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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello, everyone. I'm C.P. leslie, the host of New Books and Historical Fiction, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Maren Halberson about her debut novel, the Bailiff's Wife. If there's one cliche that most people have heard about medieval and early modern women, it's that others expected them to be humble, obedient, and above all, quiet. But if people ever did exactly what they're supposed to do, there would be no room for fiction. We see this clearly in the opener to Halvorson's novel. They could hear her coming. Even as they stood there, minding their own business on the high street, baskets on their arms, children underfoot. They could hear her high pitched, raucous voice, like a knife splitting the air in two. Anyone who came within sight of her was subject to her rant. She rounded the corner, her strides long and fast, her hands outstretched. It was a kind of madness, and they all feared it. The only thing to do was to turn away, flee into a shop, any shop, dragging your children as you went. Her skirts muddied, her red coat faded and frayed, her hair like a nest of weeds pushing its way from underneath her filthy coif. She flew down the street, searching for just one person to return her gaze and Listen to her story. My name is Sarah Kidd. She cried. My husband Nathanael is buried in your graveyard, unmarked. No prayer said over his bones. Murdered here in your village. The fortune he carried with him, coming home to me and our son gone. She reached the drunken Jewett, lying as he always did on the cheese seller's porch. I ask for justice, she implored him, hands out. I ask only that the body be brought up so that I can know it is my Nathanael buried there. I ask only that his murderer be punished. Where can I find justice? And now, please join me in welcoming Marin Halverson. Hello, Marin. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me today.
- [02:57]
C
Hi, Carolyn. I'm really happy to be here.
- [03:00]
B
Please start by telling us a bit about yourself and how you came to write fiction, especially historical fiction.
- [03:05]
C
Yeah, I think writing came to me very, very early. I sometimes think it came to me because I had two sisters who were artists and I had to sort of carve out my own niche of creativity. So I became the writer in the family from a very early age and started writing stories. But somehow it never really was clear to me that I could actually turn that into a career. So when I went off to college, I started out at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. I took writing classes and really enjoyed them and felt I learned a lot from them. But I always saw it as something that I was. Would have to do on my own and not as a primary, primary activity. But soon I became. I became very immersed in history when I started as an undergraduate. And, you know, these things eventually all intersect, but at that time they were very different parts of my life, my writing and my interest in history, the history part of it. I think there is a connection in that. What I loved about history when I started taking college classes was that there was this focus on primary sources on which was very different from, as you know, high school history. That I was really became very involved in reading documents from the past that spoke in the voices of the people of that time. And that became very, very interesting to me. My first college class was a course in Russian medieval history. And we got to read in translation, of course, source materials. And it just opened up a world to me of people who had their own thoughts and emotions and experiences and not totally unlike fiction. History became my substitute for a writing career, I guess, because it was also involved in story and world building and kind of thing. But it seemed to me I had a more obvious trajectory with history. So I went in that direction for. For the bulk of my career. I eventually went into history teaching at the college level in Medieval and Early Modern History and found that to be enormously satisfying. Interesting. It was. I think the field was going through a lot of really exciting changes in that time where there was more focus on the lives of ordinary people and their experiences. And so I really felt that I had become a historian and not a writer. And I sort of left behind the writing for a while. Having a family also complicated things as I was working at my career. But I think there was a. I will say there was a transformative moment in my. Well, maybe about 10, 20 years ago where I finally thought I need to get back to the fiction writing. I felt there was something incomplete in my experience. And so I began taking writing classes again and I began working on writing fiction. And so that brought me to where I am today, where now I totally work on my writing. I'm no longer a history teacher and I can spend my 100% time on writing if I wish. And I have writing groups and I've been writing short stories, essays and fiction for a number of years now. So that's sort of a very long trajectory of my. The beginnings of my writing career.
- [07:10]
B
It's very interesting, though. Thank you for sharing it with us. Even before the passage I read you give a short account of a murder in Hereford, England in 1688. Is that an actual case and how did you discover it?
