Writing Fiction about History

What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel?

Inheriting Our Names by C. Vargas McPherson, although I don’t think the people who have read this lesser-known novel fail to appreciate it. Inheriting Our Names is set in Sevilla, Spain, the city where I spend a third of each year. The city that I find both compelling and enigmatic.

McPherson relates the history of Sevilla at the time of the civil war and the fascist dictatorship and reconstructs the story of her mother and her grandparents. In 1936, four years after the establishment of the second Spanish republic, Aurora and Manuel are a young married couple with two children, living in the working-class Macarena district of Sevilla. An election has just returned a coalition of left-wing parties to power. It is a time of hope for the working poor, but not one of improvement.

Times are hard and they are about to get harder. In July 1936 the Francoist general Quiepo de Llano exercises a swift and efficient coup, taking Sevilla for the self-styled Nationalists. In a brief show of resistance by workers flooding into the streets a fellow employee at the iron foundry dies in Manuel’s arms.

Artillery and troops are sent into the Macarena district. Over the following months suspected ‘reds’ are dragged from their beds and shot against the wall of the cemetery before being tipped into a common grave.

McPherson portrays her grandmother, Aurora, as having a special relationship with the Virgin of the Macarena, a statue in the local church. The virgin becomes part of Aurora’s life. Like a good neighbor, she lends a hand and dispenses advice, sometimes unwanted. Through personal tragedy, hunger and fear La Macarena is on hand for Aurora.

Manuel is guilt-ridden, because he has a job at the iron foundry that makes ammunition for Franco, because he survived when friends didn’t and because he designed and built the iron railings put up to seal off the chapels in the cathedral from the poor, who might steal the gold. He risks his job and his life stealing scraps of iron from his workplace until he collects enough to make a cross, which he erects in the cemetery where his friends and neighbors were slaughtered.

Manuel told no-one about his cross. It became known as The Cross with no Name. On his deathbed, he told his eldest son, Manolo. For years Manolo also told no-one. Such was the silence in Spain for many years after Franco’s death.

Mass exhumations and examination of the remains from the common graves in the San Fernando Cemetery began in 2017. After reading Inheriting Our Names, I set out to find The Cross with no Name, Manuel’s cross. It has been treated with love and respect and erected on one of the mass grave sites.

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?

I guess finding Manuel’s cross was one. Another two also involve graveyards.

My brother lives in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, England. It is a place of harsh weather and-soul piercing beauty with a deep history. Hebden itself was little more than a pack-horse bridge across the river until the industrial revolution turned it into a mass of cotton mills. But up the steep valley side and onto the edge of the moorland, which the poet Ted Hughes described as a stage for the performance of heaven, there is Heptonstall. There are two churches at Heptonstall, St Thomas the Apostle and the ruined St.Thomas àBecket, one on each side of the old graveyard.

There are an estimated 100,000 people buried in the graveyards of the two churches at Heptonstall. One is Sylvia Plath, the poet and wife of Ted Hughes.

The day I set out to discover Sylvia Plath’s grave, with my husband, brother and sister-in-law in tow, was cold, with wind-born rain whipping our faces. My brother had notes from a friend who knew where Plath’s grave was but it still took us a while to find it. My husband and sister-in-law huddled into the corner of the grave-yard wall and probably had some unkind things to say about me. Eventually we called them over to see the  beautiful inscription: even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted. Then we sought shelter in the pub.

Some years later I was back in the Heptonstall graveyard and came across the grave of David Hartley, the Cragg Vale coiner whose story is told in The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers. Hartley was an eighteenth-century criminal, a man who forged coins, and who was so successful at it that the flood of money had an effect on the economy of the whole country. He was also a weaver whose livelihood was disappearing because of the successful new factories down in Hebden Bridge. He was at one and the same time a victim and an exploiter. He was eventually caught and hanged.

The gravestone, one of those laid flat in the old churchyard, had little piles of coins left on it by other seekers-out of literary sites.

What was the inspiration for your most recent book?

