The Circle of Shadows: Dark Academia with Marisa Linton

00:05 - Julia Golding (Host) Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. Now, today we have something of a first, because one of our students though of course she was already a very good writer before, but she came on our course and since then she's gone on to be published, so it's a big Mythmakers. Welcome to Marisa Linton. So welcome to Mythmakers. 00:39 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Hi, hello everybody and hi Julia, thank you for inviting me Lovely to be here. 00:45 - Julia Golding (Host) So, Marisa, you have two books out, or one book out and one about to be out. So the Binding Spell is a YA novel which came out with the publisher Chicken House a while ago but shortly to come out in. Is it October? October, yeah, the big, big month for books is the Circle of Shadows, which is an adult book. Who's the publisher of that one? 01:10 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Circle of Shadows is Hodderscape, so it's an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton. 01:14 - Julia Golding (Host) Ah, it might be interesting to ask that thing about I do this, why you work with more than one publisher. But we'll come to that maybe later on. But first of all, tell us a little bit about yourself. I believe you're a teacher or an academic. I should say that's your background. But before you became your eminent doctorhood, what was the young Marisa doing as a reader and a writer? How did it all begin? 01:40 - Marisa Linton (Guest) When I was small. 01:42 - Julia Golding (Host) If you can cast your mind back, what were your? The first novels, particularly fantasy ones, that led you into a love of reading and writing? 01:51 - Marisa Linton (Guest) That's an easy one the first proper book I ever read, I mean the first book that wasn't a picture book like this is Janet, this is John. Was the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Yes, that would do it. 02:06 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, it's a great one to pick. 02:08 - Marisa Linton (Guest) And so, yeah, I totally fell in love with it. In fact, my sister I had a sister who's much older than me so she could obviously read very well and she read me the first page of it. I can still remember we were sitting out in the garden. She read me the first page and then she got bored. She wouldn't read anymore, she just wandered off as big sisters do, and I begged her but she wouldn't, and so I picked it up and I can still remember piecing the words together and what that felt like at first, really, really difficult, but I so wanted to find out what happened. 02:50 I remember the Pauline Baines illustrations. I got a picture of the beaver. I didn't know what a beaver was, I mean, it was really quite small. Never encountered them anywhere, fiction anywhere and yeah, I just loved it, just absolutely loved it, fell in love with the narnia books from from that moment on and was reading and, um, there was no stopping me really. After that. I read and I read so many things, but one, one of the other, kind of the big. The big thing was, uh, tolkien, tolkien and tolkien also I owed to um, that was my old brother. That was when I was eight. This is ridiculous. Okay, there was not a. That was when I was eight. This is ridiculous. Okay, there was not a lot to do when I was yeah, was it 1970s or something? 03:31 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, well, it was even earlier than that. 03:34 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Okay, 60s, nearly the 1970s, almost almost. I was eight years old and I think I'd already read I must have already read the Hobbit and I said is there anything more like this? And he said well, there's these Lord of the Rings books. You know they're a bit and we had to get them out of the library. Those were the days. So, yeah, I was eight years old and I read Lord of the Rings and we had to wait quite a long time because Return of the King was out, so we had to wait for it to come in. 04:03 When I say I read them, I skipped over some of the elf stuff. I can remember that Some of it is very hard, even for a precocious eight-year-old with not a lot else to do. I skipped over some of that, but I really wanted again to get to the end of the story and that was a huge driving force. No films, no, of course, not nothing. Nobody would read it to me, of course, if you want to know what happens for me story is all about that You've got to want to know what happens. You have to read and you have to force yourself. So at eight I read all through it and particularly loved the Frodo-Sam sam thing. Sam became my first book hero and always, always loved him. You know the quiet one. The things done, yeah, he got things done, he stuck it out. Uh and uh, that just totally turned my brain. 