Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton Read Free Page B

but in recent years feminist critics have recognised that King-Hall and her contemporary writers of women’s historical fiction provided a crucial reflection of, and outlet for, the desires, hopes and anxieties of their largely female audience. The marketplace was relatively crowded. Some of the best-selling books of the years immediately before, during and after the Second World War were historical novels written by women: among them were Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone With the Wind
(1936); Daphne du Maurier’s
Jamaica Inn
(1936),
Frenchman’s Creek
(1941) and
The King’s General
(1946); Kathleen Winsor’s controversial
Forever Amber
(1944); and Margaret Irwin’s
Young Bess
(1944).
    The popularity of historical fiction at this time can be explained in a number of ways. As Diana Wallace has pointed out, the appeal of historical fiction ‘can be situated within a wider popular appetite for history, especially social history’: G.M. Trevelyan’s
English Social History
(1942), for instance, was also a best seller. 12 Such interest in the English past was clearly a response to the pressure of wartime, asmany readers turned to the past to establish or renew their sense of English identity and values, for which they were fighting. Many readers picked up historical novels out of a desire to learn about the period in which they were set, and an easy means of dismissing much ‘popular’ historical fiction was to focus on its ‘inaccuracy’; du Maurier, for example, was so eager to avoid this pitfall that she collaborated with the eminent historian A.L. Rowse when researching her Civil War novel
The King’s General
. Although her research was much more informal and less exhaustive, King-Hall also demonstrates a high level of historical knowledge, conjuring a vivid sense of the seventeenth-century setting not merely by dropping the names of significant historical characters, but by depicting the rhythms, patterns and rituals of day-to-day life. The novel is rich in detail about seventeenth-century traditions and practices: wedding customs, music, dances, card games, recipes for perfumes and folk remedies.
    And yet, as Wallace notes, traditional non-fictional history writing had tended to exclude women, who, with a few exceptions, tended to feature only as the wives or daughters of ‘great men’ who shaped major historical events. In the hands of many women writers, the historical novel offered an opportunity to produce an alternative version of history more reflective of the everyday life and experience of women. However, in Wallace’s words, ‘any historical novel always has as much, or perhaps more, to say about the time in which it was written’ as about the period in which it was set – indeed, even the choice of period setting can often tell us much about the meaning of a novel. 13 The Restorationperiod in which
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
takes place is notable for perhaps two important factors. Firstly, it was a notoriously licentious age, when the ‘Merry Monarch’, King Charles II, presided over a court in which decadent behaviour and sexual promiscuity were the norm. The novel abounds with passing references to this – and it is notable that many of the real historical personages who fleetingly intersect with the fictional characters are women, such as the two mistresses of King Charles, Lady Castlemaine and the Duchess of Portsmouth, who are said to have been former victims of the highwayman Jerry Jackson. Barbara Skelton’s frustration at the grinding tedium of life at Maryiot Cells is heightened, one feels, by the tantalising proximity of a more glamorous, luxuriant life at court, which yet remains inaccessible to her. For a novel concerned with rampant female sexuality, the Restoration world is the ideal stage.
    Secondly, Restoration England was a society in which the memory of a relatively recent war – the