1.  We loved your book The Nature of Monsters. What inspired you to write about 'maternal impression'?

I didn’t actually mean to write about maternal impression at all! That is to say, my first inspiration was not maternal impression but the cathedral of St Paul’s. In 2005 a wall-painting conservator friend invited me to visit her latest project, the cleaning of the eight frescoed panels in the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. As we walked around a vertigo-inducing scaffolding suspended from the cathedral’s lantern, I knew then that my next book would have to be set in the shadows of that remarkable building. It was only once I started researching the period that I found myself drawn towards the subject of science.  St Paul’s was built at a time when London was caught between the Middle Ages and modernity, between a time of religious belief and the new secularism and, in particular, between superstition and the Enlightenment principles of science.

What fascinated me about the orthodoxy of maternal impression at this time was that it was not the preserve of old wives tales but an accepted orthodoxy dating back to the Ancient Greeks; Plato wrote of it and, in Sparta, it was forbidden for beggars and cripples to walk the streets in case their disabilities imprinted themselves upon the unborn children of innocent passers-by. Luther called it ‘the surest principle in medicine’. Reports on monstrous births and extraordinary pregnancies were read frequently at meetings of the highly respected Royal Society and published in their Philosophical Transactions. When, in 1724 a woman called Mary Toft faked the birth of a litter of rabbits, the case was seriously debated among the intellectual elite, including the erudite Jonathan Swift who declared that ‘we have talked of nothing else the past two weeks’. Indeed the first challenges to the theory were only put forward in the late 1720s, when Dr Blondel set out his arguments against it. His views were considered deeply contentious. 

It fascinated me how a fundamental lack of understanding of how the human body worked combined with the need to find answers to persistent and difficult questions about disability and deformity. But I was also curious about the profound and enduring misogyny inherent in the theory of maternal impression. In the early 1700s the weakness and emotional volatility of women was accepted by men and women alike; Lord Chesterfield was famously to define women as ‘children of a larger growth’. The orthodoxy of maternal impression permitted men to believe that a child was conceived in perfection and it was only the weakness of woman that caused things to go wrong.

2. Where and how did you do your historical research?

Depending on my familiarity with a period, I like to start broad with overall histories of the period and hone in on the details that interest me as I go along. I use my local library and online booksellers at first but, given the depth of research necessary, it is not long before I head for the British Library in St Pancras which is a treasure trove of obscure and out-of-print books as well as holding many rare original manuscripts. It is one of the great pleasures to sit under the beady eye of the librarian in the Rare Books Room and untie a cord around a book that probably has not been opened for fifty years.

My approach is to immerse myself as fully as I possibly can in a period, consuming information about everything from food and clothing to politics and economics, until I feel as familiar with the world I am studying as my own. Although I give myself a starting point for a story I do not plan it before I start to read. My fear is that any novel that came out that way would by definition be anachronistic because it would have its roots in the twenty-first century and not in the one in which it is set. It is while I am reading that the specifics of it start to take shape and it is those specifics that guide the scope and direction of my research. Sometimes I take a wrong turn and have to work my way back. Other days I come across something – like maternal impression – that gives me a critical part of my story. It takes months of reading around the subject before I consider myself ready to begin writing. 

Once I begin writing I tend to read very little and instead depend on my feel for the period and, of course, upon the extensive notes I have already taken. What I would say is that the vast majority of the specific facts that I absorb in the course of my research are not used in the final story. It is sometimes hard to let go of hard-won information and let the story take over but I dislike historical novels that digress into long historical discourses. A novel is not the place to advertise your historical scholarship but to find a place in the imagination that is as real and true as it possibly can be.

3. Although we loved the book we found it a harrowing read. Was it harrowing to write?

Sometimes it was. The section about Eliza’s baby, for example, I found very emotional. But though I know the book is harrowing in parts I never set out to write something shocking, rather to tell this story which to me was very real and to get inside the skin of my characters, particularly Eliza who I was extremely attached to. The hard part of any novel, whatever its subject matter, is the necessity of utter immersion in an imaginary world and the effort of finding the exact words and emotions that it will bring it to life on the page. My husband said that there were days when he felt that the life I was living through the book was the real one and I was only just about present in body in my parallel life with him so I think perhaps he found it more harrowing than I did! 

4.Are you working on anything at the moment?

I have just finished my first full draft of a new novel. It is a big epic story, set again in the early eighteenth century, but this time not in London but in Louisiana, then a French colony. The colonial history of America has concentrated so much on the Pilgrims and the English settlers on the eastern seaboard that the short-lived French colony, named for the Sun King Louis XIV, has been almost forgotten. Research sources are very limited – there are a few very good books but most are out-of-print – and hardly any first-hand accounts of what life was like so it has been a great adventure reconstructing the period for a novel. The colony covered a vast expanse of land covering thirteen modern states and for the first fifteen years of the colony boasted no more than two hundred French and French-Canadian colonists, including the soldiers of the garrison. So that they would not take Native American women as concubines, the Ministry of the Marine organised for women to be sent over as wives, their trousseaux paid for by the King of France. They were given a daily allowance of 15 sols to last for one year or until they were married. It is amazing to imagine what it must have felt like, setting sail on a long and dangerous journey to a country you knew nothing of to marry a man you had never met. I couldn’t resist!