The Sirens: Emilia Hart recreates a legend of sea women, setting it on the Australian coast and blurring the lives of historic convict sisters with modern-day sisters.

Book: The Sirens

Author: Emilia Hart

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Format: Historical fiction/magical realism blended with parallel modern story

Setting/Era: Irish women convicts transported to colonial Australia in 1800 interspersed with modern sisters in Australia.

Debut novel: No

Author Interview by Diane Slocum

Two Irish sisters, Eliza and Mary, are taken from their home on a ship loaded with convicted women bound for a penal colony in Australia. The voyage goes on for months with conditions for the women in the hold of the ship going from bad to worse. In more modern times, two other sisters, Jess and Lucy, are not close, partly because Lucy is much younger, but also because Jess seems to have shut her out. Nevertheless, when Lucy assaults her former boyfriend, she flees to the only place she can think to go – Jess’ creaky house on a towering cliff above a treacherous sea. Jess is mysteriously missing when Lucy arrives, but as Lucy experiences vivid dreams of these sisters sailing to Australia, she learns Jess knows them, too – and that all four of them have a mysterious reaction to the touch of water on their skin.

The seeds of the idea went through many drafts.

AUTHORLINK: Where did you get the idea to write a book about Sirens? What was the first aspect of the book that occurred to you? I know a young woman who has aquagenic urticaria so I’m wondering if that water allergy was involved in your first thoughts.

HART: The novel had a very long gestation process and went through many iterations before I wrote the final version. The original version had no mention of aquagenic urticaria at all – in fact it had no magical realism either! The seed of the idea – and the element that remained constant through many drafts – was Irish convicts being transported to Australia in the early 1800s. I’ve always been fascinated by this topic, particularly because as well as being descended from Irish immigrants to Australia, one of my ancestors was actually the captain of a convict ship!

AUTHORLINK: Tell about your ideas of weaving Mary and Eliza’s story with Lucy and Jess’?

HART: I’m really interested in how misogyny reverberates across time- something I also explored in my debut novel Weyward – and so I wanted to interrogate how early Australia’s attitude to female convicts has influenced the position of women in society today. But I also wanted to show the enduring strength of female resilience through sisterhood. Interweaving the experiences of two sets of sisters seemed the perfect way to do this.

Telling the story through journalistic eyes adds immediacy.

AUTHORLINK: Did you always intend to present most of Jess’ story through her journal or how did that idea come to you?

HART: Jess is one of my favorite characters that I’ve ever written: she had such a strong voice, I knew her story needed to be told from the first person perspective. But I also wanted the reader to question Jess’s own understanding of some of her experiences as a teenager. Telling her story through journal entries allowed me to convey certain events with a sense of rawness and immediacy, and to provide a contrast with Jess’ understanding of those same events when we later meet her as an adult.

AUTHORLINK: Did you have a good idea of how everything would work out when you started writing, or did much of it come together as you wrote? Did you have to go back and change much as you went along?

HART: I did not: In fact, I had to rewrite this novel three separate times! I think I deleted about 300,000 words in the process. The original story was a very gritty, realistic historical novel, filled with tragedy and revenge. It was far too dark. With the help of my agent, I realized that I needed to add some of the lightness and wonder provided by the magical realism elements in Weyward. I began thinking about female resilience and the connections between women and the sea. After that, the story came together very quickly.

AUTHORLINK: Even though your book is fiction with magical realism, what did you do to research the historic components, such as transporting women convicts to Australia, and other situations in the story?

HART: The novel required a huge amount of research: I was very anxious to portray the experiences of Irish female convicts as accurately as possible. In this regard, I read some really helpful books, including The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, which is an extensive – and beautifully written – account of convict transportation. I also read Deborah Oxley’s Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia, Babette Smith’s A Cargo of Women and Deborah J Swiss’s The Tin Ticket, all of which shed light on the female convict experience. I was fortunate enough to visit the excellent Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney NSW, and Port Arthur in Tasmania.

I also did a lot of research into Irish history, culture and language. I read R F Foster’s Modern Ireland 1600 – 1972, which was extremely helpful for understanding the context of English colonization and Irish rebellion, as well as Irish Country Life by Olive Sharkey, which helped me grasp the rural traditions Mary and Eliza would have grown up with. I also visited the excellent Museum of Country Life in County Mayo, Ireland.

My understanding of the merrow people was informed by Thomas Crofton Croker’s fairytale, ‘The Lady of Gollerus’, which tells the story of a merrow who falls in love and has children with a fisherman before leaving them behind to return to the sea.

I’m very fortunate that one of my closest friends is Irish: She was able to help me with some of the Irish language phrases that appear in the novel. Her high school Irish teacher kindly agreed to check them for us!

The most important part of rading and writing is human connection.

AUTHORLINK: A big part of the angst in the story comes from keeping family secrets. Do you think that reading about characters’ problems can help people deal with their own?

HART: Absolutely. For me, the most important part of reading – and writing – is human connection. If something I write makes a reader feel less alone, or resonates with them in any way at all, then I feel I’ve done my job properly.

AUTHORLINK: How do you feel about having your book about Sirens out at the same time as the blockbuster movie The Odyssey?

HART: I love The Odyssey and really enjoyed Christopher Nolan’s take on it. Having said that, I do feel the myth of ‘the sirens’ really feeds into the stereotype of women as sexual temptresses, which was exactly what I wanted to interrogate in my novel. While the sirens appear only briefly in the film, glimpsed hazily through fog, I have to say that I really loved the portrayal of Circe. I felt that Samantha Morton’s performance brought such depth to that role: you really have the sense of Circe as a woman doing what she must to protect herself in a man’s world (even if the results were pretty grotesque).

AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?

HART: I’ve recently finished my third novel, The Enigmas, which is out next April. The Enigmas is set during WWII and tells the story of Beatrice Bone, whose newfound ability to travel through time forces her to choose between her sister’s life and her country’s future. I can’t wait for people to read it!

About the author: Emilia Hart was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.  She studied Law and English Literature at the University of New South Wales and became a lawyer before moving to London. She suffered a stroke at age 26 and soon after wrote her first novel, Weyward, while living in Cumbria, near Scotland. The novel became a New York Times Best Seller.