Brenda Clough wrote a sequel to Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, which is just one of the many pieces of art that have led to a resurgence of interest in the Victorian era.
Now, she’s speaking with us about why this period of time still has such a hold on us.
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For those of us who may have never read ‘The Woman in White,’ tell us what’s so interesting about this story in particular.
Well, there’s several ways to think about it. It was one of the original Victorian sensational novels. It was a fantabulous hit in its day. It was the 50 Shades of Gray of its day. So there was, like, polkas, there were, like, cups. It was completely crazy. A sensational novel is, when they really, really juiced up the emotional content of it, you know? Oh my God, everyone is in horrible peril and your heart is pounding and your characters are all practically passing out.
It was very different from the literature of just slightly earlier where everyone was going to very calm and collected, and we were going to think about this in a rational way. No, no, no, no, no, no… Wilkie Collins decided that we would just go completely, you know, the full emo — and they did! And since it was so new it was extremely popular. And so that was very cool. And from our point of view — because that’s not so exciting for us anymore, because we can do emo — what’s interesting from our point of view is that his heroine, Marian Halcombe, was one of the first proto feminist heroines. She’s the one who actually drives a lot of the action.
The plot of the story is that her half sister was compelled to marry a ratbag who essentially steals all her money and then thinks of a really creative way to get rid of her. And Marian Halcombe comes through and just saves the sister with the help of the sister’s boyfriend — you know, you have to have that love interest. So she’s one of the first heroines in English literature who wasn’t pretty. Who wasn’t marriageable. Who wasn’t going to be the one that was going to marry the hero at the end. It was different. And it was so different that people were amazed. And people wrote to the publisher and said, you know, I’m sorry to hear in the book that no one’s going to marry her, I’ll marry her! Send me her address! It was to that level of crazy, you know?
It’s so interesting that, you know, not much has changed in the modern world. We still act that way and it’s funny to think about.
Well, I’m sure people mail letters to Harry Potter like, “Please, fly by on the broom, Harry. I’m here for you!” So yeah, you know, this is the first time it had gotten to that level of crazy. And it was great. And it is still a popular novel — you know, not only is it a classic of English literature and all that stuff — but they still grind it around. It has a BBC dramatization that just ran this month and apparently it’s very popular. It’s not here in the U.S., so I haven’t seen it, but it’s still a sufficiently dramatic story that every decade or so they just grind it up and do a new version of it on TV or in the movies. So it’s irresistible. There was a musical! I couldn’t believe it.
The Woman in White with Michael Crawford singing the role. Like, it’s incredible, really?! I didn’t see that one either — it was on Broadway — but you know they still grind it around because it’s just too cool.
And so tell us about what you’re doing with ‘A Most Dangerous Woman.’
Well see, now this is where the modern person says if you wrote a monster hit, if you wrote your 50 Shades it Gray, or your Song of Ice and Fire; if you’re George RR Martin, what’s the impulse that comes to mind? You write a sequel. Isn’t that right?! You would do that! It’s gold in them there hills! I don’t know why Wilkie Collins did not do this. He had this monster hit, so why didn’t you write more stories about these people, pal? He didn’t do it. He went and wrote other stuff. And fine. But I’m sitting here and I’m saying why aren’t there more stories about Marian? She is so cool.
There’s tons of things she should be doing! And how come you didn’t do this? Well, all right. There’s no point in talking about it, he died in 18-whatever it was, but I can fix this. I’m a novelist. I will write you this sequel. And it’ll be right. So I wanted to write this, but I wanted to write it correctly. And so it wasn’t going to be a, you know, 20th century thing. I wanted to write it very, very purely Victorian. Everything exactly right. I wanted to write it the way Wilkie Collins would have written it.
