By James Taylor

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Sara Sheridan’s new novel, The Secrets of Blythswood Square, is a window into a Glasgow often neglected in its historical fiction, equally rich in research and deliciousness of scandal. The violent, masculine identity of the city is well known but in Sheridan’s hands, Glasgow becomes a constellation of art history, the fight for civil rights and the narratives of women who shape these contours of change.

It’s a refreshing and riveting take on the city, and GRB was lucky enough to chat with its author about taking on Glasgow, and the dazzling stories of its people.

GRB: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat to us Sara. Just to start, can you share a little of the premise for your new novel, The Secrets of Blythswood Square? How did you discover the Glasgow inspiration for the novel after your previous work, The Fair Botanists, and how did you find writing it after the astounding success Botanists enjoyed?

Sara Sheridan (SS): I was really nervous about it, because I didn’t want to do exactly the same again, which is, of course, what everyone wants you to do when you’ve written something that they love.

That said, it is in the same ballpark. Things I loved writing in The Fair Botanists were the sense of it being a romp, that joyousness and fun, but also that slightly gritty bit of history that was running underneath, and using real life characters and things that were happening.

So for me, when I came to look at what I would like to write in Glasgow, because I really wanted to set a book in Glasgow, 1846 was an interesting year. In this year, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and slavery campaigner came to the city.

I’m also a longtime fan of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, who are pioneering early photographers; and I’m very interested in body positivity and the female gaze, and how you represent yourself as a person when you’re being photographed.

I used to run a perfume company with my daughter [REEK]; we did photoshoots, we open cast our shoots. It happens more now, but at the time, that was quite new. Our youngest model was, I think, seventeen, and our oldest model was eighty-five. We didn’t retouch our images. We didn’t stick to the sort of blonde, white, twenty-year old models that a lot of perfume campaigns have.

So I was interested at that time in styling; how, and what, does a photograph represent, and how do you communicate visually. These early photographs are interesting, because they are coming very much from portraiture. David Octavius Hill was a painter. These are all the nascent things that were going on in my head at the time, and I knew there were many of the photographs by Adamson and Hill at the National Portrait Gallery.

That’s where it came from really – so if I was to place interesting people in this mix, who would they be? I thought, it’s going to be about a Glasgow heiress. Glasgow has a number of interesting heiresses over the Victorian period, that’s actually a little unusual.

I wanted to do something with the church, because Glasgow is a Cathedral City, it’s founded on the Church, it was a much more religious city than other places in Scotland at the time. Frederick Douglass, when he came, he picked a fight with the Free Kirk – how, then, do I bring these people together? What would make a young female photographer talk to a Glasgow heiress? What would they have in common? Then I just started to play around with it.

GRB: Many of your novels – from On Starlit Seas to The Secret Mandarin – take their initial inspiration from real life historical narratives and individuals, and this certainly applies to Blythswood also. Ellory has distinct shades of the Victorian Glaswegian photographer May Borthwick – how tightly do you stick to historical material and research before imagination and fiction come along? Do they work together smoothly in tandem, or correlate? One might even argue that the entire process of historical retrieval and archive work is itself, innately, a work of fiction, something composed by a point of view, a personality.

SS: When I’d finished writing the book, I’d forgotten what was real!  Because you have to imaginatively, actively engage with the story so closely, it’s actually quite difficult to remember which bit was the real bit, where that line was. There are large portions of our history that are missing in action; lots of queer history, lots of black history, any kind of minority history really, there’s lots of it that’s just not there.

I love writing into those gaps, because those things definitely existed! You’re like, okay, if this is missing, how do we diversify our view of where we come from? That’s really what it’s about for me, because we are taught in all kinds of ways actually, that we come from this one line of historical dates, this one narrative arrangement, such as everyone was happy when the King [George IV] came to Edinburgh, which isn’t true.

And of course, nobody in any historical period agrees on everything. I suppose my mission is to shine light into dark corners. To look at where we come from and say, what’s missing, and how can I revive that?

