CULTURE CLUB
THE ELY-BASED AUTHOR JILL DAWSON SHARES A PEEK INTO HER ENCHANTED WRITING LIFE AS HER LATEST NOVEL, THE BEWITCHING, IS RELEASED
INTERVIEW BY MIRIAM BALANESCU
I’ve often written from the point of view of a maid. They’re invisible to people. I know that because I was a nanny as a young girl to various households. They’re the perfect narrator. I started to go deaf at the beginning of lockdown. I didn’t know why. I went to my audiologist, and he said it wasn’t age. There was a mystery to it. I began wearing a hearing aid. I gave Martha, my narrator, partial deafness, so I could explore what it feels like to only hear some things. In lockdown, when people had masks on, I didn’t know if they’d spoken. I realised that was Martha’s position – she feels as if she keeps missing things. I have old-fashioned notebooks and will go on a walk, then sit and write. Around Warboys, I would stroll from the church to the squire’s house, down to the pond and see how long it took me, thinking about what Alice might be doing – and scribble. Then I come back, sit at my desk and see what comes out. I write according to what I’m feeling like that day and it goes all over the place. Then there’s a draft needed where I try to put it into shape. I try to stay with my own creative logic. There’s a lot of confidence required to hold your nerve for two or three years while you’re writing, to see if you can pull it all together. The Bewitching is out on 7 July, published by Hodder. Jill Dawson will speak at St Peter’s Church, Ely, on 14 July at 7.30pm
here’s something irresistible about the Cambridgeshire Fens. I found a quote from Virginia Woolf, who visited
Alice, my character, being a bit grumpy and postmenopausal was enough to damn her. Older women and those who spoke out of turn were often accused of witchcraft – I found that interesting amid the MeToo movement: we see a history of punishing women for speaking their truth. I started reading all kinds of accounts, a crash course in witchcraft studies. I’ve worked on this terrain for 20 years and tried all sorts of explorations of fact, in fiction, changing names, changing events. I do have some fidelity to the past. In that regard, I’m closer to a historian, perhaps, than a novelist. The writer’s trick bag includes exploring how people might have felt, or their personality. When I looked into the births and deaths of the Throckmorton family, there was a Gabriel – I found his death certificate. That murky territory is always a novelist’s favourite. I wasn’t going to book parties or literary events. It felt quite liberating to be left in my own head, without that chatter of the literary world. My husband’s an architect and we visited 16th century buildings and houses. I love that research.
Warboys when she was 17, about their stunning flatness, how bleak they are, but how they give her joy – utterly expressing how I feel. When working on The Bewitching , it was lockdown and I was going for a walk every day. I would see muntjac, hares, marsh harriers and egrets just five minutes from my house – I even spotted an otter. All of those details found their way into my novel and it felt quite magical. Witches were believed to turn into hares. It was thought it was a way you could spot one – if you saw a hare racing across the fence and your dog chased and injured it, then you might see an old woman with a wounded leg. Many believe it’s the males that box for dominance during the mating season, but, rather horribly, it’s the female hare fighting off the males. When I first went to Warboys, I remember wandering around the churchyard, right next door to the Throckmorton house. There was an obsessive religious quality to daily life. For
That murky territory is always a novelist’s favourite
CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK JULY 2022 27
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