This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Interviewed by Cesca Martin
What was your inspiration for this book set in a private asylum in the nineteenth century?
I heard about the photographs of asylum patients made in the 1850s by Dr Hugh Diamond, and sought them out. I was very moved by the pictures of women patients, who at the time were thought to look ‘mad’ but who to me looked ordinary. Some appeared depressed, or dishevelled – but in that situation who wouldn’t be?
I began thinking about what it would be like to be photographed and then to have that picture used by other people to diagnose your mental state.
I found the idea really chilling. A photograph can make people look very different to how you might see them in life, as we all know. And although we might sometimes try to ‘read’ faces and expressions, we don’t necessarily get it right.
At the same time, I’d realized through my research that some of the doctors working in this way were the progressives of their day, trying hard to find better ways of working with people with mental illness – and inspired by the new medium of photography.
Who is your favourite character in the book and why?
By the end, I felt great affection for all the characters, even the appalling Vincent who if you didn’t have the misfortune to be married to him is an almost comical character.
Anna Palmer is the heroine of the novel, and she is the one who goes through the greatest emotional journey. I feel a lot for Anna. But I also have big soft spots for Martha Lovely’s down-to-earth kindness, Talitha Batt’s wisdom and forbearance, and Emmeline Abse’s small struggles to emerge from her childbearing years as a woman with at least some measure of autonomy. I really feel for Lizzie Button too, torn from her children. You see, I like them so much I have to mention half of them by name.
What is your writing day like?
I worked hard on The Painted Bridge, full time, for two years. I don’t have a cast iron routine. I like to just get up and start writing, in my dressing gown, with a cup of tea. I feel clearest in my mind, in the mornings before I’ve started dealing with anything else. I tend to carry on till mid-afternoon, then do some other things and probably return to it in the evening. In the early stages of The Painted Bridge, I carried around a print out of the manuscript, needing to have it near me.
Ideas come when you’re washing up or queuing in the supermarket, too.
People say you must be self-disciplined to write but I don’t see myself as that – although I do see myself as motivated. It isn’t exactly that I enjoy writing, more that I have a compulsion to try and figure out the story and characters, make the prose work as well as I can.
What was your route to becoming a novelist?
After leaving college, I was first a photographer then, for many years, a feature writer. Two non-fiction books – one about a primary school in London and the second the story of an amazing Sudanese woman, helped build my confidence in writing at book-length.
The encouragement of a wonderful agent, and the solid support of my husband and friends, gave me the confidence in my 50s finally to pursue my lifelong dream of writing a novel.
What do you have planned for us next?
I am writing a new novel, titled ‘Magic for the Living’. It’s loosely linked to The Painted Bridge, in that it is the story of Anna’s older sister, Louisa Heron, and Louisa’s daughter Harriet.
The book is set just over 20 years later, in 1882, and three women set off from a fog-bound London for the light and heat of Egypt. A chance encounter on the way out trigger events that mean that one of the three can never return – and none will come home unchanged.
WENDY WALLACE'S SITE