Karen Odden's Author Blog

DIVINING THE PAST: A GUEST POST FROM CLASSICIST & AUTHOR JUDITH STARKSTON

10/20/2020

The Hittite Empire (in red)

One of the delights of writing historical fiction — even when it blends into fantasy as mine does —comes from delving into the past via research. My fiction is set in the world of the ancient Hittites, a powerful Bronze Age empire (1600-1200 BCE) that stretched across what is now Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. The main military rival of the Hittites is likely to be more familiar to most readers than the Hittites themselves: Egypt under Ramses II, the pharaoh in the Biblical story of Moses.

Painted relief of Pharaoh Ramses with prisoners

Not every era in human history provides equal access to us today. Occasionally, the random events of war and historical preservation obliterate whole cultures. Such an erasure happened to the Hittites. And to further muddle our historical understanding, sometimes there’s confusion — as there was for generations of historians — between the Hittite empire and a small later group of people mentioned in the Bible who called themselves Hittites. Fortunately, decades of archaeological excavation have resurrected this fascinating civilization, and scholars now understand quite a lot about this cosmopolitan and sophisticated people.

Rock carving of Queen Puduhepa offering to goddess

My novels focus on the high point of the Hittite empire in the 13th century BCE and especially on their most colorful and highly-regarded leader — a woman named Puduhepa who reigned for decades with great success despite the patriarchal culture of the Hittites. She was both a queen and a priestess. Her religious devotion to the Hittite goddess of love and war was expressed through visionary dreams in which the goddess spoke to her. The Hittite word for dream is Tesha, and that became her name in my fiction.

In trips to Turkey and surrounding areas, I’ve explored the ruins of my Tesha’s hometown and capital, viewing what is left of the palaces and temples across the empire that she lived and served in. But the richest source of information about Tesha’s world comes from the archives also excavated from those ruins.

Cuneiform tablet of Hattusili’s “autobiography”

The Hittites wrote on clay tablets using the cuneiform script. Cuneiform is written by pressing a reed stylus into the clay at an angle so that it leaves triangular wedges. The wedges are grouped in complicated patterns that represent a mixture of whole words and syllables. A clay tablet covered with cuneiform looks a lot like the tracks of birds. This writing system, first used to write Sumerian, was old long before the Hittites used it. The Hittites adapted this writing system to their own, very different language. That uneasy fit makes for difficulties translating these intriguing tablets — even when they aren’t fragmentary and cracked, as they usually are. The tablet in the photo shows part of the “autobiography” of Tesha’s husband, which he actually intended as an extended prayer to his goddess. Fortunately for history, he included a summation of many of the key events in his life as he demonstrated how the goddess had stood by him through his life.

The excavated tablets cover a wide range of topics: instructions for religious rites— many of which we consider magical — as well as letters, myths, treaties, court and military procedures, and diplomatic interactions. These court records reveal an exotic time and place that nonetheless will feel familiar to readers in its human concerns and themes. The magic found in the tablets forms the basis of the fantastical threads in my stories. I give free rein to these elements in ways that the historical people believed could happen, following the “rules” embedded in their culture. So, for example, the Hittites were obsessed with curses cast by sorcerers that brought illness and other suffering. The curses in my novels function in similar ways but have an enlarged dramatic scope — which makes for great storytelling that still immerses my readers in the Hittite milieu.

Divination model of a sheep liver

Divination is another aspect of Hittite life described on the tablets that feels on the surface completely foreign to us. The Hittites sincerely believed they should consult the gods with every major decision, especially if they feared they’d committed a sin and angered one of the gods. They put yes or no questions to the immortals and looked for the answers in the flights of birds, the spots on a sheep’s liver, the pattern of swimming snakes, or the fall of thrown “lot signs.”

I delved into that last type of divination, “lot signs,” for my latest book, Of Kings and Griffins, when the diviner must find out whether the gods will be angry or pleased if the crown prince takes the throne. That’s a fraught question to ask, especially when the hopeful ruler in question is standing right there. Hostility, insults, egos, drama! In the United States and elsewhere, we have elections; the Hittites had divinations. I discovered a surprising number of parallels when the scene began to unfold in my imagination.

