FFWD Weekly
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Wordfest by Harry Vandervlist Passions, writers repeatedly teach us, have their costs – and Emma Donoghue's passion for libraries and archives almost cost you, dear reader, this interview. All was arranged. I had read Slammerkin, Donoghue's vividly bleak new anti-romance about Mary Saunders, a wayward young seamstress and murderer in 18th century Wales. I'd spoken to her publisher and set a time and place to call. I'd researched the 31-year-old Irish writer whom I first learned about in 1998, when her book We Are Michael Field appeared. It was Donoghue's flair for turning up intriguing stories in the archive that led to that revealing look at two women known to their friends as "the Michaels," who published poetry under their male pseudonym and shared a life together under the very proper noses of late-Victorian Londoners. Then, just before the appointed time, I discover a phone message: she's in the library, could I call one of the payphones there? I could, if payphones accepted incoming calls. Alas, they do not. It seemed Donoghue had vanished into the archives that she discovered as a Ph.D. student, and which now nourish her work as a novelist. Luckily the phone rings just as I give up and head for the door. Now I can ask whether it isn't terribly grim, this story of a young girl on the streets of 18th century London, who's prostituted and nearly starved before she flees to Monmouth, where she sews dresses and finally murders her boss with a cleaver? And what are readers to make of Mary, who's based upon a real character Donoghue discovered by chance while browsing in the British Library? Certainly she suffers at the hands of a brutal society, but can readers sympathize with her? Isn't she quite frankly just too much of a pain? Donoghue admits Mary is no victim-hero. "When I was writing the book I thought no one's going to be able to bear this sullen teenager. But I was quite inspired by Jane Austen's language when she was writing Emma, where she said ‘I am writing a heroine who know one but myself will much like.'" Convinced that you shouldn't try and second guess publishers or readers, Donoghue simply enjoyed the act of creating a character who "had all of this perversity and impatience and passionate desire, all mixed up in a teenage package." Mary Saunders freed Donoghue to imagine someone utterly different from herself. Donoghue says she enjoyed the chance to play with those possibilities of being alone and desperate – and picking up a cleaver. "I really enjoyed writing all the sordid scenes and the murder scenes. I got an enormous vicarious kick out of those." The clothes are a kick, too. As anyone who's seen the film Dangerous Liaisons knows, clothing in the 18th century was not just theatre – it conferred real power. Through Mary's work as a seamstress and her fascination with fabric and colour, Donoghue wants to show just how potent dress could be. "It is not just ‘ooh, I fancy how I look in a red ribbon,'" she explains. In writing about the various styles of dress, including the "slammerkin" of the title, Donoghue wanted to emphasize their slightly mystical side. "You know, the image of glamour and sensuality – but also the reality of them, that they were like real estate or stocks and shares. They were money in a very solid form." The story shows that without that kind of power, a little bit of spirit could get a young girl in mortal trouble, especially long before the term "social safety net" existed. Now working on a contemporary novel, Donoghue's still finding inspiration through research, thus putting her Ph.D. to very enjoyable use. "I've never had a real job, it's great," she laughs. "I tend to taunt my academic friends by saying if I'm ever starving I might look for an academic job." Or there's always sewing.

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