Alchemy (48 page)

Fiction, especially historical fiction, requires a lot of research to make it convincing to the reader. For the kind of medicine that would have been available to Amyntas to practise I used Nicholas Culpeper’s
Complete Herbal,
published in 1653, which includes many earlier prescriptions, some from the Sidney household itself. Please don’t try them at home. For Jade’s legal expertise I drew on my own experiences in pursuit of authors’ rights. I had to create two distinctive voices as well so that the reader would know at once whether it was 1603 or 2003.

‘In
Alchemy
I wanted to write about the bigotry and fanaticism which seem to be on the increase at this cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.’

My two protagonists are both brought up against the fundamentalisms of their time, whether Christian or other, either as a clinging to tablets of stone or the pursuit of strange cults and sects, a resurgence of flat-earthism, a refusal to accept rational and scientific explanations of the universe and our place in it, and the evocation of mass hysteria or self-hypnosis, often these days induced by unscrupulous preachers,
through the media of television and the internet.

Against these forces they both oppose the equally irrational alchemy of love in all its transmutations, the creative force of nature necessary for renewal and for life to go on, the only power that can put out death if only for a time. And when love fails, as Amyntas and Jade learn, there’s always work, the ‘old toad,’ to ‘help us down cemetery road’.

Other books by Maureen Duffy include:

That’s How It Was

Maureen Duffy’s first novel, originally published in the sixties, is the story of Paddy, a young working-class girl growing up in wartime England. Abandoned by her father, Paddy is brought up by her mother, and their relationship is at the heart of the story.

The Microcosm

A collection of different voices, characters and time periods cross the threshold of a lesbian bar in London, providing a candid and lively depiction of what it means to be a gay woman.

Restitution

Betony Falk, a young woman in her late twenties, was brought up by her grandmother after the death of her parents. Between jobs she decides to find out more about her father and thus herself. However, she soon realizes that the more she finds out the less she knows.

The Passionate Shepherdess: The Life of Aphra Behn 1640-89

A biography of the Restoration dramatist, now considered one of the greatest and first female artists.

Fingersmith

Sarah Waters

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

John Fowles

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia

Sir Philip Sidney

The Chymical Wedding

Lindsay Clarke

The Daughter of Time

Josephine Tey

Waterland

Graham Swift

A Place of Greater Safety

Hilary Mantel

Possession

A.S. Byatt

The Red Queen

Margaret Drabble

Slammerkin

Emma Donoghue

Maureen Duffy published her first novel,
That’s How It Was,
in 1962. She is the author of a London trilogy:
Wounds, Capital
and
Londoners,
and has written biographies of Henry Purcell and Aphra Behn. Her most recent novel was
Restitution,
which was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

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That’s How It Was

Wounds, Capital and Londoners

Henry Purcell

Occam’s Razor

Restitution

England: The Making of the Myth

The Passionate Shepherdess