05:05 - Julia Golding (Host) Well, you're picking up. I think it's really interesting because you're talking about being lured into being a precocious reader by not being read to. So I mean people listening to this. We have advised you to write to read to your kids. I mean, please do, please do. But that lure of story it means that you have to make yourself sort of reach higher than you might do otherwise. 05:30 So I also read Lord of the Rings for myself when I was about 11, a bit older than you, because my family. It wasn't part of their culture, it wasn't the thing that we had in the house. It wasn't the thing that we had in the house, whereas my husband. It was like a tradition that in the winter his dad would gather the boys around and read it to them, which sounds lovely, but it does mean they first got it read to them in a very. They didn't have to make an effort. It was there for them. So it's interesting how all my kids got it read to them as well. So I wonder if actually the slightly harder route that we both took is actually quite good for you in terms of making you stretch and really want it more than otherwise. Yes, forbidden fruit or something that you feel like I've got it, yeah, for yourself. So I think so, but I mean, I wouldn't say well, don't read to your kids. No, do yeah, please, read, read, yes, please do. 06:32 - Marisa Linton (Guest) I think the most important thing you can do as regards your kids is throw away their mobile phones, but that's a whole you know? 06:40 - Julia Golding (Host) yeah, my kids were, I think I. I missed that bullet by a fraction, in that we had beginning of smartphones, but not like massive social media, so they escaped. But now that's a whole lot of myth makers, isn't it? Anyway, so we're talking about you and you've gone on one route you took in life. Is that you're a historian? Yes, yes. So how did that come about and what's your period? The French. 07:07 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Revolution? Ah, I mean, I was. For many years I was in university education. I'm actually a professor of history. Oh, not a doctor, you're a doctor as well. Well, I was a doctor and, yeah, now a professor. You're a doctor as well. Well, I was a doctor and now a professor. But that was a whole life stage that went on for a long time. And how I got into that, well, I think I discovered when I was older, in my 20s. I discovered politics and the meaning of things and why the past matters and became an avid reader of history books and people like EP Thompson, the Making of the English Working Class, and then I read some books about the French Revolution. I don't know if your listeners would know about that stuff, but people like Norman Hampson and just again fell in love with the subject. 08:04 I'm a bit of an obsessive If I love something, I will keep going. If I don't love it, I will find something else to do. So that was my career of many years. I was taught for nearly 30 years and wrote books, but they were history books. So if you… yeah, so now I? 08:26 - Julia Golding (Host) I mean, there is method to my madness here, because the segue is that your blend of um, your what, how you're writing your fantasy books is it's historical fantasy, very firmly situated in a particular period, um, sorry. It seems a very happy marriage, though, so I've noticed that your latest book, the Circle of Shadows, is not set during the French Revolution. We're talking Edwardian, so why don't you tell us about the Circle of Shadows? 08:56 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Well, I never wanted to write a fictional book about the French Revolution because I spent my entire career trying to write the truth about it. If you can ever get at the truth which is another sort of question as a historian you can't go beyond your sources. It's a discipline, what a historian does. So I wanted to write the truth insofar as I could discover it. So that's great and I'm pleased that I did that and that was good. But then there was a part of me that wasn't fulfilled by that and that's the part that loved fiction and the idea of making up stories. 09:32 And all those years that I was a historian I did make up stories but I didn't have the courage to try and put them out there in the world. So I wrote. In fact, even before I wrote Circle of Shadows, I wrote the Binding Spell. It was called the Pooka King then it's about a kind of goblin king idea. I wrote that first and I started that when my children were small and I told them this sort of fantasy story and then I wrote it down and then, when I stopped being a professional historian, then I turned into fiction. So that was that. But I also loved the Edwardian era, never wrote about it as a historian, just an enthusiastic, interested person who'd found out a bit. So that's where Circle of Shadows came from. 10:22 - Julia Golding (Host) Can you define? Sorry for our listeners, can you define? Many of them are in America. Can you define what the Edwardian period is? Because it's quite a little bijou, a little short period in terms of history compared to Victorian era, for example. 