I do it in nonfiction as well, like in Where Are the Women?^[1] I still can’t remember which statues are really there. Probably, because in my head, they all are. That was a sort of nonfiction, but one only a novelist could write, because as an actual historian, if you’re an academic, you do have to stick absolutely with the incomplete record of what it was like. It’s something I’m well placed to do; I’d love to do more Where Are the Women’s – it’s something that’s on my mind.

GRB: Do you think the historical novelist has a duty to represent history in a particular way, one that emphasises narratives and individuals that have been hitherto ignored? There isn’t one Scottish history, or one conception of the narrative – it’s multiple histories that have been threaded and braided together from so many perspectives – how do you represent that authentically?

SS: If we think about the threads of our history what we end up with is tartan! That’s why I have a big ensemble cast, so that readers can get into all these different little stories. And what I try to do is pair the characters – quite instinctively, I write some that run with the history.

For example, in The Fair Botanists, Elizabeth and her maid are doing more or less what you think an upper-class woman who’s fallen on hard times would do, and her maid, as well, is the way you might expect. That’s the warp, if you like.

Then for the woof, I pick other characters that work against the history, and they’re not doing what you might imagine. So, Belle and her maid, Nellie, in The Fair Botanists. That gives you both views, that allows you to widen your conception of history. You’re held somewhere you already know, because you’ve read Jane Austen, and you’ve seen these things. But you’re also putting your arms round this other history, that was definitely there.

One in five women in Edinburgh in that period, were working in the sex trade. There were a lot of women at the bottom of that pile, and then there’s Belle, who’s an upper class courtesan – there were very few of those, actually. It’s not that it didn’t exist, it’s just not really been written about.

After The Fair Botanists came out, Kate Foster, in her novel The Maiden also wrote about a historical, Edinburgh sex worker. So I hope that minor taboo is crumbling. I suppose if I have a mission, it’s to make people feel that where they came from is somewhere important, somewhere interesting, that they have forebears.

If you are Queer, if you are a woman – you feel quite often that woman never achieved anything and lived in the shadows, yet we have amazing foremothers, but few people talk about them. I think if you understand where you come from, it gives you a lot of confidence, it allows you to go forward in a totally different way. And for readers, that’s what I’d like to do. That’s my mission.

GRB: I particularly loved the Queerness present in the character of Jeremiah in Blythswood, and how much he rang true to life both in the 1840s and in the present day as a Queer man. You used him as a way of exploring the Victorian Queer experience in Scottish history, something not often approached as boldly in fiction – what prompted you to explore this (often neglected) area of Scotland’s story?

SS: Jeremiah is a glorious character!  He just turned up – I was at the end of chapter nine or ten, I can’t remember, but I remember thinking, I think I need someone from the theatre [. . . ] Oh, who’s this guy? It was just like that [laughs]. I’d obviously been cultivating him at the back of my brain.

I’d commemorated some Queer, historical real-life figures in Where Are the Women? They were difficult to find. Then in The Fair Botanists, Belle, as a Georgian woman, was sex positive, and in my head she’s also bisexual, but there was no storyline for that [in  the book]. In the next one, I’ll be able to explore it more. Also, there are some gay characters in my book Secret of the Sands.

So, a few characters dotted about had these little histories but Jeremiah is my first foray into a fully formed Queer character. He is a Highlander, you have to remember, and the narrative for Highlanders, like that of gay men perhaps, is that they were miserable and repressed. The conventional ‘Highland’ story is that they got kicked out of the crofts, they came down to Glasgow, they lived in poverty, and they were miserable as well. So Jeremiah has this double whammy – but he’s making it big. You need to flip the narrative sometimes to create a complete world.

GRB: A story that shows the joy and charm in our history, particularly the ones in which tragedy or oppression is the primary motif, is just as important to recognise, from whatever background you might be from, I think. Jeremiah certainly symbolises that!

