A Hiatus From Writing

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After a long break and a career change, I have come back to writing. Looking over old ideas, old research and old posts has sparked something of a philosophical conversation in my mind. Namely, why do I do what I do? Why do I care about the topics I write about and, more importantly, why would anybody else?

Generally speaking, when I have talked to people about the kinds of historical research that I have been involved in and about the topics I write about, particularly my more recent work, they react with a sort of macabre interest. It tends to come under the umbrella of the true-crime genre. It's Jack the Ripper, it's Victorian London, it's something shadowy and gruesome. Understandably, true crime has a huge following in the UK and while I do enjoy it, I have never viewed any of my own work in that light. I have always been clear in my mind that my work is history work. At this point, I feel I need to make it clear that I do not view true-crime writing as something inferior to historical writing. That is not what I'm suggesting. What I'm saying is that the two are distinct. Yes, there might be some cross-over but, fundamentally, they both set out to achieve very different goals.

So what are my goals, then, if I'm a historian and not under the umbrella of true crime or any other genre? This is something that I've been pondering a lot. Often, our interests take us on all kinds of magical mystery tours. We start on one topic, only to find that we finish in a place or places that are very different and unexpected. I often tell people that I am interested in lots of different topics because, for the longest time, that's what I believed. It's only recently that I have started to reframe these ideas about what drives my interest in the past.

Well, I say that I have lots of different interests. That's not strictly true. Gender, specifically women's history, is the common thread that runs through everything I have ever worked on - at school, at college, at university, as a professional. I am interested in what it meant to be a woman 200 years ago or 500 years ago, in this country or that one, because I am interested in what it means to be a woman now. How have we actually come to be who we are today? That's what has always driven me intellectually.

On reflection, though, the commonality runs deeper than that. The other two areas of focus for me - crime and health - are equally connected and intertwined. If we take my book about Christiana Edmunds as an example, I was not drawn to her because of her scandalous crimes. For me, she was a living embodiment of how femininity, crime and health were interconnected. They were three threads in the same piece of fabric. Expectations of how she ought to behave as a woman may not have only caused the deterioration in both physical and mental health, as well as her crime spree, but they were then used to form the basis of the moral and legal judgements made against her. So not only were these standards a potential cause, but they were also an effect. I have seen the same interplay between gender, health and crime over and over again when studying the 19th century. What's more, I have found that expectations of femininity go hand-in-hand with expectations of sexuality -and this has not changed in the past two centuries.

When I reflect on my goals in writing Christiana's story, among the many, many others, it was never really about establishing innocence or guilt, or about unearthing strange cases from the past, or making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It has always been about documenting this interplay, even if I wasn't always conscious of it (until recently). This is why I have never considered myself to be a true-crime writer or a writer of any other genre. I don't care so much about the crime or the illness, I care about society's response to it. My goal has been to document it, to see its evolution, to see how it is influenced by other factors, like class and age.

In terms of the history, then, what is the point of establishing and studying interplays, as I do? Well, for a start, it's not the history you were taught at school. It's true diversity! It's shedding light on centuries of darkness. Secondly, it's about being true to the concept of herstory. It's about accepting that traditional narratives of the past are male and rarely give women of the past a voice.

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