# A Conversation with Marianne Lee

## Entretien avec Marianne Lee

### Marie Mianowski

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OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/18957

DOI: 10.4000/12nww

ISSN: 2259-8863

**Publisher**

Presses universitaires de Caen

**Printed version**

Date of publication: December 6, 2024

Number of pages: 145-153

ISBN: 978-2-38185-248-5

ISSN: 0183-973X

**Electronic reference**

Marie Mianowski, "A Conversation with Marianne Lee", *Études irlandaises* [Online], 49-2 | 2024, Online since 08 November 2024, connection on 16 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ etudesirlandaises/18957; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12nww

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A Conversation with Marianne Lee

Marianne Lee is a graphic designer living in Dublin. A Quiet Tide is her first novel, published by New Island Books in 2020. It is a historical and biographical novel whose central character is Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815), Ireland's first female botanist. A Quiet Tide was shortlisted for the Kate O'Brien Award in 2021 and adapted for broadcast by RTÉ Radio One in 2022. In 2023, Marianne wrote the screenplay, with the assistance of Screen Ireland.

Author's website: https://www.mariannelee.ie

Context

Marianne Lee and Marie Mianowski met in Dublin on 24 June 2024 to discuss Marianne's work as a writer, Ellen Hutchins's fate as the first Irish woman botanist and as a fictional character in Marianne Lee's novel. Marie Mianowski's research focuses on the representations of the more-than-human world in contemporary Irish fiction in the context of climate change in particular. She also researches the writing (fiction, non-fiction, letters, diaries, essays) by Irish women botanists in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Reading a 21st-century novel about Ellen Hutchins, who straddled the 18th and 19th centuries, was a fascinating experience and the conversation with the author Marianne Lee a great opportunity to discuss the relationship between facts and imagination when writing historical fiction, as well as the place of the non-human in Ellen Hutchins's life and work.

**Marie Mianowski:** *A Quiet Tide* is your first novel. How did you come up with the idea of focusing on Ellen Hutchins, a woman who died at the age of thirty and straddled the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th? Did you have many gaps to fill in with your own imagination? What freedom did you leave to your imagination?

**Marianne Lee:** Ellen was the perfect subject. There was enough to begin and there was always enough information to continue. It was like following the bread crumbs in the forest. There was always another crumb for me to find. But in between there was so much mystery. For me, Ellen Hutchins is a mysterious character. All these years later, I still find her very mysterious. I think this was one of the main reasons why I thought she would make such a good subject for a book, because I couldn't fully understand what drove her, what her motivation was. It must have
seemed to her as if there was so little reward, until she started corresponding with other botanists.

**MM:** Dr. Stokes in Dublin introduced her to botany. It was his passion, so in a way he was sharing his passion for botany with her. But wasn't it also a way for him to try and keep her from feeling depressed? Of course that would not have been the word used at the time. But he was always careful that she had something to stimulate her mind. When I think of Ellen Hutchins first arriving at Dr. Stokes's, the way I imagine her is as someone with a lot of energy but very few perspectives. Botany was a cure of some sort.

**ML:** Yes, and it could have been the case with anything, I think. She was obviously very intelligent, very frustrated.

**MM:** But botany was both intellectual and physical so it drew her out of the house and at the same time it made her think, speculate and connect with other people. It was also the beginning of a never-ending process of learning and in this sense it projected her into the future.

**ML:** It was something to move towards. There were also references to her eyesight, the fact she could see things close up very well, so I think that played into it, this little gift.

**MM:** Because even music wouldn't have been the same. She would have stayed much more indoors: you can't play the piano or the cello for hours. Whereas you can roam outside in search of botanical specimens for hours.

**ML:** It was the escape into the environment. I think this is what people enjoy about the book – that she turned a negative situation into something positive. We don't emphasise enough how much that is a real skill in life: to be able to take the bad and turn it into something positive. And she really did. Her situation was depressing, and yet she managed to take the negative aspects – isolation, too much time, not enough social engagement – and turn these things into positives. She was in this magical place, the Bay of Bantry, but the isolation at the time would have been formidable. When you go to Bantry today, it's a big town with lots of people living there but you still feel it's far away from the rest of the world.