10:36 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Well, we can stretch a bit and say late Victorian, so that's 1890s. Okay, so that takes in Dracula, bram Stoker and HG Wells. Yeah, hg Wells, the Edwardian era, strictly speaking. Okay, downton Abbey folks, the Edwardian era starts with the death of Queen Victoria and Edward VII coming to the throne since 1900, goes on to the First World War in 1914. But yeah, it doesn't have to be. It starts in my mind a little bit earlier than that, but it does end in 1914 because everything changed in 1914. That's when we get obviously modern warfare and terrible, terrible things happening which are interesting to write about and know about. But it didn't fit my interest in fiction. There's a reason why I really love the Edwardian period. 11:31 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, I also think that Edwardian is partly defined by transport as well, because it's motorcars beginning of motorcars, beginning of flight and bicycles. And bicycles were massive for women. I've got some family photos of some I suppose they must be my great-great-aunts or something, but they've all got lots and lots of photographs of them looking in their culottes, like divided skirts, cycling around the countryside and suddenly women didn't have to wait for somebody to saddle a horse or get out the carriage for them, but they could go off and then you could cycle to a railway station and you know, bob's your uncle off you go. So I think that there's an element of opening up and bigger horizons in the Edwardian period. Tell me if I'm wrong, but your book moves around quite a lot as a result of the ease of transport. So you're not a single small village at all, it's Oxford. There's a place up north where there's a seance and so on. So there's a much more sense of a freedom of movement for Evie Wynne, stanley, who's the main character. 12:41 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Yes, it's a very liberating time in a lot of ways. Um, there are new inventions. So, yes, the origins motor, motor, car that's just before 1900. They're already quite well established by 1900. People who who had the money, the means, would go out and buy one. Bicycles have been around a bit longer but again, they're very liberating, quite cheap compared with a horse or certainly a car, and there was a sense of increased possibilities and excitement. I think it's a great time In terms of social history. It's a time for women to have a greater place in the world and to feel they can do more things, and I think that's really interesting. There was more access to education so working class men also could have, could, could, uh, widen the horizons. It's a very optimistic time and a time of progress. I mean, terrible things happen also, but it is this time of widening horizons and that really intrigues me. But I also like how it's dealt with in literature, because the writing of that kind of period no-transcript. 13:59 Many writers are thinking about the possibilities of the psychic realm being a real place, dimension that you can get to if you only have the technology. I mean, one of the things they're doing is the telephones. It's another invention from this sort of time period Phonographs so you can have music recorded, time period Phonographs so you could have music recorded. Photography is well, that's much earlier, but it's becoming much more sophisticated by this date. So there's this sense that you can map and chart things and find out about things, and part of that might be the psychic realm. So you get institutions like the Society for Psychical Research that's really flourishing in this time period and that's based in London and it's somewhere where people can go and conduct experiments about ESP and feel they can find out about this new world. That's just sort of on the borders of their knowledge and lots of people whom we would think of as very hard-nosed scientists buy into that. Physicists, politicians, all sorts of scholars they all join up these groups. 15:19 - Julia Golding (Host) The most famous of them, of course. Well now, the most famous probably not at the time is Conan Doyle, who was very committed to belief in spiritualism and the ability to speak to the dead and things like that. And this is where it brings us to your novel, because one of the sort of obvious parallels in your book is with the world of Sherlock Holmes. Obvious parallels in your book is with the world of Sherlock Holmes. So why? 15:51 - Marisa Linton (Guest) don't we hear a little bit about Evie Wynne Stanley and her detective career? Well gosh, I see her as a kind of female Sherlock Holmes, but she's a detective into the occult, which of course Sherlock Holmes didn't do, Sherlock Holmes only did rational cult, which of course Sherlock Holmes didn't do. 16:06 Sherlock Holmes only did rational. And yes, as you say, arthur Conan Doyle did believe in the psychic realm, more so over time and more so after the death of his son. But that