Hello!
I'm afraid it's been a lot longer than ' In the Blink of an Eye' since my last post here but today I'm totally delighted to welcome author Ali Bacon who has used exactly that phrase in one of her book titles. However, she's here to tell us the scenario which has also led to her latest publication 'The Absent Heart' which is exactly my kind of novel!
Ali has been immersed in similar research to me in that our studies have included various important Scottish people of the Victorian Era like David Octavius Hill and his second wife Amelia (You'll find posts about her on this blog.)
Every author comes to writing with their own story so here's Ali to tell us...
Ali Bacon explains how she used family history to find
her way into historical fiction
Until a few years ago I hadn’t thought much about the
Victorian era except that my grandparents, born in the 1890s, lived on the very
edge of it. I certainly didn’t consider writing historical fiction which, as a
non-historian, I thought of as simply too much work!
However all that changed about 10 years when I was writing a
contemporary novel (A Kettle of Fish, 2012) and somehow the story of a
Victorian artist and photographer got into the narrative. I was googling art events in Edinburgh and at
the time there was a major exhibition of the work of David Octavius Hill and Robert
Adamson. I decided to investigate and became quite obsessed by this body of
very early photography. I got hold of a large scale study of Hill where I
uncovered not just his artistic skill but also his entire life story which I
found engaging, intriguing and extremely poignant.
As a result I ended up writing In the Blink of an Eye
which was an imaginary account of Hill’s life seen through the women who
surrounded him. At the beginning of the novel he had recently lost his wife and
was caring for a 4 year old daughter. She
remained a crucial focus but I also wanted to explore the romantic implications.
He was a widower; charismatic engaging and at the centre of Edinburgh society. How come he didn’t immediately remarry as many
widowers did in the Victorian era? And who in the end would become his second
wife? So there is a romantic thread in the novel but it’s not a romance and
many themes of love, loss and friendship are explored against the backdrop of
the discovery of photography.
I was still a very reluctant historical novelist!
Researching my characters was one thing,
but then there was all the background research too and even the idea of
it was overwhelming. However, I had some
family history to fall back on and the period didn’t seem too remote to be
imagined. It also helped that I was writing about places I knew from my own
upbringing, Robert Adamson being a
native of St Andrews where I went to university, and the Paton family with whom
David Octavius Hill had a very strong friendship, were from Dunfermline, the town where I was
born. Although I haven’t lived in Scotland for quite some time it was fun to
feel I was rediscovering my own Victorian roots. Another consideration was the
‘voice’ I would use to conjure up that era. I didn’t want to attempt fully
authentic diction (whatever that may have been) so I kept to neutral (to me) language
in terms of period but falling back on voices from my youth for a more Scottish
flavour.
In the end I was pleased with In the Blink of an Eye
and had found it to be a rewarding experience, so I considered where I might go
next with historical fiction and again family came into it in the shape of
writer Robert Louis Stevenson, a more famous figure than David Octavius Hill
and one about whom a great deal more has been written. I shied away from him at first as a topic but
there was a small family connection, in that one of my ancestors had actually
gone to university with him so there was that feeling of familiarity and a
sense in which we thought of him as one of the family. Eventually, I focused
not on R.L.S. himself but on one of the women in his life, a lady called
Francis Sitwell, around whom I uncovered
a web of emotional intrigue. I brought
her to life in The Absent Heart published earlier this year. Frances was
trapped in a bad marriage but was also in a relationship with a well-connected
scholar and critic when they both met the young
R.L.S. The novel unravels this triangle and explores the landscape of
friendship, love and desire in late Victorian England. It has quite a different
feel to In the Blink of an Eye as it’s set mostly in London and in a
later period, but I still felt in touch
with my characters through those generational links. It has a more conventional novel structure than
Blink and readers all seem to consider it a page- turner.
I’m delighted that following publication of The Absent Heart my publishers Linen Press have decided to reissue In the Blink of an Eye with a new cover and I hope this will attract more readers to both books. I’ve just unearthed some old linen napkins, recalling how Dunfermline in the 19th century was a linen town par excellence, which makes a neat tie-in to my publisher!
More about Ali
Ali Bacon is a native Scot living in South Gloucestershire.
Her writing ranges from flash fiction to full-length novels and she has
recently dived into historical fiction, with her second historical novel The
Absent Heart, inspired by the letters of R.L. Stevenson published in March 2025. This follows an
encounter with a Scottish artist and photographer which became In the Blink
of an Eye, (Linen Press 2018), while her short story about a medieval nun, Within
these Walls, was winner of the Bristol Short Story Prize, Local
Writer Award in 2019.
Buy Ali’s books:
