1860: four lives intertwine. Chrissy Hogarth is arrested in St Dunstan's church while a blizzard blows outside. Lokim – a gentle herdsman – is attacked by a lion in central Africa. James Stewart – a medical student – tutors the children of the great David Livingstone, while in Dundee Mina Stephen – daughter of a rich shipbuilder – nurses a growing social conscience. Before they meet, Chrissy must remember a traumatic event and Lokim will suffer the privations of a terrible journey. James must face the realities of life and death on the Zambezi and Mina learns a dark secret concealed within her privileged family home.
Thank you Tony for giving me the opportunity to write a guest
blog on your website. It’s generous of you to support other authors as you do.
I’d like to take the opportunity to explain why I wrote Dappled Light in the way that I did.
I’d no intention of writing historical fiction until I
discovered a batch of letters from the 1860s in an ancestor’s wicker box. My two previous books - the first a romance,
the second a crime-based dissection of middle-class life - had been
contemporary novels.
Reading my family letters, I found a compelling story of allegations
and intrigue. My grandfather x3 – a wealthy Scottish shipbuilder called
Alexander Stephen – had been blackmailed by one of his sons. I learned more about
Alexander, and discovered that his youngest daughter Mina was married at just
18. She then travelled to rural Southern Africa with her husband, a
medical missionary called James Stewart who was rumoured to have had an affair
with Mary Livingstone, wife of the explorer. At a time when slavery was still
commonplace, James Stewart ran a settlement called Lovedale with one
over-arching rule; no distinction between individuals was allowed on the basis
of ‘race, colour or sect’.
I wanted to tell the Stewarts’ remarkable story, but how best
to approach it? There are so many different ways to present historical fiction,
from largely sticking to actual events - as Robert Harris does in his book about
Dreyfus, An Officer and a Gentleman –
to the creation of whimsical fancy, like Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhatten.
Whatever path I chose, I knew that I’d have to treat the
subject sensitively. Because of its worst aspects, there has been a corporate
rejection of British Imperialism so that it feels almost subversive to affirm
that anything good ever came of Victorian expeditions to ‘the colonies’. But James
Stewart did do good. He helped put an
end to slavery by opening up Lake Malawi to legitimate trade, he founded
the Victoria hospital in Alice, and he campaigned for the creation of the
University of Fort
Hare, where Nelson Mandela was later educated.
I tried using the voice of a narrator to provide historical
perspective, but the story lacked immediacy.
I started again, this time choosing the present tense. I wrote from interleaved viewpoints, using
contemporary letters and journals to explore the personalities
of James and Mina and the challenges they overcame. The published version
of Dappled Light has two additional characters – a seamstress called Chrissy
Hogarth and a herdsman called Lokim
whose gentle pastoral existence is
abruptly interrupted when he is sold into slavery.
Lokim is fictional, but his sufferings
are based on accounts from David Livingstone’s writings and also on the
autobiography of Frederick Douglass, a black American abolitionist who
influenced Abraham Lincoln. An African viewpoint gives some balance to the book,
and by contrasting the appalling nature of the slave trade in the interior of
the continent with the harmonious inter-racial relationships at Lovedale, I’ve illustrated how progressive the Stewarts
were in their thinking.
James Stewart is a man
who has largely disappeared from history, but he deserves to be remembered. He
was charming, funny and kind. He was
also gifted and hard-working; he was a botanist, a cartographer, an engineer, a
linguist, and a teacher as well as a doctor and minister of the Church. I wanted Dappled
Light to celebrate his life in a fact-based
novel that is compelling and easy to
follow, and I hope I’ve succeeded in
this aim.
Jessica Markwell
# # #
About the Author
Jessica Markwell was born in Ghana, then left Africa and moved to England as a child. She knew she wanted to be a writer when at ten she was asked to read out her story about a witch who turned her three companions into frogspawn. Having graduated from Manchester University with a degree in Medieval Studies, Jessica became a nurse at St George’s Hospital in South London, then trained as a midwife in Winchester. She travelled to Uganda as an aid worker with Save the Children Fund, and went to Australia. Back in Kent, Jessica became a health visitor and married the doctor who had treated her when I returned from Africa, ill with hepatitis. She took an MA in fiction writing at the University of Middlesex and now lives in the countryside of Powys, Mid Wales. Find out more at Jessica's website jessicamarkwell.com and find her on Twitter @JessicaMarkwel1
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