comes later, during the First World War. But even in the 1890s he's sort of ghost hunting and becomes a member of the ghost club and is interested in such things. He's very interested and yet Sherlock Holmes is the most rationalist detective ever, totally Won't hear anything else and even something like the Hand of the Baskervilles that Conan Doyle wrote in 1902. You know he wanted to ditch Sherlock Holmes but he came back because he needed the money, which we all understand. Came back, sherlock Holmes and wrote the Hand of the Baskervilles and you think, well, it might be a supernatural hound. Holmes is having none of it and of course it isn't supernatural. So yes, he sort of has a bit of a cop out there, I think, with his spectral hound, evie Winstanley. 17:04 I wanted her to be part of that world, but different. So she's a woman, she's young, she's not a fusty chap, dusty chap sitting in a gentleman's club, sort of drinking brandy and smoking cigars. She's not from that world at all. She's young and progressive and interested in new things. I wanted to have a heroine because, being female, I'm interested in the female perspective. But she's also someone whom I thought would appeal to people now who are reading, because she has quite a modern outlook, certainly about men and the limitations that are prescribed for women in her society. So she was confronting that and I liked that about her. 17:55 I liked her as a sort of window into that world who was progressive looking but also of that time and in fact I mean there were when we read up on that time. There were lots of women doing lots of things in real life. They weren't all sort of bound up in corsets and just waiting to get married. There were lots of women who were doing very active, very lively things, including becoming private detectives Not for the occult, obviously, because that's yeah. 18:30 - Julia Golding (Host) So we're working in fantasy, so obviously when you come down on the, you know which side of the line you come down on in the occult is going to be on the fantastical side of it, because you're in a fantasy world, which is quite fascinating. But you mentioned Sherlock Holmes, but, but of course, at the same time Sherlock, uh, as Sherlock Conan Doyle's writing what they often call Victorian Gothic. He and people like Kipling are quite happy to write a ghost story or something like that, so it's perfectly possible to do both. My favorite Conan Doyle Gothic story is the one about the mummy in Oxford Number 52 it's called, I think, 52?. It's absolutely brilliant. It's a short story which I would love to see adapted as a. Anyone out there, adapt it as a screenplay? Sorry, did Mark Gatiss do that? What? As a Doctor who? 19:22 - Marisa Linton (Guest) programme. No, no, he does the Christmas things. I think he did. Oh, did he? I must look it up, mummy. Yeah, the mummy that the student? Well, he gave away the plot. 19:32 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, he's great. Oh well, I must look that up. Thank you, anyway. So, but there's some serious sort of real world applications in what you're writing about as well, which is unfortunately always relevant, and particularly relevant at the moment, considering the various scandals rocking America, amongst others, and here in the UK, which is the sort of sexual exploitation that goes alongside secret cabals groups of people. So Evie's gender is also relevant to what she's looking into. So, without giving away too much of the plot, do you want to give us a sense of what it is that she's actually investigating? What are the stakes? Who's at threat? Who's under? 20:18 - Marisa Linton (Guest) threat. Her father was a seller of occult books and he's died in mysterious circumstances before the story begins. And then her home is burgled, somebody is looking for something in her father's study and Evie becomes convinced that there's some kind of occult mystery around her father's death and it has to do with this cryptic thing, this circle of shadows thing, the circle of shadows. So she starts to investigate and she goes first to North Yorkshire where she is in a grand house where she attends a seance. She goes with her younger sister, grace, and Grace is almost I can't give way too much of the plot, but grace is vulnerable in some ways to certain things that are happening, and evie is very protective of her sister, and so she sees her younger sister as being under threat from men, certain men, uh, and then from occult forces. So she's trying to protect her sister. 