History is written in absence. For every woman whose name appears in the margins of a document, how many more are erased entirely- not by malice, but by the simple architecture of what gets recorded? In writing my book Dear Sister, I have pored over medieval accounts to try and better understand their system of finance, speech, and cordiality. A fascinating aspect of this is seeing recurring names for which I will never know the story- In a fourteenth-century account roll I found only six words:
Johanna, wife of Robert, received two pence.
I wonder what their stories were, and my imagination fills in the gaps.
But what right do I have?
Is it more of a disservice or a justice to tell a story with only fragmented truths, and allow my imagination to fill the unknown? Perhaps I may try in earnest to capture their hearts and personalities- but I will never fully encapsulate their struggles. I can picture Agnes Midwife as the kind hearted and soft spoken woman she presents to be within the margins. She delivered children whose names survived in baptismal registers. Hers did not. But I am perhaps leaving out something greater.
I leave out the scorn she faced when the children she delivered were blue. I leave behind the rage she fought with for the women in her care. I leave out the tenderness for which she kissed her children’s head, in a world full of dangers different from mine. I cannot speak to the joy the widow felt in rediscovering how to live, or the pain of the spinner who cooked for her family in spite of the pricks and blisters staining her hands. I erase all the parts in which they truly demonstrate their most honest selves, and caricaturize them. And in doing so, I become no better than those who erased their names to begin with. But I do not write real women- I am inspired by them.
I use the parts of their stories that I can understand and apply it to my own situations. Hilary Mantel once remarked that historical fiction begins with sympathy before invention. I think of that often. Sympathy demands humility. It reminds the novelist that imagination is not possession, but rather stewardship. It leaves us with a quieter grief: the realization that our own lives might one day survive only in fragments. Though without hearing their words, it remains a speculation delivered with love and hope. But sympathy breeds effort. There is more research than writing within my projects lately, and I do my utmost to give sympathy and empathy where I can, but I find myself torn; do I steal another’s voice by imposing my beliefs of an occurrence for which I was not present? Or do I offer them a voice long after they deserved one? This questions is constantly pulling at the threads of my mind. I write stories from the hidden lines in the margins where no others call home but the ghosts. Ghosts, after all, have an awful habit of evading us.
In all the stories I read, one theme is constant; grief. Grief of love, grief of loss, grief of fear, and grief of power- in every word they wrote and line they erased I find more of this loathsome grief to be unearthed. I have become imbued with the idea of grief, etched within my heart and mind.
I wonder if these women ever achieved happiness. What did they sound like laughing with their children? Or sharing moments of love with their husbands? Did their feet ever ache from dancing the way mine do, or their lips gossip the way I do? Happiness is as much a part of being human as grief, I have to believe that they had moments of tenderness and joy- curled outside with a friend in the nighttime dew, or shelling peas in the evening lamp light. Perhaps the best I can do is imagine that they knew joy, to allow them to find it within the pages of my books, to give them the happy ending the world wouldn’t. To read what the ledgers and the records told- knowing that much more of the story was left unsaid, fills you with that grief once more. Not just for the tale of one woman, but for all the untold stories that history never captured.
How many anchoresses whose visions were never copied? How many illuminators whose names were replaced with "anonymous"? How many women copied manuscripts we now attribute only to monasteries? How many gentlewomen were left from the record or replaced with a marital name that they had no tie to? How many warriors and mothers were lost to the wave of time for the crime of being a woman in the ledger? Far too many to count.
To answer the earlier question; far too many women are left to the margins. Scholars make only a note about an inconsequential person of history- but nobody can be deemed inconsequential while history is being written, much less the women. The women whose labour went untold, their stories unwritten, their courage painted over for the tragedies of men and the rescuing of damsels. Perhaps the most honest historical fiction admits when it cannot know, when it must imagine and makes that uncertainty visible. Is it a disservice to attempt to capture the remnants of a story no one but you was willing to tell? The crime is not in a lack of understanding, but in writing over what is before you in favour of what you wish to see. Honesty, as with all things among the arts, is the most powerful tool in our supply- more so than the brush or the pen. Historical fiction cannot restore every missing piece, nor should it pretend to- the cracks remain visible. Perhaps they always must. But to lift what survives with care, to repair those fractures with glue and imagination rather than certainty, is not an act of theft. It is the honesty of art in the mystery of the buried past. It is an act of remembrance.
