In my previous post about Dark Aemilia I talked about beginning life as a historical fiction
writer, with no background as a historian. I should probably add that I chose
the Early Modern period simply because I discovered the real Aemilia Bassano Lanyer when I was trying to find out more about the early staging of Shakespeare’s
play Macbeth. Unlike my children, who
appeared to study nothing but the Tudors when they were at school, I had never
really studied this period. But I didn’t feel inspired by the French
Revolution, or the Industrial one, perhaps for the very reason that I had
studied these during a period of my life when I was catatonic with gloom. (Don’t
get me started on puberty, nihilism and A levels.)
Lanyer’s story inspired me for the following reasons:
She was possibly Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, the cruel and
insatiable lover to whom he dedicated sonnets 127 to 152.
- She was an outsider, the member of a family of Jewish Venetian musicians. Her father and his five brothers came to the English court to play for Henry VIII.
- She was the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain and was kept in a splendid suite of rooms at Whitehall Palace.
- When she became pregnant she was married off to her cousin, a feckless recorder player who spent her dowry in a year.
- She was herself a poet, one of the first women to be published professionally in England.
From rags to riches and then back again with music, poetry
and Shakespeare attached – what was not to like? So no matter how much work was
involved, I needed to write her story.
If you want to find out more about my research for this book
and the story of Aemilia Bassano Lanyer, then you can read my piece in the December/January/February
issue of the women’s writing magazine Mslexia.
(You can’t access the piece itself via this link, but you can find out more
about the issue and how to subscribe.)