21:26 She then moves on to Oxford, which is where you are, of course. Yeah, that's right, it is a historical and not an entirely accurate Oxford. But Oxford is where she goes and she's, uh, investigating this mystery and she comes across a group of very privileged young oxford men. Actually, I didn't have to make that much of them up, I have to say, um, yeah, it's. It's a bit bullingdon club without without really yeah so the bullingdon club is an info. 22:01 - Julia Golding (Host) Well, I don't know if it still exists. It's like a drinking dining club which sort of very it's like class ridden vestige Should be got rid of. Personally, I think, anyway, it's all the worst side of that sort of thing, of which we've had prime ministers of recent times belong to. So I don't want you to have to tell too much of the plot, but you get a sense of she's questing after trying to protect a family member and solve a mystery around her father's death. 22:32 This leads me into asking you a question about the way it's being described, because we all, once we produce a book, we then hand it over to the marketing people and they start putting labels on it, and one of the ones that you're being given is this genre of dark academia which is partly um. Well, I mean, there's a number of those. There's the uh famous ones like babel dark academia, um, the samantha shannon um books, and what's that other one? The Deborah Harkness ones, those Discovery of Witches, that's it. So do you think dark academia is actually a genre? I was just wondering when I asked that question to you or is it just a place that we keep going back to? Does it exist as a genre? 23:28 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Hand on heart, I don't really think so. Certainly, when I wrote Circle of Shadows, I hadn't heard of dark academia as a thing. I wasn't intentionally. Let's write a dark academia book. It wasn't like that at all. I wrote a book. It's dark, there are a lot of academics in it and it's set in that kind of world with that sort of vibe. 23:49 So if you like old libraries and books, grimoires with with magical knowledge and and secret societies and groups, then yeah, if you, I think dark academia is helpful as a signpost for people. If you like this kind of thing, you might like that. So I think it can be useful in that sense. And if somebody offers me a label and it helps, then I'm happy to accept it. But I see so many books that have been described as dark academia, some of them very highbrow. 24:24 Your great books, like you know, donna tart, um secret history, but that's no way shape or form is a supernatural book and it's very different to some of the other books that are put into that category. So it's. It can be quite hard, I think, to know exactly what you should fit there, what does fit and what doesn't fit. I'm very comfortable with the label. I mean it is dark and it is the sort of people who like scary books on a winter's evening might like it. So in that sense, yes, I think that's a good label. I know a bit about academics and their personalities, so that bit wasn't hard, so wasn't hard. So yeah, I mean some of it does certainly feature and having a feminine perspective on all that, the perspective of the outsider who's trying to investigate something secret in that sense? Yes, absolutely it is that. 25:17 - Julia Golding (Host) That's what it is I guess it's a bit like the school story. So so the school story can be, I don't know, mallory Towers or something, but it can also be Harry Potter or one of those magical stories I suppose it does exist. But anyway, it just seems as though it's a bit more to do with metadata than actually, because she's not at college herself, she's a detective. So it's really mostly a fantasy detective story, I would have thought. So this is your second book, as we mentioned at the beginning. So is this move to Hod Escape about the fact that this is an adult book? So it rests nicely to have a different publisher with an adult book, because Chicken House is a younger fiction publisher. 26:06 It wasn't deliberate um just who. Who will publish me, which is how I do it. 26:10 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Yes, that's my way, if you're gonna have the benefit of my books. Yeah, it wasn't like that, yeah, um, yeah, yeah, I mean I'd written these books and been turned down by just about every agent. And if I have a message for anyone listening who's writing fiction, keep going. Yeah, keep going and also find your community. Those are my two messages, really, because it is very tough. I wrote as I said. I wrote the Book of King that became the Binding Spell, very much in isolation, got turned down by everybody, but then it won this big prize. It won the Times Chicken House Prize and part of the prize is that they published it. So that was done and dusted. Circle of Shadows then got taken on almost immediately afterwards because publishers had heard of my success story with the binding spell long before it was published. So I actually had two books. Oh sorry. 