Studying the available information about divinations, I sifted through symbolic phrases the diviner priestess used, such as “sin of the heart” and “the deity takes hidden anger” and “to the left of the king.” Even less clear than the spoken words was the question of what physical form the “lot signs” took. I borrowed the necessary “props” from other less obscure rites described in the tablets: small wooden and ceramic figurines wrapped with colored wool and gold bands. Such research produced a vivid opening scene for my book, incorporating both a long-ago world and psychological insights that I hope my readers will find refreshingly original.

Of Kings and Griffins, begins with a crisis of leadership: the ruler for twenty-some years, the shrewd and crafty Great King Muwatti, has just died. The young, headstrong Prince Urhi mourns his father but bristles at the idea of being consoled or guided by his Uncle Hattu, who had been the king’s trusted advisor. As the book opens, my powerful heroine Tesha uneasily observes this triangle — the dead king on the bier, his bellicose son, and her wise husband Hattu, who commands the loyalty of the empire’s army and controls an independent kingdom within that empire. Hattu wants nothing more than to mentor his nephew and honor his late brother’s wishes to confirm Urhi on the throne. But Tesha suspects Urhi views Hattu as a threat, not an ally, and the gods exacerbate these tensions — through that divination — by throwing in their doubtful view of Urhi. Tesha uses her forbidden sorcery to repair this volatile situation, but that may not be the sure path she believes it to be. As danger ensnares everyone Tesha loves, can she trust this offer of divine assistance, or is it a trap — one that will lead to an unstoppable bloodbath?

Escape into this award-winning epic fantasy series, inspired by the historical Hittite empire and its most extraordinary queen. Of Kings and Griffins, book 3 of the Tesha series, is easily read as a standalone.

Of Kings and Griffins is available on Amazon. And from now until October 24th, the whole series is available for $4.98 through this special link! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087JGNHF9

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Judith received degrees in Classics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cornell University. Her novel Hand of Fire was a semi-finalist for the M.M. Bennett’s Award for Historical Fiction. Priestess of Ishana won the San Diego State University Conference Choice Award. Judith has two grown children and lives in Arizona with her husband.

For more about Judith Starkston and the historical background of her novels, please visit her website.

The "Outliers" in Victorian England: Women musicians, painters, and authors

10/11/2020

"Shut up! What I do with my money is no business of yours!"

An earlier version of this post originally appeared at the wonderful book blog Novels Alive on 24 September 2020. For interviews with authors, blogs about history, and book recommendations, visit https://novelsalive.com/

Before I went to grad school, I had some hazy, romanticized notions about the Victorian era, involving exquisite dresses, delicate teacups, elegant balls, and touches of the hand that were charged with meaning. (I also thought that Jane Austen was a Victorian novelist, not realizing that she died in 1817, a full twenty years before Victoria took the throne.)

Once I began researching for my PhD dissertation in the field of Victorian literature and culture, I discovered a sobering truth: it was very difficult for a Victorian woman to direct her own life or to take action of any kind in the public sphere. It seemed so paradoxical! How could a woman, Victoria, reign as queen for over six decades (1837-1901), exerting her influence across six continents and millions of people, yet the average middle-class married woman could not keep her wages, divorce a violent husband, defend herself in court, inherit money or land, or pursue a profession without her husband’s permission?

Fanny Dickens (1810-1848)

Most of this was due to the legal doctrine of “coverture.” William Blackstone, a famous 18th-century legal scholar, explains that under coverture “the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is … incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.”

Hm.

