The Scotsman

Reclaiming history for the women who made it happen

How do you write a feminist novel set in an era when feminism simply did not exist? Elizabeth Macneal reckons she has found the answer in her debut novel

-

‘ It feels like history is owned by men,” I explained in my first historical fiction module, a month before I began my novel The Doll Factory. I was at UEA, studying Creative Writing. How could I write a Victorian novel, I wondered, which reflected my own feminism when such a movement didn’t exist at the time it was set?

Through school and university, I’d primarily read men’s accounts of politics, of society, of life, of fiction. It felt, even, that there was no space for me, as a young woman, to write about it.

But my tutor Rebecca Stott encouraged me to think about writers of historical fiction whom I admire – Sarah Waters, Deborah Moggach and Sarah Perry – all of whom have placed female characters at the centre of their novels.

She asked me which female figures from history interested me.

I have been fascinated by the life of Lizzie Siddal ever since I first saw Millais’s Ophelia hanging in Tate Britain when I was a child. Growing up in Edinburgh as a teenager, I hung postcards of PreRaphael­ite paintings on my walls, raided the charity shops in Stockbridg­e for books about them and read their poetry. I quickly knew the names of the male artists – Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Millais and Holman Hunt.

It was the women in their paintings that intrigued me most. They looked variously listless, lustful, intense, caged by gilded frames.

Sometimes they played at other characters from Shakespear­e or folklore – Mariana or Beatrix or the Lady of Shalott.

I wanted to uncover who they were. I learned their names – Annie Miller, Lizzie Siddal, Jane Burden, Fanny Eaton.

I learned about their lives, and how time had erased their influence on the movement, their own contributi­ons comparativ­ely unknown.

There will be an exhibition of these “forgotten” women at London’s National Gallery in October.

As the curator of the exhibition Jan Marsh, states: “We need to see the models not as passive mannequins but as active participan­ts in the making of the art.”

I was especially moved by the trajectory of Lizzie Siddal – how she sketched on butter wrappings as a child, and was spotted as a “stunner” while working in a milliner’s shop. Millais and Rossetti had the privilege of painting from a young age, but Lizzie did not.

She found herself in the midst of a rebellious group of young male artists who called themselves the Pre-raphaelite Brotherhoo­d and who sought to challenge the artistic principles of their time.

How would that feel – that expansiven­ess, the exhilarati­on, the terror of it? She would also have been aware of her own slippery place in the world – modelling being considered akin to prostituti­on at the time – and finding her own place as a painter in a male-dominated art world, where women could not be students at The Royal Academy.

Ruskin became her patron, but her own paintings are now almost unknown.

The fact that these women had been forgotten only made it more important to tell their stories. It was a feminist act to place a woman at the centre of a historical novel and explore her life.

I decided early on that I didn’t want to write a fictionali­sed biography of Lizzie Siddal because it felt as if her death was too recent, her end too tragic, and so I chose instead to mirror her experience in that of a fictional character.

My central character, Iris, would work in a doll-making shop painting china faces and feet, but would long to be an artist.

She would throw herself into the midst of the Pre-raphaelite Brotherhoo­d, and for the first

“Neo-historical fiction can be just as much about the time in which it is written as the time in which it is set”

Iris is given the opportunit­y to become a model and learn to paint, it felt unnatural to portray that step as straightfo­rward, given the convention­s of the time. And so, I had her parents condemn her choice, and a charwoman sneer at her lowered status. Iris was exceptiona­l in not allowing these things to cow her, and in continuing to pursue her own artistic ambitions.

This introduced another layer to the historical novel where, even though the characters might be unable to voice a situation as misogynist­ic, this is filtered through the eyes of a modernday reader who is able to recognise and interpret its injustice.

The reader could see that the behaviour of the man who becomes obsessed with her is troubling, even if Iris dismisses her own instinct. And through it all, readers could cheer her on in her pursuit of her dream, and celebrate her desire to be free and to have the freedom to create her own art.

She carved out her own place as a painter within a group of male artists, just as Lizzie Siddal had done in a maledomina­ted art world over 150 years before.

 ??  ?? 0 In The Doll Factory, Elizabeth Macneal looks at the sisterhood behind the Pre-raphaelite Brotherhoo­d
0 In The Doll Factory, Elizabeth Macneal looks at the sisterhood behind the Pre-raphaelite Brotherhoo­d
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom