The Fiction and the Fact - how a true story inspired a novel

 

My great grandmother Anna 

Many years ago, when I first started researching my Polish family history, I heard the tale of my great grandmother, Anna, a lady of high status even among the szlachta, the Polish aristocracy. All I knew then was that she had, somewhat scandalously at the time, married her estate manager. I was intrigued, and the more I discovered, the more intriguing the story became. 

The real Anna was left a youngish widow, after the death of my great grandfather, Wladyslaw Czerkawski. By then, she had five children, of whom the eldest was only fourteen, and two large estates, some fifty kilometres apart, to maintain. All this was in the uncertain and often dangerous borderlands of what was then Eastern Poland, but is now Ukraine. For a woman who had been cossetted for most of her married life (my great grandfather seems to have been quite a romantic) it was challenging to say the least, especially since most of the cash was tied up in land. 

One thing I did manage to discover back then, well before the internet made things so much easier, was that her youngest son, my grandfather, also Wladyslaw, had inherited the second estate, at a place called Dziedzilow, from a wealthy but unmarried great uncle, at an extraordinarily young age. Seven, in fact. Leaving Anna with a set of intractable problems, little ready money, and many people relying on her for their very livelihoods. Not to mention the demands of her own children. I promised myself that in future, I would find out more. A lot more.

Meanwhile, this information, of which I knew tantalising little real detail, fermented away in my head and the result was a novel called The Amber Heart. Because I knew so little about the real people who inspired the story, I decided to set it very firmly in the more distant past, in the early to mid nineteenth century rather than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of the true story. And because I had an inkling, even back then, that some people who knew the truth of the relationship might still be alive, I used the story as a springboard for the novel. Anna became my fictional Marianna, a landed lady, and her lover, Danilo, started life in extreme poverty. I loved telling that story, even though it was to take a long time to come to print. (You can read a bit about it on this blog, here.) 

Cue forward many years, and I found out all kinds of interesting and moving things about the real relationship between Anna and her much younger Jan - facts which gave me considerably more sympathy and understanding of the real estate manager than (I suspect) the family had ever accorded him at the time. Which was a pity, because he had been an intelligent young man and their saviour in more ways than one. You can read all about it in my new non-fiction book, The Last Lancer.   As ever, truth is often more messy, more nuanced, more difficult than fiction, in which we always have the impulse (and, let's face it, the permission) to shape things into a satisfactory story. 

All the same - I'm very fond of the big family saga that The Amber Heart became. I was as much in love with Danilo as Marianna, and there are things about it that can still, when I read them again, make me cry. As readers have told me, they too cry over it.

If you want to download it on Kindle, it's only 99p from now until 19th of May. A bargain, because it's a big book. If you'd rather read it in paperback, that's available too, although you'll have to pay full price for that, I'm afraid. 

The point I want to make for any writer just starting out, though, is that your 'material', whatever that is, can inspire many different ways of writing. Just follow your heart.