The Fortunes of Olivia Richmond, Louise Davidson’s debut novel, is published just in time for Halloween.
I have always been interested in fear. It possibly has something to do with growing up in ‘90s Belfast. My childhood spanned the various ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement that marked the end of the Troubles, but it was not exactly peaceful. My parents had grown up through the worst of the conflict, so I inherited their habits of not mentioning my background when out in public. When visiting my grandparents, we drove past looming murals of masked men toting guns and sat, watching riots and bomb scares on the news.
By the time I was in my final years of primary school, I was writing whenever I could, which led me to finding a stack of paper in my grandmother’s house, detailing my grandfather’s experiences in the police during the height of the Troubles. It was a harrowing read, not meant for a child, and I got two pages in before I hurriedly shoved the papers back into the cupboard. Looking back, I realise that as a child, I was a little afraid all the time.
My father’s older sister loomed large in our family lore due to the quiet mystery that surrounded her. Pat is an intuitive who receives messages from the dead and was the first person to show me how to read Tarot cards. I would call my family sceptical of most things but even my pragmatic grandparents agreed that Pat was able to do things they were unable to understand. They were unsure how, but she could. And so that also became part of the background of my young life.
It was perhaps natural that I would then become interested in history. After all, I was surrounded by history all the time. By Secondary School, I was fascinated by the Victorians, seeing in them the beginnings of the modern world I inhabited. Belfast is a very Victorian city and so many great monsters come from the 19th Century. By A Level, my family were making an annual pilgrimage to a beautiful house in the mountains above Rome for Halloween and it was here that I started writing ghost stories to read around the fire and began considering how one would go about setting a story in the past. I bought my own set of Tarot, had my tea leaves read by a housekeeper in a castle in Fermanagh and after I moved to London, I set out to visit all the city’s museums.
When I started teaching, my desire to know the context of the books meant I was fully immersed in the gothic. I needed to know – what was the cultural significance of the witches in Macbeth? Would you count Frankenstein’s monster as the first zombie? Which scarier: that Mr Hyde was a monster or just a human being? I used my knowledge of the 19th Century to explore Frankenstein, The Bloody Chamber, Dickens and Stevenson.
Then I had the idea.
Usually, when I get an idea for a book, it is like a movie trailer playing in my head. I see snatches of scenes, hear dialogue, think of music that would set the tone for the piece. With The Fortunes of Olivia Richmond, it was remarkably similar. I imagined a pale young woman looking out through French windows towards a sweeping, overgrown lawn, and the dark woods beyond. I considered Spiritualism in the Victorian era. With the rise in popularity of seances and tarot readings, it was not unusual to see middle class Victorians drift to the working-class areas of East London and the edges of the city centre to attend seances where they could potentially see a ghost – or rather, a young woman dressed up to resemble a spirit. Of course, it was all an act but what if it wasn’t? What if it was real and occurring in a middle-class family, vying for respectability? What if, like my nine-year-old self holding my grandfather’s notepad, this pale girl knew more than she should and didn’t know what to do with it? What would happen to her?
And from this, The Fortunes of Olivia Richmond was born. But there was a snag – the setting. Part of it needed to be in London but the more I wrote, thought and imagined, the more I saw my first home in England – Norfolk. I read English Literature at the University of East Anglia and moved to Norwich without ever having been there before. I immediately fell in love with the city and the surrounding area. It felt so much like Belfast – a busy, thriving place that was surrounded by lush, wild countryside. I would catch the train to Cambridge to visit friends and stare at the beauty of the county sweeping past – an experience mirrored in the book. During my experience there, I visited more country houses, some close by, like the impressive, gothic Blickling Hall. Others were further afield like Audley End in Essex and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. Slowly, the broads, the little towns, the big houses came together and became the fictional town of Fellwick and Mistcoate House.
Since the book came out, I have had family and friends ask if I will write more or if I had poured everything into that one story and laid the ghosts to rest. But that is the funny thing about ghosts – haunting means repeating and I have not so much laid them to rest as let them out. Now I am seeing opportunities for gothic adventure in the places I visit, the places I remember from my past and I am sure there are more stories to come…
About The Fortunes of Olivia Richmond:
After a terrible tragedy, governess Julia Pearlie finds herself with no job, home, or references. When she’s offered a position as companion to Miss Olivia Richmond, her luck appears to be turning. But Mistcoate House is full of secrets.
Olivia has a sinister reputation. The locals call her the Mistcoate Witch, thanks to her tarot readings, and her insistence that she can speak to the dead. Her father, Dr Richmond, believes this to be girlish fantasy and is looking to Julia to put a stop to it.
Determined to prove herself and shake off her own murky history, Julia sets to work trying to help Olivia become a proper young lady. However, as she becomes a fixture at Mistcoate, it is soon clear that there may be more to Olivia’s stories than Dr Richmond would have Julia believe – not least because somehow, Olivia seems to know something of the darkness that Julia desperately hoped she had left behind.
As the danger grows, and the winter chill wraps around the dark woods surrounding Mistcoate, Julia will have to fight to uncover the truth, escape her past – and save herself.
Original, engrossing and deliciously creepy, this critically-acclaimed Victorian Gothic ghost story is perfect for fans of Sarah Perry, Erin Morgenstern and Jessie Burton.
Available from all good bookshops or you can order your copy of The Fortunes of Olivia Richmond online here.
