STAR INTERVIEW
MAKING HISTORY
Bestselling author and Women’s Prize founder Kate Mosse explains the pull, and resonance, of historical fiction to Tina Jackson
Wearing her slippers and tracksuit bottoms when we speak, Kate Mosse claims to be ‘down to earth and totally normal’. And talking to her, she completely is. And yet it feels fitting, somehow, to be writing up this interview on International Women’s Day, because you’d be hard pressed to think of anyone who has been a greater champion for women’s writing than Kate Mosse – bestselling author and founder of The Women’s Prize.
Set during the 16th century Wars of Religion that saw the persecution of the Protestant Huguenots, Kate’s latest novel The City of Tears is the follow-up to 2018’s The Burning Chambers. Absorbing and harrowing, it’s a historical novel that centres on the devastation caused when a child goes missing in the midst of a massacre. The main character, Minou, is herself a writer.
‘All of us who write know that a part of it is about making sense of the world,’ says Kate. ‘There is plenty of evidence that in the Huguenot community you could be a woman writer and be published. In the first place I made Minou the daughter of a bookseller, because after the dissolution of the monasteries booksellers started to flourish. And then Minou would have access to these things and she would want to put things down. She has things to say.’
Putting a historical woman who writes centre stage is characteristic of Kate, who has spent her career devoting her considerable energy to increasing the visibility of women writers. ‘I like to put ordinary women who are extraordinary in the backdrop of real history,’ he says. The extensive research she does for each book means that Minou’s writing is grounded in historical fact. ‘It’s getting easier to research by the 16th century. We’ve gone through the revolution in print so women are reading and writing. So we have extent writings. Huguenot women were able to publish, so we have the words of actual women.’
The City of Tears, which came out earlier this year, was one of the many titles held back in 2020 as publishers adjusted their schedules because of the pandemic. ‘Like a lot of books, it got shifted last year,’ Kate says. ‘It was moved from May to January in the mistaken belief that it would be a bit more normal at that time.’ With admirable positivity, she believes that its evocation of particular places – Paris, Amsterdam, the Languedoc – had a heightened effect in lockdown – ‘reading about other places when we’re very much confined.’ She admits; though, that even though she’s been able to take part in literary events on Zoom (‘sometimes sitting at my desk at midnight’) there are real-world parts of the writer’s life that she’s yearned for. ‘I’m very much missing seeing readers,’ she says. ‘For me, a book is finished when it’s in the readers’ hands.’
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