Ruth Warburton
About Author
Ruth Warburton grew up on the south coast of England in Lewes; a small town with a long history. After leaving Lewes she studied English at the University of Manchester, and there developed a fascination with Old English and Middle English texts.
While researching A WITCH IN WINTER she found herself returning to them, in particular BEOWULF and LE MORTE D'ARTHUR, and seeds from these mixed with ancient Mesopotamian demons, Voodoo spells, Tudor superstitions and 15th century witch-hunting guides, to create the Winter Trilogy.
Ruth is now a publicist for adult fiction at Random House and lives in North London.
Author link
Interview
WITCH FINDER
HODDER CHILDREN'S BOOKS
JANUARY 2014
Witch Finder is a finely-tuned, atmospheric story that weaves elements of gothic and fantasy into an historical fiction setting of Victorian London. In the world Warburton has created, powerful witches rub shoulders with politicians and industry leaders; their influence is felt in every aspect of London life.
Few ordinary people are comfortable with the witches' powers and some are actively engaged in ridding the city of witches. Luke, a young blacksmith whose parents were murdered by witches, agrees to kill a teenage witch in order to enter a 'brotherhood' of witch hunters. However, he has little idea of what he has taken on and when he gets to know his young victim, his task becomes that much harder.
Ruth Warburton talked to ReadingZone about her new series.
Q: As well as writing, you work as a publicist for a publishing house. How do you combine the two?
A: I am able to job share my publicity role which means I can write for a few days every week. The person I job share with is a visual artist so she when she's not in the office, she's painting.
Publicity is basically doing what you can to get a book noticed, for free, so things like setting up author interviews, events at literary festivals, getting books reviewed and authors onto radio etc, so we do as much to shout about our books as possible. My work is mainly office-based although I do go to a few events, mostly at festivals.
I do read a lot as a publicist but I try not to let what I read influence what I write there's copyright to worry about, as much as anything else. But I think my writing is more influenced by what I read during my English degree; the plot of my first series is loosely based on Malory's Morte D'Arthur. Witch Finders is more of a nod to Victorian Gothic melodrama, books like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
Working in the publishing industry does make you aware of how good things have to be to succeed. It's tough to get things out there.
Q: Like Witch Finder, your debut series the Winter Trilogy explored a world in which witchcraft was a powerful force. What appeals to you about introducing these 'fantasy' elements into your real world settings?
A: I think the reason witches are so satisfying to write about is because they are such a part of our consciousness, there have always been stories about witches and possession, and people especially women with special powers. Look at figures like Morgan Le Fay in Morte D'Arthur, or Baba Yaga.
I'm also interested in how people make the choice between good and bad; you can do the right thing but for the wrong reason. When you're writing about young adults, it's a time when you have more autonomy in your life and when you start to make your own decisions after having everything decided for you. You have to decide which subjects to study, where you will live, who you will fall in love with you get closer and closer to making all decisions yourself.
So writing about witches is a way to explore issues of power and autonomy in many different walks of life.
Q: Why did you choose to set your novel in London?
A: When I wrote the Winter Trilogy, I was inspired by where I grew up but for these books I wanted to do something about London, which is where I live now. It is such a fascinating place and has an amazing history. I wanted to do something historical and I love doing research so I decided to read about London's history and to immerse myself in that. Our images of Victorian England are shaped by Victorian London and so much literature is based in London.
I love Spitalfields and the East End because it's one of the places that shows most clearly how London has changed and developed over the years. There is the London Wall where you can visibly see the old Roman walls of London, the Medieval buildings that are still standing, and St Paul's which defined London's skyline for so many years. And there are still impoverished areas where the old slums used to be and yet they have the City right next door with these amazing sky scrapers so you can see London's past and future side by side.
Q: You anchor your story to the Victorian world through trades of the time, like blacksmithery and industrial match making. Why did you choose these industries?
A: I wanted Luke to be a blacksmith because what he is about is something archaic and doomed. By 1880, blacksmithery won't be a daily trade for that much longer.
