Interview - Kate Williams: Queen of biography takes novel approach

The life of Josephine Bonaparte, a novel set in a Yorkshire haunted house and a new BBC series on historic buildings – Kate Williams works hard not to be stereotyped.

A prolific historian, Williams found success with her biographies of the young Queen Victoria and Nelson’s mistress, Emma Hamilton, but admits having to stick to the facts was at times stifling. It was why once she had finished her second book, Becoming Queen, she lost herself in the streets of Paris for a historical novel about a young girl obsessed with a serial killer.

“As a historian you must be objective, but biography is like a love affair. You become obsessed with their lives and you need to stand back from the sources to regain your objectivity,” says Williams, who will be a keynote speaker at the York Festival of Writing. “Sometimes you want that freedom of experimentation.”

The Paris-inspired novel, Pleasures of Men, will come out in the summer. She is under contract to Penguin to produce another for 2012 and can’t reveal much about the plot, exctep to say, “It is set a little later in the century, in a haunted house in Yorkshire.”

While the worlds of fact and fiction largely remain separate, just occasionally Williams’ two lives do overlap. After Becoming Queen – her study of the teenage Victoria – became a much-aired BBC Timewatch special, the historian also helped on the film The Young Victoria, starring Emily Blunt, while England’s Mistress, her biography of Nelson’s lover, also caught the eye of production companies, and is being made into a film and a stage musical. Both have helped propel Williams to the frontline of popular female historians who are revisiting and, in many cases, restoring the reputations of women long misinterpreted by previous generations.

Victoria took the throne against all expectation at 18 and battled for her independence against her German mother and her dubious associate, the Irish adventurer John Conroy. Williams takes us back, past our image of Victoria as puritanical widow, to a spirited and passionate girl, determined to rule, and deeply in love with her prince.

Similarly, her biography of Hamilton, who made the transition from working-class northern girl to artists’ muse, royal confidante and an ambassador to Naples, rewrote accepted history.

Hamilton was shunned by much of society after Nelson’s death as an embarrassment to a nation wanting to elevate its war hero to greatness. In England’s Mistress, Williams was determined to write her back into the story.

“I think it’s utterly necessary that we keep uncovering these women’s true roles,” she says. “Even if they did not have overt political power, they had covert political power. They were in the studios and newspapers and salons. They influenced politics and shaped our culture and arts. Even within the home, these women had a profound effect.” As author and historian, she is clearly drawn to strong figures. Her next major historical work will be a life of Josephine Bonaparte and she is also working with three others on a history of the royal wedding.

“I’m writing the sections on the 18th and 19th centuries. Before then weddings were quieter affairs, often at night and women wore any colour.

“It was Victoria who wanted to introduce the iconography of the virgin queen and it was she who gave us the white wedding.”

This is alongside writing her second novel, teaching an MA course and filming a series for BBC 2 on historic houses. “They are all fun and I do try to give all my projects equal time,” she says.

“I love the research and I love writing. If there is one part I am less keen on, it’s editing. And cutting. I’m really not a fan of cutting.”

Secrets of the trade revealed

Kate Williams will be appearing at the Festival of Writing alongside the likes of David Nobbs, who created the hit sitcom The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin and Nicola Morgan, the popular author of children’s and young adult fiction.

There will also be a chance to meet those who decide which manuscripts reach the bookshops, with Patrick Janson-Smith, who discovered Sophie Kinsella and Joanna Trollope, among the publishers sharing their trade secrets.

York Festival of Writing, University of York, March 25 to 27. For the full programme visit www.festivalofwriting.co.uk