reading list

Stella Duffy: Theodora : The Empress Theodora is one of those historical characters I am perennially interested in, and I have yet to find a novel about her entire life that truly satisfies me. So far, Gillian Bradshaw's The Bearkeeper's Daughter comes closest, but a) it's only about her last two or so years, and b) while she is a very important character, the main character is actually someone else, to wit, her illegitimate son through whose eyes we get to see her. This actually is a good choice, it helps maintaining her ambiguiity and enigmatic qualities while the readers like John (the main character) hear all kind of contradictory stories about her and have to decide what to believe. But it's not the definite take on Theodora's life I'm still looking for. Last year I came across James Conroyd Martin's Fortune's Child, which looked like it had another intriguing premise (Theodora dictating her memoirs to a Eunuch who used to be a bff but now has reason to hate her) but alas, squandered it. But I'm not giving up, and after hearing an interview with Stella Duffy about Theodora, both the woman and her novel, I decided to tackle this one, and lo: still not the novel about her entire life (it ends when she becomes Empress) I'm looking for, but still far better than Martin's while covering essentially the same biographical ground (i.e. Theodora's life until she becomes Empress; Martin wrote another volume about her remaining years, but since the first one let me down, I haven't read the second one).

What I appreciate about Duffy's Theodora: It does a great job bringing Constantinople to life, and our heroine's rags to riches story, WITHOUT either avoiding the dark side (there isn't even a question as to whether young - and I do mean very young - Theodora and her sisters have to prostitute themselves when becoming actresses, nobody assumes there is a choice, it's underestood to be part of the job) or getting salacious with it. There are interesting relationships between women (as between Theodora and Sophia, a dwarf). The novel makes it very clear that the acrobatics and body control expected from a comic actress (leaving the sexual services aside) are tough work and the result of brutal training, and come in handy for Theodora later when she has to keep a poker face to survive in very different situation. The fierce theological debates of the day feature and are explained in a way that is understandable to an audience which doesn't already know what Monophysites believe in, what Arianism is and why the Council of Chalcedon is important. (Theological arguments were a deeply important and constant aspects of Byzantine daily life in all levels of society, were especially important in the reign of Justinian and Theodora and are still what historical novels tend to avoid.) Not everyone who dislikes our heroine is evil and/or stupid (that was one of the reasons why I felt let down by Martin). I.e. Theodora might resent and/or dislike them in turn, but the author, Duffy, still shows the readers where they are coming from. (For example: Justinian's uncle Justin was an illiterate soldier who made it to the throne. At which point his common law wife became his legal wife and Empress. She was a former slave. This did not give her sympathy for Theodora later, on the contrary, she's horrified when nephew Justinian gets serious with a former actress. In Martin's novel, she therefore is a villain, your standard evil snob temporarily hindering the happy resolution, and painted as hypocritical to boot because of her own past. In Duffy's, Justinian replies to Theodora's "She hasn't worked a day in her life" with a quiet "she was a slave", and the narration points out that Euphemia's constant sense of fear of the past, of the past coming back, as a former slave is very much connected to why she'd want her nephew to make an upwards, not downwards marriage. She's still an impediment to the Justinian/Theodora marriage, but the readers get where she's coming from.

Even more importantly: instead of the narration claiming that Theodora is so beautiful (most) people can't resist her, the novel lets her be "only" avaragely pretty BUT with the smarts, energy and wit to impress people, and we see that in a show, not tell way (i.e. in her dialogue and action), not because we're constantly told about it. She's not infallible in her judgments and guesses (hence gets blindsided by a rival at one point), which makes her wins not inevitable but feeling earned. And while the novel stops just when Theodora goes from being the underdog to being the second most powerful person in the realm, what we've seen from her so far makes it plausible she will do both good and bad things as an Empress.

Lastly: the novel actually does something with Justinian and manages to make him interesting. I've noticed other novelists dealing with Theodora tend to keep him off stage as if unsure how to handle him. Duffy goes for workoholic geek who gets usually underestimated in the characterisation, and the only male character interested in Theodora in the novel who becomes friends with her first; in Duffy's novel, she originally becomes closer to him basically as an agent set on him by the (Monophysite) Patriarch of Alexandria who wants the persecution of the Monophysites by Justinian's uncle Justin to end and finds herself falling for him for real, so if you like spy narratives, that's another well executed trope, and by the time the novel ends, you believe these two have become true partners in addition to lovers. In conclusion: well done, Stella Duffy!