- [07:23]
C
If so, it is. It's an actual. Well, I shall say that Raj sheets from the 17th century weren't always completely true or accurate. So. And I didn't track this down into any court evidence or documents. So I can't speak to the 100% authenticity of the story, but it was published in a broadsheet in the mid 17th century. And so I took it as a. Even if the story wasn't completely true, I was interested in what it said about the 17th century. And I came across the broadsheet when I was doing research on my dissertation. I completed a doctorate in Medieval and Early Modern History and my dissertation was on Isaac Pennington, the younger, fairly obscure individual who was a Quaker theologian, first generation Quaker. And so I was immersed in research about him and his. His world of the mid 17th century. And I remember that I was in the university library just going through these documents, looking for any supplementary materials that might be helpful to me in. In my understanding of background, understanding of what I was looking at. And I brought my sister along who was visiting me at the time. We both sort of pored over these wonderful document on. On microfilm in the library. And it was actually she came across this particular broadsheet that she thought was interesting just because it was such a extreme story. And so she turned it over to me and I began to look at it with my writer's eyes and not my historian's eyes, really, and thinking, wow, what a great story this is. And the actual document itself is a lot more involved than the novel I ended up writing. I took a little bit of what was in the broadsheet and made that into the novel. But there were a lot of other little sub stories and sidetracks in the actual broadsheet itself that I really didn't have room for in the novel and didn't really suit the story I eventually wanted to tell. But that was just so intriguing to me. And it goes back to my interest in the primary sources that bring history alive and help you understand and picture the past. That's what this broadsheet did for me. It was a very vivid story. And the thing that really stood out for me when I read it was the character of the widow who was looking for. She was looking for a husband. She didn't know if she was a widow yet. She had married her husband in London and then he had gone off to work for a lord on his estate as a bailiff and earned a small. What would be considered a small fortune at that time, while she was home in London with her infant. And she expected him back. She knew the basic route he would be taking, but he never showed up. And so she didn't give up at that point. She had this baby to feed. She had had this life with her husband, whom she loved. And so the broadsheet was really about her, trying to find him and going off. She would send friends off to look for him and she would travel herself to try to find where on this route he had somehow got lost. She actually, at one point, he had left her entirely and gone to Amsterdam. Some friend had sighted, seen him there on some street. She'd get these wild reports about where he might be, but she still kept looking. And that's what really intrigued me about her, is that she was not a lady of means. She was an ordinary working class woman who really didn't have the wealth or anything to really pursue this in any big way. She had to just go out and find, try to find her husband or to send friends. And she kept it up well beyond, I think, the point of reason. But she eventually heard of the story of a discovered skeletal remains of a body in this village north of London. And she recognized the name of the village as a place that her husband would have gone through on his way back. And so that's what generated her arrival in the village and her efforts to bring the body up and to track down the killer, who would conceivably still have the fortune that she needed. And that was the genesis of the crime case. Now, that's the story. And eventually she did see to the conviction of an individual in the village. And they don't really talk about what became of the fortune, but at least the justice was served. And so you have this story in which you have this woman with no friends, no allies. She's really. She's a pain to the people in the villa who really are not interested in her situation. And yet she persists until she finds justice. And I just found that story so captivating and that. That, first of all, that it's a woman leading this and also a woman who has really no wealth or support system behind her. And so that became the genesis of the book.
- [13:35]
B
I'm completely with you on the history part of it. I mean, when I'm. I'm a historian of early modern Europe, too, and when I'm wearing my historian hat, you know, I scrutinize the documents and I make sure they're authentic and all of that kind of thing. But when I'm wearing my novelist hat, I just. I'm looking for dramatic possibilities more than an actual truth. Just the thought that something bizarre could happen and you could write it into a story and imagine what it would be like for the people who are going through it. And I can see that in. In your novel. I mean, you've really translated this case into people who feel real. And speaking of people who feel real, tell us about Sarah Kidd, who is. I mean, you're Sarah Kidd. I'm talking about. Now, how would you describe her?
