N O T E S F O R pic here R E A D I N G MRS COOK by Marele Day

G Contents

R About Marele Day ...... 2

O On writing Mrs Cook ...... 2 U Reviews...... 5 P Some suggested points for discussion ...... 9 S Further reading ...... 10 About Marele Day

Marele Day is an award-winning novelist who grew up in Sydney and currently lives on the north coast of New South Wales. Her four book Claudia Valentine series has become a minor classic in Australian crime writing, but her Lambs of God (1998) was even more highly acclaimed as an original and provocative literary work, published in the US by Riverhead and in the UK by Transworld, with translations into German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and Japanese. Marele has also written a collection of short stories involving the elderly bingo-playing Mavis Levack, and is the editor of How To Write Crime.

On writing Mrs Cook—Marele Day

I did not set out to write about Captain Cook’s wife. I wanted, after the enclosed world inhabited by the three feral nuns of Lambs of God, to write a novel with the great global sweeps of tide and wind moving through it, a love story. But I needed a vehicle, a character to carry that story. I first came upon Elizabeth Cook while browsing in an airport bookshop. With no particular interest in the subject, I picked up a biography of Captain Cook. It fell open at the portrait of his wife and I knew immediately that she was the one.

History has left us very few clues concerning Elizabeth Cook, and most often these lay in the shadows of her more illustrious husband. She was born on 24th January, 1741 by the old Julian calendar, married James Cook when she was 21 and he 34. They had six children, three of whom died as infants, one at 16, one at 17 and the eldest at 31. Elizabeth survived them all, as if living out the missing years of her loved ones, till the age of 93. There were no grandchildren.

These facts are the bare bones. To bring a character to life we also need flesh, connective tissue, and most importantly, a beating heart at the centre of things. So began an archaeology of writing, a process of bringing Elizabeth Cook into the light. The book took three years to research and write, and led me through the labyrinth of the Internet, into many libraries, museums and churches, to Sydney and Melbourne, London, Cambridge and Yorkshire. If I was to truly bring Mrs Cook to life I had to teleport back to 18th century London, to experience it in full colour, pulsing with life. The time machine, the way back, is in what is left behind, the artefacts. My research involved examining actual objects, visiting places, talking to experts and scholars, looking at historical records and reading anything that might possibly be relevant.

Reading Group Notes Mrs Cook 2 When visiting places of significance to Mrs Cook I took notes—for the feel of the place— and photos, because during the research phase, I’m not sure which exact details I’ll use when writing the book. It was a warm spring day full of daffodils when I visited Cambridge. As I approached the entrance to Great St Andrew’s church, where Elizabeth and two of her sons are buried, I heard the delighted squeals of children. The woman who answered the door told me that Great St Andrew’s is now a community church, used as a child-care centre in the mornings. When I returned that afternoon I had to step over chairs, onto a stage and weave my way past microphones and a drum kit to find the Cook family monument Elizabeth had erected. In front of the stage, a stone is set into the floor, its inscription worn and barely visible. I stood for a long time looking at the stone beneath which Elizabeth Cook lies, working my way into the character, wondering what she would think of all the youthful activity going on above her mortal remains? I imagined she would be pleased that her final resting place echoes with such vibrant signs of life.

During my visit to the UK I also talked to Cook experts. Clifford Thornton, President of the Captain Cook Society, was a particularly rich source of information, and we developed an email correspondence, which proved very useful during the writing process. I could fire off an email on some specific issue, such as whether the 1769 transit of Venus could be observed in London, and an answer would be there in the morning.

Although the focus was on Elizabeth I needed to know what life was like in her times, so that historical detail would not be laboured, so that the eventual reader of her story would feel as if they’d looked out the window and there was 18th century London, in full colour, pulsing with life. The Museum of London, with rooms dedicated to everyday life of each century most gave the feeling of time travel. I immersed myself in the 18th century room, in which was displayed clothing, toothbrushes, matches, shop signs, and the books the Georgians were reading—travel narratives were very popular.

My own reading included social histories of London, Cook biographies, books of embroidery, on cooking, housekeeping, biographies of Elizabeth’s contemporaries and diaries, architecture, furnishings, medicine. One of the most fascinating sources of contemporary attitudes and preoccupations was 18th century newspapers, which I found in the British Library. I was specifically looking for what the weather was like on certain significant dates, but in Gentleman’s Magazine were also wonderful snippets such as a list of over 50 synonyms for being drunk (which I managed to squeeze into the book).

