Hallo, Hallo dear hearts!
One of my favourite subniches of Historical Fiction are stories which befit the category of ‘Feminist Historical Fiction’ – wherein the stories are have a strong voice for Feminism and/or strong women who are independently living a non-conventional life within the story itself. When I first heard of this novel I immediately connected with the premise and desired to know more about how the author wrote the narrative whilst at the same time, I knew eventually I would have to find a copy of it to read and experience myself.
One of the beautiful reasons I love reading Historical Fiction is not just to live through a portal of insight into the historic past but to understand different areas of the world through the story being written. In this case, travelling to a country I’ve appreciated since I was a young girl and uncovering a part of its History I had not previously known about is what makes me wicked giddy about featuring #newtomeauthors of this genre. The stories themselves seek to expound our understanding and our comprehension for the past whilst endeavouring not to repeat mistakes or cause events in the present or future which would hurt the progresses made after certain circumstances were addressed.
History best serves when it is remembered and learnt from rather than by having it hidden and obscured from view to where no one can lay hand or thought on what it taught us. This particular release is a topical story to be discussed and to be read – it is delving into the past in a reflective lens which will have bearing on today’s current events and the unrest in the world.
It is a pleasure of joy featuring Alison Booth on Jorie Loves A Story this morning and I am grateful for her candor and her willingness to discuss the key components of her novel which left me dearly intrigued to ask the questions which formed the basis of our discussion today. Be sure to brew your favourite cuppa and settle in for our conversation – I hope it might be a new book you’ll consider reading as much as I have added it to my own TBR!
The Philosopher's Daughters
by Alison Booth
A tale of two very different sisters whose 1890s voyage from London into remote outback Australia becomes a journey of self-discovery, set against a landscape of wild beauty and savage dispossession.
London in 1891: Harriet Cameron is a talented young artist whose mother died when she was barely five. She and her beloved sister Sarah were brought up by their father, radical thinker James Cameron. After adventurer Henry Vincent arrives on the scene, the sisters’ lives are changed forever. Sarah, the beauty of the family, marries Henry and embarks on a voyage to Australia. Harriet, intensely missing Sarah, must decide whether to help her father with his life’s work or devote herself to painting.
When James Cameron dies unexpectedly, Harriet is overwhelmed by grief. Seeking distraction, she follows Sarah to Australia, and afterwards into the Northern Territory outback, where she is alienated by the casual violence and great injustices of outback life.
Her rejuvenation begins with her friendship with an Aboriginal stockman and her growing love for the landscape. But this fragile happiness is soon threatened by murders at a nearby cattle station and by a menacing station hand seeking revenge.
Places to find the book:
ISBN: 9781913062149
Published by RedDoor Press
on 2nd April, 2020
Published by: RedDoor Press (@reddoorbooks)
Converse via: #HistFic or #HistNov, #WomensFiction #HistoricalFiction
as well as #HFVBTBlogTours
Available Formats: Trade paperback, Audiobook and Ebook
The premise and inspiration behind your novel “The Philosopher’s Daughters” is in of itself a thesis about the human condition and the free will of the soul. Especially as you wanted to construct certain hurdles in the lives of the sisters themselves – to challenge them, to open their eyes to the world round them and to let things percolate from those experiences they were having once they reached Australia. I would almost think, if their father had been alive and this story was not mere fiction, he would have championed the cause for how you sparked their ability to transcend their own destiny and re-shape it into a new path. What was the most challenging aspect of developing this lift shift for each of the girls’ and which sister did you feel closest to as you were developing her story?
Booth responds: Thanks for offering to interview me about my new novel, The Philosopher’s Daughters, and I love your interpretation of the book being about the human condition and the free will of the soul.