**MM:** Without the letters, do you feel you would have had to construct an entirely fictional character?

**ML:** Exactly, I mean, I had her voice very quickly. There was little information for me to lean on, but the letters really were a gift and the book would not have been the book that it is without the letters. The letters were the basis.

The National Botanic Gardens of Ireland published a short book in the 1990s, a collection of letters between Ellen Hutchins and Dawson Turner. That's what got me started. At the beginning, the letters were very formal, they just talked about plants: "I found this, do you know what this might be?". They were purely limited to discussions about botany. But then, and it's so lovely, they start to slip in small, personal details. He realised she was an interesting person, that she had imagination.
Of course Dawson Turner<fnref n="1" /> was this fascinating character and, I think, a very gen-
erous, kind person. He had his flaws but I think he was truly a kind person and he
quickly sensed that she was intellectually frustrated. Something that is difficult for
us to understand now is how deep their friendship was, just built through letter
writing. And at the time, the barriers between genders was huge. Through letter
writing they were able to let them slip away.

I went to Kew Gardens, to the Library there, and saw the actual letters. Turner
did little quizzes and doodles on the side of his: "Can you work out what this is?".
I think she knew this was the friendship of her lifetime. It lasted until her death.
He was devastated to hear she'd died.

This huge gift to me was the tone of voice in the letters.

MM: Was finding the letters the trigger to write the novel? Were you actively in search of a subject to write a novel?

ML: I was in search of a subject. I hadn't written much, really. A lot of short stories. I was trying to write. Working out the process: first, how do I write? Second, how do I write a novel? And I think the best thing to do is trial and error, whatever the project is: break it down. So I was looking for a subject which would serve that purpose. I had a feeling I wanted to write about the 19th century. There are gaps in Irish history that are not so widely written about in fiction. The Irish Rebellion, the Easter Rising, the Famine: those are subjects that are quite well covered. Ellen Hutchins's period was a "quiet" period of Irish history, from a literary perspective at least.

MM: It was the beginning of the Union. And there had been the Rebellion in 1798, the aftermath of that, all during her lifetime. One of her brothers was a friend of Wolfe Tone.

ML: Exactly, yes. Irish history was always in turmoil. It was an anxious time. The city was a dangerous place, the countryside was a dangerous place, the roads were dangerous, it was dangerous to travel. There was a lot of anxiety, tension between Catholics and Protestants, between poor and rich. So it was never calm, never peaceful, but in terms of big events, it was seen as a quieter period. And a period that is not so widely written about. I thought it an interesting pocket of Irish history.

The book isn't political and yet politics is in the background. It permeates
their lives. But it's not something they're consciously talking about all the time. I
imagined Ellen would have been somebody who would have blanked out a lot. Her
story is about escape. I think that's one of the things readers found appealing about
the book because it came out at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. So it
was a good book for Covid times, that idea of trying to cope with difficult, limiting
circumstances. And then I suppose the descriptions of landscape was something that

<footnote n="1">1. Dawson Turner (1775-1858), banker and botanist. Most of his personal botanical archives are at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens (Mark Lawley, "Dawson Turner", *British Bryological Society*, online: https://www.britishbryologicalsociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DAWSON-TURNER.pdf).</footnote>
appealed, as well. Some people have said since that it's a book about the environment, it's a book about climate. But I didn't think of it that way as I was writing it.

**MM:** So you stumbled upon those letters and it set you going, but at what moment did you realise you were writing the novel you had wanted to write? Or maybe it did not happen that way?

**ML:** Well, it's a good question. I think from the beginning I had a dream of what the book should be, which would reflect the mystery and the romance of Ellen's life. It's a very romantic story, in the 19th century sense of the term. You know, the individual in the landscape, man and nature. How nature reflects humanity and vice versa. While writing I kept having this image of the painting *Wanderer above a Sea of Fog* representing a man on a rock by Caspar David Friedrich.

**MM:** Except Ellen Hutchins is a woman.

**ML:** Except she's a woman. I had that in my head and, set against that, the formal life of the early 19th century and how people interacted with each other, the formalities between men and women, different classes, servants and their employers. Because servants left little historical record, in the book they're all fictional characters.

