By The Book: Elodie Harper Shines A Light On Ancient Women

Historical fiction has always been a favoured genre in bookshops for both men and women. However, when it came to the stories of ancient women, they’ve been mostly glossed over.

English author Elodie Harper is here to set that right. The former journalist’s first novel, The Wolf Den, became #1 London Times bestseller, with the rest of the trilogy becoming instant number ones. Now she’s returning to her native Britain to explore the lives of women in ancient times.

Boudicca’s Daughter, focuses on Britain’s most famous female warrior’s eldest daughter, Solina as Elodie imagines what her life would have been at that time. We sat down with Elodie to take a look through her bookshelves, pick her brain and learn more about history…

Tell us a bit about your new novel, Boudicca’s Daughter.

So it’s a story about one of the most famous rebels against Ancient Rome, Boudicca, and her daughter. It’s a family drama, it’s an adventure story, and it also focuses on the aftermath of the rebellion. What would it be like to be Boudicca’s daughter, Solina, when her mother is a legend in her own right. I chose to write about Solina, the daughter, because I could focus on the aftermath of the rebellion, rather than just the story of the rebellion. Because obviously Boudicca lost and it’s looking at how Soleina then continues on, either to resist or to make accommodation with Rome.

Your first book series, The Wolf Den, is so popular. This book is another historical fiction but very different, did you feel a pressure to live up to that hype?

You definitely don’t want to disappoint fans of the series, so that creates a sense of pressure. But honestly, I just feel so grateful that the trilogy found readers who loved it, so rather than pressure, it felt more like an opportunity if I’m honest. I wrote the character of Britannica into Boudicca’s Daughter, firstly because I love her, and I wanted to write more of her story, but I was also thinking about fans of The Wolf Den trilogy who might want more of her. I thought this would be a nice way to give them that. To be honest, Britannica is the reason I wrote Boudicca’s Daughter, because in the Wolf Den trilogy, she’s such an alien and an outsider and so different from everyone else. I thought, what if I made a world where it’s Britannica’s world, and her values and attitudes are the norm? So that was kind of what got me into this in the first place to be honest, using her as a bridge character between the series and this book.

 

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When you write historical fiction, how do you find the balance between facts and making a compelling story?

I do a lot of research so that I’ve got as much knowledge as I possibly can have. Then again, you do have to prioritise the demands of telling an entertaining story. So it’s deeply informed by research and by the period, and you get into how people of that time thought by reading a wide range of contemporary writers from that point. There’s some amazing research that tells us more about how the Aethene lived, because around that time, Celtic women had a lot more power and agency than the women of Ancient Rome did, and that’s something that the Romans observed and didn’t necessarily like. It was drawing all those different strands together and creating something new out of them. When it comes to historical fiction for me, one of the main things is thinking about how the past is profoundly different to the present, because that’s what makes it kind of fantastical and curious and fascinating. But also, some things remain timeless, particularly in human nature. What impulses can we see in ancient people that we still have today? The need for justice, for revenge, for love, for happiness, these are all sorts of constants, so it’s balancing those two things.

When you sit down to write, what is the first thing you do?

It should probably be to switch off my phone, but I can’t pretend it always is. I tend to go to libraries to write. Until very recently, I was also working as a journalist. I know a lot of people dream of being a full-time writer, but I really loved my job as a journalist, and it was quite difficult to decide that I couldn’t write books and be a journalist anymore; it was getting too much. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to write full-time, but I also knew it was going to be quite a big adjustment not having a job to go to. That’s why I go to do my work in libraries, because it feels like I’m going to work, whereas I think if I just worked from home the whole time, I’d go a bit nuts!

Do you have a childhood book that you still think about to this day?

Lord of the Rings, I love it so much. It actually influenced Boudicca’s Daughter in several sort of key ways. I think the reason I was quite fascinated by the Aethenes was probably due to Rohan in the Lord of the Rings saga. Also, in terms of the family dynamic, I thought the relationship between Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, and his two sons, Boromir and Faramir, was really interesting.

Who are three authors that inspire you?