The two sisters in the novel – Harriet and Sarah – are very different temperamentally. While I felt close to them both when I was writing their story, Harriet was definitely the most challenging character to write. She’s pulled in two different directions: between heart and head, between her artistic talents and the logic she’s inherited from her father. It took me a while to work out what choices she might make and what her future might bring. And it takes her some time – and the journey to Australia – to learn who she is and to slough off some of her father’s expectations about what she should do with her life. Sarah, the younger sister, was far easier to write. In fact, she more or less wrote herself; she appeared in my head fully formed, jumped onto the page and proceeded to tell her own story.
Why do you think Harriet was a harder character to draw together? Was it because of her personality and sensibility about life or was it something more? Something perhaps pointing towards her own outlook on how to approach the tides of life? As it seems she is most akin to their father or rather, of the two sisters, it appears Harriet is the most likely one to have stayed home if Australia wasn’t her destiny. What do you think Harriet’s greatest struggle was as both a woman living an independent life and of the eldest sibling?
Booth responds: Harriet, the older of the two sisters, is a very complex character who was her father’s favourite. She adored her father and was devastated when he passed away suddenly. An immensely talented individual, Harriet is good at a variety of things. At the start of the novel, she is unable to decide quite where she wants to take her talents but she’s sure that marriage is not for her.
I’ve long been fascinated by how children are shaped by the preferences and attitudes of their parents; they can react against them, agree with them, or be crushed by them. The closer we are to a parent, the harder it can be to move away from their influence and develop in one’s own right. This is the burden that Harriet carries.
What caused the unrest in the cattle industry during the time period of your novel? Especially for those of us who are not as familiar with Australian history and tend to know a bit more about our American frontier years instead? Was it due to the control of the land, the animals or the profit margins or something else completely?
Booth responds: The unrest was due to disputed control of the land. The second half of The Philosopher’s Daughters is set in the Northern Territory of South Australia, where new settlers were able to take out leaseholds of the land to develop the cattle industry. This caused friction, as the Indigenous population was driven off their own country – sometimes brutally, sometimes more humanely (as in the case of the cattle station that is where some of the novel is set). North American readers might like to know that, at the time of European settlement, Britain viewed Australia as terra nullius. This meant that British colonisation, and subsequent Australian land laws, were based on the claim that Australia belonged to no one, which effectively denied Indigenous people’s prior occupation of, and their connection to, the land.
What do you love most about travelling to a particular setting and location to research your stories? What can you glean out of those places from a first-hand visit that might become missed if you had travelled through books, films, or other content available to writers? What stood out to you about this story in particular?
Booth responds: What I love most about travelling to locations in which my novels are to be set is discovering the quality of the light, the type of vegetation, the landscape in general, the weather, the scents and so on.
For The Philosopher’s Daughters, I had to research a good number of different things, ranging from late nineteenth century life in central London, in Sydney, and in the Northern Territory of South Australia as it was known then. I also had to research the plight of Aborigines who were so cruelly dispossessed of their land.
When I was researching this book, I read a lot around the topic and examined many old photographs, including the superb collection of photos of Darwin and the NT held at the National Library of Australia.
As the landscape and the background of your novel are just as important as the players in the foreground – what can you share about creating the aesthetic of this story? How did you want readers near and far to feel as if they had taken an immersive holiday into this part of Australia and in this particular timescape? What small touches of detail and/or backstory knowledge did you want to convey to eclipse this journey for the reader?
Booth responds: Thanks, I’m so glad you appreciated the novel’s physical setting. In writing this book I wanted to convey a sense of place and to evoke the landscape, a landscape that I love dearly. This was especially important to me as Harriet is an artist painting in the impressionist style and I therefore wanted to communicate the quality of the light wherever she was – London, Sydney or the Northern Territory.
Is this a dual-narrative novel? Meaning does it shift between chapters focused on Sarah and chapters focused on Harriet or is it more inclusive of each sister in-line with a traditional narrative?
Booth responds: I wrote The Philosopher’s Daughters from two viewpoints – Harriet’s and Sarah’s – and in some chapters there are separate frames written from each perspective. I love writing from several viewpoints, as they can reveal to the reader such different observations about the same events, giving a more nuanced interpretation.