**MM:** This meant a lot of research on your part.

**ML:** I had this dream, almost an instinct, towards something I saw as perfect, then having to work towards it. The first draft was terrible. But I could see why it was terrible. There were all the classic mistakes of historical fiction. The "information dump", where you're trying to communicate all your research and in the process you over-explain. After the first draft I realised that the key, the trick, was to write every experience in the book from the characters' point of view. Something only needs to be described if it's new and exciting for the character. But if it's very familiar you just take it for granted because the character takes it for granted. So that helped me get the tone right. Then the dialogue was important. I love writing dialogue but, again, there was too much explaining. After the first draft, one of the things I did was go back to the beginning and with every line of dialogue, I took half of it away and left the ending. Then I began to get the tone of how people spoke to each other at the time. They were skilled communicators, very articulate. If you were any way educated, your level of intercourse was incredibly sophisticated. They knew how to say things without actually saying them. Everything was extremely coded, even between intimate friends. So once I understood that, everything came to life.

I also focused on making Ellen very sensual, in the full definition of the word. Botany was not just an intellectual pursuit. She experienced everything with all her senses.

**MM:** It's probably because of this characteristic that readers say it is a book about the environment. Because maybe people today are trying to learn and gain this sensual approach, this kind of direct access to the living world that you depict Ellen Hutchins as having.
ML: I think the experience of botanists at the time was a very complete one which engaged their entire being. Most were amateurs but passionate about the subject. They didn't have university degrees. Those were the last years of amateurs in botany. Someone like Ellen would not have had any credibility later on. As a woman, she wouldn't have had access to university anyway. Fortunately, her period of life was a perfect window of opportunity for the amateur. She was respected and her name became known in Europe. At the time, people who were occupied by plants, insects and so on - it was a fresh new scientific world - were documenting things for the first time. There was the possibility of discovery, of making their name, having an influence, changing the world, and that affected how they engaged with nature and the world.

What I tried to do in the book – and I was very conscious and maybe a little bit anxious about this – was to take the social situation of the time into consideration. In Ireland with our political history, there are a lot of sensitivities around the class system. Educated, wealthy people at that time were almost all Protestants, while most – not all, but most – of the Catholic Irish were extremely poor, living from day to day, worrying about feeding themselves. The idea of this woman walking around the countryside, searching for plants – in a way, it was an extremely indulgent thing to do when literally people did not have clothes to wear and food to put on the table. So I decided to present Ellen as someone who did not fit in anywhere, someone who had to find some legitimate reason for being here. As the narrative develops she becomes accepted not just by her peers, but also by the people she lived in the midst of. She found a way to become part of that world as well.

Something I was very cautious about was not to present ordinary people as part of the backdrop. There's a section in the book which I always read whenever I do public readings. It's the moment when Ellen meets the man, Murphy, collecting seaweed on the beach with his family. Murphy is trying to understand why she would have intellectual interest in seaweeds. She feels awkward by the end of the exchange because she realises that he and his family have more knowledge from their daily lives than she'll ever have from all her research.

Originally the ending of the book was the scene where Dawson Turner sees his father as he's dying. The publisher wanted an ending that included Ellen and was less bleak, more hopeful. So one night I couldn't sleep and I wrote the last chapter very quickly. I was pleased with it afterwards as it finally showed Ellen integrated into her world having overcome even the barriers of language. Most of the population was Irish speaking, so that must have been a huge complicating factor in day-to-day life that would have made Ellen feel even more "other". The role of these barriers between communities and groups and individuals and how people find ways to communicate was something I found fascinating to explore.

MM: And in the book I found it did contribute to making the characters alive.

ML: Nature was another way in which I contrived to make the characters alive. Because everyone depended on what nature offered. Weather is of huge importance in the book. Irish people are obsessed with weather! Even in this urbanised world, the weather is still very much a topic.
I grew up in the Midlands close to a special environment, the peatlands, which as a child I didn't appreciate at all. We have these boglands where they've found bog bodies so it is definitely something I am looking at writing about.

**MM:** Are you a full time writer?

**ML:** I have a day job. I'm a designer. But I'm trying to structure my life as a writer.

*A Quiet Tide* was such a passion. It was almost like writing an academic book at the same time as writing a book of fiction because the research was so huge. But you know, when you do someting for the first time you're very innocent, so at the beginning I didn't fully realise what it was going to take. Botany was obviously the most daunting aspect but I thought, Ellen started with no knowledge whatsoever, she was entirely self taught. She didn't know Latin, which was a huge disadvantage. Girls were not taught Latin in school. So she had to teach herself as she went, Latin being the language of Botany. So she had all these disadvantages which she overcame. I studied the books that she would have learnt from, primarily the William Withering botanical encyclopedia, and realised there was a process there and how Ellen followed the process. She had the sort of mind which can quickly retain that kind of information.