The good news was that in the 1870s, a group of laws were passed in response to a growing awareness of the perniciousness of these inequalities. The most significant for women was the Married Women’s Property Act (1870). For the first time, a working-class woman could keep the wages she earned instead of handing them over to her husband, and she could inherit money. (It was a start.) Another important piece of legislation was the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878, which provided legal protection for abused wives. A beaten wife could apply for a separation order from a local magistrate, who also had the discretion to award custody of children to the mother and command the husband to pay a weekly sum for maintenance. However, a woman's rights to safety under this law were forfeited if she could be proven to have been unfaithful. (Again, small steps.)

My dissertation and, later, my three mysteries reflect the very real socio-economic and political barriers most women faced. However, in my research of the era, I also found stories of some exceptional women — people Malcolm Gladwell might call "outliers" — who, against all odds, succeeded professionally in the fields of art, music, and literature. These women didn’t necessarily break down the barriers, but they strategically sidled around them, by either finding an unusual opportunity in the public sphere, concealing their gender, limiting their endeavors to “feminine” sub-genres in their craft, or presenting conservative versions of Victorian femininity in their work, so as not to appear too subversive.

There were several 19th-century women musicians who achieved success in Europe. One was Clara Schumann, German composer and pianist. Unfortunately, although she wrote her first Piano Concerto at 14, she lost confidence by her mid-30s. She reflected: “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea … a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?” (I found this heartbreaking.) Still, her distinguished career spanned 61 years.

Another prodigy was Charles Dickens’s sister Fanny, who studied piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London under one of Beethoven’s students. However, with her family in debt, Fanny had to quit because she could no longer afford tuition. She became the immediate inspiration for my heroine in A Dangerous Duet. To earn tuition for the Academy, Nell plays piano at the Octavian music hall, based on Wilton’s, established in 1859 in Whitechapel.

Exterior of Wilton's (present day)

Interior of Wilton's Music Hall, Graces Alley, Whitechapel

While women musicians were admitted to the Royal Academy from the early 1800s, until the 1870s, no serious art school in England would admit women because anatomical drawing classes would require them to look at nude sculptures and bodies (gasp!). Fortunately, the forward-thinking philanthropist Felix Slade funded the Slade School of Art in London in 1871. From the beginning, he insisted that women enter on the same footing as men, eligible for the same classes and scholarships.

The Love Potion by De Morgan, 1903

One of the earliest students was Evelyn De Morgan, born Mary Evelyn Pickering. Because her mother “wanted a daughter, not an artist,” she paid Mary’s first painting tutor to discourage her. At the Slade, Mary dropped her first name, so she’d be taken seriously, as “Evelyn” was gender-neutral. Her paintings are figural and gorgeous.

Another student, Kate Greenaway created exquisite illustrations for children’s books — an endeavor on the “feminine” side of art, as it could be considered naturally “maternal.” These two women helped me create my heroine in A Trace of Deceit, Annabel Rowe, who attends the Slade in 1875.

As for Victorian novels, many were penned by women who concealed their gender. There was some precedent for these writers, for they could draw upon the tradition of women of letters including Frances Burney (satirist and novelist, 1752-1840), Maria Edgeworth (novelist, 1768-1849), Ann Radcliffe (Gothic novelist, 1764-1823), and Jane Austen (novelist, 1775-1817). Still, many Victorian women felt the need to conceal their gender. George Eliot wrote seven novels, including the brilliant Middlemarch (1872); she was born Mary Ann Evans. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, who wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey respectively in 1847, published under the ambiguous names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

In the 1860s, three writers launched the wildly popular “Sensation Novel” genre: Wilkie Collins, who wrote The Moonstone, and two women. One was Mary Elizabeth Braddon—who published under M. E. Braddon. The other, arguably the most successful of all, was Mrs. Henry Wood, whose novel East Lynne (1861) sold thousands of copies, and was staged in either England or North America every week for over forty years! I find it interesting that Mrs. Henry Wood sidled around the barrier by calling attention to her status as a married woman — as if to emphasize that she was no threat to male authors; she was under a man’s “wing.” Furthermore, in this novel, a married woman named Isabel Vane runs off with a lover, abandoning her respectable husband and her three children. Within days, she discovers her lover is an absolute scoundrel, and she longs to return to her family. She experiences a railway crash, which alters her face so remarkably that she can return in disguise as a governess to her children! (Robin Williams played Mrs. Doubtfire in a plot very much like this one, for comedic effect.) The absurd plot device notwithstanding, this novel was a conservative, cautionary tale to Victorian women, inscribing motherhood as the proper role — and providing a Fateful Warning about the dangers of transgressing it. Mrs. Wood's financial and highly public success as a novelist might have been seen as threatening to the patriarchy, except that her message was not.

