The Hounding
By Xenobe Purvis
(Henry Holt & Company)
Interview by Diane Slocum
The town of Little Nettlebed doesn’t know quite what to do with the five Mansfield sisters. There is something different about them. They lost their parents and live with their nearly blind grandfather, Joseph, who seems to give them too much freedom to wander about, always together. Then Pete, the ferryman on this far upstream part of the Thames, sees them turn into dogs. At least, that is his story. Temperance, the barmaid, who knows how much Pete drinks and tells tales, doubts it. Robin and Thomas, Joseph’s hired hands, are supportive of the girls. But other events seem to corroborate Pete’s story, and the town grows alarmed with this threat to its normalcy.
AUTHORLINK: What was your first thought about this story – barking girls – and where did it go from there?
PURVIS: The novel was inspired by a true story of five “barking” sisters in a village in eighteenth century Oxfordshire. I was fascinated by the questions this case raised. Why were the girls barking? And how would this behaviour have been received by their community? As I researched the case, and the setting and historical period, the other characters slowly began to emerge, and the plot soon followed.
AUTHORLINK: Pete, Temperance, Thomas, Joseph and Robin all have chapters in their point of view. How did you work out giving five characters each their pieces of the story and how do they each help tell the story? Did you intend to spread the point of view that much or did some of the characters surprise you?
PURVIS: Each of these characters offers a different perspective on the story, and a different view of the sisters. I hoped with these conflicting points of view to create a sense of narrative unreliability, reflecting the uncertainty that the villagers themselves might be feeling. Five characters seemed the right number, mirroring the five sisters at the heart of the story.
AUTHORLINK: There are five sisters – Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Grace, Mary – each with their own characteristics, but It seems in the village of Little Nettlebed, they were looked on as one entity. And they stood out from the norm in other ways. Comment on how these girls affected the village and how these attitudes affect us even now.
PURVIS: It’s true that these girls are fairly idiosyncratic: they don’t conform to the expectations society has of them; they go out whenever they want; they behave somewhat oddly. But it might also be true that the idea of them as “strange” is confected by the other villagers. In many ways, they are just ordinary girls—wilful, yes, but not weird, and certainly not fear-inducing. What the villagers dislike about them is their belief in their own worth, their refusal to submit. This is a challenge girls continue to contend with: they can be punished for refusing to submit.
AUTHORLINK: If you didn’t already discuss it in the previous question, talk about the spreading of rumors in your story and in general.
PURVIS: I really wanted to dig into the idea of rumour-spreading in the novel. Why are human beings so susceptible to rumour? What is it that makes rumour-spreading enjoyable? And what is it that makes it so dangerous? Small communities seem especially to foster rumours and gossip; it spreads like a kind of contagion. I hoped to portray this over the course of the narrative.
AUTHORLINK: Did you especially enjoy writing some of the characters?
PURVIS: Truthfully, I loved writing all of them. I enjoyed imagining myself into the mindset of each of these characters, many of whom have views and experiences that are wildly different to my own. It was a gratifying creative challenge.
AUTHORLINK: What research did you do to set the time frame for your story and what odd things did you discover?
PURVIS: I read everything I could from and about that period. Diaries, poetry and probate records—whatever I could find. I wanted to locate myself as fully as possible in that era, to create a rich, textural rendering of the time and place. So much of the strangeness of the novel is rooted in real historical detail. For example, the giant water creature that washes up on the banks of the Thames at the start of the book is taken from a true account. The ravens that are said to gather on the roofs of people who are about to die was mentioned in a social history I read from that time. Even small things, like the names of the animals, Fillpail the cow and Catchrat the cat, were taken from historical sources.
AUTHORLINK: How was your experience in selling and publishing your first novel?
PURVIS: The short answer is that it was an incredible whirlwind, more exhilarating than I could possibly have imagined. But there is a longer answer: this was a high point in many years of writing fiction. I have several novels sitting in drawers and have experienced plenty of rejection. Some of this has been quite bruising, but I truly believe my writing improved as a result.
AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?
PURVIS: A novel—historical fiction again. I’ve set myself an enormous, exciting challenge, which I am hoping I can pull off.
About the author: Xenobe Purvis was born in Tokyo in 1990 and studied English Literature at the University of Oxford. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway and was part of the Emerging Writers Program at the London Library. She has published in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Magazine and other places. The Hounding is her first published novel.