But you know, because you are in the 21st century, I am pushing around this feminist stuff. You know, there’s a nice discussion you can have — I’m a science fiction writer and what science fiction says to you is, what shit will happen if this goes on, you know? If we continue to, I don’t know, degrade the environment or whatever it is, what’s going to happen to us? And that’s the novel that you write, right? But if you’re switching to write about history, historical fiction, what historical fiction says to you is, this is the way it was in the past. We don’t have to do this. We’ve done this before, it was pretty lousy then, let’s not do that again. And so when I wrote A Most Dangerous Woman, Marian has to buck all of the things that we really don’t have to buck anymore. At least, at this moment, we have obstetric care and birth control and we have the franchise, we can vote… She didn’t have that. She has to just buck that. And so one of the things the book is, is the story of maybe you don’t want to do this.
As a person who obviously lives in the modern world, what are some of the challenges of writing in this genre? Because I’m sure you have to do a lot of research, but you can do research all day long and still not necessarily always grasp the feeling of Victorian literature. So what are some of the things that you had to work on to make sure that you did get it exactly right?
Well, there’s the whole vocabulary thing, you know? The words they use are not quite the words we use. They’re not going to do selfies, they’re not going to swipe left. That’s technology. But then there’s just — the rhythm of speech is different. And if you read the novel you can see it. The rhythm of their speech is different… So that I can do. The things that they are interested in are not the things that we’re interested in. Marian is not actually interested in getting the vote because that was sort of — it was a really distant pipe dream in the 1860s. There was no way we could contemplate getting the vote. Hey, it would be enough so that you could actually marry someone and then not immediately lose control of all of your money because the minute you married him he had your checking account and all your accounts. At that point, once you got married, that’s the way it was. And so they weren’t so much interested in the vote, it was just not completely losing your financial identity the moment you said, “I Do.” They had other issues to deal with. There’s things she doesn’t care about because there’s other major things she has to care about.
One of the things she didn’t have in the Wilkie Collins novel was she didn’t have a husband. She was the ugly spinster who didn’t get the guy at the end of the book. Her sister got the guy. And so I sort of fixed that. I found her a nice guy to marry. And that’s the other thing I wanted to do — I didn’t want to write about single young women. I wanted to write about people who have more real life difficulties. You get married and then you have your married issues. There’s a lot of books that are sort of targeted to people who are 17 years old — I decided this was not going to be that kind of book because there’s just so much more that you could do. And if you were a woman at that period, you really sort of kind of had to get married. It was really, really difficult to get by in life without getting married. And in the book she was poor. And it’s just, you have so much more fun if you had money. So you marry a guy with money and then suddenly you can have much more fun.
I wanted to do all the fun stuff that Victorian novels do. So everything. I put in everything. You know, unwed motherhood, anarchist with bombs, pouring through the slums of London and trying to find its secrets… Being imprisoned in nasty period jails, getting thyphis because you have prison fever… There’s no point in having a book set in the 1860s if you can’t have all that fun. So I fished up all that fun and I had it! You know, if you’re going to be there, let’s do this.
Right. And you were talking a little bit about the dialogue and the way they speak, which can be very formal. Especially for people who don’t read in this genre a lot. How do you keep that interesting for them and what details do you pull out of there and don’t include in order to make the story more enjoyable? What kind of hand waves do you give to certain details?
Well, I always try to mention the things that maybe they would not have mentioned. Like I’m sure you’re sitting where there is electricity ’cause that’s where I’m sitting. That’s how we’re talking on the phone. We don’t mention it because if you don’t have electricity you’re someplace awful. You’re in South Sudan or someplace. So we don’t mention it because that’s part of our natural process. In Wilkie Collins, they didn’t mention it because either you couldn’t mention it or it was so natural that you just never bothered to do it. So I always mention things like, well, the fire is made out of coal. You know, there’s no central heating. Anywhere she wants to go, you build in the time that it takes to either walk there or ride on a horse there. Because there’s no Uber, there’s no cars. You can only go — the train is only going to go 10 miles an hour. So you know, you’re going to travel and it’s going to take all day. There’s just no way around it. And so I try to build all that stuff in and tell you about it. Wilkie Collins never bothered to mention it because everybody knew that if you were going to travel to Scotland it would take you two days, so you might as well just live with it.
