CityLife

Sarah Dunant is putting her story in history

AUTHOR: Sarah Dunant

WHEN author and presenter Sarah Dunant talks you through her love affair with history, it's impossible not to share her swooning sense of romance about the past.

Her recollections of first discovering the stories of Anne Boleyn and Mary, Queen of Scots not only demonstrate her strong sense of imagination, but they also expose a youthful desire to one day find herself as centre stage as these women were (albeit, in quite different circumstances).

“I came to history like lots of particularly young girls do, through historical fiction,” she says. “You're at that age where you're not quite sure what you're going to be in the real world but you have a very powerful imagination.

“You spend a lot of time, in a sense, in your own head working out who you are. And that's a very good time for going back into the past because you have both the appetite and the imagination to get there.

“I was almost always reading about the kings and queens, and through fiction I became interested in history as fact.

“When I finally came out of a history degree, I realised that historical fiction was a good story but wondered how you got under the surface of it – and I've done that by looking at the people you can't see in the big picture, the people who aren't properly recorded.

“If you like, it's what about you and I?”

Sarah only wrote one short book in her teens – an 'excruciatingly bad' piece about Elizabeth I's imprisonment in the Tower of London that no longer exists, she laughs with relief – and aspired to be an actress, a passion she indulged while studying at Cambridge University as a member of the famous Cambridge Footlights.

But writing (coupled with the need to make a more consistent living than life on the stage afforded) eventually won her over. First published in 1983, Sarah made her reputation as a political thriller writer, among others publishing a trilogy of books based around her protagonist private detective Hannah Wolfe.

She also carved herself a career as a BBC producer and presenter on several TV and radio shows, including The Late Show and Woman's Hour, and is a co-founder of the Orange Prize for Fiction – an award that recognises international female writers and is now one of literature's biggest annual gongs.

It is, though, her last three books that have established her as a globally acclaimed historical writer. Her trilogy focusing on the life of spiky and talented teenagers growing up in 15th century Florence began with The Birth Of Venus back in 2003. She followed it up in 2006 with In The Company Of The Courtesan and completed it with Sacred Hearts 18 months ago.

A mum of two teenage daughters, Sarah is acutely aware of the divided passions of young girls. Not that either of her offspring currently share her passion for history; on a recent trip to Florence, Sarah's attempts to enthral her kids with the city's rich story were rebutted with, 'I'm really sorry mum, but at my age I don't do culture – I just do shopping'.

It's funny, but it also touches a raw nerve; you can imagine the females in Sarah's novels, born into a period when girls were discouraged from cultural pursuits and developing their creative talents, shaking their head in disbelief.

“Sacred Hearts is set at a time when women had zero power,” says Sarah. “There were 50 per cent of them in convents because the families couldn't afford to marry them off.

“But women had personality and a yearning for creativity – and you start to wonder how they found it.

“This was a time before Dawkins and Darwin and Freud. They didn't have good medical science, they'd get up in the middle of the night to pray and it's black because electricity is four centuries away, and it's cold, and I was interested to see what it was like to be a woman with severe sleep deprivation.

“A religion like Catholicism, which emphasises the physical suffering of Christ, makes a lot more sense in that context. I'd never really thought about as a young Catholic before, but the person who will understand your pain is Christ and if you think like that you can start to have a relationship with this figure.

“Part of going back into the past is being able to imagine what it would like without all those things around us – water, warmth, even painkillers. I'm not trying to say what they did was wrong, I'm just asking what would we have done in their place.”

Sarah is currently working on her new novel, Blood And Beauty, which examines the lives of the Borgias family – a powerhouse of the Italiam Renaissance and Papacy – and is released next summer. But it's Sacred Hearts that brings her to the city on Sunday for a special semi-dramatised version of the novel for the Manchester Literature Festival.

Set in the claustrophobic setting of a Italian convent, the Manchester Cathedral performance is a musical interpretation of Sacred Hearts, completed by an abridged narrative performed by Sarah and three supporting actresses.

Two amateur choirs of cloistered nuns, Celestial Sirens and Musica Secreta, will perform a programme of religious songs chosen to tell the tale of the book's leading lady, 16-year-old Serafina, who has been condemned to convent life by her father after falling in love with a forbidden suitor.

Sarah laughs with pride when she recalls how well the piece was received at last year's uber-bohemian Latitude Festival. It reflects a growing interest in her writing niche – and, says Sarah, a renaissance in modern fiction generally.

“We're in real trouble because the industry followed the money and serious writing did suffer,” says Sarah.

“The whole culture has lurched towards celebrity and instant fame, the publishing industry has jumped on that bandwagon, and it doesn't seem the heart of publishing is in quality.

“When you look at the best-seller lists you see this is a culture defined by television spin-offs. At one level, that's fine, but I get sad that the culture followed the money – that always felt queasy to me.

“But having said that, I've watched a rebirth of historical fiction in the last 10 years. There are places where you can see green shoots but in general it feels very different to me.”

Sacred Hearts is at Manchester Cathedral on Sunday, October 16 (7.30pm), £12/£10.