Nancy Jardine Author: Welcoming author Ali Bacon!

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...

What the Victorians did for me

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 19^th 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.