Bring to book: Alison Leonard takes a prompt

‘I knew I had to be faithful to what she was actually experiencing.’

When the author Hilary Mantel died, her many admirers realised there would be no more magical novels, no more of her incisive commentary, or heartbreaking accounts of topics like women’s illness. Six months later, however, it was revealed that Mantel’s next work would have taken quite a departure. She was preparing to write a novel about the third sister in Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, the rather tedious Mary Bennet. It was to be ‘a load of fun, an Austen “mashup’”.

I had to search for the meaning of ‘mashup’. Wikipedia says it is ‘a creative work, usually a song, created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs’. Mantel intended to ‘get away from the really serious research, to do something lighter’. Other Austen characters would appear throughout the book in unfamiliar guises.

I wonder how many of Mantel’s fans were also writers – more particularly, writers of novels about Mary Bennet. I was – am – one of these; my reimagined Mary Bennet has just been published. I wanted to give shy, pious Mary a life of her own – one that didn’t rest on whether she married the right man. I also wanted to invent new characters around her. One such character came to me with just a voice, a sentence. She spoke in a strong Ulster accent and said, very clearly: ‘Here she comes, the minx.’

‘Minx’ hadn’t been in my vocabulary for this novel. Nor was Ulster on my map. But the voice held authority and could not be denied. In the end, we negotiated: her plot-line was not a main thread, but it would hold a final twist.

Writing is my weekday job. On Sundays I go to Meeting and hear that I should ‘Take heed… to the promptings of love and truth.’ I open my mind and my heart to these; I respect them even when they’re unexpected. In fact, I respect them more when they’re not what I usually hear.

As I finished The Unexpected Marriage of Mary Bennet, I pondered the similarities between writing and heeding prompts. They seemed akin to each other. I know other writers feel the same way. As the Quaker writer, Jeff Phelps, puts it: ‘There’s an inevitability about the truth in fiction – asking oneself not what ought to happen next but what could really happen here. There’s a kind of rightness that mere “making things up” doesn’t have.’ We trust these literary promptings, as we do the more spiritual ones.

Here we come to a difficulty. Can we trust the characters that come to us? Advices & Queries defines the promptings as being ‘of love and truth’, but our fictional characters may take us into dark places, where love is absent and truth gets confused with propaganda.

What about my Ulsterwoman? I knew I had to be faithful to what she was actually experiencing, rather than forcing her into things, like a cardboard figure. These are mysteries, but one thing is certain: ‘Happily ever after’ is rarely a convincing conclusion. In fiction, as in so much of life, it’s a matter of ‘living the questions’.

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