- [14:19]
C
I think, first of all, it is really interesting to create these characters. And one of the things that's hardest for me as a historian is to let go of precise accuracy. Because I'm writing a work of fiction. I had to keep telling myself I can. I can relax, I can create a story. It doesn't have to be exactly like the broadsheet. So there really is. It is really a different, different experience to create a story like that. And Sarah Kidd is a good example that she. She developed into her own person in this novel. And she certainly has her starting place with the woman in the broadsheet, but she is her own woman, and the way I envisioned her as Someone who was prepared for a certain kind of life in London with her husband, with her family. But that circumstance transformed her into something else. And with that transformation, and I think I allude to it a number of times in the novel, that she leaves behind all sense of propriety and pleasing others, the way women are expected to please others. And she leaves all that behind because she is single mindedly in demanding justice. And so the circumstance of the loss of her husband transforms her from a very ordinary London working class woman into something else altogether, sort of a force of nature. And I really wanted to explore that in relationship to her major ally in the book who is Frances Bright, the local Quaker gentlewoman who is having her own struggles with pleasing others and being authentic to what she needs to do and struggles with that a lot. And she looks at Sarah Kidd and she sees somebody who is kind of monstrous in a way, as a woman in that she rejects all the social niceties. But I think she's sort of envious too that Sarah can leave all that behind and focus on what needs to be done. So I think the relationship between those two women really works because it shows both the extreme nature of what Sarah has to do and also Frances's growth during the course of the novel to try to figure out her own path in helping Sarah or being, you know, an obedient Quaker mother in that community. This holiday discover meaningful gifts for everyone on your list at K. Not sure where to start.
- [17:20]
B
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- [17:22]
C
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- [17:28]
B
This season only at Kay. I do want to get back to the Quakers in a minute, but before we go on to some of the other characters. And I agree with you that the relationship between Sarah and Frances is crucial because they are so different in personality and yet they're facing some of the same challenges. But tell us a bit about Chalfont St James, the village where Sarah goes to look for her husband. What is it like?
- [17:52]
C
This is always what so interests me about this time period too, is the village. You know, we always say it takes a village and we always mean that in the most positive way. But sometimes it takes. A village can have a negative connotation too in that time period. You know, I think it's easy to forget how isolated and separate villages were from each other. And before the trains, before transportation was re revolutionized in Britain, so that folks who came through town were considered pretty unusual, first of all, and initially pretty suspicious. There were a lot of Vagrancy laws and concerns about strangers in communities in the 17th century and before. So I think that's one thing to note about the village. It's very insular and restricted in some ways. I based it on. There's actually two. It's in an area of England in Buckinghamshire that's very. In the Cotswolds. That was very much a Quaker homeland, really, during that period. And so that's one reason why I chose that area. And I needed it to be reasonably close to London, to involve some travel to London. But the village itself is really, in terms of tone, you know, you have this beautiful bucolic setting. The Cotswolds are just like everyone's sort of cartoon of cozy England, but it harbors a lot of fear and anxiety. And, you know, certainly that's something we experience today. We still worry about it in terms of people so focused on the borders and citizenship and things like that. People. We want to know who people are. And in that village, it was just a microcosm of that. And there is, for example, one part in the novel where it goes back in time to Sarah Kidd's husband, Nathaniel, arriving in the village, and he encounters the villagers who pretty much put him on trial because he is a stranger. They want to know who he is and why he's there, and they have suspicions of him for various reasons. And that was lifted directly out of the diary of Thomas Elwood, who was a Quaker of the time period, who talks about how he went into a village and he was basically hauled before the villagers in the middle of the night and. And interrogated for why he was there and what he was doing there. So that's one of the things I wanted to highlight in this novel, is the village itself is a character of what's happening. I will say that I think about mystery novels. The ones I like are ones that have complicated villains and often more than one villain. And it sort of reminds me and you, Carol, in this note, you know. You know, the great man theory of history, where, you know, history really change in history comes down to one individual who makes things happen, who sort of represents the era or whatever and is a transformative agent. And a lot of mystery novels are like that, where it's one villain, one person who is really the cause of the problem. And I always struggle with that because I think in reality, villainy is very complicated, and it's not just down to one. And so, for whatever series of reasons the village has a role to play in what happens to Nathaniel and what happens to Sarah Kidd. And that's why I want to emphasize you have this really charming little village with green pastures and this little stream going through, et cetera, but it harbors some real dark, dark things.
