So what was the image that came to me as the start of Alchemy? It was of a young woman in black leathers on a motorbike. I thought it was based on the niece of one of my closest friends, but he says it wasn’t, that she never rode a motorbike. Did I make it up then? Anyway there she was, a lawyer, like my friend’s niece, but further into her career, independent, with her own struggling law firm, Lost Causes. And her name, suddenly, was Jade Green, an echo of her own wry sense of humour and of a girl skilled in the martial arts, Jade from China.
And Amyntas? Because images can be sparked by literature as well as life, and behind every book stands a line of other books like the ghosts that haunted Macbeth, s/he sidestepped out of All’s Well That Ends Well, via Sir Philip Sidney’s romance Arcadia, with its jousting ladies in armour, bringing her Sidney connections with her, and the charge of witchcraft, in an age when alchemy was transmuting into science.
‘Mostly my ideas for books begin with an image of someone in a setting that’s a bit blurry round the edges. I carry this about in my head for weeks, sometimes for months, like a faded photograph that, in the opposite of the usual direction from life, gradually becomes stronger.’
Witchcraft in its various manifestations as part of the body of English folklore has interested me ever since my dancing and singing years in the heyday of the post-war revival of English traditional music in my teens. Twenty years later I combined this interest with a largely Freudian interpretation of the supernatural in literature, beginning with the remnants of Celtic paganism and ending, for the time being at least (pre Dr Who and Star Trek), with the science fiction creations of Isaac Asimov, bottling up this collection of genies in my first non-fiction book, The Erotic World of Faery (1972), published in one of those recurring periods when critics and publishers announce that the novel is dead.
As so often in writing, the tap root for Alchemy goes back a very long way and even deeper into childhood stories like Puck of Pook’s Hill, or films like The Thief of Baghdad, or deeper still to a nightmare about a witch standing on one side of a blackly gleaming coalfield while I watched paralysed as she laughingly pointed her wand at the edge and shrank the whole mass to one small knob. Those were the years of coal rationing.
I knew that in Alchemy I wanted to write about the bigotry and fanaticism which seem to be on the increase at this cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Both Amyntas and Jade come up against the glass ceiling for women of their time. Today, a century after the struggles of the Suffragettes, there are still very few women in the top echelons of the legal profession, and in the early seventeenth century it was hard for any woman, unless she was a queen, to pursue any profession, let alone as a physician. Those who did were usually midwives or ‘cunning women’ who ran the risk of being labelled witches.
Fiction, especially historical fiction, requires a lot of research to make it convincing to the reader. For the kind of medicine that would have been available to Amyntas to practise I used Nicholas Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, published in 1653, which includes many earlier prescriptions, some from the Sidney household itself. Please don’t try them at home. For Jade’s legal expertise I drew on my own experiences in pursuit of authors’ rights. I had to create two distinctive voices as well so that the reader would know at once whether it was 1603 or 2003.
‘In Alchemy I wanted to write about the bigotry and fanaticism which seem to be on the increase at this cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.’
My two protagonists are both brought up against the fundamentalisms of their time, whether Christian or other, either as a clinging to tablets of stone or the pursuit of strange cults and sects, a resurgence of flat-earthism, a refusal to accept rational and scientific explanations of the universe and our place in it, and the evocation of mass hysteria or self-hypnosis, often these days induced by unscrupulous preachers, through the media of television and the internet.
Against these forces they both oppose the equally irrational alchemy of love in all its transmutations, the creative force of nature necessary for renewal and for life to go on, the only power that can put out death if only for a time. And when love fails, as Amyntas and Jade learn, there’s always work, the ‘old toad,’ to ‘help us down cemetery road’.
Read on
Have You Read?
Other books by Maureen Duffy include:
That’s How It Was
Maureen Duffy’s first novel, originally published in the sixties, is the story of Paddy, a young working-class girl growing up in wartime England. Abandoned by her father, Paddy is brought up by her mother, and their relationship is at the heart of the story.
The Microcosm
A collection of different voices, characters and time periods cross the threshold of a lesbian bar in London, providing a candid and lively depiction of what it means to be a gay woman.
Restitution
Betony Falk, a young woman in her late twenties, was brought up by her grandmother after the death of her parents. Between jobs she decides to find out more about her father and thus herself. However, she soon realizes that the more she finds out the less she knows.
The Passionate Shepherdess: The Life of Aphra Behn 1640-89
A biography of the Restoration dramatist, now considered one of the greatest and first female artists.
If You Loved This,
You Might Like…
Fingersmith
Sarah Waters
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
John Fowles
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
Sir Philip Sidney
The Chymical Wedding
Lindsay Clarke
The Daughter of Time
Josephine Tey
Waterland
Graham Swift
A Place of Greater Safety
Hilary Mantel
Possession
A.S. Byatt
The Red Queen
Margaret Drabble
Slammerkin
Emma Donoghue
About the Author
Maureen Duffy published her first novel, That’s How It Was, in 1962. She is the author of a London trilogy: Wounds, Capital and Londoners, and has written biographies of Henry Purcell and Aphra Behn. Her most recent novel was Restitution, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
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Praise
From the reviews of Alchemy:
A hugely absorbing read…page-turning adventure. Jade’s voice is wonderfully achieved and Duffy brilliantly charts a search for identity’
Independent
‘Packed with wit and wisdom’
Daily Telegraph
‘Erudite and entertaining. Jade’s pacy narrative is cut with Amyntas’s restrained, elegant prose, and Duffy deftly handles the movement between two worlds, four centuries apart. Her range of cultural reference is dazzling’
Literary Review
‘Riveting…blending passion, wit, and witchcraft to sparkling effect’
Daily Mail
‘A fascinating coda to the history of the twentieth-century politically engaged novel…a novel that bristles with ideas’
Sunday Times
‘A novel of high emotion and devious stratagems…I read avidly to the (literally) incendiary close’
Spectator
‘Duffy writes lyrically and convincingly’
Sunday Independent
By the same author
That’s How It Was
Wounds, Capital and Londoners
Henry Purcell
Occam’s Razor
Restitution
England: The Making of the Myth
The Passionate Shepherdess
Copyright
Harper Perennial
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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
SECOND EDITION
First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Fourth Estate
Copyright © Maurreen Duffy 2004
PS Section © Louise Tucker 2005, except ‘The Alchemy of Words’ by
Maurreen Duffy © Maureen Duffy 2005
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Maureen Duffy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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