If you were born in 1800, there was a 25 percent chance that you would die before your fifth birthday. Popular sports of the day were often bloody: bear- or badger-baiting, cockfighting and, of course, bare-knuckle boxing.

When I was researching British history (for a book idea that ended up being shelved), I came across actual newspaper extracts of the time, in which women challenged one another to fight:

I, Ann Field, of Stoke Newington, ass driver . . . having been affronted by Mrs Stokes, styled the European Championess, do fairly invite her to a trial of her best skill in Boxing, for 10 pounds…

I, Elizabeth Stokes, of the City of London . . . do assure her I shall not tail meeting her for the said sum, and doubt not that the blows I shall present her with will be more difficult to digest than any she ever gave her asses. 

Reading those extracts, I had one of those magical moments that drive me to research history: I knew those women were real, breathing people. I felt them. I almost became them. At a time when ladies were expected to occupy themselves with nothing more than sewing, painting and music, Ann Field and Elizabeth Stokes had been standing in front of a howling crowd, fists raised. They had punched and been punched in return, they had seen their own blood stain the boards of the ring. They’d been as desperate and frightened and savagely elated as any of us would have been, in their place.

And what had happened to these women, to drive them to choose such a different, brutal way of life? These were fights with almost no rules; medical science was often ineffective. They were genuinely risking their lives. The prize of 10 pounds was a huge part of it, of course—it was more than many domestic servants would earn in a year. But there had to be more than that.

I was left to imagine how it must feel to choose between making your living by your fists or lying on your back. 

The newspaper articles of the time suggest that many of these women came from a background of prostitution. So I began there; perhaps boxing felt like the only other option. Beyond that, however, it proved very difficult to find out much about their real, everyday lives. History is mostly recorded by, and about, people from the upper classes. There are facts and figures about mortality rates and a fair bit about the everyday diet of people living in poverty. But whereas there are a fair few surviving diaries of aristocratic women, recording their thoughts and feelings, most of the working class women who took their chances in the ring weren’t even literate. I was left to imagine how it must feel to choose between making your living by your fists or lying on your back. I like to think that if I were in that position I’d make the same choice that my character Ruth does, and step up into the ring.

Another protagonist of The Fair Fight, Charlotte, sprang from those aristocratic diaries. Many of the noblewomen keeping them felt trapped and miserable, imprisoned by the genteel boredom of their day. When I discovered that some ladies did accompany their husbands to watch boxing matches I thought, my god, what must it have been like to step out of your drawing room, bound by the shackles of convention, and watch another woman break them so completely?

In fact there was one “lady of quality,” Lady Barrymore, who was nicknamed “The Boxing Baroness.” She enjoyed watching boxing matches as much as her husband did, and would dress up as a lady boxer and pretend to spar. Reading about her, I could imagine the kind of freedom she must have felt while she was in costume. I wondered how much further she would have liked to go, if she could.

The Fair Fight is intended to be fun to read, and it’s a fiction. Even so, it’s based on real struggles. Every character in The Fair Fight is battling the limitations imposed on them by their class, gender, sexuality or family situation. It’s always been an unfair fight for women, working class people and people outside the heterosexual norm. Some of the characters fight in the ring, and others in drawing rooms and around the dinner table. And every little victory counts. 

Poet Anna Freeman makes her fiction debut with The Fair Fight. A visceral take on the world of female prizefighters in 1800s Bristol, England, the novel has already been optioned for TV by the BBC. Freeman lectures in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a review of The Fair Fight.

What sort of person would choose to be cloistered in the walls of a church, alone, for life? Australian poet Robyn Cadwallader was researching a PhD thesis when she came across the story that inspired her first novel, The Anchoress, the richly told tale of a 13th-century woman who chose to live a circumscribed life in the name of religion. Here, Cadwallader explains how she stumbled upon this remarkable piece of history.

How did I come to write about an anchoress?

It started with a dragon. I had begun research on the life of St. Margaret of Antioch, a virgin martyr who was swallowed by a dragon and bursts from its back, proclaiming herself a hero. The patron saint of women in childbirth, she was one of the most popular saints in medieval England. In the 13th century, this story of female dragon-slaying was bound together with the Ancrene Wisse (Rule for Anchoresses), into a book given to anchoresses.

Anchoress: That was a new word to me; I kept on searching.

Anchoresses were women who chose to be enclosed for life in a stone cell attached to the wall of a church, there to read and pray, committing themselves to Christ in a “living death.” The cells varied in size, but the Ancrene Wisse suggests an anchorhold should have one window to a room for maids and one window to a parlour, where those seeking counsel could come to speak with the anchoress. Both windows would have curtains and the anchoress was told not to look out and not to let others, especially men, look in on her; the only male visitors would be her confessor or the bishop. She would also have a “squint,” a small opening through which she could view the altar to see Mass celebrated, and through which she could receive the consecrated bread.

