About the Book
The Ideas That Informed The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant
Several years ago, I came across a newspaper report that gave details of suitcases, belonging to patients who were never to take them home, left behind in an old asylum. There was something very moving about the abandoned personal items that the suitcases contained—spectacles, alarm clocks, vinyl records, dress patterns, embroidery, satin dancing slippers, silver-backed hairbrushes, and so on—which had once been so precious to someone.
Additionally, when I was about nine or ten, my family lived in the Pacific Northwest, in Tacoma, not far from Seattle. My mother would often take us to visit a ruined, abandoned mental asylum called Steilacoom. We still have an album from the 1970s of faded Polaroids that show us peering through the windows and framed against the graffiti that covered the outside of the buildings. The eeriness of the ruined rooms, the broken furniture, the seemingly random objects left behind, and the air of desolation within those walls are something that has stayed with me.
As I began to research an asylum setting, I was horrified to learn that in England, until the early 1950s, a woman could be committed on the say-so of her father or husband without a doctor having even examined her. I also discovered that postpartum depression was, as late as the 1950s, described as “nervous tension,” and if severe, treated with electroshock therapy. Despite the fact that recent studies have shown that as many as one in six new mothers experience postpartum depression, books on pregnancy and birth published up to and including the 1940s make absolutely no mention of it.
I remembered my mother telling me the story of my great-grandmother, who was confined to a mental hospital in England in the early twentieth century with postpartum depression (my grandfather was the youngest of seven or eight children I believe, so it is hardly surprising that she suffered a breakdown) when my grandfather was a small boy. She said that my grandfather almost never spoke of it, and it was a source of great shame to the family. He had gone to visit her with his father once, hoping to collect her and bring her home, but it was obvious that she was in no state to leave and it traumatized him to see her like that. I spoke to my uncle, who was able to add a few details about my great-grandmother, including her name: Phoebe. He also told me that she remained there for the rest of her life, dying of breast cancer when she was much older. While the reasons for her continued stay in the asylum have been lost in time, her story strikes me as utterly tragic.
These ideas and events were the starting point for the novel.
I decided to contrast Esther’s suffering with those of returned servicemen from the Second World War, and, thanks to the British Imperial War Museum’s extraordinary oral histories (which are available online), was able to listen to accounts of former prisoners of war, which added depth to my research. I was particularly moved by their matter-of-fact descriptions and the stiff-upper-lip stoicism they displayed in the face of horrific experiences.
I also wanted the novel to have a great love story at its core, and so I rewatched movies such as Brief Encounter and Hanover Street, both to get a feel for the period and because I wanted to write about similarly impossible relationships. An emotional heart to the novel was very important to me and I worked very hard to try and tell a story that would elicit an emotional, empathetic response in the reader.
It was important to me for Esther to overcome the harrowing events that befell her early in her marriage, and not to be defined by them. In the course of my research, I came across a book, The Summit of Her Ambition: The Spirited Life of Marie Byles by Anne McLeod, and it provided me with such a wonderful example of an adventurous, intelligent woman (Miss Byles was also the first woman to practice law in New South Wales, the cofounder of the Australian Buddhist Society, an environmentalist, and a staunch advocate for women’s rights). I also read of the exploits of three intrepid Englishwomen, Anne Davies, Eve Sims, and Antonia Deacock, who drove sixteen thousand miles from London to India and back, and who trekked for three hundred miles to remote Tibet in 1958. I was inspired by their stories and hope I managed to instill something of their collective indomitable spirit in the character of Esther.
Finally, there is indeed a giant clam research station on Aitutaki, which I visited with my family a few years ago. I had no idea when I was there that it might end up in a novel one day! 