I love Nikita Gill, whose Hekate is about to come out. Thomas Moore is like a sixteenth-century writer, and his life I find very fascinating. He wrote Utopia. I just think he’s a really interesting man because he’s a man of his time, but very much out of it at the same time. Who could I pick as my third? Sorry, you know when there’s just so many authors that you love? I think Half of a Yellow Sun is just one of the greatest books; it’s the greatest work of modern fiction I’ve ever read, it’s by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Do you have a book that you will never forget reading?

It would be In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. That really blew me away. I read it as a teenager, and I slightly wonder if the books that we read when we’re in our teens and early twenties perhaps have a particularly massive impact on us, because you’re just so open to ideas at that point. That book really blew me away. It sounds quite grim, but it’s not really. It’s set in a Soviet prison, one of the prisons where intellectuals were held during the Soviet era. The thing that blew me away about the book is that it’s written from multiple points of view, and it’s a work of huge integrity, but also morally grey. He covers the lives of the prison officers as well as the people who are imprisoned. It’s a book that really tries to grapple with human nature, and why people do the things that they do, and the way that everybody is the main character in their own story, and nobody thinks they’re the villain. It just blew me away as a book.

Do you have a favourite character that you’ve written?

It’s difficult because you have favourites for different reasons. So, Britannica, I don’t think could ever be anything but a secondary character, because she’s quite extreme, and in writing main characters, I tend to prefer to write the likes of Solina or Amara, who are perhaps more compromised, rather than Britannica, who’s incredibly and relentlessly true to herself. So Amara and Solina have been my favourite characters to write, but I also really enjoyed writing Paulinus, the male character. He’s definitely not my favourite, but I found he was quite a challenging character to write in Boudicca’s Daughter. I think I grew to like him the most out of my characters, as in there was a starting point of not liking him very much, and then I did. I feel I understood him better by the end.

What is the best piece of advice that you’ve ever been given?

They all sound like cliches, but they are true. You do have to write what you want to write, without overthinking about the audience. You have to be writing what feels the most true to yourself. So, for instance, I knew that one of Solina’s central relationships in the book was going to be incredibly marmite, and that some people might hate it. But it was an aspect of the life of ancient women that I really wanted to explore in a nuanced way, you know, like how after the conquest of their country, a lot of women had to make some accommodations with the people who colonised them, both in a practical and a deeply personal way. So I think that was very much something I wanted to include in Solina’s story. It’s quite a challenging topic to think about, and I wanted to do it in a way that I felt would try to make sense of the experience of so many women in the ancient world and in history in general. Is the search for happiness, and family, and creating a new life, wrong in those circumstances? Personally, I don’t think it is. You know, we try to find love and family and happiness in whatever way we can, no matter what circumstances we find ourselves in.

Are there three books that define you in a way?

In terms of echoes of what I’ve written from the ancient world, I would say there are particular books whose spirits kind of infuse what I was writing about. So, Ovid’s poem The Art of Love is very much something that infuses Amara’s shenanigans in The Wolf Den with Rufus, so there are kind of deliberate echoes of the poem in that book. Ovid was a Roman poet writing about the power struggle between men and women.
I’d say the sweariness and the colloquial language of Catullus are what I was aiming for in The Wolf Den trilogy with the characters and the way they are around each other. Catullus is a Roman love poet. He was definitely a big influence in how I chose to write that book. I know it’s definitely quite marmite that I wrote it in such a colloquial way, The Wolf Den. Then, with Boudicca’s Daughter, so much of that book felt like a conversation with Tacitus, the Roman historian. The main narrative feeds off his history of that period. It feels like I was kind of in conversation with that source, the things that I chose to change or to pick on, or the way that I interpreted his record of events.

Do you read reviews about your books?

I don’t go on Goodreads because I don’t think those reviews are written for authors; they’re written for other readers about the book. It kind of feels like it’s not my business. I hope people love the book, but if they don’t and that’s what they want to say, then that’s their business, and I don’t particularly want to hear it. I wouldn’t go searching for reader reviews. Getting reviews in the press on the other hand, I’m not sure how people have the strength to not read that, like I’m just too curious. Maybe that’s the journalist in me, I just have to know.

Do you have a favourite genre to read and is it similar to what you write?

I do love historical fiction, which is the genre I write, but I think probably my favourite genre to read for pure pleasure would be fantasy. I think historical fiction and fantasy are quite close in a way, because it’s sort of all world-building.

Boudicca’s Daughter by Elodie Harper is out now

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