A FAN of novels written by the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen, Sarah Collins (below) soon realised that the world she so loved in these books did not have a place for someone like her, a black woman of Jamaican descent, whose family had fled Kingston after the unrest following the 1976 elections and settled in Grand Cayman.
She then began writing a book based on her love for Gothic fiction. Her debut novel, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, was shortlisted for the 2016 Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize.
Run by the University of Cambridge, the prize provides an opportunity for unpublished female writers to launch their literary careers.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton is about a Jamaican housemaid in Regency London who is accused of a crime she cannot remember committing.
The story begins at The Old Bailey, London, on April 5, 1826. Frances ‘Frannie’ Langton is accused of murdering George and Marguerite Benham, the couple whom she worked for as a maid.
Collins, who studied law at the London School of Economics, said there were two reasons she started the book with the trial.
“The first was I wanted to start with the action, with Frannie’s predicament and her dilemma. Initially, I started the novel with Frannie being held outside the steps of Levenhall (the home of the Benhams), immediately after being woken up and placed under guard by the watchman.
“She would be saying: ‘I never would have done what was done to Madame’.
“But I realised that [since] we were going to finish with the trial and the resolution, I could bookend the novel by starting with the trial as well.
“I think the second [and] more important reason, the whole point of the novel [really], was [because] I have never seen someone like [Frannie] in literature - a black female protagonist in Georgian London.
“I wanted to open the novel with her in the middle of her predicament, to make it plain that this was a book that was trying to do something different.”
Frannie is presumed guilty, and a lot of it has to do with the colour of her skin.
Not a lot has changed since then, with people still being judged this way.
“That is the purpose of historical fiction. It is to bring attention to the way in which we fail to address injustices ... That is one of the things I felt very strongly about when I was writing the novel.”
People of colour were often cruelly mistreated during that era.
“Not only were they required to do hard labour, they were subjected to inhuman experiments and even viewed as [objects] rather than people by their colonial masters.
“I was shocked because I was one of those people who didn’t know the extent to which all those things were being done,” Collins added.
“One of the most surprising things about researching the novel was finding out how these great and venerated men of the Age of Enlightenment had immersed themselves in these pretty grotesque and ultimately pretty idiotic experiments.”
Another thing that stands out is that Frannie carries a lot of past guilt.
“One of the great tragedies of slavery was what it required of people to survive it.
“It required complicity and how to navigate it.
“The price for her surviving it is that she realised she had to put her own well-being and survival above [that of] others, in really horrific ways.
“Ultimately, the book asks the question of how much responsibility she must bear for those things.”
There is some courtroom drama towards the end of the book, and Collins had to do some research on the legal realities of the time.
Although she had been a lawyer for 17 years (her expertise was in Trust), she never handled criminal law.
“I had to research criminal law and the added complication of how the state of the law would have been in 1817.
“If there was an aspect of myself I brought in the book, it was the feeling of being in a room and observing how barristers behave, their mannerisms and the way they address each other.”
Collins said that as an avid reader herself, she believes a contract exists between the writer and his or her readers. As such, while Collins wants a page-turner, she also wants a story that lasts forever.
“I want a novel that keeps me so invested in the story that I won’t sleep until I have finished it.”