SS: And that’s great! There is joy out there, and we do come from a lot of joyful places. I think we forget that, yes, there was a hard time and yes, people have had terrible things that happened to them – but there was also pleasure, and fun, and joy. It’s just balancing that up.

I think in Scotland, quite often, we feel guilty about our history. There’s no question these tragic things happened. But we also invented a load of shit! Edinburgh is mapped as an Enlightenment city, but Glasgow was huge in the Enlightenment, and important in the Enlightenment too.

I think that’s also about the built environment [gestures out of the window at central Glasgow], here we are, on a main avenue and in Edinburgh, none of the buildings on this road would have been put up. Probably the [Victorian] building we’re sitting in, wouldn’t have been built cos the Georgian one before it, wouldn’t have been demolished.

Glasgow remakes itself, and remakes itself again. It doesn’t think of itself as a Georgian city, but there are rows and rows of amazing Georgian houses here. This street was residential! Robert Burns walked up and down the streets here.

But Edinburgh nabs that, and we don’t recognise that history in Glasgow. I want Glasgow to claim it – there is music here, there’s poetry here. There are hugely successful businesses, yes, but also creatives, engineers and science. The city comes from that just as much as it comes from deprivation and poverty.

GRB: Your previous novel, The Fair Botanists, was set in Victorian Edinburgh, and we’ve now moved west to Glasgow in Blythswood, a city you describe as ‘treating its history differently in every way’. Can you talk a little about the main differences you see there being in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and how this informed Blythswood? Did you have to augment your writing style, research or structuring to accommodate these contrasts?

SS: I think I did this with The Fair Botanists as well, because I lived in Edinburgh when I wrote it – what does Edinburgh think of itself? And how can we look at that again, with a different lens?

Coming to Glasgow and doing the research for this, I thought, what does Glasgow actually think it is? And what is missing from the way that people are perceiving themselves in their city? How can I broaden that understanding of this complexity, like that tartan we were talking about at the beginning – how can you read that blanket? That’s very much walking the streets. Because you’re talking about doing research in archives, and I have mounds of notes, reams of notes from old accounts of Glasgow.

But I also love artefacts, because artefacts let you connect very directly to the way that people actually lived. So a watch, or a cloak or the paper people used to curl their hair. I spent a bit of time in museums, looking at visual images, paintings and photographs, and asking; what’s that bed made of? Where is that? Why is that guy out in the street at 10 o’clock at night, eating oysters? What’s that about? I love the richness of that. That’s what I want the story to represent.

I want a time machine. I want you to walk into that book, whatever it is, and you’re back there and you can smell the street – what do you hear? What do you smell? How does it feel to wear that bodice or that top hat, or whatever it might be? That takes you back to how your great, great, granddad lived, and that’s what’s really important.

Things like Acts of Parliament, they’re important to a different kind of history but that’s not where we really come from. Where we come from is running down the street at night with people coming after you, or swimming in the sea because you live in a croft, or eating bananas for the first time. Any of that.

GRB: I love how the novel is written in the present tense, emphasising the immediacy, the vitality, of the historical moment. It’s a historical novel for the modern time – what can history teach us, in the present moment, particularly those histories which have been so long neglected? Do you think they can direct us in a certain way – with any examples from Blythswood, perhaps? Blythswood has a very modern sensibility, and really speaks to a lot of the conversations we are having now.

SS: Yes, you can see where things are coming from in this novel. It’s a really interesting period, because you’re moving from the Georgian into the Victorian, and the Georgians are actually quite open-minded –  the Victorians are not like that at all, they’re much more moralistic. You’re on the cusp here, because Victoria is on the throne, but it’s right at the beginning of her reign. Everyone who is alive and is an adult at this point is basically Georgian, or still has very Georgian sensibilities.

When I think about things like the female gaze, there aren’t that many female photographers early on, because it is very expensive to get a camera. There was the female photographer May Borthwick who had a studio in Glasgow, and she got into terrible trouble for under charging compared to male photographers, but she’s the only one that I could find, and we don’t have any of her images.

