One delightful bonus of studying at the University of Edinburgh is our proximity to the celebrated Book Festival author Kim Sherwood. Lecturer of Creative Writing at our university, her published works span everything from literary fiction, historical fiction, feminism, swashbuckling tales set on the high seas, to her ongoing trilogy of Fleming-estate-approved James Bond novels. The first instalment of her Bond trilogy, Double or Nothing, was released in paperback last month. This year, she was at the Edinburgh Book Festival to discuss her latest work of literary fiction, A Wild and True Relation, a high-seas adventure about a young woman smuggled onboard a ship at a time when women on ships were deemed ‘bad luck’. The novel took her fourteen years to complete and was, ironically, supposed to be her first book, but it is now the latest instalment of an already admirable career.
The interview was titled ‘Women in Writing’, though it could have been more specifically described as ‘Forgotten Female Writers’. That was the theme: Sherwood was very clearly there to celebrate women, especially those whose contributions to history have been unfairly overlooked. She came across as she always does: insightful, genuine, and entirely without ego. What struck me about her this time was her heartwarming lack of judgementalism. She can praise a “beautifully written” biography of Samuel Johnson, even though she remains critical of how it has not mentioned the women in his life. Even as an avid Bond fan, she remains respectful of how some women avoid Bond entirely because they see it as too dated. No judgement or condemnation at all. What a class act.
She told the story of an “18th Century Literature” university course where all twelve prescribed writers were male. This would be understandable if the most influential writers of the time were genuinely all male, but Sherwood argues that this wasn’t the case. “Women invented the novel!” she exclaimed, a sentiment she regrettably didn’t have time to explain further, but certainly isn’t untrue: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is one of the proto-novels, and she even predated the 18th Century.
This led to some very exciting recommendations when interviewer Jenny Brown asked her for two female writers she would recommend to the whole audience. Sherwood chose Georgette Heyer and Helen Macinnes: two mid-20th century genre fiction writers who were bestsellers of their time. Heyer wrote feel-good Jane-Austen style Romances (“we pass over Heyer but praise Jeeves and Wooster – because they’re way more serious!?” Sherwood quipped), and Macinnes espionage novels. Needless to say, after the talk, I immediately went on Goodreads to mark several of their books as ‘Want to Read’. (Sherwood advised that her favourite Heyer novel is Venetia.)
That was the ultimate pleasure of this talk: Sherwood’s celebration of literature is so infectious that it makes you want to read all the books she mentions. If the Edinburgh Book Festival stands for nothing else, it should stand for that. The passages she read from A Wild and True Relation – and the dramatic stories she told about historical figures (apparently Dickens threatened to reveal George Eliot as a woman unless he could publish her upcoming book) – inspire the same excitement.
If you do nothing else this Book Festival, read the literature of Kim Sherwood (especially A Wild and True Relation, purchasable from the Book Festival village), followed by the works of Georgette Heyer and Helen Macinnes, followed by any other female writer you have lurking on your shelf that you’ve not got around to yet.
Image via Freddy Lowe