Writing it Right: Researching my historical novel about Eileen O'Connor.

Part one: attention to detail in the historical backdrop to the story

To write a historical fiction novel requires two things: research – cold, hard, accurate facts; and inspiration – something personal that touches the writer’s heart and makes the story authentic.  

I imagined Eileen and her friend giggling over the difficulties of a girl dressed like this managing to do anything courageous.

Contemporaneous events and the details of how people lived their daily lives are so important, they are almost characters in their own right. I learned this in primary school, watching a documentary on the ancient traditions of Eskimo hunters, long before the conveniences of modern shopping, tracking caribou across the tundra. The sudden flick of an animal skin-clad wrist exposed a digital watch (the must-have new accessory in the ‘seventies) and completely destroyed the credibility of the film in my young eyes. Since then, I have been appalled by faux pas including a zip up the back of the outfit of a medieval queen, and yellow roses in a Jane Austen-era movie. (In case you wanted to know, the first yellow garden rose, Soleil d’Or was released in 1900. It got terrible black spot.)

When I set out to write the story of real saint-in-waiting Eileen O’Connor, I was ready to be fastidious in my research.

Writing authentically about a real person, especially one being investigated for canonisation, takes the need for diligence and reverence for truth to an even deeper level, and is worth an article of its own.

As luck would have it, I had spent more than a year researching the history of World War I, because my homeschooled daughter and I thought it would be a cool project to run workshops for the centenary of Armistice Day. That research seeped into my bone marrow, waiting to become invaluable in the writing of this story.

When it comes to that personal touchstone that brings the story to life in my mind, and thus, hopefully, my readers’ minds too, inspiration can come from many surprising places.

Decades ago, I had a conversation with a woman in her nineties that I never forgot. She told me the story of her husband, returned from the war with an infected leg wound. She was haunted by the look of devastation and defeat on her husband’s face every time the nurse changed the dressing and he saw that it hadn’t got any better. The memory of that long-gone wounded soldier and his widow. was vivid when I wrote about fictional character George.

I have a photograph of my grandfather as a young boy which, according to family legend, was at the Western Front with his father, and was returned home with his personal effects after his death. That inspired the presence of a mysterious old photo in the story.

Vintage inspiration.

I also am the proud owner of a copy of the book the young Kathleen reads to Eileen. My father found it in a flea market in before I was born. When I was wondering what book Eileen might have enjoyed reading, Fifty-Two Stories of Courage and Endeavour for Girls (c1902) fitted the bill perfectly. Eileen O’Connor’s courage in the face of devastating illness was so great that she was found to have heroic virtue by the Vatican. You can’t get more courageous than that! Opening the gilded, ocean-storm-coloured cover, my eyes fell on the photo on the frontispiece, and I could imagine a young Eileen and her fictional best friend giggling over how hard it would be to be courageous in a frilly frock and with roses in your hair, just as I had when I was a little girl.