These successful professional women were rare. But they were present, striving to be true to themselves and paving the way for others. Part of the reason I love writing novels about young women in 1870s London is because I want to find them some wiggle room — ways to claim a degree of autonomy in the public sphere and some choices in their lives. In their different ways, my heroines Elizabeth Fraser (A Lady in the Smoke), Nell Hallam (A Dangerous Duet) and Annabel Rowe (A Trace of Deceit) all grow and change, as protagonists do, but they also bring about a small, realistic change in their society, enough to suggest in fiction my optimistic hopes for women who strive even today for self-actualization and equality.

THE CUTTHROAT WORLD OF ART AND MURDER

8/25/2020

RHYS BOWEN: It's always a pleasure to host my friend, fellow Arizonan and fellow historical mystery writer, Karen Odden. And when we can't travel, she can transport us to Park City or to Victorian England. So welcome, Karen.

KAREN ODDEN: Like my friend Rhys, my family and I try to spend some time out of the Arizona heat each summer. In Park City, Utah, the mountains are a lovely change, and over the years I’ve found that I write differently up here. I hike most days, and as best I can explain, the act of shifting my gaze constantly between the expansive mountain vistas and the tiny wildflowers opens up what feels like a play-space in my brain, with room for weird plot twists and eccentric characters.

It’s no place for my squint-eyed internal editor, however, so I set down words more rapidly on the page. Two years ago this summer, I drafted my third novel, A Trace of Deceit, which came out last December, and I still remember my artist heroine Annabel Rowe, her troubled brother Edwin, and their world in 1870s London coming alive for me on Spiro Trail.

The foundation of the novel was laid earlier, though, with my work at Christie’s auction house back in the scandal-filled 1990s. (For those who don’t recall, Sotheby’s and Christie’s were caught price-fixing, and the heads of Sotheby’s paid millions of dollars in fines and stepped down in disgrace, while Christie’s employee Christopher Davidge skated away in exchange for his testimony.) Having never taken an art history class, I didn’t know a Miro from a Modigliani when I arrived. But I knew marketing, so I’d been hired to buy ad space in publications such as the New York Times, Magazine Antiques, Art & Auction, and the Maine Antiques Digest, where we promoted our auctions for everything from Van Gogh paintings to Fabergé eggs and Paul Revere silver spoons

In order not to appear a complete idiot about art, I perused these publications and many others. (This, despite the fact that when I was a child, my father insisted I’d never find a job that paid me to sit around and read!)

Through reading, I learned to appreciate art objects, but what captivated me were the stories around them—the daring heists, the deceptive forgeries, the vicious family feuds, the anonymous sales by European nobility who sought to mend their fortunes discreetly, the desperate attempts to preserve art during WWII, the lawless pillaging of antiquities from Egypt, and so on. On my 29th birthday, in 1994, I was in “the room where it happens”—Christie’s main salon—when Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Hammer, the notebook with the famous Vitruvian man, was auctioned off in a fierce, frantic bidding war for $28 million to an anonymous phone bidder, who turned out to be Bill Gates. It was the first time I felt down to my bones, and in the adrenaline running down my arms, the suspense, allure, and history that surround pieces of art.

