THE OUTLANDISH QUEEN
Diana Gabaldon has created a stir around Scotland that no one could ever have predicted and her genre-defying juggernaut of tartan shows no sign of slowing. Rosie Morton looks at the woman behind the Outlander Effect
Outlander creator Diana Gabaldon goes under the spotlight
From Brigadoon to Braveheart, some of the most passionate transatlantic love letters from North America to the Old World have been dispatched in Scotland’s direction. Yet few of the stories created Stateside about the auld country have been more memorable than one of the great modern-day romantic tales – Outlander.
With their time-travelling, historical, romance fiction, the Outlander novels have created a whole new genre. Not only that but the success of their translation to the screen has put American author Diana Gabaldon’s creation on a par with George RR Martin’s fantasy epic Game of Thrones, JK Rowling’s boy wizard Harry Potter and Scot Mark Millar’s illustrated creations for Marvel and Hollywood. Like those three authors, Gabaldon has not so much created a series of novels as spawned one of the most popular publishing phenomena of modern times.
The numbers that underpin Outlander are incredible. Her breezeblock-sized books – they average 300,000 words – have consistently reached number one in the New York Times bestseller list and have now sold over 35 million copies in 43 countries and 39 languages.
If the Outlander books sold extraordinarily well, the tale of romance, windswept time-travelling beauties and brooding kilted heartthrobs has transferred seamlessly to television. Since Gabaldon’s debut novel was transformed into a hit TV series in 2014, each of the 55 episodes so far have been watched by over five million viewers. Nor is there any sign of the phenomenon running out of steam – the fifth series will hit our screens in February 2020, with a sixth currently being filmed.
Gabaldon has successfully tapped into the deep fascination with Scotland that exists in the USA and Canada, where over 500 Highland Games take place each year, the biggest being Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina, which attracts 300,000 tartan-swathed visitors every July.
I saw first-hand how this Scotophilia manifests itself: as a student living in lodgings in Montreal in 2014, my landlady would have her ladies over to watch Outlander every week, all of them dressing head-to-toe in tartan for the occasion.
Outlander has had a profound impact upon tourist numbers in Scotland, a country which she had never visited when she first wrote about the travails of Highland warrior
Jamie Fraser in 1743 during the time of the Jacobite rebellion against the Crown. Figures from the national tourist authority, VisitScotland, show that the Outlander phenomenon has led to a 67% increase in visitor numbers since 2013, with Outlander Bus Tours now a daily occurrence and some sites featured in the show so popular that they have had to restrict access.
The accuracy of those figures may be open to question, but it is beyond argument that Gabaldon has exponentionally increased the numbers of people around the world who know about Scotland’s history, who care about the country, and who are now visiting in prodigious numbers.
But who is the woman behind Outlander? Her beginnings were suitably unconventional. Born into a Roman Catholic family in 1952, Gabaldon is the fourth generation of her family to have come from the Arizona city of Flagstaff. Her mother Jacqueline Sykes was the mayor’s daughter and descended from England, while her father Tony Gabaldon – an Arizona senator and supervisor of Coconino County – could trace his ancestors as far back as the late-1500s in New Mexico.
However, the deeply conservative southern community in which she grew up looked on her parents’ marriage – the union of a daughter from one of Flagstaff’s founding families with a man of Mexican heritage – with horror. A public petition was raised to stop the marriage, the family priest refused to conduct the nuptials and Gabaldon’s mother’s English teacher ‘told her firmly that she couldn’t possibly marry a Mexican; her children would be idiots’.
Gabaldon’s mother was sent away to the University of Arizona in Tucson, only to sneak back six months later and marry her father in secret, Gabaldon arriving when the pair were 21. What Gabaldon characterises as the ‘miscegenation’ – a euphemism for racism – faced by her parents has clearly stayed with her, and there’s a clear sense of the outsider in her writing.
The most obvious example of her sticking up for the underdog is the figure of Jacobite Jamie Fraser in Outlander. Her decision to write forewords to biographies of two celebrated anti-heroes who championed the everyman against oppression – Thomas Paine and Californian bandit Joaquin Murieta – also speak volumes.
But perhaps the most telling example is a spin-off series of four books she wrote about Lord John Grey. A minor character in the Outlander series, Gabaldon’s creation is, she says, ‘a gay man, in a time when to be homosexual was a capital offense and Lord John has more than most to lose by discovery’.