Grace Tiffany: The Owl was a Baker's Daughter. The subtitle of this novel is "The continuing adventures of Judith Shakespeare", from which you may gather it's the sequel to a previous novel. It does, however, stand on its own, and I can say that because I haven't read the first novell, which is titled "My Father had a daughter", the reason being that I heard the author being interviewed about the second novel and found the premise so interesting that I immediately wanted to read it, whereas the first one sounded a bit like a standard YA adventure. What I heard about the first one: it features Shakespeare's younger daughter, Judith, running away from home for a few weeks dressed up as a boy and inevitably ending up in her father's company of players. What I had heard about the second one: features Judith at age 61 during the English Civil War. In the interview I had heard, the author said the idea came to her when she realised that Judith lived long enough to hail from the Elizabethan Age but end up in the Civil War and the short lived English Republic. And I am old enough to now feel far more intrigued by a 61 years old heroine than by a teenage one, though I will say I liked The Owl was a Baker's Daughter so much that I will probably read the first novel after all. At any rate, what backstory you need to know the second novel tells you. We meet Judith at a time of not just national but personal crisis: she's now outlived all three of her children, with the last one most recently dead, and her marriage to husband Tom Quiney suffers from it. This version of Judith is a midwife plus healer, having picked up medical knowledge from her late brother-in-law Dr. Hall, and has no sooner picked up a new apprentice among the increasing number of people rendered homeless by the war raging between King and Parliament, a young Puritan woman given to bible quoting with a niece who spooks the Stratfordians by coming across as feral, that all three of them are suspected after Judith delivers a baby who looks like he will die. (In addition to everything else, this is the height of the witchhunting craze after all.) Judith goes on the run and ends up alternatingly with both Roundheads and Cavaliers, as she tries to survive. (Both Charles I. and Oliver Cromwell get interesting cameos - Stratford isn't THAT far from Oxford where Charles has his headquarters, after all, while London is where Judith is instinctively drawn to due to her youthful adventure there - , but neither is the hero of the tale.)

Not the least virtue of this novel is that it avoids the two extremes of English Civil War fiction. Often when the fiction in question sides with Team Cromwell, the Royalists are aristo rapists and/or crypto Catholic bigots, while if it sides with Team Charles the revolutionaries are all murderous Puritans who hate women. Not so here. Judith's husband is a royalist while she's more inclined towards the Parliament's cause, but mostly as a professional healer she's faced with the increasing humber of wounded and dead people on both sides. Both sides have sympathetic characters championing them. (For example, Judith's new apprentice Jane has good reason to despise all things royal while the old friend she runs into, the actor Nathan Field, is for very good reason less than keen on the party that closed the theatres.) Making Judith luke warm towards either cause and mostly going for a caustic no nonsense "how do I get out of this latest danger?" attitude instead of being a true partisan for either is admittedly eaier for the general audience, but it's believable, and at any rate the sense of being in a topsy turvy world where both on a personal level (a marriage that has been going strong for decades is now threatening to break apart, not just because of their dead sons but also because of this) and on a general level all old certainties now seem to be in doubt is really well drawn. And all the characters come across vividly, both the fictional ones like Jane and the historical ones, be they family like Judith's sister Susanna Hall (very different from her, but the sisters have a strong bond, and I was ever so releaved Grace Tiffany didn't play them out against each other, looking at you, Germaine Greer) or VIPs (see above re: Cromwell and Charles I.). And Judith's old beau Nathan Fields is in a way the embodiment of the (now banished) theatre, incredibly charming and full of fancy but also unreliable and impossible to pin down. You can see both why he and Judith have a past and why she ended up with Quiney instead.

Would this novel work if the heroine wasn't Shakespeare's daughter but an invented character? Yes, but the Shakespeare connection isn't superficial, either. Judith thinks of both her parents (now that she's older than her father ever got to be) with that awareness we get only when the youth/age difference suddenly is reversed, and the author gives her a vivid imagination and vocabulary, and when the Richard II comparisons to the current situation inevitably come, they feel believable, right and earned. All in all an excellent novel, and I'm glad to have read it.