Mary Sharratt

BIO

Mary Sharratt’s first novel, SUMMIT AVENUE, was a Book Sense selection. She has taught at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and has given workshops around the country on the subject of women and fairy tales. She lives in Lancashire, England.

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AUTHOR TALK

June 2006

In this interview, Eleanor Herman --- author of SEX WITH THE QUEEN --- spoke with Mary Sharratt, who has penned the historical fiction novels SUMMIT AVENUE, THE REAL MINERVA, and most recently, THE VANISHING POINT. Sharratt explains the initial inspiration behind her latest work and discusses her fascination with the hidden history of women. She also details some of the religious and societal constraints placed on females in the 17th century, and provides insight into how people today can learn from their past struggles and achievements.

Eleanor Herman: Your new book, THE VANISHING POINT, and your previous books, SUMMIT AVENUE and THE REAL MINERVA, are historical novels centered on the lives of women. Why are you so fascinated with women of the past?

Mary Sharratt: How can we hope to understand our lives as women in the present day if we don't understand our history --- the whole foundation of where we're coming from? But women's history is such a tricky thing. The late, great Mary Lee Settle wrote, "Recorded history is wrong. It's wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it." To a large extent, women have been written out of history. Trying to uncover their lives involves a lot of detective work and reading between the lines. My goal, from my first novel onward, has been using historical fiction as a tool to give voice to the voiceless.

THE VANISHING POINT was inspired by a visit to Philadelphia many years ago. On the tourist trail, I stumbled on a tiny row house where two 18th-century seamstresses once lived and plied their trade. I felt immediately drawn into their world. Even in that era, when nearly every factor of the dominant religion and economy herded women into marriage and domesticity, some women still succeeded in carving out independent, masterless lives, ruled by neither father nor husband. I wrote THE VANISHING POINT as a way of trying to uncover these two seamstresses' hidden history.

EH: What made you decide to set THE VANISHING POINT in 17th-century Maryland?

MS: One of the most intriguing periods of social transformation was the English Civil War and the English Revolution, which underlay it. For several decades in the 17th century, the world was turned upside down. Groups like the Ranters, Seekers, Diggers, and Levellers demanded an end of feudal lords. The newly founded Quaker religion offered a vision of gender and racial equality, a world without slavery or war, in which people bowed to God alone and not to their lords or kings. Of these utopian groups, only the Quakers endured, but not without persecution. Many fled to the American colonies. What tugged at my curiosity was the possibility that the idealism of the English Revolution somehow survived into the Restoration in the minds of ordinary people who were not willing to forsake their ideals and bow down to the new order. What would happen to a late 17th-century woman who was determined to carve out her own destiny and who demanded the same liberties, both social and sexual, as a man? This was how my heroine, May Power's character was conceived.

As a setting I was particularly attracted to the Chesapeake because it presents such a startlingly different image of early America than the straight-laced New England Puritan model most of us learned about in school. Instead of close-knit New England villages, you had far flung plantations mimicking a wilderness version of English feudalism. The gentleman landowner had nearly absolute power over his family, indentured servants, and slaves. Yet it was paradoxically a very perilous place for a landowner to be: isolated in the back country, where, in some cases, blacks far outnumbered whites. I became intrigued with this potential for mutiny. The slave trade brought malaria and yellow fever to the region. English settlers, having no natural immunity to these diseases, died in droves, leaving countless children to be raised by stepparents and servants. How did people in the Chesapeake live their lives, knowing how brutal and transient their existence was?

This research made it all the more poignant for my character Hannah, who remained in England to take care of her aging father while her beloved sister May sailed off to Maryland to wed a young planter. I thought about how these two sisters would long for each other and how difficult any communication would be until Hannah was free to sail to America and join her sister. But would she find May in the same condition in which she had last seen her? Or would she be in for a brutal shock?

EH: Your character May's unbridled sexuality plays a major role in THE VANISHING POINT. What did you discover about sex in the 17th century?

MS: People in the 17th century were much more frank about sexuality than people in the 19th century or even the early 20th century. Unlike the Victorians, people in the 17th century not only believed in the existence of female orgasm, but learned physicians thought that it absolutely essential for a woman to climax in order to conceive a baby. Thus, if a man wanted a family, it behooved him to make sure that his wife enjoyed herself in bed.

While living in Germany in the 1990s, I studied naturopathic medicine and learned about the natural remedies women would have used in this era to control their fertility. Honey is spermicidal. Queen Anne's lace seeds, when swallowed daily, hinder conception. There are also numerous abortifacient herbs, such as pennyroyal, which Elizabeth Pepys mentions in her diary. (Dear reader, please don't try these at home!)

Of course, the dark side of 17th-century sexuality was the terrible double standard. Whereas New England Puritan society at least attempted to enforce the same moral code on both men and women, in the Chesapeake, free men could do largely what they wanted, while adulteresses and unmarried women who bore bastards were punished by whipping and public humiliation. If a woman had sexual relations with an African slave and bore a child as a result, she and the child were forced to become slaves.

Yet despite these constraints, some women succeeded in freely exercising their sexuality outside marriage. The frequent jokes about cuckolds in Restoration comedies give us a picture of upper-class women enjoying adulterous romps while using their marital status as a safety net for any resulting pregnancies.

EH: What lessons have you learned from studying women's history?  Are there any insights that we can use today?

MS: I think one of the biggest misconceptions people have is that women progressively attained more rights and freedom with each century. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I interviewed historical mystery writer, Paul Doherty, for The Historical Novels Review, he pointed out that European women in the 12th century had more rights than their 19th-century counterparts. Until the 15th century, there were female physicians across Europe, many of them highly respected, but by the 17th century, the profession was forbidden to women by law. My heroine, Hannah, trained in the physician's arts by her father, must practice in secret.

Similarly, the rights we take for granted today, such as voting and access to higher education, didn't come for nothing. Previous generations of women had to fight for them and if we don't keep up the good fight, we could lose our rights, just as women in previous centuries did.

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