As can be seen from the chapter headings, Mrs Cook: The Real and Imagined Life of the Captain’s Wife is structured around objects. Of all the different forms of research, examining the objects most strongly brought the past into the present. In the excellent collection of Cook memorabilia

Reading Group Notes Mrs Cook 3 in State Library of NSW is an unfinished waistcoat, consisting of two uncut pieces of tapa cloth. It is the lines of embroidery that take the shape of the garment. Each stitch seemed to be a pulse of hope and anticipation, a promise of Cook’s return. I imagined Elizabeth working on it at her home in Mile End, London. Was she embroidering the waistcoat on Valentine’s Day, 1779, when her husband was killed, or in January of the following year when news of his death finally reached London? The poignancy of the piece is that it remains unfinished. We know now what Elizabeth could not have known then—that her husband would not return from that fatal third voyage, would never wear the waistcoat that she so lovingly stitched.

James travelled lightly through his life, leaving in his short will ten guineas to his father, and £10 a piece to his two surviving sisters, Christiana and Margaret, and two friends. The rest of his estate went to Elizabeth and the children. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was a hoarder, the house in Clapham where she spent most of her widowhood, ‘crowded and crammed in every room with relics, curiosities, drawing, maps, and collections’. Her will runs to more than ten pages of closely written script. It gives us an inkling of the many friends and relatives who were important in Elizabeth’s life. As well as detailing how her £60,000 should be distributed, the will also takes into account specific items—her husband’s Copley Medal to the British Museum, the contents of the kitchen, washhouse and scullery to one of her servants, bedroom furniture to others. Other items had already been distributed. Elizabeth lived long enough to see her husband pass into history, and knew the value of Cook memorabilia. She gave her doctor a first edition of James’s last voyage. She would peel off pages of her husband’s journal and present them to people for services rendered or as a ‘mark of her esteem’. One set of papers that is lost to history is the private correspondence between Elizabeth and her husband. She burnt all those letters, considering them ‘too personal and sacred’. It was suggested that I include in the book a series of imagined letters, but I felt Elizabeth wouldn’t want the public gawping at invented letters either. That’s the trouble with a subject that’s been dead for nearly two hundred years, you can’t ask permission.

What I enjoy about writing fiction is being immersed in an imagined world and exploring it, of taking undiscovered paths and seeing where they lead, but with Mrs Cook, the life was already mapped out for me. I felt morally obliged in this novelised biography to stick to the path she had taken. I struggled all the time when writing Mrs Cook with faithfulness to the subject and the more familiar practice of making things up. I’m not sure I’d tackle a real subject again because my concern for the subject’s feelings get in the way of a good story.

Reading Group Notes Mrs Cook 4 Reviews The Weekend Australian—Kerryn Goldsworthy ‘How Elizabeth fared as a Cook’

… Having moved over from detective novels to literary fiction with her previous book, Lambs of God, Marele Day has ventured into ‘faction’. Mrs Cook shifts the focus from the captain to his wife, making her the central character and her the observing consciousness and voice in this retelling of his—and her—story. The book uses techniques of fiction to explore what happens to wives of heroes: what their lives are like and how they deal with fame and absence. It sees the explorer through the charmed eyes of his wife and it also casts an approving eye—as did Jane Austen’s Persuasion, written a few decades after Cook’s death on his last voyage—on the way the navy provided a rare opportunity for social and financial advancement in the lives of humbly born Britons.

History can be a double-edged sword for fiction writers, as for so many other people, producing unutterably dull and badly constructed books, but Day has used her sources cleverly and sparingly, and the book is an easy read.

Each chapter is based on a still-existing object from the Cooks’ lives, all stored in libraries and museums: a quill pen; the telescopic quadrant whose use first brought Cook’s name to the notice of the Royal Society; a Chinese porcelain teapot … Using these things as a focus for each chapter is a vivid and enchanting technique, making good use of the numinous qualities of material relics from other times.

