June has been a good month for Mary Hooper. Her novel At the Sign of the Sugared Plum is on the recently announced list of Booked Up titles for 2010, while her new book Fallen Grace has been described as her ‘breakthrough’ novel by The Times. Of the Booked Up selection, she says she is ‘absolutely thrilled to bits. Hopefully they’ll go on to read the sequel, Petals in the Ashes, and then some more of my historical fiction. Brilliant!’
Hooper has written eight historical novels in the past seven years, but At the Sign of the Sugared Plum was not the start of her writing career.
Before its publication she had spent two decades writing about the dilemmas facing contemporary teenagers. She turned to historical fiction because, quite simply, she ran out of ideas.
Anything that a 15-year-old could do in this day and age my 15-year-olds had done in the books: three about teenage pregnancy, about the dangers of the internet, about a girl who finds out her dad isn’t her real dad, step-parents – all the modern stuff I’d covered, and I just got a bit bored with doing it. I just thought, Hmm. I’ve written a lot about teenagers today. What was it like to be a teenager in 1665?
Until now her historical novels have featured fire, plague, hanging and intrigue at the royal courts. Fallen Grace leaps forward two centuries, enabling Hooper to explore her slightly morbid interest in the Victorian approach to death and mourning.
‘I liked the idea of the romantic graveyard and was fascinated by the Victorian mourning business. Oxford Street was filled with mourning emporiums and mourning warehouses. So I concocted a plot which would take in all these elements. And the Necropolis Railway, of course; that was the other element.’
As Fallen Grace begins, the eponymous heroine is taking the Necropolis Railway to Brookwood cemetery to bury her stillborn baby. While there she meets James, the handsome solicitor who will help her to solve a mystery, and Mrs Unwin, the undertaker who hires Grace to work as a funeral mute in the family business.
There are about five or six big cemeteries outside London,’ explains Hooper. ‘I’d been to Brookwood and Highgate just as part of loving cemeteries, with the statuaries and the whole Gothic thing. I saw at Brookwood that there was a train there to bring coffins out of London to the cemetery and that really intrigued me. You can walk round the tracks of the Necropolis Railway. The plot really began to come together once I’d done that.
Though her reasons for turning to historical fiction were mainly pragmatic, Hooper soon found that she was bitten by the research bug. ‘I think the research is the most enjoyable part of writing: doing the research and finding out all these obscure facts and figures,’ she says.
‘I immerse myself in the period as much as possible. With Fallen Grace it was anything and everything about all areas of Victorian London. I use the internet and the Guildhall library, but also my local library for books about basic things like what houses were like in Victorian times or the birth of photography, because sometimes it’s quite difficult finding out all the nitty gritty of everyday life.
You can find out about big historical events that have happened, but finding out how people lived from day to day is more difficult. A book I relied on greatly was Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Everything is in there. There’s millions of stories – really compelling stuff. It’s wonderful.
After the research is completed, Hooper puts her characters into her framework and then waits to see what will happen. ‘I more or less know – vaguely - what’s going to happen from chapter to chapter, but always leave room for something wonderful occurring along the way that’s going to improve the plot. It’s a very haphazard way, I think, but it’s what works for me.’
‘But there comes a point where you get to something that you haven’t researched. When Grace goes and works in the Unwins’ shop I had to do a little bit more research about shop hours, how they were lit, the sort of shops they would have had. But there are photographs of Victorian stuff, which you can’t get for Restoration or Tudor, so it’s much easier.’
Its two mysteries, concluding twist and fascination with death and graveyards root Fallen Grace in the tradition of the Victorian Gothic novel. In order to get a sense of how to approach the mystery she read Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.
‘It was quite a difficult ending to do,’ she says. ‘Grace had to make two discoveries and there’s a reunion, so I spent a long time trying to figure out what order those three things should go in. What should the surprise be? Should it be on the last page? It’s nice if you can finish with a good twist at the end. Being a mystery writer is a tricky thing.’
Hooper insists that she is merely interested in writing a good story, but, like much contemporary historical fiction, Fallen Grace also contains social commentary and gives voice to marginalised groups whose stories were not often heard in novels from earlier times.
I don’t think about the political side of it at all,’ she says, but admits, ‘I think about the poverty; that affects me more. When you think that we’re only 100 years removed from such dire poverty and cruelty you can’t help being affected by it. That must creep into the writing somehow.
With unscrupulous undertakers, minute period detail and a concern with the exploitation and hardship suffered by London’s poor, the shadow of Dickens is ever apparent, as it is in almost any modern book set in Victorian London. She does not see Dickens as an inhibiting presence, though; instead, she cleverly acknowledges his influence by making him a character in her book.
‘It’s a sort of homage. All of my books have someone famous in them. I’ve got three books about Dr Dee, who was a real person, the Sugared Plum and the Plague book have got Charles II in them, and Eliza Rose is about Nell Gwynn and the maid to her, so I like them to have some sort of hold on reality.
I made sure that Dickens was in the country at the time and he did actually cancel his lecture tour of Liverpool – I found that in Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens. Dickens didn’t actually care for Prince Albert at all. I think it’s in The French Lieutenant’s Woman where he makes an appearance in his own book. I like things like that.
Another bit of fun is a throwaway line about a London bridge that has become a tourist attraction because of a famous literary scene set there. It’s a reference to the meeting between Nancy and Mr Brownlow in Oliver Twist and, says Hooper, London Bridge really did attract tourists after the novel was published.
It’s moments like this that lift what could have been a very dark book. ‘I like to think there’s some humour there,’ Hooper confirms. ‘Certainly I had fun with the Unwins. If it was a modern book it would be a misery memoir, wouldn’t it? I can’t bear them. So having the Unwins and the paraphernalia of mourning, I feel I’ve lightened it.’
The book she is working on next is again set in the Victorian era, which will make the research much quicker. The heroine works in a steam laundry. ‘I don’t know why, but it intrigued me,’ she laughs. ‘I read that it used to get so hot that the girls would faint all the time and if they fainted more than three times a week they’d get sacked. The book is about Victorian spiritualism. The main character – I’ve got a fabulous name, which I found on a list of Victorian names – she’s called Velvet. Isn’t that nice!’
‘It has Grace on an authentic 1861 train and one of the Unwins in his club reading the paper with the little advertisement for Mrs Parkes, who’s being sought. He had a newspaper printed out, The Mercury, with this little advertisement on it. It’s fabulous.’ The trailer has whetted her appetite for a film of the book: ‘Oh, it would be wonderful,’ she enthuses. ‘Grace, coming through the spooky churchyard with her black dress flapping in the wind…’