27:12 - Julia Golding (Host) That's really exciting for everybody who's watching this on YouTube, because I was warned We've been joined by a most delightful, beautiful cat. 27:22 - Marisa Linton (Guest) She's not very delightful. I might have to move her because, sorry, I will. 27:27 - Julia Golding (Host) We will do a little pause in the proceedings, do a pause just for a second. That's quite funny. We might have to keep the cat in because it was a very pretty cat. So we're talking about moving from writing for a YA audience, which is very different well, not very different, but it has different things that you have in mind when you're doing that to writing the circle of shadows for an adult audience. Are you thinking of this as a series, this particular book? 27:55 - Marisa Linton (Guest) because it's a two book deal. Ah, so this. I am writing the sequel as we speak. That is what I spend my time doing, yeah fantastic. 28:06 - Julia Golding (Host) have you got a title for it? It probably won't stay the same, though I've found I have a title, but I don't know if they'll fit, so I probably shouldn't. 28:16 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Yeah, no, don't. 28:17 - Julia Golding (Host) No, I'll say when you stop recording. Yeah, people don't realize how little power authors have over their own titles. I've had books that have been published under one title in one country and then another a completely different title, both in English, which is very confusing, and you worry sometimes that people might by mistake buy both and find it's the same book. But it's not the author's fault, it's to do with the market. You're in, yeah, so do you enjoy the process of working with an editor and being edited? Because that's one of the privileges of actually doing a professional route to being published, as opposed to self-publishing something or that kind of route. I've loved it. 29:01 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Yes, it's one of the and when you get an editorial letter, do you? 29:05 - Julia Golding (Host) do you always feel some people feel attacked by it and sort of, you know, clam up and try and defend what they're doing? If only you understood how brilliant I am. Or do you actually sort of say, right, this is my opportunity to make this better. 29:22 - Marisa Linton (Guest) The editors I've worked with have been brilliant. The editors I've worked with have been brilliant. I can imagine what you're saying, that you can imagine a circumstance where somebody wants you to basically shred the book as you've imagined it, and that would be, yes, that would be really, really hard and you would have to say at what point do I sort of dig my heels in and say this is not my book, this is something else? I could yes, I certainly could imagine that scenario happening, but it wasn't my experience. My experience with both books has been really positive and that I felt that both editors for the Binding Spell and then for Circle of Shadows wanted the best for the book, really cared for the book. And if you trust the editor the editor and you feel they're engaged with your book and your world and your characters, then you can trust the process. And in neither case did they force me to do anything. There was no kind of get rid of that character oh my God, it wasn't like that. 30:26 And I think if an editor really cares about your book and engages with it, they can help you see things that you've missed. So if there are other problems, we all have problems. It has sort of technical problems along the way, this bit doesn't work so well. How do you get these characters from here to here? Is this motivation quite worked out? Is this backstory working? Those kinds of things. If you trust the editor, they can help you find the best way up the mountain. That's how I see it. They can say, well, have you thought of this path? And it can be quite a shock when you get the editorial letter because you hadn't thought about that path, you didn't even know that path existed. But if they're really engaged with it, then yeah, I would. I would listen to what they say really closely if they want the best for the book and they they really know what they're talking about. And I had that and, yeah, that was, that was brilliant and I think both my books are a lot better for that editing process. 31:29 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, yeah, I do think so I do remember right at the beginning of my career back in 2004, something like that um, I had a sort of development deal with a publisher, oxford University Press, for my first set of fiction, fantasy, fantasy fiction books and I did a rewrite after a sort of big edit letter and the editor said to me after that, when I saw that you would take an edit, that's when I decided to give you a contract. So it's a really good skill to try and learn to be edited. It's really important to not feel attacked but to think what they're trying to do is make this the best book it can be for a market into which it's going. So I never really considered myself writing immortal prose anyway. So I'm quite happy to be told where I can be improved. It's really important to be able to do that. 32:28 So, just playing on your sort of interest in libraries and academia and the fact that you were a historian, I had a little fun question for you which was what do you I mean you have grimoires and things like that in libraries. What do you? I mean you have Grimoires and things like that in libraries what for you, would be a dream discovery as a historian and as a writer in an archive, somewhere like in the Bodleian Library or something like that. You can have two different things. If the or maybe the same thing would be what you want to write about. 