When real people creep into your novel

The first real person to appear in a novel of mine was Noel Coward. He wasn’t planned, or strictly speaking invited, he just appeared at a party given by my protagonist Claudia’s daughter and her husband in  The Awakening of Claudia Faraday.  He and Claudia formed a warm relationship and she even gave him the title for his first play, The Vortex, and the idea for his film Brief Encounter. (Both these events needless to say were fictional.)
Noel Coward 1925 (Wikipedia)Statue of Millicent Fawcett, Westminster SquareAm I breaking any rules here? I hope not. I went to a lot of effort to research these people and they are represented in my books as accurately as I could make them. In this I believe I am breaking fewer rules than writers who write biopics that knowingly distort the facts. (I could name some but I won’t.)Featuring real people is not just fun, it adds substance and context to a book that is set in the past. Anyone who is familiar with Coward or Mrs Pat or Tree or Barker will I hope recognise this and appreciate that by including them in my made-up stories I am in a sense acting as their publicist, with the best motives. Coward had an uncanny understanding of older women, so it makes sense that this might have come from such a person as Claudia Faraday. Mrs Patrick Campbell overcame huge odds and the almost permanent absence of a husband whose name she used even after his death to become one of the West End’s most celebrated actresses, and by portraying her through the doting Prudence’s eyes I have tried to pay tribute to this. John Maynard Keynes was happily bisexual before he became happily married, though not to Prudence of course, so why shouldn’t he have enjoyed an eleventh-hour flirtation with her? Herbert Tree was a genial genius, a philanderer, unfaithful to his wife yet loyal to everyone else and seemingly loved by everyone, including his wife. So why shouldn’t he invite young and green Violet to lunch and flirt with her? (That’s all he did.) Millicent Fawcett was a well-bred woman who stayed true to her belief that women’s suffrage could be achieved through peaceful means throughout her long life, and Harley Granville Barker, actor, writer and manager of the Court Theatre (now the Royal Court) was in his unassuming way instrumental in revolutionising theatre in the early twentieth century and introducing the notion of the theatre director.Mrs Pat and Herbert Tree were the original Eliza and Higgins in Shaw’s play
Pygmalion. The slipper-throwing was in the script but according to Richard Huggett
Tree was so upset at being hit, rather forcibly, Mrs Pat was asked to tone it down,
thereby rather negating the purpose of the exercise.So if nothing else, by including these luminaries in my books I hope I am introducing the readers to fascinating characters they might not otherwise have been aware of. Call it homage from an ordinary writer to extraordinary personalities, call it the writer’s aid, they are portrayed as authentically as possible (within the bounds of fiction), and with great respect and  admiration and a lot of affection.Visit my website

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