Sophia Bennett

Sophia Bennett

About Author

Sophia Bennett's debut novel, Threads, won the Times / Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition in 2009. She has since published six further novels for young teens, including The Look and Love Song. Sophia has been called 'the queen of teen dreams' by journalist Amanda Craig, for her exploration of the worlds of fashion, art and music. Her books have sold internationally to over 16 countries and there are plans to make Threads into a children's TV series.

Interview

FOLLOWING OPHELIA

STRIPES PUBLISHING

MARCH 2017


In FOLLOWING OPHELIA, a story that takes us directly into the world of the Pre-Raphaelites, author SOPHIA BENNETT explores art, feminism and social history through the transformation of teenaged girl Mary Adams from servant to artist's model.

Mary is a striking young woman and, although a servant, her looks draw the attention of a group of artists, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including newcomer Felix Dawson. With his support, Mary enters a world of parties, artist studios and glamour as the artist's model, Persephone Lavelle. But this is also a world of deception and the shadow of betrayal is at her heels...

We asked SOPHIA BENNETT to tell us more about FOLLOWING OPHELIA.


Q: Why did you decide to revisit the Pre-Raphaelite era for this novel?

A: Art is always bubbling under the surface of my novels, beginning with my debut, Threads, but it wasn't until my fifth book that I realised I was writing about creativity - whether that was modelling, music or sewing.

My books are about people who make things and I've been interested, since my early teens, in art. In fact I know more about art and the history of art than many of the other things I've written about.

Writing historical fiction, however, came out of the blue. It was the publisher, Stripes's, idea to write the book. They invited authors to write a synopsis based on this idea and they liked what I wrote.

I was intimidated at first by the research aspect because I've not written historical fiction before and I'm not an historian. Also, I didn't know as much about the Pre-Raphaelites as I know about other periods like the Renaissance and French Impressionism.


Q: What kinds of things did you need to research for the novel, and where did you go to find the information?

A: To find out more about the Pre-Raphaelites, I read a book called Wives and Stunners: The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Muses by Henrietta Garnett, which is like a diary of this group of women.

But I also needed to find out about other areas like servitude in the Victorian era. For about a century, the main jobs of a servant remained essentially the same; my granny, who was a nanny in the '30s and '40s, would have recognised the world I was writing about. Everything changed in the 1950s when labour-saving devices came in and the class system changed massively.

Until then, howver, people had to do absolutely everything by hand. There is a scene in the book where I have Mary scrubbing fish and descaling them and she's covered in fish scales; we forget how many jobs had to be done in homes.

Through my research, I found out that the scullery maid had a particularly tough life. She had to be up before the cook came in to clean the kitchen, and she had to clean it again after each meal. By the time the family came down for breakfast every morning, she would have done all those chores; the slops had to be thrown out, the kitchen cleaned and the fires lit.

But there were other things about that world that I also had to research, like how people would have got from A to B, would they have walked, were there pavements and what was the road surface like? At that time London was very different; Chelsea was full of market gardens, potteries and brick factories.


Q: It is set at a time when conditions were quite tough for women, which you make clear in the book, and yet it is also quite a feminist story.

A: The story features some very beautiful women, the Pre-Raphaelites, and we see them being looked at and adored but we also ask, who is doing the looking and how does the person being looked at feel about it?

As a woman, you might be lovely but if you need power in some way, that isn't going to give you the power you need at all and a lot of the women in that group actually had very difficult lives. Lizzie Siddal, who appears in the book, died of laudanum poisoning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti was awful towards her, although Jane Morris and others had very fulfilling lives.

I wanted to explore how women negotiated doing something that they wanted to do. A lot of women at that time were very dependent on their families but in my book, the girls' families are no help at all and with no family support, they could end up in terrifying situations; there were no safety nets if things went wrong for you.

And yet it was also a more porous society than we might realise. People were quietly marrying their housekeepers, although no one would talk about it once it had happened. But it wasn't impossible to move up in society.


Q: Mary's move upwards in society comes from her work as an artist's muse and transformation into Persephone. Why did you decide on this mythical character for her?

A: This book was a collaboration between me and Katie Jennings, the editor at Stripes. She had the idea of Persephone although I came to it not knowing much about the legend. Once I read more about it I was fascinated, and Rossetti's painting of Persephone is one of my favourites.

The legend of Persephone also felt relevant to what I was writing about; a girl who flits from the dark into the light and whose story has elements of tragedy to it.


Q: What was it like writing the story collaboratively?

A: After I wrote Love Song, my seventh book, I had plenty of ideas for what to write next but I couldn't actually write them. I think I just needed a pause from writing, so I took on this book as a writing exercise, to see if I could write someone else's idea. What I found was that working together with someone is very freeing and it was a lovely experience.

Katie came up with the bones of the idea and liked my ideas for developing the story. We bounced it back and forth and Katie was very good at reminding me to keep to the plan, the synopsis we had agreed.

I wrote the story very quickly - I started writing Following Ophelia in June last year and the first two books in the series will be out by July this year, so it was fast and fun. There is a speed and freshness that comes from writing this way, although sometimes in writing it can be good to follow tangents and to spend two years getting to know your characters...


Q: What are you planning next for Mary, as you have left the book open to a sequel?

A: At the end of the story, we see Mary planning her next move which is to go to Venice. Mary has gone from being a scullery maid to an artist's muse, so the question is, how high can she go and what is she prepared to do to get herself there? She sets the bar much higher - but our favourite villain will also be making an appearance.

Mary is aged 17 in book two but although she is still quite young, it is a dangerous world for her and she must operate as a fully functioning adult.

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