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.