Q & A with Hope Adams (Adèle Geras) on her new novel DANGEROUS WOMEN

"I regard patchwork as a wonderful metaphor for life as well as a beautiful craft and (sometimes) art form ..."

Hope Adams is  the pseudonym  of one Adèle Geras of this parish. Here she  answers questions  about her new novel from Celia Rees and Linda Newbery.

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Celia: Dangerous Women is based on a true story. How much did that effect your telling? What fictional elements did you decide to add and why?

Hope: I tried very hard to stick to the known facts about the real voyage, though I took the liberty of adding a crime and a ticking clock to keep readers gripped by the story. The real voyage was a very peaceful and uneventful one on the whole. That would never do for a novel!

Linda: It's no spoiler to say that the novel begins with a knifing, the key event of the story which we keep circling round. How did you decide on the structure - Kezia's viewpoints alternating with 'Clara's' and others, and the back-and-forth of the time scheme? 

H: It took very many editorial interventions and shiftings around of great slabs of narrative before we fixed on an order. I always had a back and forth structure and an order which I thought would be fine but there were others involved who made it even better! Both my UK and my USA editor worked on it together, which was most efficient but I did have to do a bit of juggling of scenes, etc. The time scheme had to be very carefully worked out. I slightly changed the real timing of the love affair to suit my plot. Putting the actual knifing right at the start came quite late on, but I hope it works. 

(the US edition)

C: You have a mix of real and fictional characters. Which were real people, which made up? Why did you feel it necessary to add these particular characters?

Only four of my characters are real: Kezia Hayter, Charles Ferguson, James Donovan and the Reverend Davies. I put them in because I didn’t see any reason to leave them out. Charles especially is very important to the plot and together they provided a ready-made panel of judges.

L: You said that the voyage of the Rajah is very well documented. This must have been helpful, but were there any points at which you felt hampered by the facts? 

H: I altered the timings of certain things as I’ve said above, but otherwise, I have taken the liberty of adding a crime but hope I may be excused for that as I’m writing a novel. I also decided not to use any of the real women’s names. 

C: Each of the chapters begins with a piece of sewing. Are these fabrics from the Rajah Quilt and how did you select which piece for which chapter?

H: I was lucky enough to be helped enormously by my friend Carolyn Ferguson, who’d been given sight of every single fabric used in the real quilt (which was actually a coverlet, not a quilt!) She showed me photos of the fabric and I chose them in a rather random way. If I could describe them adequately, they were picked. A lot of fabrics fell by the wayside when it was decided only to have them at the top of the THEN passages.

C: How and when did you have the idea for Dangerous Women?

H: I’ve been wanting to write about the Rajah Quilt ever since I saw it in the V&A museum in 2009 in an exhibition called QUILTS. I started writing it properly in 2017.

L: Was it daunting to set your novel entirely on a 19th Century sailing ship? Did you do any practical research for that? 

H: I went to see the Cutty Sark, and asked some questions of some nice people at the Royal Museum in Greenwich but otherwise I didn’t do a tremendous amount of research. Carolyn (see above) has written a paper or two about the real Rajah Quilt and those were tremendously useful. 

I was worried that one setting on board ship might be boring, but the flashbacks to characters’ lives make for a bit of variety, I hope. 

C: Was the novel always going to be called Dangerous Women? Did you try out different titles and why did you settle on this one?

H: This novel went through very many titles. It’s been called Great Waters, The Work of their Hands, Miss Hayter’s Company, and so on. Then it was decided that CONVICTION would be a good name. I never liked it, mainly because Denise Mina had a novel of the same name, which appeared last year. It was only when Reese Witherspoon chose Mina’s book for her book club in the USA that my American editor said: ‘We can’t have two books called the same thing so close together, as no book club will ever choose it.” She came up with Dangerous Women which I love and which is perfect for the novel. Whether a book club will choose it now is unknown but meanwhile I’ve got a very good title, I think. 

L: You said that the voyage of the Rajah is very well documented. This must have been helpful, but were there any points at which you felt hampered by the facts? 

H: I altered the timings of certain things as I’ve said above, but otherwise, I have taken the liberty of adding a crime but hope I may be excused for that as I’m writing a novel. I also decided not to use any of the real women’s names. 

C: As writers, we invest a lot of ourselves in the books we write: our particular interests, passions and obsessions. What part (or parts) of Dangerous Women are things dear to Hope Adams/Adèle Geras?

H: I have loved and been interested in patchwork all my adult life. One of the first books I wrote for children was called Apricots at Midnight and that was about an old lady telling stories based on the patches in a quilt. I regard patchwork as a wonderful metaphor for life as well as a beautiful craft and (sometimes) art form. I love the history of patchwork which is a very ancient way of preserving memories and using and reusing what you’ve got to hand.

L: I like the way you've shown Kezia struggling to be listened to and taken seriously by the senior men on the Rajah. She, obviously, was a real person -are any of the other women based on real people? And what sort of futures would the women have had in Van Diemen's Land? 

H: No, all the other women are products entirely of my imagination. Even my Kezia is more of a feminist than she would have been, I think, in real life. She was a very devout and pious young woman.

As for the convict women and what became of them, I think many  might have been employed as domestic servants or worked in the new farms, workshops etc that were being set up in the 19th century. I tried to show that for many, it would perhaps have been a better life than the one they had at home.

L: Do you see Hope Adams as a different personality from Adèle Geras? (I think we once talked about her having a different style of dress!) Is her writing different from Adele Geras’s and where do you see her going?

H: Not really, alas. I did toy with the notion of different clothes but that came to nothing. Hope is exactly like Adèle in her writing style, I think, though readers will be the best judges of that. I changed nothing in my writing process. And she (Hope) will be starting on another historical novel very soon…watch this space.

Dangerous Women is published by Michael Joseph.