Shelfies #51: Anna Abney

It isn’t obvious here, but like everything in the old cottage where I live, these shelves slope downwards. I have to stop myself from rolling towards the window on my office chair - at least if I fall out I’ll have a soft landing onto the field below. Building these shelves was a drawn-out process, but now they contain, in a somewhat haphazard order, the books I refer to most often when I’m writing and researching. 

In mentally conjuring up seventeenth century worlds, contemporary paintings are invaluable. Nicholas Maes’ pictures (bottom shelf left) of domestic interiors are transporting. They’re detailed studies of women sewing, cooking, delousing children, falling asleep over account ledgers and eavesdropping at doors. Each picture tells multiple stories. I was astonished by his portrait of Simon van Alphen - this gentleman with his lustrous locks is just how I picture one of my main characters, William Hawthorne. 

Our sitting-room is lined with shelves full of novels arranged alphabetically. Sometimes a novel makes its way up here for a little holiday from such regimentation; Tristram Shandy for instance (top shelf centre). I’ve had this copy since my student days in Belfast. Writing about the 1690 Siege of Limerick recently, I was excited to come across a reference to Sterne’s novel. Shandy’s Uncle Toby survives the rain soaked battlefield by imbibing large quantities of claret. I’m not sure how trustworthy his account is though, especially the notion that ‘setting fire every night to a pewter dish full of brandy … took off the damp of the air and made the inside of the tent as warm as a stove.’ One to try when camping?

I picked up Derby Words and Phrases (middle shelf) in a second hand bookshop on a research trip to Derbyshire. It’s a fun read and includes gems like ‘‘yo tauken’, you talk; meaning to talk big or falsely.’ ‘Nestlebub, a child or person fond of being at home; ‘smart as a carrot’ and ‘Snudge, to go to houses unasked in order to be entertained’.

You can’t write about seventeenth-century England without referring to the Bible (top shelf), it was the one book everyone read or had read to them and is a vital resource for entering the mind of an early modern protagonist. I also find the language of the King James version quite beautiful.

Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (bottom shelf) offer plenty of insights into seventeenth century attitudes. She was the subject of my PhD and I have a love/hate relationship with her. For an uneducated, seventeenth-century woman, she was unconventional, often visionary and sometimes brilliant. Her writing is also rambling and elitist. She wasn’t into sisterly solidarity, but then, as she writes ‘one may be my very good Friend, and yet not of my opinion, …though there hath been a Civil War in the Kingdom, and a general War amongst the Men, yet there hath been none amongst the Women …’. Her belief that ‘it should be no breach of Friendship, if our opinions were different’ seems particularly apt today. 

Anna Abney is a historical novelist and author of the Measham Hall series of novels. Set in the seventeenth century, the novels follow the adventures of the Catholic Hawthorne family and their beloved Derbyshire estate. A family loosely based on her own ancestors, the Abneys of Measham.

After growing up in London, Anna lived in Ireland for thirteen years. She gained a BA in English Literature at Queens University, Belfast and wrote her PhD on the seventeenth century writer, Margaret Cavendish, under the supervision of Lisa Jardine at Queen Mary, University of London. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Queen Mary and the Open University. She has two grown up children and now lives in rural Kent with her screenwriter husband and their border collie.

As Madeline Dewhurst, Anna has also written journalism, drama and the contemporary novel Charity, which was longlisted for the Bath Novel Prize and is published by Lightning Books.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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