Which is just as well because narrative structure is one thing you can’t do much about when telling a true story and this one suffers—as do most life stories—from a lack of narrative development, tension and resolution, things a reader of fiction has a right to expect. Most people know, at least in a general way, the story of Cook’s life and so can’t even share the suspense and apprehension felt by Elizabeth every time he sets sail. As an experienced writer of detective fiction, Day must have been particularly aware of this problem, but there isn’t much she could have done to solve it.

The story is not quite told in Elizabeth’s voice but it assumes her point of view and the style is intended, or so I assume, to suggest her innocent consciousness and limited powers of expression. Day is a gifted mimic—witness the effortless parodies of the hard-boiled detective style in her earlier books—and does the cadences of the 18th century voice well …

Reading Group Notes Mrs Cook 5 Her voice is at its most compelling in its expressions of disquiet, loneliness and grief. Elizabeth Cook was dramatically widowed at 37 and lived for another 56 years; she gave birth to six children and outlived them all.

In almost every case she had to bear the burden of their deaths—and sometimes their births—alone; Cook spent most of his married life away at sea. ‘You think you are the only one to voyage?’ she asks him as he prepares for what will be his last, fatal expedition. ‘I have made discoveries I didn’t wish to make. Three children dead. Do you know to which bleak shore that takes me?’

But it’s only there, near the end of the novel, that the reader begins to feel a genuine sense of depth and complexity in the marriage and in Elizabeth Cook’s inner life.

Good Reading—Dina Ross

Captain James Cook’s wife, Elizabeth, is a subject ripe for mining—partner to one of the most intrepid adventurers of the day, when Britain really did rule the waves, in a world racked by change and discovery, and the advances in science and mathematics tipped the age of satire into the age of commerce and engineering. Through all this excitement and upheaval, as her husband undertook his memorable and dangerous voyages, Elizabeth led the quiet existence of faithful wife. She put her life on hold until his return, dutifully becoming pregnant whenever James was between expeditions and tragically, watching her six children die, one by one.

Elizabeth observes greatness but is never a party to it, essentially sidelined by history. It is Elizabeth’s stoicism and loneliness that Marele Day explores in her novel, which never quite makes up its mind if it’s straightforward biography or romanticised fiction. The novel is well researched, with tantalising snippets of social history … Nevertheless, though slight, this is an entertaining read, providing rare insights into the life of an eighteenth-century housewife.

The Age Saturday Extra—Judith Armstrong ‘Yearning for the explorer’

Simple subjects can still be thought provoking, as the low-profile heroine of Flaubert’s story Un Coeur Simple demonstrates. No one could call Captain Cook’s wife Elizabeth a live-wire either. She grew up in a London ale-house, but spent lengthy periods in the country in the care of Quaker acquaintances. Her foster family left a far deeper mark on her than either her pragmatic mother, Mary Batts, or her jovial stepfather John.

Reading Group Notes Mrs Cook 6 … The story thereafter is rigorously that of the decorous, hardworking wife. Cook, making his way up the naval tree (or should that read mast?), is merely the ancillary husband to the constant, female focus of the narrative.

The two loved each other deeply, and despite Cook’s long absences at sea, found time together to engender six children, but it was a marriage based on separation, endurance and yearning rather than fully satisfied passion.

At first the absences were Cook’s; Elizabeth cared for her children with the help of her mother, relatives, friends and a servant. Then came losses, but James was always at sea when the babies died, and had already perished at the hands of Hawaiian warriors when the three older boys came to their own untimely ends—two at sea and one studying in Cambridge. Day’s meticulous account of the petty details of domestic life is regularly broken by the sombre gran- deur of unremitting tragedy.

Both the originality and, in some ways, the reservations one might hold in regard to this novel come from the same source: the language of the narrator is toned down to read as though Elizabeth herself had vetted it. It is a little prudish, deliberately simply, sometimes stilted. It is frequently, if gently, informational: Day has done her homework, and is keen to insert her research, lightly or not, into the text.

… The rewarding side of this is that we do learn a great deal about how people in the latter half of the 18th and early years of the 19th century lived their lives; it is the novel as social history, the ‘real’ stuff of the sub-title. The solitary stalwartness and inner feelings of the lonely, anxious mother and wife is the ‘imagined’ part.