Kind of switching gears a little bit — what do you think it is about Victorian literature that still captivates audiences today?
Well, you know, the Victorian writers were really the masters of character. They’re the masters of things like… You know, think about Charles Dickens. God, we all still watch A Christmas Carol every single year in December. He was able to create — some of the great storytellers of our language, lived during that period. It’s incredible. They’re finally getting it to where other people other than white people with titles could write books. So you had people like Charlotte Brontë writing Jane Eyre. And you know, finally you could really have books about women’s feelings — you could really get it out there. Finally you were able to get it really real. And so things became much more vividly colored and vividly described.
If you go back just one generation, if you go back and look at the novels of Jane Austen. She deliberately didn’t describe anybody’s appearance. She didn’t describe their clothing. Everyone still had set courses everywhere because there just was no other way to imagine it. But there was no description of these things. She deliberately didn’t do that because it was in better taste. It’s fascinating. The other thing about it is that they’re just far enough away, they’re just distant enough, you can see the same thing when you see Downton Abbey. They’re just distant enough that you can sort of grip what’s going on. If you go a little bit older, you go to like the Middle Ages, suddenly it’s really hard. Hard to get into their heads, hard to figure out what’s going on, it’s harder when everything revolves around the Catholic Church and we have to fast for lent. It’s harder to do it. And they’re not quite so distant. And maybe in another hundred years they’ll be so distant they’ll be, like, alien. They’ll be like ancient Egyptians. But at this moment, they’re the past, but not too past if you know what I mean.
Yeah. Exactly. And I think one of the things that I find very interesting is how women are portrayed in stories like these. Especially a woman who’s considered rebellious because their rebellion doesn’t look like our rebellion.
No.
And I’m curious why you think that this still translates to audiences today because their struggles are very different from our struggles.
Well, you know, it’s worth looking back. This is a great lesson of The Handmaids Tale? If you remember that?
Oh yeah.
Okay. We can lose our rights, okay? We have these rights. You have the right to birth control, you have the right to abortion, you have the right to vote… Well, science fiction has said, “Well, you know what would happen if you lost those rights?” So that’s what The Handmaid’s Tale is about. What this book is about is, it’s not that far ago that you didn’t have those rights. And it was fricking tough and you would not like it. We don’t want to do this.
Of course, there was a whole suite of things that we’re all going to hold onto like grim death. Like antibiotics. Modern medicine? They didn’t have that. And the number of things that you can — research is so fun — the horror stories in Victorian medicine would make your hair curl. I couldn’t get them all into this book, but I wrote a sequel and I tried to wedge all of these horrible things that they would do. There was a doctor who insisted that all your health problems revolved around your teeth. So anything that was wrong with you, you know a backache, you broke your leg, he’d say, you know, what is proscribed is an extraction. Let’s pull out a tooth and you’ll feel better.
Well, you pulled out a tooth and you did feel better. But I didn’t know if it was a cause and effect here or [psychosomatic]. And he carried on doing this until finally he got sick. He got some disease or another. And he said, “Well, the solution to all my problems is extracting all my own teeth.” So he had this done and he didn’t get better. At that point he had like a psychological crash because everything fell apart. But gee willikers think about the patients that he was rattling around with pulling their teeth left and right for, you know, your bunions, your sprained wrist, goodness me.
It was the Wild West in terms of medicine. And the things they would do to people… Holy mackerel it was frightening. There was no food and drug purity thing. So you could just roll through and water the milk and add sand to the flower. There was no one to stop you. There was no law to stop you. You could just go and do it. Frightening! So it was the Wild West. A lot of the things we take for granted, that was the period when they just brought in flush toilets. Think about that. Then there are people who wouldn’t use flush toilets because the noise was too noisy and you know if you go in there and everyone heard that noise they knew what you were doing and they couldn’t handle it. So they didn’t. It was like, you know this is so great.
