Part One – but first some background…
In the days before Christmas, I thought I would have a bit of festive fun, and return to my unpublished first novel that still sits in the metaphorical drawer that every author knows all too well – the file full of writing which is destined to languish in the darkness because the right publisher has not yet been found. Over the next few days I will share two extracts from that novel, both of which reflect what was happening in the life of one woman in two Christmases, but decades apart.
This unpublished novel was my first completed novel, and it taught me much about the process of writing. It also helped me remember how much I love to write stories, and it reanimated my long buried dreams of becoming a published author, which I finally achieved in 2024 with my novel Dark Waters. But this first effort at crafting a novel is one that stays with me, and I return to it every now and then, using some of my writing from it as a prompt which I develop in other ways.
But where did I first get the impetus to write a whole novel from? In 2014 I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I discovered The Convalescent, painted in 1872 by English artist Ford Madox Brown. I was drawn to the woman in the painting and started researching what had happened to her, to Emma, the second wife of the artist. I started with one question. How did a woman so beautiful end up so fragile, and as ill as she was depicted in the painting? The more I discovered about her, the more I realised I wanted to tell her story. I wanted to give her a voice.
My obsession with Emma led to a novel of over 100,000 words. Does it have some good writing in it? Well, yes, I rather think it does. Is it a good novel? Well, given the number of times it has been rejected I have to concede that no, it is not. But it still has promise. And I think I have finally figured out how to fix it, so I can give it another chance of coming out of the confines of ‘the drawer’.
In the meantime, I am going to take you to Christmas of 1848. It was a year of hunger, want, and political turmoil. The weather, although mild for winter, was stormy, windy, with bouts of torrential rain, the Thames flooding. It was the year Ford Madox Brown first met Emma Hill, the woman who was to become his second wife, whose face would feature in many of his paintings, but whose story would gradually be forgotten, as the stories of so many woman often are.
Christmas was approaching. Ford had no time for the seasonal expression of joy. He had been able to feel nothing but a lingering sadness since the death of his beautiful Elisabeth, who had died in his arms two and a half long years ago. Yet his desire for her had not lessened and his emptiness without her was still raw. Even now, he felt a painful yearning to hold her within his embrace, to seek the comfort of her wisdom and the reassurance of her words. But she was gone, buried in the cold grounds of Highgate.
So, what was Christmas to him? All he wanted was to work, to lose himself in his calling. He was an artist. He knew he was a good artist. He was convinced the world would soon know that he was a great artist. He wanted Elisabeth to have had that honour, of being married to a great artist.
The girl sat before him. He thought about the promise he had seen in her when he had first encountered her on the streets. He would not normally condescend to talk to a common working girl like her, but there was something about her which he found irresistible. Her eyes had transfixed him. Their colour difficult to discern, in some lights a luminous grey, in sunlight perhaps a sapphire blue, possibly even a green. He remembered how the lines around them had creased with worry as he examined her. Her hair had been mostly hidden under her fraying bonnet, but he could see the warm tones of it framing her face. Again, from his first glance he had known that only by scrutinising it under different lights would he be able to determine what colour it truly was, though he imagined it as a gold tarnished with darkness that would shine true when the light was upon it. Her skin was an unblemished creamy white, with only a slight flush to her cheeks, and a suggestion of darkness under her eyes. Her lips had been slightly parted, showing a small gap in her teeth. She was imperfect, her beauty flawed. Yet she was perfect. And now she was here in his studio.
Her tentative gaze never lifted from the floor. She sat perfectly still, as if she knew that this was what she had been made for. Her lips were parted as they had been when he first encountered her, almost as though they were perpetually allowing a sigh to escape from her. Her head was tilted to the side, her magnificent hair piled on top of her head, exposing her delicate neck. Elongated, her neck was a thing of beauty, each sinew to be worshipped and carefully reproduced by him on paper. As he drew, he imagined his hands encircling her neck. She was so small, so fragile, and so very young. He could easily hold her neck in his hands, just as he held her life in his hands now as he brought her into existence on paper.
The drawing was crude, a black chalk rendering of his subject on paper. It was a start on what he hoped would become a great work, that of Lear and Cordelia. Ford was drawn to Lear’s story. King though he may have been, he was still a man that knew the utter devastation of loss. Lear had carried the body of his beautiful Cordelia, uttering the words:
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She’s dead as earth.
Elisabeth was dead. When she had died in his arms in Paris, Ford knew death with an intimacy he wished only to replicate in his art. She was gone.
But in this moment, he had the girl. He had Emma. She sat before him; a pale imitation of all that Elisabeth had been to him. Her eyes never once looked towards him. Only the whispering sounds of the chalk on the paper and the crackling of the fire in the hearth broke the unearthly silence between them. Her submission to him and his desire was complete.
He examined his work. It was adequate. She would do.
Deborah Siddoway 