Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Sara Sheridan, Saara el-Arifi and more

Sara Sheridan | [email protected]

One of the questions historical novelists are always asked is which era they would like to go back to. Sara Sheridan has no doubts: “The 1550 and 1560s. John Knox.”

“To stab him?” asked chair Ashley Douglas eagerly. “No. To discredit him. I mean, what a bastard! He was a really influential and a huge misogynist. What would Scotland’s story have been like without him?”

Knoxian misogynists are the villains in Sheridan’s latest novel, The Jewel Keepers – out to prevent her early Victorian protagonists, including a badass Edinburgh nun, from puzzling out the hiding place of the Stuart queens’ jewels.

Making her heroines proto-feminists is, she argues, just redressing the balance. Historians can’t do that because there isn’t enough stuff relevant to ordinary women in the archives. But historical novelists can.

This is why she rages against what she calls Downton Syndrome – “where you have a working-class maid or butler who lives only for the mistress and they have no opinions or dreams of their own, and are just there, as in Jane Austen, to bring in the tray.”

Read more: Colson Whitehead interviewed by David Robinson

The other question historical novelists are always asked came right at the end: does she ever make up the historical facts? No, Sheridan said: she might change small details, but the story’s essence should remain true, which is why she works hard at her research: “I try to create the understanding that we all come from a world which is a lot more complicated and inclusive than we have been taught.”

Fantasy and romantasy writer Saara el-Arifi and poet and playwright Nikita Gill would doubtless agree. El-Arifi’s fascination with Cleopatra began when in primary school in the UAE she was asked to colour in a picture of Egypt’s last pharaoh. All the other crayons in the box were small and heavily used but the brown one wasn’t, and she felt sorry for it.

There is, she said, a through-line from the feelings of kinship she felt then to her master’s dissertation, entitled Between Rupture And Rapture: Cleopatra As A Site Of Resistance For Black Women, which she wrote in the wake of George Floyd’s death “when I was really having a reckoning with myself as a black queer woman”.

Her publisher was delighted to hear she planned to write a novel about Cleopatra. But she grew tired of their constant questioning of whether Cleo loved Caesar more than Mark Antony – especially when her one clear love was so obviously her maidservant Charmian.

Plutarch didn’t realise this, but what would he know? “I’m not ‘woo-woo’,” she said. “But when it comes to Cleopatra, it’s the closest to religion I’ve felt. In writing this book I felt I was like some sort of vessel.”

Gill had no time for classical sources either. In her case, it’s Hesiod (“I hate that guy”). In his Theogony, “he gave all the goddesses a bad rap apart from Hekate, who betrays her entire Titan family, including her mother Asteria, to stand alongside Zeus, who was such a great guy, right?”

Wrong. In Gill’s eyes, it’s obvious that Hekate wouldn’t do that or be anything like as submissive. What really happened, she says, is that Asteria sacrificed herself like a true warrior queen, and her death allowed her to take her daughter Hekate across the Styx to Hades, “which means Hekate experiences the all-encompassing loss of the child asylum-seeker.”

In Hades, though, Hekate grows to become the powerful witch-goddess pagans worship and Gill (who interviewed them extensively) clearly adores.

Sadly, I don’t have space to do justice to Susan Orlean. Her New Yorker journalism – “about the sort of stories that you might not know you want to read” – is spectacular and she talked engagingly about her career. So engagingly, in fact, that I gave her event the ultimate rave review of buying her memoir.

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