I knew I wanted to write about a suffragette and I knew I didn’t want the story to take place entirely in London. I feel London dominates far too much, in both history and fiction. I had lived in Nottingham for several years, which is  in an  area of England called the midlands because it’s neither in the north nor the south. So, I searched for “Suffragette and Nottingham” and I hit pay dirt. Elizabeth Crawford, a British author, historian and dealer in suffrage ephemera, had an entry in her fascinating blog, Woman and her Sphere, about Helen Kirkpatrick Watts. Helen was the daughter of a vicar of Lenton. Lenton, now a suburb of Nottingham, was, in 1900, still a village on its edge.

Harriet Loxley, in Strait Lace, is not Helen Watts. All they have in common is that they were suffragettes, daughters of vicars and come from Nottingham, except, that is, for a trunk.

Helen Kirkpatrick Watts

Elizabeth Crawford’s blog tells the story of how a schoolteacher in Bristol once set a project for his students giving them free rein to choose a subject. One enterprising young woman bought an advert in the local paper asking if anyone had any material relating to suffragettes. To her, and her teacher’s, surprise an answer came from an employee at the Avonmouth docks saying they had a trunk in lost property that contained letters to and from a suffragette. That suffragette was Helen Kirkpatrick Watts who had lost a trunk on a transatlantic journey and never reclaimed it. The teacher got permission to copy the papers. The copies are now in the care of the  City of Nottingham. I don’t know what happened to the originals, or the trunk they were in.

Trunks make cameo appearances in Strait Lace. They will play a bigger part in the companion book to Strait Lace: Crocus Fields.

How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?

I only have Crocus Fields waiting in the wings, a few ideas for a novel that never flew and a short story that everyone said ought to be the beginning of a novel.

I originally intended to write a dual time-line book that centred on a problem faced by women that was particular to the age they were living in. My modern day character would be dealing with infertility and IVF, my past character would be a suffragette. The women would be members of the same family and it would be a family from Nottingham.

I was no more than two chapters into my first draft when my modern-day character’s mother demanded a role in the story, a major role. She was living in the 1970s and her female problem was being a single parent and holding down a professional career.

By the time I was finished with the first draft I had a monster of a book.

I entered a competition and submitted two sets of first chapters, as if there were two books. One of the side events of the competition was editorial review of my work for a modest extra fee. The editor was very enthusiastic about both pieces and asked if I would like to work with him. I liked his detailed and perceptive approach. I sent him the manuscript and explained that I didn’t know if I had one, two or three books.

His response was, “What is the book you want to write?”

The book I wanted to write was one with interwoven timelines. So I took out whole subplots, whole scenes, whole characters, until I got the book down to a reasonable length. I sent it to the editor. It came back with lots of, “You need more here” and “This should be a scene not a transition”.

We talked.

Eventually we decided that the modern mother/daughter story was too firmly intertwined to be teased out but the Harriet story, the suffragette story, could stand on its own.

So Strait Lace now exists as a book and Crocus Fields, the original title, is awaiting final edits.

What was the best money you ever spent as a writer?

The best money I spent was on that editor. He’s an Oxford graduate living in Spain. We speak the same language. And his wife was looking to branch out as a cover designer, so she did the cover for Strait Lace. I got a whole team when he offered to edit for me.

Rosemary Hayward grew up in the countryside to the north of London, England, left home for Oxford University when she was nineteen and married that same year. She is still married to the same lovely man. Leaving college with a degree in English, she trained as an accountant while working for Britain’s largest bicycle manufacturer, Raleigh’s of Nottingham. Her working life has been in finance; as a cost accountant, a teacher of finance, and a tax preparer.

When her husband’s job took her to California for a year, she sat down to see if she could invent some characters and think up a story. Many years later that project became Margaret Leaving, published in 2017. In 2000 she moved to California permanently. She qualified as a CPA and worked for a Santa Cruz firm preparing taxes. Now both retired, Rosemary and her husband split their time between Santa Cruz and Sevilla, Spain.

Rosemary’s second novel, Strait Lace, was published on March 8th, 2025.

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