For my third novel, I wanted to explore the cutthroat 1870s London art world, with an artist heroine, but did such a woman really exist? In graduate school, at NYU, studying the Victorian era and its literature, I learned just how difficult it was for nineteenth-century middle-class women to exert agency, to authorize their lives, to carve their own paths as professionals in any fields other than the genteel ones of teaching and governessing. No amount of “feistiness” could overcome the very real economic, social, educational, and political limitations women faced, including the system of coverture, which meant that married women could not keep their wages, own or inherit property, or initiate any legal proceeding, including divorce.

The Love Potion, by Evelyn De Morgan

As I began to research, however, I came upon a few encouraging stories of women artists who made their living by their craft. One was Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), for whom the annual and prestigious Greenaway Medal for British book illustration is named. Another was Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919; born Mary Evelyn Pickering), whose stunning paintings I had seen in the Met in New York. As a child, Mary was immensely talented in both writing and painting—but her upper-class mother “wanted a daughter, not a painter,” and paid Mary’s art tutor to demean her efforts and discourage her. Like the story of Charles Dickens’s older sister Fanny, a brilliant pianist who had to leave the Royal Academy of Music because she couldn’t afford tuition (which hardship fueled my second novel, A Dangerous Duet), this anecdote spoke to me of all the painful consequences of the constraints on ambitious, talented women in the 1800s.

Fortunately, in 1871, the forward-thinking philanthropist Felix Slade funded a school of art at the University College London in Gower Street (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/about). He made it a condition of his donation that men and women would enter on equal footing for serious art study, including women being permitted to take classes in anatomical drawing (with the heretofore forbidden nudes--gasp). Both Greenaway and Pickering eventually found their way to the Slade, and De Morgan won one of the prestigious scholarships, going on to paint brilliant, bold figures well into the twentieth century.

De Morgan’s story raised all sorts of questions for me. What does it mean to be discouraged from your ambitions by your mother, by a mentor, and by society? How does it narrow your horizon, shut down your heart, fade your sense of bright possibilities? And is there a flip side of this coin, for men?

In A Trace of Deceit, Annabel is a student at the Slade in 1875. Her older brother Edwin was ostensibly the “gifted” child of the family, but pressured by his ambitious father to develop his genius, Edwin grew sulky and resentful, eventually turning to a life of opium, crime, and lies. A convicted forger, Edwin has just been released from prison as the novel begins, and as he seeks to mend his ruptured relationship with Annabel, he swears to her that he has reformed and will pursue his craft within the law. When he is murdered, and a priceless French painting by François Boucher disappears (in chapter 1), Annabel is desperate to discover the truth about Edwin’s death. Had Edwin lied to her? Or had he genuinely changed his ways? As she and Inspector Hallam of the Yard follow the clues that lead to Edwin’s past, she realizes her memories of Edwin are not like a painting, fixed in form and tone; they all bear a trace of deceit.

This summer, I am drafting another mystery, again set in 1870s London. Henry Morton Stanley (of “Dr. Livingston, I presume” fame) has just returned from his first expedition to Africa, which he would later describe My heroine Gwendolyn Manning has a friend Lewis Ainsley, a (fictional) journalist, who returns with Stanley and plans to write a book exposing the brutality of the ivory and slave trades. But there are influential men who would squelch that story, and when Lewis is murdered, Gwendolyn must find out why—especially after Lewis’s wife points the police toward her. The words are landing on the page, messily, but they’re landing, and this afternoon I’m off to hike and find some more.

This blogpost originally appeared on the Jungle Red Writers blog, courtesy of Rhys Bowen.
https://www.jungleredwriters.com/2020/07/karen-odden-on-cutthroat-world-of-art.html

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DIVINING THE PAST: A GUEST POST FROM CLASSICIST & AUTHOR JUDITH STARKSTON

The "Outliers" in Victorian England: Women musicians, painters, and authors

THE CUTTHROAT WORLD OF ART AND MURDER

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DIVINING THE PAST: A GUEST POST FROM CLASSICIST & AUTHOR JUDITH STARKSTON

The "Outliers" in Victorian England: Women musicians, painters, and authors

THE CUTTHROAT WORLD OF ART AND MURDER

About karen

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