Emma Donoghue: I know how I started my habit of writing about women from the past - either famous ones who've slipped into obscurity, or the kind of nobodies who never left enough textual trace to make it into capital-H History. It all began (I'm a little embarrassed to admit this) with my PhD, which was on 18th-century fiction and included lots of reading about social conditions in pre-modern Britain. All that fascinating muck and stink, combined with the heady intellectual atmosphere of feminism and revisionism more broadly in 1990s Cambridge grad-student circles, led me straight to my first historical novel, Slammerkin. I was burning to give a voice to sex workers and maids and slaves. Nowadays it seems self-evident that there's a big readership for novels about people (and women particularly) who've been underrepresented in traditional history, but in the late 1990s that wasn't true at all...
Emma Donoghue and Laird Hunt on Writing Historical Women | Literary Hub
13 February 2017
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