Interview with Caroline Miley - 2021
Interview #8 (fiction, historical fiction, literary fiction, political fiction, novel)
Caroline Miley is an art historian and writer with a long-time passion for art, history and literature. She is fascinated by the late Georgian era, a time when the old and the new existed side by side in an era of rapid transition. Society was in flux; new worlds were being mapped in the heavens as well as on the planet; Europe was in the grip of revolution; anything seemed possible. Miley writes novels that explore this wonderful time.
Randal Eldon Greene: Hello, Caroline Miley,
Your novel The Competition is about a London painter in the Georgian period. You're an art historian, so I think you'd be pretty qualified to give us an artist's story from about any era of of history. What about this period did you find compelling enough to create a story around the painter Edwar Armiger?
Caroline Miley: Hello Randal.
I find the late Georgian era fascinating for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it stands on the border of the old world and the new. It was a time of enormous change. There were many people who were still living a way of life that had not changed a great deal for centuries, farming the land in the same sorts of ways, rarely moving far from home, some still believing in witches and magic, many uneducated. At the same time, it was an era of exploration and discovery and massive expansion of knowledge in all sorts of fields - new planets, new countries, new scientific theories. And in society - it’s thought of as very genteel, but it still retained the rambuctiousness of the Georgians. It was a lot freer and easier than the Victorian era that followed. The King had a mistress - or several. Men drank incredible amounts. There was a lot of gambling, driving fast, living a rakish life. The clothes reflect this - light dresses for women and riding boots for the men. Their hairstyles too - ruffled, 'natural' - none of the powdered wigs of their fathers or the neat coiffures of Victorian ladies. So, a very interesting time to be alive.
Randal Eldon Greene: You provide many fascinating details about the often elaborate process of painting. Are these just things you know or were you collecting these details over time for a project like this book?
Caroline Miley: I’ve always loved art. I’m an art historian and spent much of my life teaching in an art school, so I had plenty of opportunity to see artists at work and understand the life of an artist. I’ve also done some painting and drawing myself and was interested in techniques and methods. For the book, I did a lot of research specifically into the techniques in use at the time to add to my general knowledge. I knew an artist who ground his own colours in the traditional way and watched him work, just as artists had been doing for centuries. I wanted to convey the real feel of being an artist then, especially since new techniques and pigments were becoming available to extend methods that had been around for ever. New yellows, for instance, that Turner was keen on.
Randal Eldon Greene: The feel of being a working artist in the Georgian period certainly came through. Yet I felt in tune with your character, despite the two hundred year gap between us. The times Edward is tempted to put off painting "for some ale and conversation," how he'll walk to clear his mind, and his realization that "all we artists were putting ourselves up for examination" felt so true to my own experiences — and I'm not a painter but a writer. Did you imbue Edward with some of the realities of your workaday life as a writer or did you create such a true portrait from a pastiche of working artists you've known?
Caroline Miley: I’m glad it felt true - that was my aim. I suppose it was a combination of how I know artists live and work now - and I’m sure it was the same then - and my own experience of life, and life as a writer, as you say. When I’m writing, I try to immerse myself in the character’s world, then imagine how I’d feel and behave in that situation if I were that character. Then at least it feels true to me, and I hope to readers. If it doesn’t feel true to me, I can’t hope that it’d feel true to my readers.
One of the aspects I like about writing historical fiction is that I think people are pretty much the same, throughout history and across cultures. For instance, you can read Pepys saying, four hundred years ago: ‘put on my new laced suit for the first time today. Looked very well in it. I pray God make me able to pay for it’ and laugh out loud. But at the same time, their way of life and values and ideas may be very different - the concepts of honour and duty, for instance, that were very important in 1800, have changed a great deal. Social expectations around relationships between people. So I have to imagine myself as a person like me, but with those different values. That’s the part I like most about writing, I think.
Randal Eldon Greene: There are really three strands of plot interwoven to create your novel. There is the painting competition of the title. There's also a romance plot that has some unexpected twists in it. The third strand is a political one: the worker fighting for his rights – the inevitable kind of tension created by capitalism. I'm of course familiar with the Luddites, but for the audience that might not be, do explain this part of history and tell us why you decided to draw your character into this political movement.
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