Kate Summescale read English at St John’s in the 1980s. She is an award winning author who specialises in a unique style of historical biography. Her books have won numerous accolades and have been made into TV series. Her latest work, The Haunting of Alma Fielding, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Sensational, frightening and, above all, true, her stories examine a diverse range of vignettes throughout time from cross-dressing divers to unsolved murder cases. The Haunting of Alma Fielding focuses on an investigation into a poltergeist haunting in 1930s London, conducted by a Hungarian Jewish ghost hunter. Earlier this month, Kate spoke to Rose Sundt (SJC Women’s Network Communications Officer) about her life and work.
Q: When researching your early life, one of the initial things that struck me was your international background. I saw that, like myself, you also have links to Japan and Chile. Could you tell me a little bit about your upbringing?
KS: My father’s work as a diplomat meant that our family was posted to Japan, and my first word was in Japanese. I was born and spent the first few years of my life there. We then went to Chile, at what was a very turbulent time – during the military coup when Pinochet took power. As a child you don’t know what is normal, but in retrospect it certainly was a difficult time. I even remember dissidents taking shelter in our house on their way out of the country! We were incredibly insulated from it although my father saw more of the violence than we did. In some ways it was similar to that weird feeling of being at home in a pandemic and knowing there are cruel things going on outside your door!
Q: That sounds like a very interesting environment in which to grow up. Has this or your time at St John’s influenced your writing?
It is hard to disentangle what comes from what! I loved my time at St John’s. I had two wonderful teachers in John Pitcher and John Kelly (now Emeritus). I didn’t go to many lectures or do much extracurricular activity whilst at Oxford, but I found the English tutorials extremely rewarding. I think what I can identify as influencing the kind of books I write, is that I studied English but I became very interested in history through this. The books I write are story books that are also history books, and the connection between the truth and the artistic brings them to life. They are not novels, they are factual but they draw a lot on some of the techniques and pleasures of novels. The combination, being curious about history and liking novels through English, was certainly one I learned at St John’s, particularly through John Pitcher’s analysis. Reading the works of Shakespeare and Milton, whilst focussing on the societal context, for example the religious convictions at the time, had a very strong effect on what I am curious about when I write and read.
Q: Your passion for both history and literature certainly comes through in your writing. Your latest work, The Haunting of Alma Fielding - I’ve never read anything like it. It melds non-fiction with the gripping narrative of a novel.
I do aim for the rhythm and feeling of immersion of a novel. There are limits on that because it is factual, I cannot know what someone felt or thought except so far as they recorded it. But that is what I am reaching for, to get at someone’s emotional and imaginative life. It is an impossible task! But a really interesting one.
Q: I was interested to read that you started your career as a journalist in obituaries. Now you write historical novels. Do you think this gave you a good grounding?
Yes, I started off as an obituary writer. My first book about ‘Joe’ Carstairs, was inspired by my obituary. I wrote her obituary and then I decided I wanted to write more about her. There was a large unrecorded story that I felt like I might be able to salvage. I wrote these anonymous obituaries about all sorts of people, public figures, and very skilled people. But I learned that the best ones were about people that you’ve never heard of. The feeling of discovery and surprise when you have never heard of someone was amazing. I have continued to write about people you’ve never heard of. Telling a person's story for the first time is a great thrill. There is a lot of responsibility that goes with it and also freedom.
Q: You certainly seem to play detective; your research for all your work is clearly very methodical. It seems that you go to the original source and are an amateur historian!
I love the research aspect and get caught up in it. I am like a detective, doing the investigation, going down the rabbit holes, and gathering my evidence. The more I have, the richer the true story I can make out of it. I feel I am doing something that will reward me and my reader. There’s a pleasure to that.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (about the murder of a child, which was made into a drama on ITV), showed me that the detective is a very seductive figure in our culture and he is the hero of countless novels and TV dramas. Indeed, I think many of us secretly want to be detectives! In many ways, they are a romanticised version of the writer or historian. And it extends to scientists, archaeologists, journalists.
Q: It talks to something universal - the desire to find the truth. Your books also have a penchant for the macabre. There is the feel of a penny dreadful, and many of the stories you write about focus on the darker side of society, like murders. How do you balance realism and sensationalism when discussing real events?
