Former lecturer and historical fiction novelist Leonora Nattrass talks to us about her latest publication 'The Bells of Westminster' and how the famous poet William Blake inspired its story.
Leonora Nattrass lectured on the literature and politics of the 18th century for almost ten years before running away to Cornwall, where she now lives in a seventeenth-century house with seventeenth-century draughts and knits the wool of her small flock of Ryeland sheep into complicated jumpers.
Her first novel, Black Drop, was a Times Book of the Year and her second, Blue Water, was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month, shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger and longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Her third, Scarlet Town was a Telegraph book of the year and shortlisted for the CWA historical dagger. Leonora's latest novel The Bells of Westminster was published by Viper in October. You can find The Bells of Westminster and Leonora's other titles on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
I can’t remember the first book I read, nor when I decided I was going to be an author, but I do remember pretending to write before I even knew any letters: filling notebooks with mysterious squiggles. It only took me another half a century to achieve that early dream!
Strangely, I do have a vivid memory of my first encounter with William Blake, whose story inspired The Bells of Westminster. We weren’t the sort of family who owned many books (we were library people) but I found a copy of his Songs of Innocence and Experience on a dusty shelf at home, at the age of six or seven, and was amazed and fascinated by it. I didn’t understand much, but I knew it was strange, eerie and impressive.
I rediscovered the romantic poets as an undergraduate and did an MA in Romantic Literature at the University of York. There I came across the ‘Revolution Debate’: the fierce intellectual tussle in 1790s England over the meaning and value of the French Revolution. I became interested by the politics of the period, and one of my tutors suggested I read Cobbett. Cobbett virtually invented the popular press in England and the Times called him a ‘Fourth Estate in the politics of the country.’ Funny, excoriating and outrageous by turns, he became my specialist subject in a short-lived academic career.
I now live in a very isolated seventeenth-century farmhouse in the depths of rural Cornwall. My view is mainly of sheep and chickens and the occasional postman trundling down our farm track.
After my short-lived academic career, I went back to writing fiction, as I’d done ever since childhood. I had two unsuccessful attempts at selling quirky literary novels to agents and publishers, but luckily, I did get some encouragement too.
It was my husband who suggested I ‘write what I know’: in this case the reaction to the French Revolution in England. Once I realised this was a good setting for a thriller and murder mystery, Black Drop came together!
After three novels featuring Laurence Jago, it was both exciting and terrifying to go about creating a whole new fictional world. I wasn’t sure where to start, but I remembered my husband’s advice the last time and began researching the romantic poets I’d always loved.
In a Victorian biography of William Blake, I found the story that is now the opening scene of Bells of Westminster. As a seventeen-year-old apprentice to a London engraver, the talented artist Blake was sent to Westminster Abbey to make sketches of the tombs for a forthcoming book. While he was there, the Society of Antiquaries came to the abbey on a mission to open the medieval tomb of Edward I, Hammer of the Scots. Blake was called over and asked to sketch the proceedings. I fell head over heels in love with the idea immediately!
It seemed a perfect storm of wonderfully evocative things: mystical and mysterious Blake, the glory of Westminster Abbey, and the idea of bewigged Georgian antiquarian researchers taking on the unscientific past with the new, eighteenth-century rationality.
The antiquaries themselves wrote an account of the opening, and I spent a good deal of time researching the Bayeux Tapestry, along with ancient and unlikely histories of England involving Troy and giants, and the love lives of monarchs!
I’ve just written ‘the end’ of my next book, which is another standalone and something rather different. Where the narrator of Bells of Westminster is the bright, witty daughter of the Dean of Westminster Abbey, my new novel features a rather down-trodden widowed clockmaker named Tobias Swann, who is plunged into the middle of an ‘alternative history’ invasion of Britain by Napoleon Bonaparte!
If you enjoy Bells of Westminster, you’ll love Anthony Trollope’s Barchester series, which was such an inspiration to me in writing the book.
