The story behind A Way Through the Woods

Like Footsteps, this book began with a photograph, or rather a set of photographs, in this case the famous pictures of what are known as the Cottingley Fairies. The photos were taken in 1917 by two cousins – the elder of whom lived in the village of Cottingley in West Yorkshire – who claimed that the fairies were real. The elder cousin, Elsie, was 16, the younger, Frances, 10. One of the reasons the photos were taken seriously by the public was that Arthur Conan Doyle, celebrated as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and a Theosophist (devoted to the theory of a spiritual hierarchy) believed that they were authentic.

What intrigued me about the photos was not whether or not they were of real fairies (to my mind they were clearly fakes), but the temerity of the two cousins who claimed, right up until the 1980s, that at least one of the photos was a true picture of fairies. The date the photos were taken, in the middle of a war that was anything but fairy-tale, also struck me as significant.

So I decided to write a novel in which one of the girls is a dreamy, lonely country child, Helen, inhabitant of the village of Needlewick, whose life in 1912 is turned upside down by the arrival of her sophisticated London cousin, Sophia, forced to spend a summer in the country because her beloved brother is suffering from measles. Sophia is rather full of herself and thinks she’s doing her cousin good by descending upon sleepy Needlewick in her London frocks and with her London ideas about sex and relationships. However, in 1920, after the war in which she loses her brother and her family is broken up, Sophia is confronted again by the events of the 1912 summer and finds herself painted in a less than idyllic light.

It seemed to me, as I wrote the book, that those Cottingley fairy pictures were an odd relic of a world in which catastrophic violence and slaughter was happening on a scale never before experienced. As a result, the book is about the trauma of awakening from the sleep of myth to the harsh reality of the world. My book, in so many ways, turned out to be about the journey from innocence to experience. A reader of the novel is not required to believe in fairies, only that the Tunnel Woods, and what goes on in them, are in some ways a symbol of initiation. Girls who enter the tunnels come out changed. They learn about sex and betrayal there. They are confronted with their own true selves, and with the temptations of adulthood.

But what the book also became, as I wrote it, was an examination of what it meant to be a woman in the early twentieth century. When Sophia returns to Needlewick in 1920, women have just been awarded the vote. Her feckless mother, who has chased romantic illusion all her life, has moved on from the suffragette movement and is packing food parcels in Switzerland, so Sophia is left all by herself to face a future filled with conflict and difficult choices. Because in the end she rejects both her father’s preferred world, in which the woman agrees to married submission, and her cousin Helen’s decision to cut herself off from relationships altogether and bury herself in work, Sophia’s future is wide open.

So a novel which began with the premise, ‘How did those two young girl cousins dare to claim they’d taken photos of fairies?’ ended up, in a gentle way, to be all about daring. But it is also about tearing the paper-thin veneer on that Edwardian summer of 1912, when nothing was quite as it seemed. Mrs Gresham, the astute looker-on, is dying; Michael, the outcast, is actually the one who knows most about everything; Sophia’s sophisticated home life is falling apart, and Sophia, who believes herself to be blessed, is actually far worse off than her plain country cousin, who is so firmly rooted in the community of family and friends.

But perhaps the last word (but one) should go to the fairies. Like many children, I saw the boundaries between the real and the imagined world as blurred when I was young. In researching fairy mythology, I found it intimately connected with nature, the seasons, chance, superstition and folklore. For Helen, in the novel, the world of fairies is as real as all the other things she doesn’t understand. It is unpredictable, exciting, just out of reach, and a powerful link between the present and the past.

To some extent, A Way Through the Woods now seems to me to form part of a trilogy with Footsteps and Confinement, novels which explore womanhood at a time of monumental change – suffrage, war, machines, the gradual erosion of the class structure. As such, it’s quite a serious novel, though with a light touch; under the preoccupation with frocks and fairies are much darker questions. Its original title was: Beneath the Leaves…

Katharine McMahon

For discussion

• What does the first sentence tell us?
• ‘Boredom is such a luxury.’ How so?
• ‘I won’t delve into the past, such a foolish thing to do.’ Is it? If so, why?
• How does the author create such a vivid atmosphere?
• ‘Sophia says she does not like sitting under trees because you never know what might fall on your head.’ What does this tell us of Sophia?
• ‘She can’t understand the meaning of anything you can’t touch or buy.’ Is this a fair assessment of Sophia, do you think?
• ‘You should never be afraid to leap alone.’ Good advice?
• ‘Sleep came easily in Needlewick.’ Why?
• ‘It’s always a mistake to be too dependent on one person.’ Is it?
• Why does Sophia know it’s time to leave Needlewick when she sees the garden at The Grey House?
• How does the novel examine the contrast between the small world of Needlewick and the wider world?
• ‘It was my father. He’s always been in her way.’ How was he in Suzanna’s way?
• ‘The trouble with Suzanna was that she could never forget herself.’ Is Sophia at all like Suzanna?
• How has the changing role of women affected life in Needlewick?

Suggested further reading:

Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Case of the Cottingley Fairies by Joe Cooper
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Go-Between by L P Hartley
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton