Owain attacked the castle, Gerald escaped down the castle’s toilet chute into the moat, apparently at Nest’s suggestion. After a couple of years, she was returned to Gerald through the negotiations of her former lover, King Henry. Gerald later killed Owain in a skirmish and then died himself, perhaps from wounds inflicted in the fight. King Henry then married Nest off to yet another Norman, Stephen de Marais, the constable of another of her father’s appropriated castles at Ceredigion.
The women in my first five novels were all kidnapped. This ripping from one situation to another is a trope that interests me. Nest has been described as ‘the Helen of Troy of Wales’ and several historians have suggested that her string of lovers was the result of her beauty or perhaps even her promiscuity. That made me quite angry and I wanted to write her fictional story to try to get to the truth of her story – or at least one possible truth. It has been suggested that she colluded in Owain’s kidnap of her. She had been living with Gerald then for ten years and had three children with him. Clearly, she was caught between the opposing camps of the Normans and the Welsh, but it seemed unlikely to me that she would have willingly left Gerald and her small children.
I look at what I feel the realistic psychology and motivations of my characters might be. Another novelist would interpret the same historical person and event in a different way. They are always a fictional creation. I make judgement calls on grey areas of history, based on the needs of my story and the consistency of the character I am creating. I am reading the evidence – about Nest or Almodis – weighing the the misogyny of their societies and our own, and striving to create a character with consistency and credibility.
Since I am writing about a real woman and researching her context, many of my other characters are also based on real people. In particular, I enjoyed creating King Henry who had at least 23 illegitimate children and many mistresses, but also took care of those mistresses and children. There is always more information available about the men than about the women. The majority of available material is about the medieval nobility. My non-noble characters, such as maids and stewards, all have to be imagined.
In a novel, I am able to take a very slight historical detail and make good use of it. Nest’s final lover may have been Hayt, the Sheriff of Pembroke and they may have had a child. He was a real person recorded in the court rolls but not much else is known about him. His name suggests that he was Flemish. I met a charming Dutch man around the time that I was creating Haith (as he became in the novel) and I used him as the physical model for Nest’s final lover.
Real historical figures, fictional characters
My first five novels could be termed biographical historical fiction. I tell most of the lives of the women in a single novel or in a trilogy of novels. For my most recent book, Love’s Knife, however, I decided to take a different tack. My protagonist is a fictional character and not based on a real historical character. I wanted the book’s action to take place in a short span of time – nine months. Nevertheless, one of the main secondary characters is based on a real woman and the facts known about her life give me a framework to work within for what I intend to be a long-running series.
I often have a poet as a character in the novels. A female troubadour in Almodis, a skald in The Viking Hostage, and a bard in the Conquest trilogy about Nest. In Love’s Knife, the protagonist, Beatriz de Farrera, is a female troubadour. These characters allow me to include fragments of the real medieval voice in the novels. Beatriz’s patron is the real historical character, Philippa of Toulouse, who later becomes the Duchess of Aquitaine. (She was Almodis’ granddaughter and the grandmother of Eleanor of Aquitaine.) Love’s Knife is book 1 in the Trobairitz Sleuth series and I’m currently having fun researching Philippa’s life and imagining Beatriz’s.
Blog Host, Helena P. Schrader, is the author of
the Bridge to Tomorrow Trilogy.
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