Growing up as the product of a marriage that scandalised her community is just one way in which the ‘idiot’ who took home the Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award for Best Romance of 1991 for Outlander – which was dubbed ‘the smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written’ – is not your run-of-the-mill author of romantic fiction.
Another sign of her willingness to veer from the coventional was her was an unapologetically geeky love of academia. By the time she had started a family with husband Doug Watkins, Gabaldon had collected an impressive array of degrees: a BSc in Zoology, MSc in Marine Biology, and PhD in Behavioural Ecology. In the 80s she was founding editor of Science Software Quarterly while working at the Center for Environmental Studies at Arizona State University; she wrote software reviews and technical articles for computer publications Byte and Infoworld; and even put together comics on a freelance basis for Walt Disney.
In fact Gabaldon only turned to writing fiction while busy at home in the early 90s with three children under the age of six. The unlikely trigger which got her creative juices flowing was an episode of Doctor Who which featured fictional Highlander Jamie McCrimmon, who had seen his clan defeated at the Battle of Culloden. Gabaldon was looking to write fiction and it proved the perfect starting point for her male muse, Jamie Fraser.
‘That’s where I began,’ she recalls, ‘knowing nothing about Scotland or the eighteenth century, with no plot, no outline, no characters – nothing but the rather vague images conjured up by a man in a kilt (which is, of course, a very powerful and compelling image). I thought that I’d write this whatever-it-was for practice, and then write a real book – perhaps a crime novel as that’s what I mostly read at the time.’
Even then, she wrote for herself and only came to prominence when, inhabiting one of the internet forums which connected her to ‘real life’, she took exception to a misogynistic posting about pregnancy and responded with a passage from her unpublished Outlander novel, which detailed a more realistic version of the process. Much to her delight, her fellow forum users’ overwhelmingly enthusiastic reaction gave her the courage to approach an agent. Although the gamble paid
“The Outlander phenomenon has led to a 67% increase in visitor numbers since 2013
off – she is reputed to be worth around $100 million – she lives a relatively unremarkable life in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her husband, ‘two big, fat dachshunds, somewhere between two and three cats, and a lot of parakeets’.
In many ways it is unsurprising that she adopts such a scientific approach to her writing. Historic details are precise, locations are researched obsessively, and the chaos of the Highland Clearances and their aftermath meticulously presented. ‘I did Outlander entirely from library research,’ she says, though she has since visited Scotland many times. Still, the inner academic remains, and research books are never far away – whether out walking the dogs or on an exercise bike, she remains a prodigious reader.
Yet although Gabaldon has fired the imaginations of her millions of readers, she has also divided the critics. Publishers Weekly declared that ‘Gabaldon’s prose is crisply elegant, she brings an effusive joy to her fiction that proves infectious, even for readers unfamiliar with her work or the period.’ The Independent wrote of the television series that ‘yes, it’s a timetravelling, wish-fulfilment fantasy but it’s done with such flair and attention to detail that it’s impossible not to hop on board for the ride.’
There are, though, a significant number of dissenters from that view of both the books and television series, particularly on this side of the Atlantic. Our very own Siobhan Synnot wrote in The Scotsman that ‘there has not been such a proud display of tartanalia since the opening of the 2014 Commonwealth Games,’ her compatriot Alastair McKay called it ‘magicalmystical heuchter-teuchter cobblers’ in the Evening Standard, Euan Ferguson dubbed it ‘gorgeous drivel’ in The Observer while The Guardian’s Thomas Batten opined: ‘If you love the scenery, shifting allegiances and palace intrigue of Game of Thrones but find yourself wishing the pace were a little slower and that the sex scenes were filmed in a more pretentious manner with lots of slow pans and softer lighting, here’s your show.’
But for every critic that knowingly references Fifty Shades when dismissing Gabaldon’s prose, there is another championing her. Eminent writer and critic Stuart Kelly, for instance, is impressed by her ingenious ploy of reverse engineering her novels, which means she can continue writing them indefinitely. ‘It is endlessly re-inventible,’ he notes. ‘Even if all the principle characters die, which isn’t unlikely, it’ll turn out there’s been a child, and the child has all the same magical powers.’
Kelly also pointed out that Gabaldon – who wrote a bestselling book called ‘I Give You My Body; How I Write Sex Scenes’ – also has a rare talent for describing the earthier side of romance, which the women who make up the bulk of her readership seem to find believable. Writer Graeme Virtue said she has a ‘rare acknowledgment of the female gaze’ in her treatment of sex scenes, and Kelly agrees.
