When Demeter and Persephone tapped me on the shoulder late in 2019, I made no immediate association between them and Frances, Countess Purbeck, 17th century protagonist of Nights of the Road , or her mother, Lady Elizabeth Hatton. My only impetus was to search out their original myth, which I found in a translation of its first known written version, Homer’s 3,000 year old lyrical Hymn to Demeter .
I didn’t know why I should spend any time with this particular myth, but my intuition, however fleeting and fuzzy, alerts me when characters and places from the past want me to read their story. Whisperings of 400-year old exhumed bones of Eliza Hatton in a London cemetery being cleared for property development had once stirred me into researching her story and that of her daughter, Frances. I was rewarded, in so many ways not anticipated, by following their trail and bringing it to twenty-first century lif
Following an intuition from its first easy-to-miss signals to a fully emergent story is not the way of all writers, yet many an author of historical fact and fiction testifies that such messages, seemingly carried on the wind, source and feed their creative process. Perhaps people from the past whose souls and stories are not yet at peace find fitting wordsmiths to do their unfinished work, when the moment is ripe…