I decided to make the Knyvet family's fortune based on making matches because one of the defining struggles of the East End was the exploitation of workers by the wealthy and the match factories were a good example of this. The workers' suffering was so visible with facial deformities because of the phosphorous they worked with. The punitive conditions also meant that workers were heavily fined if they were late or off sick.
What happened slightly later than the book's setting is that the match girls went on strike. It was a great example of the early unionization of a group of young women - who had no power - but who took on enormously powerful families. No one was interested in their ongoing struggle, but they went to Parliament, got journalists involved to describe what their lives were like, and created a great public awareness campaign. They won their campaign, which no one had expected, and within 20 years the use of white phosphorus to make matches was banned.
Q: Was it tempting to give your heroine, Rosa, more power in order to appeal to modern readers?
A: When you're writing about Victorian times for young adults its tempting to bring in 'girl power' but if you're being historically faithful, you need to remember that women had a terrible time, they were very constrained and that was generally accepted by women as well as men.
There were a few women trying to change things but they tended to be older and wealthy, but for a 15 year old girl, you did what your parents told you to do. The fact that Rosa has magical powers in my story gives her more options and that makes it more interesting to write about her. She has power to change the world.
There's a lot about corsets in my story because corsets were such a physical metaphor for how women were treated at the time and there was a huge debate then about whether corsets were desirable or harmful. My book is all about a woman being constricted into a role she doesn't want to be in and the corset was a great image for this. Also, until the marriage laws changed things, any property that a woman owned or gained passed to her husband. But all this was beginning to change and today, women are a separate legal entity thanks to the battles fought by women campaigners in the 1880's and 1890's.
If you're looking at modern women's campaigns, you're looking at issues such as forced marriage and female genital mutilation that's probably the biggest ongoing atrocity. In the UK there should also be equal numbers of female and male MP's and equal numbers of women on executive boards - but I don't know how you go about achieving that.
Q: You have a few interesting bad characters in your books - do you have a favourite?
A: My favourite bad character out of all my books is Bran in the Winter trilogy; he's not really bad but he enjoys being horrible. I enjoy writing characters that can't be pigeon-holed into being 'bad' or 'good'.
Take John Leadingham in this story; I enjoyed writing him because he makes a terrible decision but for him, it's the right decision. What he's proposing is terrible - the slaughter of innocent people - but for him it's for the morally right reason and he's persuaded a lot of people to go along with him.
Q: How many books are you planning to write about Witch Finders?
A: I have just planned two books at the moment. Book two starts where book one finishes; Luke and Rosa are on the run and they have everyone on their tails, so it's called Witch Hunt. All my books tend to have quite unfinished endings. I love endings that leave you with some way to go in your imagination so Witch Hunt may not end with everything tied up neatly.
Q: If you could step back into the past, would you like the idea of living in the Victorian era?
A: I think the Victorian age would have been an absolutely terrible time to be a woman! If I had to live in the past, I think I would have preferred to live as a Tudor matriarch. That was quite a good time to be a woman, as long as you didn't get sick! Or I think I'd have enjoyed life in a monastery. But now is probably the best of the pick for women.
Q: How would you treat yourself?
A: I have very little time to write, I only write when my children are at school, so I write between 9am and 2.45pm, and I write one book a year. So to have some time for writing would be great!
A WITCH IN WINTER
HODDER CHILDREN'S BOOKS
JANUARY 2012
author Ruth Warburton talks about magic, romance and writing in her debut title, A Witch in Winter (ages 12+).
Anna's life falls apart when she and her dad move to a tumble-down house in the country. Then she meets Seth, casts a spell, and discovers a strange power that brings unwanted attention.... Will the village and its people escape the forces she has unleashed?
Q: This is your first published novel. Did you always want to be an author?
A: I always wrote but didn't really think about writing to be published, I have always liked making up stories though and they gradually got longer until I could make them into a book. I started working in publishing because I wanted to work in books and once I was in the industry, I realised how competitive it is - there is a lot of talent out there.
