From the British Library to Loose Women
An international bestseller, Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin started off as a short story. Here, the author outlines how it grew into a worldwide sensation.
One day in the mid 1990s I was sitting in the British Library — the old one, the famous domed Reading Room — killing time as I waited for some essay I needed to cite in my PhD on eighteenth-century fiction. (The delivery system was famously inefficient; request slips had to be filled out in triplicate with blunt pencils, and often went astray.) So I was flicking through the nearest volume on the reference shelves — an encyclopedia of Welsh women’s history — and came across a brief entry on a bloody crime committed in Monmouth (a border town, technically part of England at the time) in 1763. The motive was given as ‘fine clothes.’
This phrase stuck in my head. I liked a bit of silk or velvet as much — probably more — than the next girl, but enough to shed blood? Probably not, but in 1763 there was nothing trivial about a woman’s clothes; they were not just her image but her reputation, her fortune, her stocks and shares. Daniel Defoe’s pragmatic heroine Moll Flanders regularly tots up her dresses and linens, though she does not wax lyrical about them. I began to imagine a girl for whom clothes were not just important for survival, but the one form of transcendental beauty she knew. All I could find out about this woman was that her name was Mary Saunders, and that she was 16 when she entered the historical record and immediately dropped out of it again.
Slammerkin was meant to be a short story. Sketching it out in my early days in Canada (where I settled in 1998), I realized that it would take the length of a novel to explain what happened that day in 1763, or at least what I — preoccupied with this almost anonymous, mutinous girl who longed for ‘fine clothes’ — imagined might have happened. The paradox about researching historical fiction is that often, the less you find in terms of hard facts, the more you are free to invent.
My steadfast agent, Caroline Davidson, could not stifle her sigh when I told her what I was working on. In the mid 1990s historical fiction was still an unfashionable genre, especially if it had such an unsexy setting as the eighteenth-century Welsh borders. Caroline warned me gently that if a historical novel was not set during the French Revolution or the American Civil War, it would be very hard to sell. I had my own worries; a heroine whom I knew no one but I would like (to paraphrase Jane Austen’s rueful comment on Emma Woodhouse, the character for whom my father named me), and an ominous sense that this story was such a downer, no one would care to hear it. Especially in the middle of the novel, when I felt as ground down by the minutiae of pre-mechanized housework as any scullery maid, I was convinced that the story would never reach print. But I pressed on, because writing is a compulsion as irrational as any other (cigarettes spring to mind), and also because I felt an obligation to Mary Saunders. When these obscure ghosts come knocking at your door, you cannot comfort yourself that somebody else will save them from oblivion.
And sure enough, Slammerkin was hard to sell; on both sides of the Atlantic, the publishers of my three previous books of fiction turned it down, one editor warning me that it would damage my career. One of the many rejection letters pointed out that ‘our readers prefer rags to riches, not rags to more rags.’ I am recalling these details not in a spirit of smugness — well, not solely smugness, anyway — but to remind myself that no one really knows what readers will like, so there is no point aiming to please them. As I occasionally advise would-be novelists, write the stories you feel compelled to write and cross your fingers.
Slammerkin was meant to be called The Complaint of the Crows, a lugubrious title that would have doomed it to the remainder outlets a week after publication. It was Lennie Goodings at Virago who not only bought and improved the novel (‘add more London and more whoring’) but insisted I change the title to something about clothes. I remember her ringing me in glee one night to announce that one of the words I had given her — ‘slammerkin,’ meaning a loose dress — turned out to have a second meaning: a loose woman.
Much to my surprise, it turned out that rather a lot of readers would care about the ragged Mary Saunders, especially in America, where Ann Patty at Harcourt somehow magicked Slammerkin into a bestseller. You can imagine my pleasure now that HarperCollins Canada is giving the book the accolade of ‘modern classic’ in my second homeland. But it says less about my writing than about the ability of readers to make a leap of imagination and slip under the skin of a scowling teenager who never expected anyone to give a damn about her at all.
