What inspired you to move from journalism into writing historical fiction?
I’ve always wanted to be a novelist – it was a childhood dream – but it didn’t seem a practical option when I first left school, short of money and keen to see the world. Luckily I spoke some foreign languages, though, and Reuters took me on as a correspondent, so for a long while I felt I’d found the best of all possible worlds writing, traveling – and earning – as a journalist. Still, I couldn’t stop trying my hand at writing longer stuff. I had a couple of terrible novels about people traveling in the same war zones I’d visited cluttering up my desk drawers before I got a contract for a journalistic, non-fiction book about Chechnya. Next came a more impressionistic travelogue, loosely about the illegal caviar trade in post-Soviet Russia. It was after that one that my agent told me I wrote like a novelist and should try my hand at it. Fiction is so different from the journalism I knew that I was terrified. But luckily my big-hearted husband joined in the coaxing. He booked me a week in a hotel in Bloomsbury (like Virginia Woolf) and said “come home with four chapters”. How could I do anything after that but start writing?
Your novel Portrait of an Unknown Woman, is set in Tudor England. What drew you to this period of history?
I’ve always been fascinated, and appalled, by the violence done in the 16th century in the name of God. I spent my childhood reading history books and puzzling over how that could possibly be. Oddly enough, it was that Catholic-Protestant slaughter, rather than the period’s more obviously interesting big set-piece stories –Henry VIII’s wives, Elizabeth’s world – that made me want to look closer. Although the “King’s Great Matter”, as Henry’s love for Anne Boleyn was known, was the trigger for England’s break with Rome and affected the lives of all the characters in my novel, the story in the foreground is one of a different family – that of Sir Thomas More – and the direct impact religious conflict had on them.
I believe that the idea for this book came from an exhibition of Holbein drawings you saw some years ago. Could you tell us a little more about this?
Holbein’s drawings are so extraordinary – bringing an era to life and literally making us see Tudor statesmen and women, the hopes and ambitions in their hearts. Holbein’s vision was a deeply Protestant one – seeing the workings of God in an ordinary human face, rather than only through Bible subjects, and preferring non-religious subjects. I went to admire all those plug-ugly, brutish new rich faces of the men getting ahead in the new regime – who looked strangely like the new rich of 1990s Russia, where I was then living! -but came away with a new fact in my head. Somewhere in the exhibition’s promotional material there was a discussion of Holbeins portrait of Sir Thomas More’s family. This was done in 1527 when More was Henry’s chancellor. But, it seemed, Holbein had also painted a second version, seven years later, after More had opposed Henry’s break with Rome, left his job, and begun his suicidal lurch away from court. And this painting had an extra character added in, whose presence, according to an ingenious conspiracy theory, could only be explained through an understanding of the religious and dynastic tumult facing Henry at the time. It stayed in my mind. And, years later, it became the focus for the novel.
Do you have a favourite Holbein portrait?
I love lots of the non-royal minor portraits, especially Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, a beautiful portrait of a young, dark-haired woman with a pensive expression. In my mind, the heroine of my novel looked like her.
Your novels are detailed and impeccably researched. Could you share with us the process you undertake when researching them.
Well, I love doing the research! I go to the British Library and ferret – from footnote to footnote, trying to dig up as much reality as I can before constructing a fiction on top. I’m always astonished by just how much knowledge about the past is accessible, and by how the stuff you learn right at the last minute is always the killer information that completes the jigsaw and lets you start to write with a clear conscience that you really do know your stuff.
In your research into Tudor life, have you come across any activities, customs or traditions that you’ve found particularly interesting or peculiar?
A lot of what you research isn’t so much the stuff you write about as the stuff you just need in your head as you go – how people ate, washed, peed, prayed, “got word” to friends, organised friendships, married, had children, buried their dead, and moved from place to place. I’ve been especially fascinated by medieval ideas about food, medicine and the search for balance – all, to them, part of the same complex of beliefs. The way they saw it, the universe was made up of four elements – fire water air and earth. The human body, likewise, was composed of four vital fluids. If these got out of balance, and you became too hot cold dry or moist, you’d get ill. Staying healthy was a question of achieving as perfect a balance as possible, taking into account your age and body type – rather like the Indian Ayurvedic tradition we are more familiar with today, that also seeks to eat to align body mind and soul.
There are many locations in England connected to the Tudors. Do you have a favourite?
I love beautiful Hampton Court Palace, built by Cardinal Wolsey and coveted by Henry VIII. Henry got it but nowadays its glorious halls, tennis courts, gardens, peacocks and all, are open to the public.
What book/s do you recommend for people wanting to learn more about everyday Tudor life?
Lisa Picard has written a very entertaining guide. I’d start there …
Are you currently working on any books?
Yes – a new departure for me, but also familiar terrain, as it’s set in revolutionary Russia.
If you could ask any historical personality a question, what would it be and whom would you ask?
It’s a corny one, but I’d want to ask what really happened to the Princes in the Tower. And the person I’d want to put that question to would be the first Tudor king, Henry VII.
For more information about Vanora visit her official website here.
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