From Fact to Fiction: The challenges and opportunities in shaping factual research into a compelling fiction novel

By Donna Moore, Author of 'The Unpicking' (October 2023)

Happy Friday Scribblers!

Today it is my pleasure to present an exclusive feature with historical novelist, Donna Moore. The Unpicking follows three plucky generations of Gilfillan women as they navigate the dangers of Victorian Scotland and battle against a systemically corrupt police force. The novel came out of both Donna Moore’s PhD research and her deep empathy for vulnerable women, from her day job as Adult Literacy and Numeracy Development Worker at Glasgow Women’s Library. Over to Donna…

I am fascinated by the gendered treatment of women and women’s history and the possibilities of fiction to bring those aspects to the fore, and the prospect of being able to explore these questions really excited me

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II. Background

The period I have chosen to focus on for these novellas – from the 1870s to 1919 – was one of great flux and upheaval which brought enormous changes in many aspects of women’s lives – economically, socially, politically and legally. Up until the 1870s, women were invisible in the eyes of the law once they married and were simply added to the husband’s possessions. He controlled his wife’s body, property and children. As the nineteenth century advanced, voices campaigning for improvements in the property rights of married women and increased freedom for all women became louder. The results of campaigning were three Married Women’s Property Acts in 1870, 1874 and 1882. These Acts didn’t apply in Scotland and it was only in 1880 and 1881 that women in Scotland gained improved rights. The Birdcage starts in 1877, prior to both the Scottish Acts.

In terms of a husband’s control over his wife’s body, the nineteenth century was also a time when campaigners fought for the lunacy laws to be overhauled. The Birdcage has, as part of its plot, the concept of hysteria. By the second half of the nineteenth century, it was considered that any disease or abnormality of the uterus and ovaries could cause a range of symptoms from moodiness to insanity and I wanted to show how that formed part of the controls that women were subjected to.