West Australian—Christopher Bantick ‘A Captain Cook at the trouble and strife’

James Cook is synonymous with the great age of 18th century seafaring exploration and discovery.

But as much as Captain Cook may have been an extraordinary man of his times, his wife Elizabeth was moored to their family and domestic responsibilities while her famous husband circumnavigated the globe.

A new book goes some way to restoring Captain Cook’s wife to her rightful place in history. Marele Day in Mrs Cook: The Real and Imagined Life of the Captain’s Wife incorporates fact and fiction into a persuasive read that is bound to reach a wide public.

Reading Group Notes Mrs Cook 7 If anything, Mrs Cook’s life was measured out in tragedy as her husband’s life was celebrated in achievement and accolades. By the age of 50, she was a widow and she had lost all six of her and Captain Cook’s children. It is a sobering thought to ponder.

But as much as the book is historically speculative at some points, its impact is not diminished. Day says that she has tried to be balanced and to resist the temptation to imagine Mrs Cook well beyond the historical record. ‘I think I now know more about her than anyone else,’ Day has said. ‘I was constrained by the facts and her life would have been more exciting if she had done other things. I think every biographical work is a combination of what is real and imagined. With Elizabeth, she burnt all of their private correspondence. I think she too had to imagine what her husband was experiencing as his letters were not regular. With her based in London, we can only surmise her intimate, personal thoughts.’

Though the story is one of considerable loneliness and emotional hardship, what comes through Day’s representation is a woman of formidable strength. If anything, producing a biography from little personal evidence offered particular challenges to Day as author.

‘When I wrote the story, I kept a postcard of her portrait, which is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, above my computer. I used to check to see if she’d raise a smile over something I had written. Now, in my mind, she is the person in the book. The Cooks had no direct descendants, so to portray them as a couple was largely imaginative.’

Throughout the book, there are some arrestingly tender moments. The way Day explores the relationship Mrs Cook had with her husband when he was at home, informs us about Cook the navigator as well as the woman who was his heart’s foundation. It is a love story.

Day says she is aware that her take on Captain Cook, as expressed through his wife, may challenge the legend of Captain Cook the gallant explorer.

‘James Cook is a full and flawed character,’ Day says. ‘For him, the South Land was a Heart of Darkness journey. I think he wanted to go as far as he could geographically but also as far as he could into himself. He was the Lord of the Seas.’

Reading Group Notes Mrs Cook 8 Some suggested points for discussion

♦ Judith Armstrong has said ‘Of course it is extremely important that the world should have access to Elizabeth’s story, yet it does feel like reading in low gear, thus raising the issue of whether “little lives” played out in an obscurity only occasionally illuminated by vicarious fame, can be as interesting as the aspirations of a navigator, explorer and ship’s captain hacked to death by savage natives whom he thought he had won over.’ Do you agree with Judith Armstrong that Elizabeth’s life is ‘lustreless compared to her husband’s’? How important is it that we have HERstories as well as HIStories?

♦ One critic mentions Elizabeth’s ‘sensuality nurtured by a consciousness of two James Cooks; one who adventures to the Pacific and is innovative to save his crew from scurvy, and the imaginary double who is always with her to ease her loneliness and warm both heart and bed.’ Which husband, do you think, Elizabeth loved more?

♦ James Cook is the famous explorer, circumnavigating the globe and going further than any other man. Elizabeth, in contrast, rarely leaves London, and her life revolves around her house and her children. Who do you consider to be more heroic? Why?

♦ What parallel discoveries did Elizabeth make, when James was off discovering the world and the Great South Land?

♦ What do you think is the significance of the objects that are chosen as the headers for each chapter? Why has the author structured the novel around these particular objects?

♦ Whose life? Whose story? Is a biographer’s primary obligation to the story or the subject of the story?

♦ To what extent are all biographies real and imagined accounts of the life?

♦ Mrs Cook is a rich, evocative portrayal of Captain Cook’s wife, told from her point of view, detailing the minutiae of daily life in 18th century London. How does Marele Day capture the past so realistically.

Reading Group Notes Mrs Cook 9 Further reading

Lambs of God by Marele Day

Persuasion by Jane Austen

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

Skins by Sarah Hay

The Gentleman’s Garden by Catherine Jinks

Reading Group Notes Mrs Cook 10