As regulars to my blog will know, I’m a big fan of strong female characters and have recently found myself more and more drawn to fictional depictions of historical women. Nicola Griffith’s Hild is one such novel. Set in the Dark Ages, it tells the story of the girl who would later become St Hilda of Whitby. It’s an utterly mesmerizing narrative, and Nicola talks here about how she crafted what would become Hild’s voice:
I was in my 20s when I first saw
Whitby Abbey and heard about the extraordinary woman who had founded it. But I
wasn't a writer then. I tucked her story in the back of my mind and went on to
other things.
Fast forward 20 years. I was
waiting for the proofs of Always,
the third Aud novel. My mother was dying. I was going crazy. So I did what I’ve
always done when I can’t sit still: I just started to write. In a blaze of
energy I wrote a memoir. I wrote the whole thing, soup to nuts, in three
months; there was no time to be precious or step around the truth. As I wrote
the introduction, I found myself talking about history and language and landscape
and how I was shaped as a writer by all three. It became clear that this story
about an extraordinary woman called Hild was where I’d been going for years,
where I’d always been going, I’d just been too afraid of failure—failing at
this thing I’d been aiming for all my life—to admit it. So the day before my
birthday I thought: Enough. I would celebrate by having begun. So I sat down,
opened a new document. And there she was, lying under a tree, listening. She
was three years old…
I’d never written from the point
of view of a child before. I’d never written a novel set in the past. It was
daunting.
I wanted Hild and all the other
women to do their extraordinary and interesting things securely within the
constraints of their time—while being fully, recognizably human (not idiotic
stereotypes of Women In Ye Olde Past; you know the kind of thing). Hild had to
be believable as a woman in her time and place, yet singular. Because she must
have been. She began as the second daughter of a woman widowed in exile, hunted
by rival petty kings, and ended as the most powerful abbess of Britain,
counsellor to kings and teacher of five bishops. Now beloved as a saint.
But saints are never saintly in
real life. They’re complicated, sometimes difficult, human beings. I wanted to
know what made Hild who she is, how she managed to remain within her cultural
constraints and become universally revered.
So I researched, and I pondered,
and, frankly, quailed. And as I indulged in all kinds of avoidance
behaviour—including more research—I stumbled over a new factoid: one scholar
estimated that Anglo-Saxon women spent 65% of their time in the production of
textiles.
This stopped me in my tracks.
Sixty-five percent. That’s a greater proportion of her day than sleeping, child
care, and food preparation combined. As I thought about it I understood that
textile production was life-or-death technology for the whole community. I kept
returning to it. It fascinated me. But I didn’t want to write that kind of
book. I didn’t want to write about the restrictions of gender. Domesticity
makes me claustrophobic. Hearth and home are all very well, but I love an epic
canvas: gold and glory, politics and plotting.
To avoid that, I was tempted to
take the easy way out and make Hild so singular that the restrictions didn’t
apply to her. I tried everything I could think of; at one point I even had her
learn and use a sword, although in reality she might have very well have been
put to death for that.
It didn’t work: History is made
by real people; the rules always apply. I despaired of being able to reconcile
that reality with what I wanted, what somewhere inside I knew was possible.
In the end I did what any good
Anglo-Saxon would: I got drunk, laughed in the face of fear, and charged. And I
discovered what poets have known for millennia; that constraint is freeing. I
had nothing to lose, so I committed. The words came. It felt like magic. It was
Hild’s voice.
Nicola Griffith has
won a Nebula Award, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the World Fantasy Award and
six Lambda Literary Awards. A native of Yorkshire - now a dual US/UK citizen -
Nicola is a onetime self-defence instructor who turned to writing full-time
upon being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1993. She lives with her wife
in Seattle.
Follow her on Twitter @nicolaz
