The writer's bookshelf: Lauren Johnson

Eight questions about writers, books, and reading…

My favourite conversations are almost always about books. I love hearing about what people are reading, what they read when they were young, how their reading tastes have or haven’t changed, and so on. Who doesn’t, on visiting someone’s house, spend a few moments surreptitiously scanning the shelves – looking for familiar faces, points of connection, frissons of surprise or horror, a sense of someone’s inner life?

Hence this series of quick Q&As. It’s intended as a bit of fun, to be taken as lightly or as seriously as the respondent wishes. Is there an element of nosiness? Yes. Of course. But I do think that books are among the most magical, intimate and vital of societal connective tissues, bringing reader and writer together – soul to soul, heart to heart, mind to mind – across continents, across centuries, across every kind of distance. So I do hope that the different answers people give will spark conversations, provoke argument, give delight, prompt further reading – all the different points of connection and engagement that books can inspire!

Huge thanks to Lauren for taking part.

What was your favourite book as a child?

Little Women, which I remember reading avidly on holiday when I was nine or ten. I have four brothers and the world of the March sisters, with their imagination and creativity, their close bonds and sisterly fighting, was so delicious. I was very jealous of them. Obviously, I thought I was Jo. Now I look back and suspect I might have been Amy…

What book has had the biggest influence on either your thinking or your writing?

Not a book, but Natalie Zemon Davis’s article ‘The Rites of Violence’, about the Protestant-vs-Catholic religious riots in sixteenth-century France. I read it as part of an anthropology module during my History undergrad, and unlike 99% of the articles I read, I found it utterly compelling. It transformed how I viewed religious violence, and by extension a lot of other very alien historical behaviour: it made me understand these acts as the people of the time may have done, it contextualised the stakes involved and put me into a mindset utterly unlike my own. That, I feel, is the point of history. For me it’s not grand sweeping narratives or drawings of battlefields with arrows on them. It’s the nitty gritty of how and why people behave the way they do. It demands contextualisation and analysis. I tried to bring that understanding to Henry VI and Margaret Beaufort in my biographies of them, and it’s something I reiterate whenever I’m working in education: if you learn nothing else from history, learn to critique your sources and really engage with the who, what, when, where, why of it all. Not just for the past, but most importantly for today. It’s a monumentally important lifeskill.

Do you have a literary guilty pleasure?

I’ve got really into Hollywood memoirs, which isn’t the most on-brand thing for me. Matthew Perry’s audiobook kicked it off, and I’m now revolving between Shirley Temple Black’s and Cheryl Crane’s autobiographies. I like to imagine I have a Hollywood connection because I grew up in the house (and school) where Cary Grant spent much of his childhood.

Do you turn first to fiction or non-fiction for pleasure?

For a long time it was fiction, because I find it tricky reading historical works for pleasure. I’m either annoyed by something they lack, or annoyed they’re too good – and neither schadenfreude nor professional jealousy are very relaxing. But I have started to read more non-fiction recently, especially eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. I loved Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Facemaker, which I bought for my husband and then devoured myself.

What writer or books do you most go back to?

Anything by Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse, for absolute comfort and delicious humour. Both are hilarious, in very different ways, and – since I know how all Austen ends – there are no stakes to stress over. I grew up in Bristol so regularly wafted about Austen’s Bath imagining I was Anne Elliot, wearing my scarf like a shawl and inhaling melancholy pasties.

What writer or book have you most changed your mind about?

I read Jane Eyre too young and hated it. Why is this weird woman so drawn to this horrible old man? Why is so much of the bit in the castle in untranslated French? Why on earth would she consider running away with a missionary? And then the happy ending is that her gross employer / lover is terribly injured, so they’re somehow equal?! It’s definitely a book that demands emotional experience – and benefits from historical context. All the Brontës were so immersed in the religious world of their upbringing, but constantly flexing their creative muscles against it. Now I defy anyone to find a better expression of the promise of a relationship than Rochester (admittedly, just as he’s going to con his employee into a bigamous marriage) saying, “Make my happiness – I will make yours”.

What was the last great book you read?

Lauren Groff’s The Matrix is the most fascinating and enthralling book – I picked it up on a whim because the central character is the twelfth-century abbess and writer Marie de France, who has featured a lot in my heritage performance and storytelling events. (My other life involves creating and performing heritage theatre and interpretation.) Besides the beauty of the writing, and the achievement of compressing a whole life into a pretty slim volume, I loved that Groff parsed everything through a female gaze. All the male characters were defined at a remove, often through their connection to a woman – mostly they were absent. I have never read anything like it, even in historical fiction that purports to be female-focussed. It encouraged me to think more creatively in how I present my own stories of women.

What’s at the top of your to-be-read pile?

I’ve recently registered at my local library and went absolutely bananas. Left with armfuls of books. The fact you can pick out anything on the shelves – maybe just because you like the font, or the cover art – and it’s totally free to give it a try. What an incredible gift! Which is a long way of saying, I now have six books next to my bed on top of a half-read biography of Napoleon I found surprisingly dull, plus reams of a silly nineteenth-century romance I’ve been writing for five years, and I’m paralysed by choice. It might just be Persuasion again…

Lauren is a wonderful historian and writer whose work focuses on late-medieval England. She is the author of So Great A Prince, a study of England at the accession of Henry VII, and Shadow King, a biography of Henry VI, as well as the novel, Arrow of Sherwood. Her next, much-anticipated book, a biography of Margaret Beaufort, will be published in November.