‘Her books let her have her cake and eat it,’ he said. ‘The time travel means you can get somebody who can be a kind of feminist, but because it’s set in the eighteenth century it allows her to be swept off her feet as well; and a rugged machismo is allowed. It’s artful.’
But Gabaldon is more than just an author; like JK Rowling she is also an astute businesswoman who has overseen the growth in her franchise with additions like The Outlander comic book and the stage show Outlander: The Musical.
She is tactful and diplomatic, careful not to isolate any of her readers through religion, and constructs her narrative to defy categorisation; something she calls ‘the peculiarly indescribable nature of my books’.
The genres under which the Outlander series has been sold are endless: literature, fiction, historical fiction, historical non-fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance, gay and lesbian fiction, military history, and even horror. Gabaldon certainly takes advantage of this.
‘She said that at events people would come up to ask her what Outlander was about, and she had a different angle for whoever it was,’ says Jenni Steele, film and creative industries manager at VisitScotland. ‘So, if it was a guy she would say, “It’s about battles and history”, and if it was a woman she’d say, “It’s about romance and Scotland”.’
The way Gabaldon presents herself is slick and composed; often seen in her trademark turquoise peacock dress, she has constructed a very definite authorial persona. ‘She’s a kind of living brand,’ says Kelly. ‘I think she has very carefully created a character called Diana Gabaldon that the fans would love. Authors have to be on stage, they have to be on TV, they have to be on radio. I think she clocked pretty damn quick there had to be a “Diana Gabaldon”, and the dress is the giveaway. She is the sorceress behind the magic.’
Her highly considered approach to the media extends into her impressive public utterances. When under the spotlight, she responds to interview questions about her books with enormous composure and imaginative detail. But although she seems to be an interviewer’s dream, her ostensibly candid ruminations are a well-rehearsed performance. ‘Whenever I see her, she tells the same story,’ says Kelly. ‘Almost word for word. About the inspiration for Outlander. She’ll put her little fly innuendo in about how she was fascinated with the story of what was up the Scotsman’s kilt.’
Behind the public face, Gabaldon is careful to provide as little insight as possible into her private life. Though she tantalises her 700,000 Facebook followers and 300,000 Twitter followers with the odd picture of a grandchild, no text or embellishment accompanies them. However, Gabaldon has been unable to resist the temptation of voicing her dismay at Donald Trump’s presidency and Brexit. ‘I don’t talk politics,’ she wrote, ‘but as a student of history, my impression [is] that [the] world [is] led by idiots approx 85.7% of the time’. Shortly after President Trump’s election, she also posted, ‘I don’t talk politics, but will note that ego does not equal psychological security’.
Her occasional liberal outbursts haven’t negatively impacted either Gabaldon’s popularity or Trump’s presidency, but she has had a huge impact upon Scotland’s economy, with Scottish tourism growing exponentially since her chiselled, blue-eyed Jamie Fraser first graced television screens across the globe.
‘People who have watched the series want to come on holiday to Scotland, but are also interested in visiting locations,’ says VisitScotland’s Steele. ‘They want to do things like learn about Jacobite history and clans, trace their own ancestry, and find out about the Gaelic culture and language. A lot of the fans are very well researched about Scotland and want to delve beneath the storyline.’
North American interest in Scotland has never been in short supply, but Gabaldon has certainly heightened the romantic notion of distant hills and glens. Though she admits she did not set out to help Scottish tourism, her so-called ‘Outlander Effect’ means themed tours take place on a daily basis, with film locations like Doune Castle (the fictional Castle Leoch) registering a colossal 226.5% increase in footfall in the last five years, while Blackness Castle, Black Jack Randall’s headquarters, saw visitor numbers rise by 181.7%. The impact of the books and television series has been so far-reaching that VisitScotland last year gave Gabaldon an award for her International Contribution to Scottish Tourism.
Gabaldon is due to release the ninth book in her Outlander series, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, this year and has already shared multiple excerpts from it on her website. ‘I still keep the family house in Flagstaff, and escape there regularly to write,’ she explains. ‘To me, the ideal weather for writing involves a gleaming portcullis of icicles to keep out all intruders, soft white drifts on the pines and the sidewalks, and the muffled grind of cars in the distance, rushing cinders into the slippery packed snow.’
For the self-proclaimed ‘Heughan Heughligans’ out there, this winter might just provide enough glittering inspiration to see her over the finishing line.
“Gabaldon has certainly heightened the romantic notion of distant hills and glens