Anchoresses were women who chose to be enclosed for life in a stone cell attached to the wall of a church, there to read and pray, committing themselves to Christ in a “living death.”

I read all this with fascination and a degree of horror. Sealed in forever? Never to see the world again? How strange these intensely religious women could be, I thought. During the enclosure service, burial rites were read over the anchoress, and some had a grave dug inside the cell to remind them of their living death. Awful, isn’t it? And wrong. That’s what I thought, for a time. Until I began to think about the women themselves, the ones making this choice. Who was I—in my modern, comfortable life, with my opportunities for education and a career—to decide these women were weird or foolish?

photo of a cell and squint at St. Nicholas at Compton, courtesy of Robyn's blog.

The stereotype of the downtrodden medieval woman with no rights or agency is much too simplistic but, for an upper-class woman, marriage or life as a nun were the main paths open to them. It seems understandable that a woman with a strong faith in God, an enquiring mind and an ability to live in seclusion could well make the decision to close herself away.

This living death was the greatest expression of love for God, and anchoresses were honored for their willingness to give up everything in order to suffer with Christ. The status of a village was enhanced where a recluse offered up prayers for her patron and the village, and people often travelled to seek counsel from an anchoress known for her holiness and wisdom.  

Yet life in the Middle Ages was intensely physical, and despite the accent on bodily denial and seclusion, an anchoress would be inevitably drawn into that physicality. Attached to the wall of a church, the cell would be located in the middle of the village or town, and at the center of social life. An anchoress would hear church services, festivals, village meetings, people chatting, fighting, making plans; she would hear the fears, pain, loves and gossip of those who came for counsel.

Intrigued, I just had to go to England to investigate anchorholds, or what little remained of them. I found mostly squints and evidence of the cell’s outline in markings on a church wall. I saw squints cut into church walls; I visited Shere, where documents tell of Christine, a recluse who asked to leave her seclusion; I stood in what is believed to be the chapel of an anchoress at Kings Lynn, and though it is now painted and well lit, I tried to imagine what it would be like to stay there within its four dark walls. Forever. 

I was disturbed and challenged. Gradually, as I pondered, the questions moved from “these women” to “a woman.” Who was she? Why did she choose enclosure? Was she afraid, excited, certain, doubtful? What about her family? And what would this small dark place be like as a home? In my mind, I went inside the cell. The body she sought to deny could paradoxically become even more present; holy as she may be, she was as human and frail as those she prayed for. My central question was always: What was her experience: bodily, emotionally, spiritually, mentally?

I was fascinated by the idea of her confinement: the moment of enclosure, the door nailed shut behind her; the darkness; the small space, seven paces by nine; the claustrophobia; the threat of madness; her strength; her love of God; her perseverance; her experience of her body, the only physical companion she would have. She was no longer a weird idea; she was a woman. Sarah.

I began to discover the novel’s imaginative space, and I got to know my anchoress and her cell. Through all this, I retained one single commitment: to honor, as best I could, the women who made the choice to be enclosed more than seven centuries ago. And maybe even to learn from this 17-year-old girl who had chosen a life so far away from my own.

Author photo by Alan Cadwallader.

For me, the story of Sai Jinhua begins on a summery day in Shanghai. It is the final day of a trip I very much fear will be the last one that I and my husband will take with our two sons, both of whom are poised to leave on journeys that are suddenly, although hardly unexpectedly, becoming their own next chapters.

We are in China—and not in India, Vietnam or Peru, all of which were discussed as alternative destinations. China is my trip, mostly. I’ve lived in Singapore and Taiwan; I’ve studied Mandarin. I’ve always wanted to go to the mainland. The men in my life agreed to indulge me.

On this final day, we are in Shanghai’s Yu Garden overlooking the famous Jiu Qu Bridge that—with its nine zigzag turns—was built to confuse evil spirits trying to cross the lotus pool. I overhear a tour guide talking—talking—talking, and he is a droning irritant until he mentions the 19th-century Chinese courtesan who traveled to Europe as the young concubine-wife of one of China’s first diplomats. I am suddenly interested. He says that she is very famous in China. I know nothing more than this about the person I will come to call “my girl.” I don’t catch her name, or know that she may have been a Chinese heroine in a distant past when China and the West were clumsily, violently getting acquainted—or that some people say she was a traitor, a woman of ill-repute and loose morals who collaborated with the forces of imperialist western invaders.

"What was it like in 1887 for a young woman to leave her home in China and go to a Europe that was strange and disorienting and fabulous?"