33:11 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Is there a missing manuscript that historians are hunting for um as a historian. My, okay, you're serious serious serious hat. 33:17 as a historian, my work has been on the leaders of the french revolution and there is there aren't that many personal documents from the most important time. Not personal documents? So letters, personal letters, a diary, oh my goodness, from Robespierre or Saint-Just or one of these people. That would just be heaven, that would be wonderful, because as a historian, you can't let yourself go beyond the sources. If somebody didn't write something down and it didn't happen to have been kept by a whole succession of people, you will never find it. 33:57 So many documents are burnt or just generally got rid of because people were afraid to keep them or didn't see the point of keeping them. Got rid of because people were afraid to keep them or didn't see the point of keeping them, so that there are or they, they erased parts of them or rewrote them and then published them, and so many things happened so that that kind of that window into someone else's mind that I've been researching, those that that's that's for me, is the gold. Yeah, as a as a writer of fiction, well, I think, above all, I'm a reader of fiction, so the things I would actually like to find would be another book by Tolkien. 34:36 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, he secretly wrote. 34:41 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Can I confess this? Can I be really honest? I couldn't get on with Silmarillion. I could not. I love lord of the rings so much, so much, apart from the fact that not many women in it, but I can't tell you how much I loved it, and still do. I would love to find something more of that nature, or um, I also love the golden age of detective fiction and those women writers like Agatha Christie, dorothy L Sayers a whole cache of Agatha Christie books, dorothy L Sayers books. I would just sit happily and spend the rest of my life reading them until I'd run out of books and probably not need to write. Because if you can live in someone else's world and it's a wonderful world why would you ever want to do anything else? I think so. So for me, that would be my dream. 35:29 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, I quite like to find that. Cs Lewis wrote a story where Susan belatedly got to Narnia. She's always been a stick to beat him with by critics since and I've got a feeling he probably didn't think too much about it, other than thought, well, I better have one of them, not get there, just to sort of be fair, and picked on poor old Susan because she liked nylons and lipstick. 35:53 She grew up. Yeah, I think perhaps if someone had asked him what happened to Susan, he'd say oh well, actually later in life. I believe in second chances, anyway. So that's what I'd like to find okay um. 36:07 - Marisa Linton (Guest) So when it comes to Lucy sorry, I know people say that how he treated Susan and yes, it's appalling by our standards, but he wasn't one of those writers who didn't have women playing a place. I mean, there are if you go back, you and I know many of these writers. They didn't really see much point in women at all in the in their books. But Lucy's the most important character in the Narnian stories by quite a long way, so he could see that place for a girl and that's probably one of the reasons why I loved the book, because a six-year-old however old I was but yeah, susan, that's a sad disappointment. Of all all his books the Nalia books, the Last Battle is that was the hardest to get on with A lot of reasons. 36:51 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah Well, I agree, basically. But he also is brilliant on female baddies, Because not only have you got Jadis the white witch, but you've also got the green witch in the silver chair, who's a sort of lamia type, a sort of seductress, another version of a bad person. 37:12 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Totally brilliant and that hideous strength. 37:16 - Julia Golding (Host) can I just say we're doing a little CS Lewis. Yeah, why not? 37:20 - Marisa Linton (Guest) People love CS Lewis listening to this, loved it, loved that the hide the hideous strength. 