Celia Rees was born in 1949 and grew up in Solihull, England. She took a degree in History and Politics at the University of Warwick and worked as a secondary school History and English teacher for seventeen years, during which time she also became a writer. Celia gives talks on her writing and teaches Creative Writing on the University of Warwick Open Studies Programme. She lives in Leamington Spa with her husband and daughter.

Celia Rees began writing to fill what she and her students identified as a gap in the market: purpose written fiction for young adults. Her books are written for older children and teenagers, and usually include an element of fear. Her first novel, Every Step You Take - a thriller for teenagers - was published in 1993, and was followed by many more thrillers and tales of horror and the supernatural. Witch Child (2000) was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 2001, and was followed by a sequel, Sorceress, published in 2002, and shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbread Children's Book Award. These were followed by Pirates! (2003), The Wish House (2005) and The Stone Testament (2007). Her latest novel, Sovay (2008), set in late eighteenth century England and France, is the story of a passionate young woman making her way in life against the prevailing social expectations.

Bridget Carrington met Celia  in Soho Square – where Sovay is partly set – immediately before the book’s launch.

Why are you particularly attracted to historical settings?

 In the past I wrote a variety of novels, not only historical ones. I studied History and Politics at university, so I have always been fascinated by history but when I taught I preferred teaching English.

Why did you choose to set Sovay at the time of the French Revolution?

I don’t choose – the main character does! I travel with an idea, and the historical period comes from that. With Sovay I started with an undated ballad. The period most associated with highway robbery is the eighteenth century, so I set my story then. I had also always been fascinated by the enormous impact of the events of the French Revolution on life in England.

 How do you decide whether to include actual historical figures?

I need to place my characters in their historical context, so I include real people in peripheral roles – as I did in Witch Child with Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General. However, I don’t want to be constrained by using a real person as a central character. If I did that, I would have to stick to what actually happened.

Your young women characters seem to have a very modern outlook. Is this an accurate reflection of your view of girls at the time, or a means to engage modern readers?

Of course I have to engage my readers, but it is a careful balancing act of being attractive to a modern reader while being true to the time. I try to point out the individuality of people even then. Characters need always to be possible, not unbelievable. Many women in the past were far more independent than we realize today. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft travelled independently widely and in Europe and actually witnessed Marie Antoinette’s final journey to the guillotine.

Your use of language seems to work really well. It is not at all archaic, but reflects the atmosphere of the time. How do you achieve this?

 I try to frame the narrative through the eyes of someone of the time. In the ‘Afterword’ to Sovay it is her brother Hugh who, twenty years later, has apparently related her story to visitors intrigued by her portrait. I attempt a style which doesn’t copy the prose of the time, but which does remain true to the spirit of it. It’s not meant to be a dry PhD thesis stuffed with fact, as it’s written for the readers’ enjoyment, but it needs accuracy and the true flavour of the times.

You clearly research your period very carefully…

I studied the French Revolution at school and again at university, but I needed to research the detail of its impact on British history. The incident where someone is arrested for selling seditious booklets but has to be released is based on an actual record. The booklets seized were the wrong ones, and concerned with domestic economy not revolution! In a historical novel the chronology needs to be accurate, but also to reflect the reality of the story.

Some descriptions and characters seem to be based very closely on historical fact…

Certainly! I love the Gothic, and Thursley Abbey is based on contemporary plans and descriptions of William Beckford’s amazing Fonthill Abbey. The activities of Dysart and his friends are influenced by Beckford himself, and by libertine societies such as the Hellfire Club. The image of Sovay awaking from a nightmare, and feeling as though something oppressive is sitting on her refers to the famous Fuseli painting The Nightmare. I’m delighted that you spotted these references!

Some of the incidents are quite horrifying, and reveal a very dark eighteenth century underworld of child abuse, depravity and ‘molly houses’. Do you anticipate criticism from some quarters that you included these?

Possibly. Sovay comes from a very sheltered rural upbringing, and I needed to show the reality and the impact on her of street life in London. As I researched I became very interested in gay London at that time.

 With its wealth of reference to specific aspects of eighteenth century life, the arts and culture, would there not be a place in the book for some explanatory notes which readers could follow up if they became interested?

I hope that, as we did with Witch Child, there will be a website for Sovay. That sort of additional information could go there.

It seemed to me that Sovay is a historical romance, thoroughly twenty-first century but also very much in the tradition of writers like Georgette Heyer…

I devoured Georgette Heyer’s novels many years ago, and it’s quite likely that some aspects of her work have crept into Sovay! Publishers and girl readers like romance in a novel! At first I thought the American, Virgil Barrett, might carry her off. She also falls for the highwayman Greenwood. I had wanted to finish the novel after she leaves Thursley Abbey, and write the French episodes as a separate book. However,  I was persuaded that it would be better to include it all in one novel. I know that any man who was going to sweep her off her feet would have to be a ‘big’ man – tall, powerful, violent, a passionate believer in revolution – and I needed someone to personify that. The Revolution went wrong very badly, very quickly before it recovered its true course. He had to be able to express all those aspects. I watched the films Danton and Goya’s Ghosts before I created Léon and found the inspiration for him there, in Javier Bardem’s characterization.

Your historical novels seem to be written mainly with girls in mind. Would you write one that would specifically engage boys?

 With historical characters it is more interesting to me to show how independent and adventurous some girls and women were in the past. We expect men to be pirates and highwaymen, so there’s no news there! However some of my other writing [such as The Wish House] engages very much with male issues.

What comes next?

I’m writing a novel set at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, with the action partly taking place in my own family’s home area of Warwickshire. It’s provisionally called Illyria because we will see whether what seems to be about to happen at the end of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night really does. I take the view here that Shakespeare based his story on people he actually knew, and whether their lives turned out in the way his play predicts. In it Viola’s daughter comes to London and tells Shakespeare the story… The idea came to me when I came across a student outdoor performance of Twelfth Night.

Sounds fascinating!

Anything else?

 No! I can only work on one book at a time nowadays, as the research is so intensive. I used to be able to edit one book while writing another, but I run the risk of getting my characters confused if I’m not careful, so it has to be one book at a time now!

Thank you Celia Rees for talking to Write Away