Standing there at the edge of the Jiu Qu Bridge and knowing almost nothing about Sai Jinhua, memory leads me to a time and place in my own life when I traveled to the far side of the world, to Singapore, which was and still is a fascinating, multicultural place, a place that is exotic and loud and pungent and delicious—and was also hugely alienating to a young girl from the West. I remember watching life unfold in the streets of Singapore, and in the markets, and in sights, sounds and smells that seeped through the open windows of colonial-era buildings. I remember people everywhere—all with faces not like mine.

Now, all these years later as I hear for the first time about this famous Chinese courtesan, I wonder, what was it like in 1887 for a young woman to leave her home in China and go to a Europe that was strange and disorienting and fabulous—where people all had faces not like hers? So I say to my one-in-a-million husband, if I were going to write a book—which of course I am not because it just is not something I would ever do—this would be the story I would like to tell. And right there by the Jiu Qu Bridge, he turns to me and says, well, why not? Why don’t you try?

These are the first of many improbable things that conspire to turn a tour guide’s fleeting remarks into a novel called The Courtesan. Returning home, I begin to work at learning to write, and to read everything I can find about Jinhua and her era. Chance throws many happy opportunities my way. I join a writer’s group with people who are both talented and supportive of my story. My eldest son moves to Suzhou, China, where I visit him and find, quite by accident, the very house at Number 29 Xuan Qiao Alley, where Sai Jinhua lived with her scholar-diplomat husband. Reading the “bones” of her true story, I find more places in my own story that fit together with hers in fictional ways that are magical to me. For her European odyssey, I decide to place Jinhua and her husband in Vienna, a city where I have spent much time and where I have strong family ties. Researching places for them to live, my mother suggests the Palais Kinsky. It is a place I know well; I studied there for a year—and met my husband there. I later learn that during the early 20th century, the Chinese embassy was actually located in the Kinsky for a number of years.

History drops other tidbits into my lap. Fabulous, true-to-life characters who populated the places Jinhua inhabits in my novel, who might have met her, who have amazing stories of their own: the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who with her fascination for beautiful women would have adored meeting a beautiful, exotic creature from China; Edmund Backhouse, a true eccentric, a brilliant man with profound flaws and more than a touch of evil genius—who lurked in Peking at the time of the Boxer Rebellion and could have been acquainted with Jinhua; Kobelkoff, a man who had enormous physical challenges, who was put on display in Vienna’s Prater for people’s amusement (a common form of popular entertainment at the time)—who clicked perfectly into place as a reminder of Jinhua’s fictional dead father.

Slowly, gradually, Jinhua became a person I knew. She became a person with flaws and vulnerabilities and strengths—and very human relationships. At the same time, the history of her era was fascinating to me, both in its own right and as a context for our modern era. I hope that I have in some small way managed to co-mingle the historically real with what I have imagined and what I myself have experienced in a way that will give readers of The Courtesan a sense of what it was for Sai Jinhua to travel from East to West and back again, and a sense, too, through her eyes, of China’s history with the West.
 

Born in Canada, Alexandra Curry has lived in the United States, Europe and Asia, and her globetrotting days contribute depth to the various settings depicted in The Courtesan, her debut novel. A graduate of Wellesley College, she now lives in Atlanta with her family.

A secretive painter who may not be all he appears and a bored, wealthy socialite are at the center of Amber Brock's hypnotic debut novel, A Fine Imitation. Brock, who teaches British Literature at an Atlanta high school, shares the story behind the book and explains how art shaped the journeys of her characters.

My novel, A Fine Imitation, tells the story of a wealthy beauty, Vera, who comes to realize how suffocating her rarefied world of 1920s Manhattan really is when she falls in love with a mysterious painter and unexpectedly reconnects with an old friend. It’s a tale full of false identities. Some are obvious: the artist, Emil Hallan, is not who he claims to be and has dark, dangerous secrets lurking in his past. Vera, on the other hand, spends most of her life believing she is the woman she wants to be. Hallan’s arrival upends her world and makes her question that certainty, much the way her relationship with her college friend Bea did 10 years earlier. Vera comes to see that she’s been pretending to be the person others in her life (particularly her mother) wanted her to be. As glamorous and glittering as her life is, it’s all surface, all a show. She’s been playing a part, imitating someone else’s style, and the cracks show—her life has been, in effect, a forgery.

In writing A Fine Imitation, my first novel, I fell deep into the art world, researching the Spanish golden age of painting, Vermeer’s work, and the art nouveau style so popular in Vera’s youth. I also studied cases of art forgery, and I found myself considering how many false works were discovered because of the exceptional difficulty of copying another artist’s style. In the very act of attempting another artist’s use of color or shading, these forgers were giving themselves away. To my mind, this hit on a central fact of human nature. When we pretend to be someone we’re not, the truth of who we are tends to “out” us.

When we pretend to be someone we’re not, the truth of who we are tends to “out” us.