GRB: Do you think they’re in an archive somewhere still, waiting for rediscovery?

SS: They could be, because people don’t sign photographs – Ellory signs her photographs in the book, but in reality most don’t. What you see, in the 1850s, are some posh women starting to get their hands on a camera one way or another. They’re suddenly taking photographs of these intimate spaces, their lives – dressing rooms, bedrooms, the inside of the private rooms of these big Victorian houses. They’re taking photographs of themselves in their nighties. It’s interesting to see what women are shooting, and then to see what men are shooting – very different things. So, the nascent female gaze is absolutely there.

Then we go through this period in the Victorian era where the generalised culture is massively misogynistic, and actually much more oppressive than where things had come from, and then we come out the other side into the 20th century. One of the things that’s interesting about this, is that we think of history, or human rights, as getting better and better and better and better. But history comes in waves.

GRB: Look at figures from history like Ewan Forbes-Semple, a Scottish trans man, and the relative, to now, neutrality his transness was discussed with. It’s easy to assume history as a linear progression to some kind of great enlightenment, but in some cases, folk of the past were more liberal than we are now. Historical novels always have their foot in the contemporary in this way, you could argue, these conversations have always been happening.

SS: Absolutely. We feel like we’re in a period of, what is going to happen next? But actually, it’s all happened before, you have that sense of a continuum. And I think that’s quite affirming really, isn’t it? I suppose with reference to the female gaze and body positivity, we’ve had quite an assault on body positivity, because of social media, fad diets, various bits and pieces. It’s quite nice to be able to take the long view and think of it as a blip.

GRB: Can you expand a little on what the female gaze might mean, as a term and experience, in The Secrets of Blythswood Square? It’s central to the novel’s functioning, both externally and within the character’s lives, as photographers and artists. What does it mean for you to centralise the female gaze in Scottish historical writing? As we might guess from your radical non-fiction work, Where are the Women?, it’s a process of recovery, retrieval, and memorialisation. The way we look at someone can be radical in itself [. . .]

SS: As an author, I suppose, with The Fair Botanists, I definitely went in thinking I wanted to be super sex positive – and for the next book [Blythswood Square], I wanted to be super body positive.

Although there were constraints on the way that women were supposed to look, there were fewer than now, because there were fewer possibilities; you can get botox or your lips plumped now, but people couldn’t do that then. The ideal woman’s body was actually a relatively healthy, normal body, compared to how we perceive the ideal now.

A sculptor I was chatting to told me this [with reference to women’s body hair], in the Georgian era, they had marble goddesses, and that was when it became that you shouldn’t have hair. It shows how important visual images are to people feel about their own bodies.

I started writing with the idea that I was going to be body positive, and then in addition, allow these women to be more than just a body. I think sometimes in historical fiction, we don’t allow women to be more than a body. For example, the character of plain Jane Ramsay [in Blythswood] is very much that way. She’s like Kate Moss, the supermodel – she looks unremarkable. Then she gets in front of the camera and lights up the whole studio. But in the book she doesn’t want that for herself. And she’s allowed not to want that. It’s very much about consent and autonomy.

The West of Scotland is better at that than the East, I think. Glasgow women are amazing, you know? [laughs]. These women knew what they wanted, and they expressed it. Charlotte [another character in Blythswood] has been brought up in the Free Kirk, and she thinks she has to be a good girl, so her story in the book is learning to find her voice. Representing women in that nuanced way was a pleasure to write.

GRB: If you had to choose a favourite figure from Scottish women’s history, who would you choose, and why? How powerfully do you experience these historical figures as instructive or guiding in your own work?

SS: I have a long list. So Lorna Moon, who wrote amazing short stories in the 1920s and then emigrated to America, where she became a screenwriter in early Hollywood and had an affair with Cecil B. DeMille’s brother – she is the best short story writer I’ve ever read. It’s her economy with words, you understand why she became a screenwriter. So certainly, Lorna is an important one for me.

