#HistFicThursdays - The Fortune Keeper - Deborah Swift - Guest Post

  

For this week's #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm thrilled to be sharing the gripping book The Fortune Keeper from Deborah Swift, as part of her Coffee Pot Book Club tour. In her guest post, Deborah shares her approach to telling a fictional story of a real person. But first, let's meet the book...

Blurb

Count your nights by stars, not shadows ~ Italian Proverb

Winter in Renaissance Venice

Mia Caiozzi is determined to discover her destiny by studying the science of astronomy. But her stepmother Giulia forbids her to engage in this occupation, fearing it will lead her into danger. The ideas of Galileo are banned by the Inquisition, so Mia must study in secret.

Giulia's real name is Giulia Tofana, renowned for her poison Aqua Tofana, and she is in hiding from the Duke de Verdi's family who are intent on revenge for the death of their brother. Giulia insists Mia should live quietly out of public view. If not, it could threaten them all. But Mia doesn't understand this, and rebels against Giulia, determined to go her own way.

When the two secret lives collide, it has far-reaching and fatal consequences that will change Mia's life forever.

Set amongst opulent palazzos and shimmering canals, The Fortune Keeper is the third novel of adventure and romance based on the life and legend of Giulia Tofana, the famous poisoner.

Her characters are so real they linger in the mind long after the book is back on the shelf - Historical Novel Society

The Fortune Keeper is available via this Universal Link

Guest Post

History is Not Fixed  

When I began writing this series of books set in the Italian renaissance there was very little known about Giulia Tofana, the poisoner who features as the main character in the previous two titles. Supposedly she poisoned six hundred men with her lethal brew, Aqua Tofana. The best information we had about her consisted of secondary sources from the Victorian era and earlier, along with some information from the few Italian writers and doctors who wrote about her in the years following her death. I collated all the available information and it formed the basis of the facts I used in the first two books, The Poison Keeper and The Silkworm Keeper.

Unfortunately, although we think it must be so, history is never fixed, and is always open to interpretation. When writing the first two books in the series I relied on the information we had then. But recently, in an old library archive in Italy, an American academic has unearthed the real-time transcript of the murder trial of Giulia Tofana’s stepdaughter, Girolama Spara, (also known as Gironima Spara) and published it. The document was originally kept under lock and key by the Pope at Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, and from there ended up in the State Archive where it lay uncatalogued and undiscovered for generations. 

Changing horses in mid-stream

The ledger was in a poor state of repair, but the trial of Girolama Spara is recorded verbatim with added dates and details, and Professor Craig A Monson has translated it into modern English. This is of massive interest to me because at last we know more about the actual trial and details of the life of Girolama, (nicknamed Mia in my book to avoid confusion) who having a similar name to her mother Giulia, was often confused with her. Many of the crimes attributed to Giulia belonged to Girolama and vice-versa. You can find the document translated by Monson at the end of this post.

So what do you do as a novelist when the history changes? Well first, you have to be aware that whatever character you have created can never be the real person. The events you describe can never be ‘true’ as even contemporary witnesses to the event will have different views. However what I think is important for the reader is that the world you have created is consistent within itself. That the rules you have set for that world remain in place so that the reader feels they are in a real and secure locale, no matter how fantastical the story.

After all, we were all prepared to suspend our disbelief when watching the film Jaws to believe that a giant shark could terrorize our beaches. The film carefully constructed its own reality. 

If that is the case, why tie your books to history at all? Blending historical fact with historical fiction enables the reader to experience the past in a uniquely sensory way, from living within a person of the time. Film cannot do this, non-fiction cannot do this. Only by physically placing the reader in another person’s imaginary past can the reader really feel they have ‘been there.’ Often when people think a book is accurate, they mean it agrees with their version of what they believe to be the facts. But there are bigger truths than facts, and reality is not just information. 

 A novel can never be ‘accurate’, just as someone trying to depict my life of yesterday could never be accurate, even with all the iphone technology and photography available now, and even my diaries, because life is too complex to render completely. What I hope to achieve in my novels is a tantalising whisper of what it might have been like to inhabit another era.

So to complete the book I’d started, the most important thing for me was that it should ‘read the same’ as the other two books in the series; that it didn’t suddenly change tone or feeling. At the same time, the accuracy of the setting and the milieu in which my protagonists were living had to support the story, as well as the many new facts. I used maps, academic articles and transcripts of primary sources to complete the book, as well as the translation of the trial documents by Professor Monson.

Is the book a true telling of Girolama Spera’s life? Definitely not. Will it take you on a journey into the heart of a young woman in Renaissance Venice? I hope so.

You may be interested in: 

The Black Widows of the Eternal City: The True Story of Rome’s Most Infamous Poisoner by Craig A Monson

Now, let's meet the author:

Deborah Swift is a USA TODAY bestselling author who is passionate about the past. Deborah used to be a costume designer for the BBC, before becoming a writer. Now she lives in an old English school house in a village full of 17th Century houses, near the glorious Lake District. She divides her time between writing and teaching. After taking a Masters Degree in Creative Writing, she enjoys mentoring aspiring novelists and has an award-winning historical fiction blog at her website www.deborahswift.com 

Deborah loves to write about how extraordinary events in history have transformed the lives of ordinary people, and how the events of the past can live on in her books and still resonate today. 

Recent books include The Poison Keeper, about the Renaissance poisoner Giulia Tofana, which was a winner of the Wishing Shelf Readers Award, and a Coffee Pot Book Club Gold Medal, and The Cipher Room set in WW2 and due for publication by Harper Collins next Spring.

You can follow Deborah on these links:

Website - Twitter - Facebook - Pinterest - Bookbub - Amazon Author Page

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