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Many years ago I was given a ticket for all three parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI. Here was the brilliantly lit cockpit of English history, the Wars of the Roses, when private armies were the stuff of governing, and love, desire, marriage and children were political coin.

Here too was a woman, a tall and notoriously beautiful widow. What did it feel like to be her, Elizabeth Woodville? To have a husband killed in battle, years of poverty, a king at her feet, a job as Queen in a court full of enemies? She bore a dozen children and twice fled for her life. How was her brother Anthony, surrogate father to Edward, Prince of Wales, betrayed into losing him? And why, when Elizabeth had her youngest son safe, did she give him up?

But I couldn’t make the story that would become A Secret Alchemy work. There were facts and arguments galore about the Princes in the Tower, but it was like trying to animate puppets that history books handed me. And much that shaped Elizabeth’s life in that glamorous, violent age took place elsewhere. So, I brooded about how storytelling works, and put the novel aside.

‘Write about what you know,’ they say, but with my first novel, The Mathematics of Love I came to say, ‘Write about what you can make me believe you know.’ Whether it was the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, or the scent of a king’s skin, it needed to be as real, in touch and smell and feeling, as if I were writing about my own world. By then I knew my second book for Headline Review would be Elizabeth’s, and Anthony’s too, because he was everywhere and I couldn’t resist him: clever, thoughtful, a famous knight yet religious ascetic, enmeshed in the politics of his day.

My fiction is always about how the past exists in the present. Una Pryor, the modern-day lead of A Secret Alchemy, knows about contemporary love, about surrogate fathers and what families do to themselves. She knows about unresolvable loss too, and her own life is changed by what she comes to understand of Anthony and Elizabeth. One thing Una doesn’t know – as I don’t – is what happened to the Princes, but Elizabeth learns this in the end because I couldn’t bear to leave her not knowing.

What drives me to write a novel is the need to find out whether I can write it, so it was never an easy ride, even before the The Mathematics of Love was published. After publication, it became a roller-coaster. Reviews, interviews, festivals and prize shortlists are exciting and scary, and meeting readers is best of all, but when a reviewer calls your first book ‘quite extraordinarily accomplished,’ it’s hard to have faith in the still raw, rough, very unaccomplished draft of your second. But I always had faith in the stories I wanted to tell in A Secret Alchemy, ever since that day in the theatre many years ago.

Further reading...

A Secret Alchemy
by Emma Darwin
Headline Review
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