Some of the Jacobite women were great. They’ve got that ‘I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want’ attitude, some of them went against their husbands in this, they were really quite amazing.

And then there are some early mediaeval women – class trumps gender, in the mediaeval. So if you are a mediaeval woman, you can defend a castle if there are no blokes around. Black Agnes down in Dunbar defended Dunbar Castle against the English, and there’s a number of these mediaeval Scottish women who were really kickass and also ran what were effectively early hospitals and social care programmes.

I find it interesting, that they were allowed to do that within a society that we think of as being repressive and misogynistic. But because class trumps gender during the mediaeval, they get in there and say, right, I’m gonna fix this, and I love that.

Amongst twentieth century women, we have so many pioneers, I find it exciting. You have Sophia Jex-Blake, who was an early doctor, and Dr Elsie Inglis, who founded the Scottish women’s hospitals. And then there’s some real wildcards in Glasgow’s history. Actually, there’s a woman called Bebe Brun, a stunt woman who went to Hollywood. She did stunts for Hitchcock, but was also Marlene Dietrich’s leg double. So apparently Marlene was raging, because she thought her legs were okay – the madness of it.

I go into schools, and I try to talk about at least one hundred women in an hour, and that’s difficult. But when you’re going in, and you’re talking to sixteen year old girls who think there were no Scottish women, and if there were Scottish women, they were staying home and crocheting. It’s really important to say actually, no, you come from something amazing, and that means you can do amazing things, go out and do them right now.

In terms of writing, I suppose Mary Brunton is key for me. She was an Edinburgh writer, contemporaneous with Jane Austen. She eloped with a minister from Orkney – who also was her brother’s tutor – in a rowboat, and came down to the big city. He’s in The Fair Botanists!

He became a Moderator of the Church of Scotland, she wrote these two and a half novels, which are like gritty Jane Austen. I love Mary Brunton, I love her story. And I mourn a little that we lose so many of these women, to the archive, but also to childbirth, to poor medical care for women, or just to society –  like Susan Ferrier, another writer in this period, who just couldn’t bear the attention. She thought it was unlady-like so she stopped writing. All of this is in my head, all of the time.

GRB: Ellory and Charlotte, as the two female protagonists of Blythswood, cement their reputation and financial security (or sometimes, instability) through the medium of photography. Could you tell us more about the role of art-making as a method of liberation or even equilibrium for women of the Victorian period, and how that manifests in Blythswood? How common were stories and personalities in the period like that of Charlotte, Ellory, and Jane, would you say? Are there perhaps more stories like those of Ellory or Charlotte waiting in the archives, now forgotten, waiting to be rediscovered?

SS: Without any question. I mean, creatively, there are a lot of female painters. There was one female painter called Christina Robertson – she was from Scotland, and she became a painter at the Russian Royal Court. In fact, she’s in the book; she sends back a picture, and they won’t hang it because they think it’s scandalous – but it’s not. I can show you some really shocking bits of furniture from the Russian Royal Court. It was much more liberal over there, or perhaps visually more liberal.

There is that sense of women finding something for them that is a trade, a release, but also a way of expressing themselves. It’s not always picked up of course – Margaret Macdonald whose husband was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was overlooked for a long time. But he knew, of course. He said she had genius, and he only had talent. Margaret is the one who came up with what we think of as the Mackintosh rose.  

Anyway, one of the great things about The Fair Botanists was uncovering the stories of women who got into botany, because it was more difficult to get into chemistry, for example. But a lot of women could get into botany because you were allowed to illustrate, you were allowed to propagate, these were socially acceptable. I loved mining the seam of women who created amazing botanic illustrations in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They made a living. Like I’ve made a living, I suppose. I think, in a sense, it’s still the case for female creatives, isn’t it – and here I am! [laughs].

GRB: Sara, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with the GRB today.

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About the author

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^[1] Sheridan, Sara 2019. Where Are the Women?: A Guide to an Imagined Scotland (Edinburgh: Historic Environment Scotland)