From the Journal

A few reflections on how I developed the character of Angharad for The Siren’s Daughter, based on the life of Angharad ferch Nest, the renowned twelfth-century wife of William de Barry.

Starting with a blank page

Even less is known of Angharad than of her mother. So, we have a true blank page on which to write.

We know that Angharad was the daughter of Nest, the legendary ‘Helen of Wales’, whose beauty inspired rebellions, murders and a war. From this sprang the idea of a girl overshadowed by her mother, possibly quite shy and compliant, a good listener, embarrassed by her mother’s dynamism and charisma. Initially, I imagined Angharad as the ‘negative’ of Nesta – as the calm where Nesta was the storm, and the nondescript ear into which Nesta would pour her extraordinary life story.

But writing Angharad proved a struggle, since her quiet character was overpowered by the vibrancy of Nesta. Angharad felt boring. I worried that she would be a hollow figure in the book, simply a foil for her dazzling mother. My breakthrough – during the novel’s second draft - was deciding on the advice of a friend to make Angharad the main character. And dedicate more time to her inner world.

So, what do we know of the true Angharad, the historical figure, and how has that knowledge helped shape the Angharad in the novel?

A daughter caught between love and frustration

Given the trauma of Princess Nest’s early life, she was unlikely to be an easy person to be around. So, I imagined Angharad as a peacemaker – constantly trying to appease Nesta and explaining away her foibles to her critics. From this sprang the concept of Angharad as an essentially torn person, battling conflicting emotions, swinging between sorrow on her mother’s behalf and what must have inevitably been annoyance at her mother’s tempers.

We also know that Angharad’s son, Gerald of Wales, was the greatest, most famous chronicler of the twelfth century. He wrote about his childhood (you can buy his amazing books on Amazon, in translation from the original Latin) and described their family life as idyllic. Thus, Angharad in her later life must have built a very happy home. So, I have made her a caring, sympathetic and essentially kind person.  That must have been a challenge in a world where kindness was often unvalued and sometimes dangerous. It has also created one of the governing dynamics of Angharad’s relationship with Nesta: the sympathy Angharad feels towards her mother.

Norman society and divided identity

We know that Angharad’s marriage to William de Barry was successful: long-lasting, productive of many children and a nurturing home. Therefore, Angharad must have been attuned to, and well able to thrive in, Norman society. This adds a fascinating context to her relationship with Nesta in the novel, given that Princess Nest was born into a different world – hostile and Welsh - and she may never have quite fitted in with the Normans. Hence Angharad submits to the Norman practice of breast-binding whilst Nesta refuses; Angharad likes caged songbirds whilst Nesta prefers falcons. It also creates one of the biggest tensions between the women: how would Angharad have felt to have identified as Norman, but have a (captive) mother whose people were at war with the Normans? What burden would that have placed on her emotionally?

Given that Angharad chose to name her son after her father, Gerald, we can assume that she loved her father. He, however, is recorded in the annals as having been actively involved in the conquest of Nest’s kingdom; and he was definitely on the scene when Nest’s father was killed and her younger brother Hywel brutally mutilated. Again, this created another point of tension between the women in the novel – I had the concept of Angharad loving her father whilst Nesta hated his guts … what would that do to their relationship? Throughout, poor Angharad is a torn character – she has beloved family members on both sides of the brutal conquest of Wales, and she is powerless as they kill each other around her.

Faith, obedience and inner conflict

Because Angharad was born into Norman society and steeped in its mores, she would probably have absorbed key Norman beliefs at the time. She must have believed that God favoured the conquest of Wales (for Catholicism in this era was a martial religion). And she would likely have shared the heavy anti-women sentiment of the Normans. Her own son Gerald makes highly misogynistic statements in his writings. I am fascinated by the inner conflict this might have created in Angharad. Believing as she must have done that fornicating women must be banished to Hell, what would that have meant for her mother? And what turmoil would Angharad have felt as she tried to reconcile her taught views of the limited capabilities that a woman ought to have against the evident wit, cunning and brilliance of her mother?

Fear, fire and hypervigilance

Angharad may have lived a more sheltered life than Nest did, but she had her share of trauma. She would probably have been present (aged two or three) at the burning down of Cilgerran Castle and the abduction of her mother, so I chose to give her an aversion to flames and constant nightmares about fire. Given the plots and intrigues surrounding Angharad, I have also chosen to make her hypervigilant, with high residual anxiety and constantly on the lookout for sources of danger.

Becoming her mother’s daughter

Finally, I reflected on the immense storytelling talent possessed by Angharad’s son, Gerald. His writings are full of life, leaping off the page even nine hundred years later, full of world-weary humour. Gerald tells us that his storytelling powers were a gift from God (so perhaps was his high self-esteem). But I liked the idea that perhaps Gerald’s gifts came not from God, but from Angharad. This set me onto Angharad’s great arc. From being her mother’s greatest contrast – a quiet, obedient, dutiful Norman – Angharad and I together had the dawning realisation as the novel progressed that perhaps, underneath her dowdy and diffident exterior, Angharad might in her own way be a figure just as clever, seductive and manipulative as her mother. We learn that Angharad can spin a story too. Maybe there is more to her than meets the eye. Maybe, in the words of Oscar Wilde, ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.’

