With wit, suspense, and sheer originality, C. J. Carey has crafted an eerie story of “what if” that explores how some systems of female control cherished by the Nazis would have developed in a German-occupied England.
We chat with C. J. Carey all about her latest release Widowland, along with writing, book recommendations, and more!
Hi, C. J.! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi, I’m a British writer, living in Wimbledon, and I was a journalist before I was a novelist. I worked at the BBC and in Fleet Street, the home of UK newspapers, and I loved almost every second. But I always knew I wanted to write novels, and pretty much from my twenties I was always writing one. Before Widowland I’ve published nine other novels under my real name, Jane Thynne.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
Probably when I started passing round stories I’d written about teachers at school. I gave the teachers wild private lives behind their respectable exteriors and I realised it was fun when my friends starting asking for more. I went on to study English literature at Oxford and I’ve been writing fiction and poetry ever since.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
The first book I fell in love with was A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The idea of a girl on her own, living on her own resources in a hostile world, has informed almost all my novels. It wasn’t a novel that made me want to be an author, but the big, immersive world of George Eliot’s Middlemarch showed me what novels could do. And right now I’m obsessed with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s addictive family saga, The Cazalet Chronicles.
Your new novel, Widowland, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Exciting, immersive, pacy, romantic and thought-provoking (cheating on the word count there!)
What can readers expect?
A counterfactual mystery set in 1953; Coronation year in Britain, but not the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Great Britain has formed an Alliance with Germany and in this harsh, oppressive regime, every aspect of the country is transformed, especially the lives of women. They are divided into castes reflecting their value to society, with the lowest caste representing single women and widows over fifty who live in run-down areas dubbed ‘widowlands’. Our heroine, Rose Ransom, is engaged in rewriting the classics of English literature to align them with the ideology of the Alliance, especially to remove references to challenging, independent or intelligent women. When subversive graffiti starts to appear on public buildings, the women in the widowlands are blamed and Rose is sent in to investigate.
Where did the inspiration for Widowland come from?
Shortly after my own husband died early, I was having lunch with an old friend who was commiserating. He said, ‘We’d love to invite you to dinner . . .’ yet before I could say yes, he added, ‘but we only have couples to dinner.’ As I was walking home, I thought, I’m living in widowland now. Almost immediately, the idea came, what if widowland was a real place, where women were shunted to the edges of society? And what if those women turned out to be the most subversive and literate people in the land? So my friend did me a favor without knowing it.
Can you tell us a bit about the challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
I’m not the only author to say that the most distracting and disruptive challenge was lockdown, which counter-intuitively was a terrible time for writers. Being isolated, with no opportunity for outside stimulation, was creatively stultifying. If you’re going to pour it all out on the page you need human interaction to refill the source. Although I was lucky enough to have two millennial children and a dog with me, it was not a great time.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Often in novels, characters undergo a process of growth, where they come to discover more about themselves during the story. The joy of writing Rose Ransom was to imagine someone encountering the great classics of English literature for the first time and finding them in conflict with everything she has been trained to believe. That required not only Rose but the reader to see the familiar afresh, which is what novels are intended to do.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
‘Write what you know.’ It’s the maxim that’s always trotted out and it held me back for ages because I assumed it meant that I could only write about a white, middle class woman growing up in twentieth century Britain. A bit like the proponents of cultural appropriation would have it. The answer, of course, is that anything you write will be what you know, because it will be rendered through your own, unique perspective on the world. It will be your lens and your observations that you reproduce, no matter what larger template you choose. In the same way that I believe all historical novels are modern novels, because they reflect contemporary concerns, so any background or characterisation you choose will, in some way, be a reflection of yourself. So throw off the shackles and write what you like. Stray from the narrow confines of your own existence. In the process of research you will also learn so much about the world.
What’s next for you?
My next novel is a sequel to Widowland called The Last Queen, which will be out in the US next year. It takes up the story two years on, when President Eisenhower is making an important state visit to the UK, and Queen Wallis is plotting to escape.
Lastly, do you have any 2022 book recommendations for our readers?
The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland is the incredible but little known story of Rudi Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz and tried to warn the world, but whose warnings fell mostly on deaf ears. It’s an astonishing account, both of human brutality and resilience, and although it’s non-fiction, it reads like a thriller.