- [22:07]
B
Yes, it does. And I should mention that this is, in fact, a classic murder mystery with multiple suspects. And it's really well done, too. I didn't actually even realize it. Early on. I thought it was going to be a pure historical novel. And then as it developed, I started to realize that, no, there was a murder mystery hidden in there and that it's figuring out who was actually responsible. I have to admit, you took me by surprise. I read a lot of mystery novels, and usually I can, at this point, because I write novels myself, I can figure out sometimes just based on the structure, who is the likely culprit. But you took me by surprise, and I love being taken by surprise when I'm reading a book.
- [22:53]
C
Well, I think that when I, you know, I think of myself most of mostly as a historical novelist, not a mystery writer. I admire mystery writers because I think there is so much challenge in creating a good mystery that you're both surprised but not surprised by the ending. You know, you don't want to be so totally surprised that none of the novel makes sense, but you want to be. You don't want to already know who the culprit is early on. And so. But. But with my writing, I think I think of myself more as a historical novelist because I'm primarily interested in world building, and the mystery is a way of. Of understanding that world. And so it's, I guess, a tool of the. Of the novel. In the end, they both are. You know, it's very strong with the historical and the mystery component. But I think the goal of the book is to try to understand the people in it.
- [24:02]
B
So one of the elements which is actually contributing to the uncertainty people are feeling in the village is the restoration of Charles ii, which occurs a year before the story opens. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it changes the entire situation for these characters?
- [24:22]
C
Yeah, that was a choice of mine. The original broadsheet, of course, was in a different. Was earlier. Took place earlier than this. But I just picked this date because I wanted to have a world that was a little bit unsettled, that was. Had experienced a deep trauma, really, with the English Civil War. And part of the issue coming back to Vagrants was that during the English Civil War, you have these various religious sects that were growing up in that time period, and also political groups, radical political Groups such as the Levelers and then you have the ranchers and these various groups of radicals who traveled around the country and as proselytizers and Quakers would be included in this and were unsettling. I mean they were just strangers who came into town and were making unique and radical demands on the society as it existed. And so what had been long, long held traditions and customs and beliefs were all being challenged in that. Now by the time Charles comes back, I think England is suffering from radical fatigue which is one reason he's invited back from his, as he said, from his travels. The country had been through a lot of chaos and difficulty and there was this movement towards return to a version of what had been before with the Stuart kings. And so Charles came back and at the same time they still had to deal with these radicals who were still floating around the country including the rapid growth of the Quaker movement in this period. And Charles himself actively persecuted the Quakers and saw them as subversive and potentially dangerous to his regime. And so that's part of the background of the novel is the problem what to do about these Quakers who were advocating for a kind of radical social revolution in England. And so while I think most citizens in that time period were sort of in recovery from what had been a very, very difficult last many, many years of revolution, you still have these Quakers advocating for more revolution as they move about the countryside. Now they were non violent, they were not organized in any kind of military way. They weren't interested in that. They were, they were actually very, they were a people of peace. But their message was subversive and radical and it was at its heart that everyone is the same before God and that we live our life here on earth much as we will live it afterwards in that we're all the same. There is no deference to one's betters. There is no special oath to loyalty oath to the state or to a monarch that we are all equal and that we should all be honored as such. And so that was especially in this time. Excuse me. In this time the, the existence of the Quakers was seen as especially threatening because everybody sort of wanted to get back to quote, unquote normal and they were still out there rabble rousing.
- [28:16]
B
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that you went back to the Quakers because I was going to ask about them next. They were a research interest of yours as, as part of your novel. Is that why you decided to include them?
- [28:29]
C
Yeah, when I was, when I, my, my research was on Isaac Pennington the Younger and I Will say while he's very admirable as a theologian, he's not the most fascinating person. I actually became more interested in his wife, Mary Pennington, who wrote her own memoir about her life and other kinds of writings that she did about her. She had visions and a sort of an interesting spirituality. And even though I worked and I wrote I think a pretty good dissertation on Isaac I increasingly became intrigued by Mary Pennington. And these Penningtons were by the way, of course related to William Penn. Their daughter married William Penn. So it was a very close knit little world of Quakers in. And so Mary Pennington interested me and I based the character of Frances Bright on Mary Pennington. And so that's where the Quakers come into it. Part of the reason too I brought in Quakerism is. And I suppose I could have also done this with any Puritan aspect of religion in that one of the interesting things about Quakerism is its introspection that Quakers thought and wrote, they were seekers and they often spent a lot of time writing about their feelings, about their connection to God, about their lives and a lot of really pretty rigorous self examination and they do a lot of self examination in their writings. You can look at Quaker writings and they're just filled with spiritual seeking and introspection. So I, and I thought that's perfect for Frances because I want her to be somebody who is really struggling with her place in the world with her relationship with her daughters, with her relationship to God. And this leaves her open to a relationship with Sarah Kidd. So that's one of the big reasons why I thought the Quakers would be. Would fit very naturally into this novel. And actually in the original broadsheet there is a Quaker character, somebody who testifies and brings evidence about the case. So it was part of the original story too.