These became the twin issues in A Fine Imitation: a deep focus on visual art intertwined with the little forgeries of daily existence, something I think the title expresses beautifully. I think this performative aspect of day-to-day life—the small ways in which we try to meet other people’s expectations, the white lies and fake smiles—is something that everyone feels, and I really wanted to explore that in the novel.  

Researching the novel brought back memories of the first time I felt I really “got” a work of art, Diego de Velazquez’s Las meninas. I didn’t know before then how to appreciate art outside of looking at it in a museum and thinking something along the lines of, “Ooh, that’s pretty” or “I could never do that.” I never understood that a static work of art could tell a dynamic story. In the painting, a court portrait of the Spanish royal family, Velasquez also included himself. It’s both a portrait and a self-portrait, a fascinating riddle of perspective. If the painter is in the painting, whose perspective does the viewer take? And how does that change the narrative? I never fully comprehended how closely related visual art and storytelling were until I encountered Velazquez’s masterwork, how a work of art tells a story, and how point-of-view can change the narrative. That one painting opened a world of characters, adventures and mysteries to me. I relished being able to return to a world that I loved, that of visual art, in writing A Fine Imitation.

Art is in the creation, and as humans, we have an innate desire to create. That act of construction even extends to ourselves, as we fashion the different versions of ourselves that we present to others. A Fine Imitation is about what happens when Vera realizes that the woman she’s pretending to be is a work of fiction. Interestingly, it is in the stories of art that she finds her truth.

Author photo by Nina Parker.

The whole idea behind my novel, All True Not a Lie in It, was a gamble. Once I was hit with the memory of an old National Geographic article about Daniel Boone, I couldn’t stop thinking about him and his story. I was hooked, utterly. But would other people want to read about a long-dead American frontiersman? (And, hang on, would they even know who he was?)

It took a lot of writing and rewriting. And one of the books that influenced me, perhaps surprisingly, was Lolita, whip-smart and shocking. It turns me into a gawper, a gasper—not so much for its horrors as for its own wild gamble. What writer can pull off the tale of an aging, predatory child molester without scattering readers like pigeons at a gunshot?

Nabokov can. His Humbert Humbert is one of literature’s most ghastly and sorry creations, but we find ourselves listening to him, following him across America, even as we recoil from his desires. Loathsome as he is, I will argue for this book every time. So why does Nabokov win? Why do we go along with Humbert into the dark? 

We have Nabokov’s electric prose, of course. But we also have the character’s own words, his own voice: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”

It’s the key. The gamble only succeeds because of it. If we’d had, instead, “His sin, his soul,” the book’s pull would have frayed like old rope. Well, I suppose I have a gambler’s heart, too. I rolled the dice and stepped into the first-person shoes, which I’d always found pinching. I fought it, writing draft after draft in other voices, until I caved. Fine. I, Daniel Boone. Double or nothing.

I walked around until the shoes fit. His voice is not my voice. He’s a rough, charismatic leader and a famous hunter; I’m female, fairly quiet, Canadian and vegetarian. But first person was the only voice for this book. Once I could hear it in my mind, I couldn’t shake it. I hope readers will follow me into Daniel’s shoes—and head—as he moves through the wilderness in search of perfection, a quest that leads to his daughter’s kidnap and his son’s murder. The aftermath is denial, guilt and hard suffering.

My story elides chronology in places, making guesses and filling in gaps for the sake of narrative. But I didn’t need an unreliable narrator—the story had plenty going on already—so I looked at complicated speakers, like Humbert, and how they tell us their stories.

And we want books to create a reality. To reanimate the 1700s, I had to plough up forests of detail and try to use what Daniel and his family would have known in a natural way: the Quaker meeting house of his childhood; the Appalachian wilderness he explored; the homes he and his wife, Rebecca, built; and the Delaware, Shawnee, Cherokee and Black lives that intersected with his. I read several biographies, including Lyman Draper’s The Life of Daniel Boone, a 19th-century rescue of Boone oral history and manuscripts, trying to expose the flavor of 18th-century life. 

But the books that gave me what I most needed were fiction, Peter Carey’s and Hilary Mantel’s. Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang snares Ned Kelly’s wild mind and feeds it to us in pieces, letters and articles. Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, while in third person, give a similar feeling of an access-all-areas pass to someone’s brain. What works in these books is the uncanny sense that we’re listening to the characters while at the same time experiencing what it’s like to be them. We’re inside and outside. For me, this was the trick: We had to be able to see Daniel from both sides at once.

My Daniel Boone is talking to his dead, trying to turn himself inside out and see what he has done, and who he has become. This book is about what is lost, and what remains.

Canadian writer Alix Hawley studied English at Oxford University and now teaches at Okanagan College in British Columbia. All True Not a Lie in It, her debut novel, was longlisted for the Giller Prize. She is currently working on a sequel.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.