A few reflections on how I developed the character of Nesta for The Siren’s Daughter, based on the life of Princess Nest of Deheubarth.

Starting with the silences in history

We know nothing about Princess Nest’s real personality. In the chronicles, her character, her likes and dislikes, and how she felt about the tumultuous events of her life, are all a blank. Nothing remains of her but one single, iconic, twelfth-century painting of Nest – in bed with the king of England, naked but for her crown, her golden hair spread over their shared pillow. Even this is more a stylised medieval representation than any pretence at accuracy.

Almost everything else about Nest - except her marriages, the names of some of her children, and the life stories of the men in her family - is lost to history.

So where did I start?

Royal blood, captivity and ghosts

Nest was brought up as a princess, but she suffered a devastating loss in her childhood when her kingdom fell, and she became a hostage overnight. She later rose to prominence as the mistress of the King, but as she got older, she was forced into marriages with various men of ever-decreasing status. This inspired me to have the Nesta in my novel be fixated with social hierarchy and her royal lineage – clinging to the memory of her glorious ancestors, dismissive and rude to her social inferiors.

Many of the important people in Nest’s life were dead by the time she was forty years old, when the novel is set. By 1126, she had already lost her parents; most of her childhood household; at least one of her brothers; and two of her husbands to war. So, I had an image of her haunted by ghosts– I imagined her walking around the castle with spectres at her shoulder (see Louis MacNeice’s poem The Taxis). When you are talking to Nesta, sometimes you get the sensation that she is in fact directing her remarks at someone invisible standing behind you.

Control, charm and suppressed rage

Nest spent many years as a captive, being married off to first one man, then another, with little control over her life. I therefore decided that the Nesta in my book would love things over which she could exercise power – making her obsessed with her hawks and hounds (wild beings, forced to submit to her will) and giving her an unusual relationship with one of her slaves.

I also imagined Nest as having passive aggressive traits. Nest would have been unable to openly express her feelings about the men to whom she was married. In the misogynistic Norman society of the twelfth century, she would even have been unable to speak in public without her husbands’ permission. In my novel, therefore, Nesta lives a life of little sarcastic barbs, smirks and raised eyebrows, feigned illnesses, being late, ‘accidentally’ causing offence, and sudden bouts of spitefulness which represent occasional overflows of an inner rage which would have had no safe outlet.

The only aspect of Nest which is preserved in the annals is, of course, her spectacular personal beauty. Being so beautiful, I decided to make Nesta extremely vain – as well as seductive, funny, and magnetically charismatic. Not ‘nice’ in the classic sense, but when Nesta decides to exercise her charm, mere mortals cannot look away.

Violence, trauma and divided loyalties

Princess Nest also lived a life marred by outbursts of brutal violence. In the book, Nesta is personally courageous and calm in a crisis, as well as comfortable with violence (and, at one point in the novel, quite capable of using it herself). I imagine that all the unresolved trauma would, however, have taken a heavy toll on her mental state– which is why Nesta suffers from night terrors, depressive periods, and odd habits like (in a reaction to her years of hunger) stealing and hiding food from the dinner table whenever she is drunk. One of the governing dynamics in Nesta’s relationship with Angharad is how much Angharad pities her.

One remarkable thing about Princess Nest was the fact that she was intimately related to both sides in the brutal conquest of Wales. At one point, she lived through a three-way battle between her brother (leading the rebels), her husband (attempting to suppress them) and her mother’s cousin who was also her past lover (representing the King, another ex-lover of hers). This fact has allowed me to inject layers of ambiguity into Nesta’s closest relationships. The Nesta of my novel hides her own thoughts whilst she flatters and ensnares those around her, constantly trying to plan contingencies and manipulate whoever she needs to help her survive, never sure which of her close relations is going to triumph or be killed at any given moment. She is good at saying the right thing; she understands how to appeal to men (and how to provoke and torture them).

A mysterious and unreliable narrator

Finally, and most importantly, there are far too many things that we do not know about Princess Nest. Historians have no idea what happened to Nest’s mother when Deheubarth was conquered – she simply vanishes from the record. Both the Prince of Powys and the Sheriff of Pembroke had sons of whom Nest was the alleged mother – but the truth of their parentage is shrouded by time. So, I decided to make the Nesta in my novel a mysterious figure. If I, despite my immense curiosity, cannot discover the missing facts about Princess Nest – well then, my readers cannot know either. In the book, Nesta is an unreliable narrator – she drops hints, but she also tells lies. Many key things which Angharad would love to know about her mother are obscured by gossip and rumour, scandal and accusation. Like Angharad, I wish they weren’t.

So, there we have it – this is how the character of Nesta was born, a woman who, as Angharad says, is ‘a riddle … mercurial, as fickle and elusive as a roe deer, sometimes happy beyond reason, often plunged into sorrow with no apparent cause’.

I would have enjoyed knowing Princess Nest. I am not sure I would have liked her much – and vice versa – but she was undoubtedly a remarkable woman: the type for whom people willingly surrender their lives.