Dear Reader,
As you know, A Wild & True Relation will be published on February 2nd 2023. The team at Virago are putting together a brilliant plan for launches and events across the country. After fourteen years of dreaming, researching, walking through woods and moors, along the coast and riverbanks, reading and writing, I am eagerly counting down the days until this ship can set sail.
For now, though, I thought I might share with you a little about how the book first came into being. (IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS FOR SOME OF THE FIRST CHAPTER, PLUS A DISCUSSION OF THEMES, STOP READING HERE.)
The characters of Tom, Grace and Molly came to me on a beach in Devon. This beach, in fact.
I was with my family visiting what Charles Dickens called the most beautiful of English counties, where we would soon move from London. I was born in our home in London, and leaving was heart-wrenching. But I rapidly fell in love with Devon’s turquoise water, ruffled sands, bursting hedgerows, sunken lanes and black moorland. When I want to get to know a place, I research its history, and I was soon drawn to Devon’s history of smuggling.
Around that time, Penguin brought out a series of ten fantastic books they labelled Boys’ Own Adventures, all with great covers (you can see some inspiration here for the cover of A Wild & True Relation).
I grew up loving adventure stories, always feeling drawn to stories that society at that time said were meant for boys, and which always featured male protagonists. (My love of James Bond is perhaps the clearest example!) I wondered what a girl’s adventure might look like, what adventures women have been denied throughout history, and what adventures have been erased from the record.
In the first chapter of A Wild & True Relation, smuggling captain Tom West comes ashore during the Great Storm of 1703. He believes his lover, Grace, has betrayed him to the Revenue. Following a confrontation, Tom leaves with Grace’s daughter, Molly, to raise as a boy aboard his ship. I originally wrote this chapter as a self-contained short story entirely in eighteenth century Devonshire dialect, using a dictionary I’d found in a second-hand shop on that family holiday. I took the story to class – I was in the second year of my degree in Literature with Creative Writing. The main feedback was that no one understood a word. Shocker. I re-wrote the story in modern English, but couldn’t let the characters rest. Returning to Devon, I began to wonder what happens next after Tom leaves Grace’s cottage with Molly. How would the story end? It only took a little over a decade for me to work it out…
I’ve always been fascinated by the archetype of the Byronic hero. In the character of Tom, I wanted to explore what we celebrate in male heroes, the cost of violence, and how far our love can stretch. Grace dreamt of being a writer, and through her diary the story looks back to the past. In the fictive now, Molly grows up to worship Tom, and the narrative asks what it will take for her to become a hero on her own terms. In the future, real historical figures who visited or lived in Devon hear the story of Tom, Grace and Molly, and pass it down the centuries along with the mystery of Grace’s diary. Figures like Celia Fiennes and Daniel Defoe, Hester Thrale and Dr Johnson, George Eliot and Charlies Dickens.
Virginia Woolf said we look back through our mothers if we are women, and that for a woman to become a writer, we must first know the foremothers who gave birth to the novel and carried it through the ages. Researching figures like Hester Thrale and George Eliot gave me a new and empowering sense of connection to a heritage of women’s writing. The history of women writers is largely hidden, from the early historical novelists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to Bluestocking salons and Victorian pseudonyms, and anonymous critics and Modernist rebels. I hope to celebrate these pioneers in A Wild & True Relation, without whom I wouldn’t be writing today.
You’ll hear more from me soon about events that will stretch across 2023. I hope our paths will cross and we can talk swashbuckling adventures…
From Kim, With Love x
Looking forward to Wild and True early next year. Waterstones only seem to be able to pre order the hardback in the unsigned format. Are you doing any signed copies. Also any idea when Bond 2 will be released? Is it later on in the summer? Jules
I very much look forward to reading this. especially as there was no shortage of smugglers in this part of Kent. There should be a book launch here in Faversham.