New Voices

Sarah Adlakha, Maya Deane, Joanna Quinn, and Olesya Salnikova Gilmore have set out to rediscover people, places and classic stories that have been overlooked or sidelined.

photo credit: NL Costa

Joanna Quinn

© Nicole Levine Photography

Maya Deane

Olesya Salnikova Gilmore Sarah Adlakha

Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theatre (Fig Tree UK/ Knopf US, 2022), lives in Dorset, in the South West of England, which is “famous for being the home of writer Thomas Hardy and is associated with the thatched cottages and manor houses found in his novels.”

Quinn explains: “Although Dorset has changed since Hardy’s time, those buildings still exist. I grew up in a thatched cottage and my Mum now lives next door to a 16th-century manor!”

Like many people, she says, “I have often wondered what it would be like to live in an ancient manor, not least as many of the books I read as a child, like The Secret Garden, were set in big houses. But I’m also aware of the inequalities inherent within them, both between owners and staff, and between men and women.

“My own family history is not particularly English—I’m a mix of Irish, Welsh and Cornish—so when I decided to write a novel set in an English manor in the first half of the 20th century, I knew that I wanted to come at it from an angle. I wanted to examine what it would be like for people who don’t fit in. I wanted to explore the gap between the roles they are expected to fill and those they want for themselves.”

Quinn’s “main character Cristabel Seagrave,” she continues, “is not only a girl—someone of secondary importance in an upper-class family—but also an orphan. Within the structure of the house, she is largely powerless, but she is also a strong-willed individual, and she lives at a time of immense social change.” life in the English manor, I read a lot of Victorian children’s fiction, seeking out the books my characters would find in their dusty library. I think you can tell a great deal about a society by looking at its children’s books, and my fictional family would have been fed a steady diet of epic battles and male heroism, from Homer to G. A. Henty, a popular writer of jingoistic adventure stories for boys.”

She then asked herself: “What happens to a girl who reads these books? Who absorbs their lessons? Who does she become when she grows up? Well, of course, she would want to go to war if she ever had the chance—and as my book runs from 1919 to 1945, Cristabel is given that opportunity.”

Quinn found that some of her most valuable research was uncovered at her local library, “where I found memoirs from Dorset people who had lived through the war and newspaper cuttings from the time. My first job had been as a reporter on the Dorset Echo, and I found I was returning to subjects I had written about back then. A woman I once interviewed about the fact she had married a German POW inspired a section of the book. Sometimes we overlook the places we live in, or believe them to be uninteresting, and writing the book was a reminder that good stories exist on our own doorsteps. I even found out that the road into my village was widened to accommodate U.S. military vehicles, as troops were camped in woods nearby before setting off to fight on the beaches on D-Day.”

Maya Deane, author of Wrath Goddess Sing (William Morrow, 2022), points out that “there are many ways to retell a classic story. You can flesh out the details for a new audience; you can reinterpret, revealing facets that went unseen; or you can deconstruct, stripping away layers of past interpretation to reveal the bones, then reassembling them to engage with the tradition in new ways.”

Deane has “always loved the Iliad; in its raw Greek Dark Ages form, it defies the simpler, more polished, more consistent Edith Hamilton reinterpretation of it as part of The Classical Tradition, and instead reveals itself a strange story from the age of iron about the fall of the Mycenaean world (and the collapse of the entire Bronze Age international system) five centuries before.”

Research led her, she continues, “to read the Iliad not as the foundation of a canon but as it would have read to its contemporaries: the latest shaping of cultural memory about a past whose relics were visible everywhere, a collapsed cosmopolitan world that had been richer, gentler, and more civilized than the rough, poor world of its audience.”

Consequently, she wondered “what those events would have looked like to the Mycenaeans who lived through it,” she says. “Mycenaean elites decorated their houses with frescoes of the Egyptian Delta and craved carnelian beads from India. They didn’t know their descendants would become Classical Greeks. They didn’t know the minor sky god Zeus would take on Hittite Tarhunna iconography and displace Poseidon as chief god. They didn’t know later traditions would decontextualize their world, writing out the Hittites and Egyptians and Mesopotamians and Syrians. They didn’t know myth and history would separate, that later historians would view their world through a secular lens, disbelieving their gods, analyzing their fall in terms of economy and climate.”