37:27 - Julia Golding (Host) Yes, that has some issues with it. About the place of the woman in the home. I noticed that the bbc dramatization of it I think my was it you who suggested it I think it was yeah, and bbc have done a version where they get rid of that problematic radio play. 37:42 This is, and they've got rid of that problematic element, um, which was, you know, a relief, right? Okay, um, that's what we want to find in a, in the bodleian archive or somewhere. Um, in your case it might be over in the sorbonne, or or a little forgotten library in some french backwater town. Um, we always end by thinking where in all the fantasy worlds we want to do something which relates to the theme of your, the guest's book? And I thought it would be fun to think of the idea of fighting the occult or detecting the occult in, like Evie Winstanley does, but in another fantasy world, where would be the place that most potential for excitement and adventure if you're going to fight occult forces? Have you got any faves that you'd like to? 38:35 - Marisa Linton (Guest) mention. That's a hard one for me to answer, because most of the books that I've read and loved on the occult are set in our world. 38:45 - Julia Golding (Host) It can be in our world, but I meant the world of an author. So you know, it could be Bram Stoker's world, or it could be. 38:54 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Well, bram Stoker, then let's go with him. 38:56 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, that is a good pick actually. Thank you for giving me that. 39:01 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Thank you very much. Yeah, dracula brilliant, of course, absolutely brilliant. The Jewel of the Seven Stars that's a very kind of occult book as well by him. 39:12 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, yeah, I've not read that. That's to go on the reading list An Egyptian one. 39:16 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Yeah, it's flawed. It's flawed. Don't read the Lair of the White Worm, though. Okay, unfortunately, there are some books that you cannot read now without without being, oh my god did they really say that? Yeah, there are some things and that was, it was the, it's the racism actually of that okay, that's not funny. 39:38 Yeah, yeah, don't don't go, don't go there. But, um, yeah, the layer of the white worm is. It's a brilliant one, and I just I love those worlds where we seem to be in this world and everything is all very cosy and understood. But just outside, just beyond, there are these dark, occult forces. Dennis Wheatley, the Devil Rides Out. There's another one, don't know if you want to spend time in that. 40:00 - Julia Golding (Host) No, no, but it's about potential for story really, I think for me I was thinking about this and actually staying with the inklings that we were talking about. I think that Charles Williams has a wonderful take on the occult. So the greater trumps, that's wonderful, and the Place of the Lion, and I mean there's just lots and lots of them. The one about the Hunt for the Holy Grail the title of it is escaping me at the moment. What I really like about that is where you get books that invest some object with great power. 40:45 Everyone tends to be really sort of focused around it, like in the Grail itself in the Arthurian legends. It becomes this great thing everyone's sort of looking for. There's a character of an archdeacon in this Charles Williams version where he basically says it doesn't matter if it's the grail or not, because faith isn't about a cup. The fact whether or not it held Jesus's blood doesn't matter, it's the faith of the person that matters. So he's quite ready to hand it over to the bad guys because he thinks, well, that isn't where faith resides. And I love that turning around of saying these objects are only invested with this by the people who sort of you know, it's their faith that activates them. So Charles Williams, I think, is a really fascinating place to fight the occult. 41:43 - Marisa Linton (Guest) I'd love to know so much more about the Inklings to fight the occult. I'd love to know so much more about the Inklings. 41:47 - Julia Golding (Host) There's a great biography about Charles Williams himself by Greville Lindock, which is because he is a bizarre figure. He was a wizard for the Rosicrucians. He believed in magic. 41:59 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Oh, very occult. 42:00 - Julia Golding (Host) Yeah, really occult, but a kind of white magic or whatever one calls that benign. And the fact that he was meeting regularly with bluff CS Lewis and Catholic Tolkien is fascinating. He's CS and Church. Well, on that thought to wrap things up, we could obviously, you know we could wander off into Charles Williams byways, an interesting, very interesting writer. Thank you, Marisa. So just to reiterate, the Circle of the Shadows is out in October 2025. So if you're listening to this later on, it might well already be out. So do look out for that. By Hod Escape, and thank you for joining us. 42:45 - Marisa Linton (Guest) Thank you. Thanks very much. I've enjoyed it. I hope you have. 42:57 - Speaker 3 (None) Thanks for listening to Mythmakers Podcast brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.