I am drawn to the lurid and melodramatic. The stories that I chose feel larger than life and a little bit more saturated with colour. They seem like they are lifted from a novel or technicolour movie, but I only write about real events. There is something excessive about them. I look at events which crystallise something in the culture. It is not purely voyeuristic; it is partly, but they nearly always tell you something about the secret impulses of the society in which they take place. The stories often elicit lots of commentary and emotion about things that do not often get spoken about. For example, my book Mrs Robinson's Disgrace looked at sexuality in Victorian England. They allow me to get to something that is not readily available in an ordinary history. Something that is a little more shameful.
Q: Your work provides an interesting glimpse into incidents that speak to wider societal issues at a very niche point in time, from The Wicked Boy, which looks at child murderers to The Haunting of Alma Fielding which looks at the world of spiritualism in the 1930s. You read through the case notes and archives of the Institute for Psychical Research. Indeed, even the life of your journalist turned ghost hunter protagonist, Nandor Fodor, is extraordinary. He is also a kind of detective. How did you discover him?
I like writing about things I know nothing about. Even though I have written three books set in Victorian England they all had different themes, and I approached each one as an amateur because it piqued my interest. I wanted to write a ghost story. When I found out that there were largescale media reports about poltergeists in the 1930s this startled me. I like to be surprised and always pursue things I didn’t know about before.
Nandor Fodor, too, is an amateur stumbling into this world of the supernatural. I am shadowing him in a way, as he pursues his investigation to prove or disprove the poltergeist. He was a very suspiring figure, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant, new to London, and he became heavily involved in one of several so-called Institutes for Psychical Research. Séances, spooks and telepathy were of enormous interest to the press, at the time. We think of Victorians being obsessed with spiritualism, but in reality, it extended much later. In the ‘30s there was news about the science of telepathy, telekinesis, and numerous reports of poltergeist attacks. Psychoanalysis got tangled up with it all.
Fodor and others noticed that a lot of the attacks seemed to centre on women, often young women or girls. The idea that the poltergeist was a supressed female desire was a wild and attractive idea. In his investigation there is a game going on between Fodor - the investigator - and Alma - the subject of his studies. Who was manipulating who? That’s the question!
Q: Do you think about gender when you are writing?
My first book was about a woman who dressed as a man and ruled an island in the Bahamas, The Queen of Whale Cay. So that examined gender in its most intense form. Certainly, Mrs Robinsons’ Disgrace also focussed on a Victorian woman as a writer and a sexual being and the constraints in which marriage placed this particular woman. My latest book also looks at how women were understood and how they could express themselves in the 1930s. I don’t pick subjects in order to address certain issues. I pick subjects because the stories seem rich and intriguing and the stories go out in many directions that I cannot control. I am never making an argument or write a story to make a point. But gender normally plays a part in that quite naturally.
Q: As someone who has written so much about people who have committed various societal transgressions, across the whole gamut from murder to misleading people to believe in poltergeists, how much do you think one can redeem themselves?
My works deal with transgression as a starting point for each story. Often the transgressions are perceived in a particular society or moment, and they are things that we might feel differently about or even forgive. That is one form of redemption, the redemption of time. We might feel very guilty about how culpable someone was.
In The Wicked Boy in particular, it was not intended to be a story about redemption. I thought by choosing something that happened so long ago I wouldn’t run the risk of hurting anyone. However, I followed the story and was very unnerved but it was very wonderful to find out there were people alive who had a part in the story. I could find out there was a happy ending.
Q: Finally, what advice would you give the other members of the SJC Women’s Network on your career and how you’ve managed to make it a reality?
For me, becoming a writer happened organically. When I was a child, I would have thought being a novelist was the most glamorous thing ever. However, I had no plans to do it when I grew up.
At a certain point I took a risk. That was when I left my permanent job as an editor to write The Suspicions of Mr Whitcher. You can always have more than one go at things. I had one kind of career, as an editor at a newspaper, dealing with other people’s words and working in a team. Now I have a different existence, solitary, independent, free, and I set my own terms. I have enjoyed both. The thing they have in common is that I really like reading and writing. Basically, what I was doing as an editor was reworking words using the tricks I have used reading books. I have essentially, just followed this path following what I liked best and seeing what opportunities arose. Doing what you love can take many different forms. For me, becoming a writer has happily arisen. I am overjoyed to make a living by researching and writing. It feels very right and also a little bit lucky!
The SJC Women's Network is grateful to Kate for giving up her time to be interviewed. Is there something that you would like to share with the network? Email us and let us know.