Deane learnt “to deconstruct the Iliad we think we know and give voice to a story that’s nearly unrecognizable to those who remain

committed to a 20th-century recreation of a Classical or Hellenistic interpretation, a story that touches on the whole post-Iliad tradition— from Hesiod to Shakespeare—but remains deeply rooted in that earlier Bronze Age world.”

Olesya Salnikova Gilmore was born in Moscow, raised in the U.S., and graduated from the Northwestern School of Law. She practised litigation at a large law firm for several years before becoming an author, and lives in a wooded, lakeside Chicago suburb. The inspiration for her novel The Witch and the Tsar (Berkley, 2022) was drawn from was the witch Baba Yaga, a childhood “diet of poetry and fairy tales,” and “fantasy films with the actor Georgy Millyar in the role of Baba Yaga.” Millyar’s portrayal of her—old, bent, and in rags, so clearly a villain—horrified Gilmore. When she misbehaved, her mother would evoke Baba Yaga, “particularly at night, when she was said to be riding the skies in her mortar. Of all characters, she is the one I wanted to know more about. I wondered how she came to be, living alone in her chicken-legged hut, and how a man ended up defining her character and appearance as much as Millyar had.”

Many years later, Gilmore says, “I started to re-read the tales I had grown up with, immersing myself in that colorful world of my youth, of firebirds and spirits, of forests and winters, of onion-domed churches and white-walled cities, of Russia and of Baba Yaga and her history. Unlike Millyar’s portrayal, she is not always a villain; unlike our conception of her, if we look back far enough, she is not always a witch but sometimes a goddess. She is a powerful and intelligent woman, living outside of societal norms and expectations.

“I imagined such an independent woman would ruffle more than a few men and women, even tsars. One came to mind who would not only see her as a witch, but as a threat to his divine rule, a tsar remembered through the centuries as Ivan the Terrible. Medieval Russia, with its bloody history, its mystery and magic, and its timeless beauty, reminded me of the fairy tale realm in which Baba Yaga has been frozen all this time and proved the perfect setting. My hope is The Witch and the Tsar unfreezes Yaga from her past by reclaiming her history and finally giving her a voice.”

Sarah Adlakha’s Midnight on the Marne (Forge, 2022), is her first historical novel. However, the story of George Mountcastle, one of the main characters, was born from her debut novel, She Wouldn’t Change a Thing. “George was an ancillary character in my first book who barely made the editorial cuts, and whose only appearance was in a late chapter where he showed up as a nonagenarian who’d fought in one of the most pivotal battles of WWI with the American Expeditionary Forces—twice. Needless to say, this time-hopper quickly became a crowd favorite; everyone wanted to know his story.”

Because George’s adventures were detailed previously, she says, “I was forced to work around those elements to ensure everything fell neatly into place. Besides George’s point of view, which highlights more of the strategical battle plans of WWI and France from the perspective of an outsider, there is also Marcelle’s point of view. Marcelle is not only a French nurse working on the front lines, but she is also a revered spy working with British Intelligence.

“The period surrounding WWI is such a fascinating era of history and one that I don’t think gets enough attention from the pens of female authors. So, while George was the basis for this story, and the reason it even came into existence, I thought it equally important to include a female perspective of war, and not just from a woman on the sidelines.”

Midnight on the Marne is, according to Adlakha, “a love story at its core, but the path to get there is winding and tortuous. It is an alternate history tale, giving the reader a taste of what if. What if WWI had an entirely different outcome? What if you were given the chance to rewrite history? What if you were asked to make unconscionable sacrifices for the greater good of the world?”

Debut historical writers Adlakha, Deane, Quinn and Gilmore have all strived to ensure that their readers are able to reimagine past stories, events and people and to view them from a different perspective.

WRITTEN BY MYFANWY COOK

Myfanwy Cook is an Associate University Fellow and ‘a creative enabler’. She is a prize-winning short story writer who facilitates creative writing workshops. Contact myfanwyc@btinternet. com if you have been captivated by the writing of a debut novelist you'd like to see featured.