The historical novelist runs through, in choronological order, the five books that most influenced her development as a writer
SHELF LIFE
My current novel is Clairmont, a historical-biographical novel about Claire Clairmont, who is best known as Mary Shelley’s step-sister and some-time mistress of Byron, and the mother of his child, Allegra. I came across her when I was reviewing an edition of a newly discovered Mary Shelley story for children, called ‘Maurice, or The Fisher’s Cot’. In the introduction, the biographer Claire Tomalin mentioned Claire and the ‘lost children’ of the Shelley-Byron circle. I had a hazy recollection of Claire from student days reading Shelley, but I had no idea about her afterlife, once Shelley had drowned, and Byron died. When I found out that she went on to become a governess in Russia, and live on her own in Paris, to be self-sufficient at a time when women had to marry to survive, I knew I wanted to write about her. Her letters and journals show such an emotionally open and honest woman that brings her much closer to a modern era, than to a Regency or Victorian one.
I wrote the entirety of Clairmont in a coffee shop only a few streets away from my flat. It’s the perfect space – enough going on so that I’m forced to concentrate to shut out the noise, but not so much that I can’t concentrate at all!
The best piece of writing advice wasn’t given to me directly – it was from Carol Shields to her daughter, Anne Giardini, who said, ‘write as if you’re whispering into the ear of someone you love.’ That sense of intimacy is so important.
The best piece of advice I could give to other writers, though, is write your passions. Don’t write for the market, don’t write ‘what you know’. Write what you’re passionate about, what lights the fire in your belly and sets off sparks in your brain. It’s said that all writers have a sliver of ice in their hearts, which may be true. But they need fire, as well.
Clairmont by Lesley McDowell is published by Wildfire, (£18.99)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
I have no idea what made me first pick up an Agatha Christie novel – it wasn’t the usual influences which did when I was a child, like a friend, or a film or tv series. But I was a huge fan of the Nancy Drew detective series, and the last one of those that I bought was in October 1979, when I was 12. The next book I bought was Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced, in March 1980, followe