- [31:01]
B
One other character I want to ask you about before we close is Arthur Burnskill who is the local vicar. And could you say a little bit about him? He's also affected by the Restoration in his own way.
- [31:16]
C
Yeah, I really have a lot of affection for Arthur Brunskill. For me he's somebody who was born a little too late. He was raised or taught at Cambridge in the radical period of the Cromwellian regime between the two. Charles and really was. Had absorbed the radical Calvinism. Now Calvinism had been. And I guess I shouldn't go into a lot of Calvinism here because that would be a whole day's worth of talking in and of itself had been a very big traditional part of the English church. But there had been a radical aspect to it during the time of the English Civil War. And Arthur Brunskill has been raised in that. And so when he comes to this village, again, it's. But he's an outsider, just like, in a way, Francis is for being a Quaker, and definitely Sarah is. Arthur's an outsider because the villagers are not interested in his form of Christianity. And ultimately he finds he's not very interested in them. He is really, I think, an academic, and he's not built for pastoral care. And so he really struggles with his role in the village, trying to be a good priest to the people, trying to do his duty, but it's. It's difficult for him. And again, being an outsider, being somebody who has struggled with his place in the village, makes him more susceptible to alliance with Sarah Kidd and with Francis. And so that's. That's what he does. But I would say, Fran, Arthur Renskill is somebody who, if I imagine his life after this novel, it will not be as a minister in the church. I think he's going to have to leave that behind.
- [33:18]
B
What would you like readers to take away from the Bailiff's Wife?
- [33:21]
C
Well, I think, first of all that anybody reading it, I hope that they see it as just a good story and that. And that's really my goal as a writer, but I think also to just sort of. The reason I wrote this was really thinking about the way in which we all are seekers, that we are all trying to negotiate and navigate our lives in a world that sometimes doesn't share all of our values and to make connection with others and how difficult that can really be, as hard as we try. And so that's what I think. It's a novel of human connection, really unlikely friends, unlikely allies, people caring for each other, making mistakes, trying to correct those mistakes, being flawed, but trying to live good lives. And that's really what I was trying to make the story about.
- [34:26]
B
And what if you. If you're writing full time, you must already have another project underway.
- [34:30]
C
Yeah. I'm working now on a novel about Margaret of Anjou, who was Queen of England during the 15th century, early 15th century, during the wars of the Roses. And there's lots out there about Margaret, because even dating back to Shakespeare and the play of Henry vi, she was married to Henry vi, and there have been various treatments of her over the years, but it became really, really interested in her as somebody who had a tragic life, somebody who was sort of, again, like Sarah Kidd, rose to the challenge, faced with circumstance that sort of threw her in an entirely different direction from that she had led from her life earlier and that she just had the adventure of her life. So I reimagined her life. So it is a creative biography, I guess, of Margaret of Anjou living through the treacherous world of the wars the Roses. And I'm about. I'm almost complete with the first draft.
- [35:48]
B
Wow. Congratulations. I look forward to finding out more about it. Thank you so much for spending your time with us today, Mara, and I've enjoyed talking with you.
- [35:56]
C
You. I've enjoyed talking with you too, Carol, and it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [36:01]
B
And thank you for listening to our podcast once again. I am C.P. leslie, the host of New Books and Historical Fiction, a podcast channel on the New Books Network, and today I've been talking with Maren Halvorson about the Bailiff's Wife. Find out more about her and her book@marenhalvorson.com like us on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok ewbooks network. You can find out more about me and my books@cplesi.com where I blog about the interviews and in general discuss history, historical fiction and the rapidly changing publishing industry. Goodbye until my next conversation about historical fiction on the New Books Network.