As this story was written with the thoughtfulness of perspectives (how you choose to tell this story from the sister’s POV and not directly from the Aboriginal’s) – for those who are seeking diversity in Historical Fiction – what can you share about the indigenous persons who are part of this novel’s heart?
Booth responds: Let me say simply that I wanted to bring into the story, with a great deal of respect, important issues about race. One of my goals was to explore relationships between white and Aboriginal peoples, how they were at the time and how they might be, but without attempting to write from an Indigenous person’s viewpoint (more on that below).
Which secondary character did you love creating and why?
Booth responds: I particularly loved creating the character of the Aboriginal stockman, Mick, and I also loved conveying his experiences and his sensitivity. I didn’t write from his perspective, however. While I can try to imagine what the Indigenous experiences might be and feel empathy for Aborigines’ history and treatment at the hands of colonisers and beyond, we have already taken enough from them without appropriating their stories.
Art plays a central role in the life of Harriet – what type of artwork does Harriet undertake in her pursuit of establishing herself as an artist and how did you prepare for peppering the story with this part of her life?
Booth responds: My first degree was in architecture and during this I studied history of art, which I have always loved. This training and experience prepared me for writing about Harriet, who is an impressionist painter.
Self-discovery and self-evolution whilst in pursuit of ourselves if a critical mark of growth for any of us – how did you work on the layers which would be needed to stitch into this story to show a period of self-directed growth for both sisters? Did you outline their individual journeys ahead of time or did you organically let their lives take you into new directions to better understand how they might have lived them directly?
Booth responds: When I’m planning a novel, initially I use a table or scene log to work out the main scenes. When I have multiple perspectives, as in The Philosopher’s Daughters, I put each in a separate column, as this helps me keep track of important scenes as I move down the columns, and helps make sure I’m getting the balance right. It also reminds me as I write of where the story is going, because sometimes it’s easy to lose track! Once I’ve done the scene log, I start writing. Here I follow my instincts and gut feelings. This is the fun part of writing. Then at the end I check the story arc and how the principal characters have developed over the course of the narrative. And Harriet, as noted above, needed a lot more work than Sarah, mainly because my views on her character and choices were evolving during the writing of the novel.
For sensitive readers who might worry about the graphic nature of the violence depicted in this novel – what can you share about how the violence is treated in the story? Is it tempered or more realistically gritty in how its shown as those circumstances become explored in the context of the story’s focus?
Booth responds: The violence is tempered, shown through a veil, in the sense that it is what the sisters learn through eavesdropping or through hearing reports. In that way, the reader is shielded to some extent.
What would you consider to be the best takeaway from the thoughts and views shared by John Stuart Mill and would you consider this novel a work of Feminist Historical Fiction due to how readily his writings inspired you as you wrote the story?
Booth responds: It is indeed a work of feminist fiction. I was inspired by my upbringing as I wrote this novel, but John Stuart Mill also inspired me as someone who would make a good father to the two young women who are at the heart of The Philosopher’s Daughters.
Here is a quote from JS Mill, from p18 of the Dover Thrift Edition of his monograph The Subjection of Women: “… we ought… not to ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person’s position through all life.’
When you’re not researching and writing your stories what renews your spirits the most?
Booth responds: Walking in the mountains renews my spirits the most, and trips to view wonderful exhibitions of paintings come a close second, and of course reading reading reading!
I would like to thank Ms Booth for her wonderful responses to my enquiries and for providing us all with a wonderful conversation wherein we learnt more about how she approached writing this novel and why this novel spoke to her to be written. I love when writers give us a personal glimpse ‘behind-the-book’ and help all of us who haven’t yet read a page in a novel learn more about the heart of its story and the ways in which the story inspired the writer.
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What a fabulous interview! Thank you for hosting Alison today!
Amy
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