So we’re kind of here today because we’re talking about the resurgence of Victorian literature and adaptations, particularly in 2018, or at least like the last year or so. Are there any that are currently airing or are about to come out either on the big or small screen that you’re particularly looking forward to?
Well, I’m hoping that they’ll get the BBC run of The Woman in White to the United States. They’re apparently going to run it in commonwealth countries. You know, Australia and that kind of thing. But I can’t get my hands on it in The United States, and I realize the reason for that is that they’re probably going to sell it to like PBS, and it’s all going to have a big thing whenever it is. So at this moment I can’t find it because they’re going to premiere it in, I don’t know, October or something irritating. So I’m keeping my eye out. I haven’t been able to get my hands on it. Sooner or later I’m sure they’ll do it and then we’ll be able to see it. There’s a persistent run of these things. Did you see, last Christmas they did The Man who Invented Christmas? It was a vaguely biopic thing about Charles Dickens. That was great. It was very, very cool and it stars Dan Stevens, who’s the star of Downton Abbey.
Oh my God. He was very cool. So they’re continuing to do this stuff to a greater or lesser extent. I think for a long long time they were pretty heavily invested in regency stuff. The Jane Austen stuff. And now they’re finally broadening it out a little bit to different periods.
I think what really caught my attention this year was ‘Mary Shelley.’ And telling her story in a way that hasn’t really been told before. Because a lot of people don’t realize how fundamental she is to the science fiction genre.
Oh absolutely. She was a founding mother of the genre. And she had a fascinating life. She was a protofeminist and a daughter of one of the feminists for mothers. She was interesting. You know that there is an entire subdivision of science fiction — steampunk — which is driven a lot by Ada Lovelace, who helped invent the computers. So there’s a whole thing. Within the genre there’s been a steady push of Victorian/Edwardian stuff, mainly driven by steampunk, that’s sort of steadily been going on for a good several years now. They’re going to be doing a TV version of The War of the Worlds. This is the H. G. Wells novel, and they’re going to be setting it finally in the proper period. In late Victorian or Edwardian — and that should be great.
Another one that I picked up recently and haven’t finished was ‘The Alienist.’ Did you get a chance to see that?
I have not seen it, but I did read the book and I don’t remember much about it because the book came out a good 10 or 15 years ago. And I read it when it came out, so I don’t remember that much about it. But I gather that that one fairly guy oriented. That one is all men. I think my thing at this moment is Victorian women. That’s so fascinating. The things that women can do.
There’s one women in ‘The Alienist’ and she plays a very headstrong character, somebody who is kind of walking a little bit outside her station and the men around her aren’t too happy about it. So I’ve definitely enjoyed it so far. Dakota Fanning is who plays her.
Oh, she’s a great actress. There’s actually a lot of interesting things going on. And they’re not continually doing this, ’cause there’s always stuff going on — but there definitely is stuff.
And I guess that’s a good segue into my final question, which is just — what other stories from this era would you like to see make a resurgence. Either in a way similar to what you did with ‘The Most Dangerous Woman’ or something being adapted for screen. Are there any of your favorites you’d like to see sort of make a comeback?
Well, you know there’s an enormous, enormous number of Victorian novels. You know you could do this all day long because there’s such a large number of them. A lot of this dramatization [is] on the BBC. They do a lot of this. There is actually a dramatization, just this past week, of Little Women, and it was on PBS. It was originally filmed in the ’40s, but it was exactly in the period. It’s an American novel, but it’s exactly in the period. It was filmed in Britain, so they finally aired it in the U.S., which I guess is a good thing. But a lot of things that we remember and love, date back to that period. You know, they could do it forever. And I’m sure they will. All the favorites just keep coming through over and over again.
You can read A Most Dangerous Woman by Brenda Clough on SerialBox.
Note: This interview was transcribed by Brook Wentz. It has been slightly edited for the sake of clarity.
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