Q: Why did you write a romantic novel?
A: I started to explore the idea of romance after listening to a radio programme about writing romance. The main conundrum is how you keep the hero and heroine apart, otherwise they'd just fall into each other's arms and that would be that. For me, the thing keeping two people apart would be not knowing how the other one felt about you, which I remember asking in my teenage years - how does he really feel about me?
In my story, a girl casts a spell and gets the boy's love but the price she has to pay is, will she ever know how he really feels about her? Which is probably the case in a lot of relationships!
Q: Is any of this drawn from your own life and teenage years?
A: I have drawn from my own teenage years for the storyline, not so much for the romantic side as the friendships, parties and sleepovers!
Having said that, it was only when I'd finished the book that I realised I had also drawn on an event in my life for an episode that involves flooding. I grew up in a town called Lewes that was flooded really badly when I was a teenager. I remember looking at the water coming across the fields and wondering if it would reach us. I wasn't frightened at the time, it felt more like an adventure, but then I had a dry home to go to afterwards while lots of other people didn't.
Q: Is the village, Winter, based on a real place?
A: Winter in the book is quite strongly rooted in Lewes, where I grew up. It has a spooky ruined castle although the town is five or six miles inland rather than on the coast. But we grew up not far from the sea and there were lots of walks along the cliffs and on the Downs and the coastline was constantly being eroded and houses on the edge were tumbling into the sea. I was also inspired by places we had visited in Cornwall and Brittany as a child.
Q: How hard was it to write the book?
A: Once I had the idea of a girl casting a spell, the first book was very quick to write because one thing came after another quite logically. Once she had cast the spell she wanted to undo it and because she's not an experienced witch, it was likely that things would go wrong and by doing that, she attracted the attention of some other people, good and bad.
Q: How 'real' is the magic in the book?
A: I always loved reading about witches and magic when I was younger, books by Diana Wynne Jones for example, although I've not read much in the paranormal field.
The pieces I include about witchcraft in the story are partly made up and partly researched, especially the parts about casting spells which are based on real spells. For example Prue reads out a spell about putting blood in your husband's wine to make him love you, and that's an old vodoo spell. There's also one about putting a broomstick across the door to keep out evil spirits that is fairly well known about, and a reducing spell that I have based on an old Hebrew vanishing spell.
All the incantations are made up and I've used Old English words in these - I studied it at university and loved it. I realised that all the strongest and most powerful words in English have their roots in Old English so I used and adapted words from Old English poems like Beowulf.
I didn't want my magic to involve wands but to be more elemental and more about willpower; these witches do use spells but they can also influence things by just feeling strongly about them. The spells are like a ritual to help concentrate the mind; the spell itself has no power. It was more about the person and how much they wanted something rather than the words of the spell.
Q: Are you a superstitious person?
A: I'm not really the superstitious type but I remember when I was doing my university exams, I had to have an espresso coffee before the exam and a Worthings Original sweet in my pocket
I'm generally very practical though, things don't spook me and my husband is a scientist which matches my personality. But I don't take things for granted, I realise you can't be too sure of your own knowledge and point of view; there are other perceptions and ways of seeing things and there could always be a different version of around the corner.
Q: How many more books about Winter are you writing?
A: This is a trilogy, so two more to go. The second and third books have taken longer to write and are more twisty and turny with a lot of surprises to do with Anna's mum, who disappeared when she was little. Everything Anna thought about her mum turns out not to be true. Book two looks back into the past and tries to work out what her mother was trying to do and if she is really gone... There's also a great new baddie in book two!
Anna and Seth's relationship remains at the heart of the following books but their love doesn't run smoothly, as love seldom does. The issue in their relationship remains that Anna finds it hard to understand why Seth wants to be with her, which is something that harms a lot of relationships.
I am sure I will write another book for teenagers, I really enjoyed writing this one, but I also love my day job as a PR for a publisher so I am not sure if I will ever be a full time writer. I like going to work!