I do think that by the standard of the time and of her class she had a difficult life. She worked hard. It was cold, she was ill at times and she had a lot of responsibilities. Her family wasn't easy. She had to be, as women often are, the negotiator.

I tried to be kind to the brothers although they were difficult characters. I tried to be fair with Emanuel Hutchins in particular. Today we talk a lot about trauma, but we don't often think back on historical figures to understand how they experienced traumatic events. We should consider them in light of those traumatic experiences. Someone like Emanuel was certainly selfish and domineering, but he must have suffered huge trauma in his life. I mean his experience of the Irish Rebellion. Also, he was likely a personal friend of Wolfe Tone. Emanuel himself escaped but he could have been hanged, as could Dr. Stokes, who had a narrow escape and lived a quiet life afterwards. How such trauma is passed on to the people around them and their families – it's an issue that's rarely considered.

**MM:** When you try and write back emotions, as when you said that you try to write only what the characters know and see and feel, aren't you afraid to project your own 21st-century emotions on someone who would not have had all the knowledge in psychology that is part of the common language now? By psychology, I mean broadly psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

**ML:** Yes I'm aware of this particular risk. There's this tension and contradiction: I wanted the character to be relatable to the modern reader, but in order to do that there was a danger I'd start to project modern sensitivities.

One of the things I like about historical fiction is that idea of entering a world. What I really admire about Hilary Mantel's novels and those of the best historical fiction writers, is they get the balance right between making the characters relatable
so we recognise them today, but also giving them motivations that were purely of
the time. Hilary Mantel almost does not explain the past, she presents it.

It was obvious that Ellen suffered from anxiety and that some of her illnesses
were probably psychosomatic. Not all: she did suffer from something like tuberculosis
that she likely caught at her school in Dublin from the harsh environment. And also
she had various other ailments that weren't treated and then some of her illnesses
were possibly caused by the treatments she did receive, such as mercury and so on.
Her way of managing her anxieties was to get outside, which was probably all she
could do.

In the book she's the central character but I never felt she was so dominant. I tried to give weight to all the characters around her to balance out this modern idea of the self at the forefront, but I agree it's a consideration. One of the dangers of writing historical fiction is that readers will expect a modern woman in a long dress and for her to react to situations as a modern woman would. You see it in drama on TV but also in historical novels.

MM: You said you rewrote the first draft. Were you the only reader of your first draft?

ML: I started off in a sealed bubble. I didn't discuss it with anybody, didn't show anybody anything. It was just this personal dream and then as I progressed I became influenced by other people's viewpoints.

I've always been very self motivated. I don't feel I need feedback. It's a positive
which can turn into a negative because when eventually I do get feedback, it's not
so easy. That's something I have to learn to deal with. The first draft was terrible and
there were many more drafts. But very quickly, I knew it was getting better. I had a
whole section at the beginning set in a boarding school where Dr. Stokes comes to
visit Ellen. Early on, I did show it to a friend who reads a lot of historical fiction, who
said, "it's too dark and bleak and Ellen needs to enter the new world of possibilities
much more quickly". So that's why the beginning is her arriving at Dr. Stokes's
house. And then Ellen's great-great-grandniece Madeline Hutchins<fnref n="2" /> entered the
scene. I connected with her early on. My husband works as a librarian at the National
Library of Ireland. One day, a woman came up and said she wanted to access certain
papers about Ellen Hutchins and my husband said that his wife was doing research
on Ellen Hutchins too. Madeline was very surprised and they exchanged contacts.

<footnote n="2">2. Madeline Hutchins is “the main researcher on Ellen Hutchins and is her great-great-grandniece. She has transcribed a great many of Ellen Hutchins’ and Dawson Turner’s letters”. She is the author of *Ellen Hutchins, Botanist of Bantry Bay* (Bantry, Ellen Hutchins Festival in association with the Bantry Historical and Archaeological Society, 2019), a piece on Ellen Hutchins for Cork University Press publication *The Coastal Atlas of Ireland* (Cork, Cork University Press, 2021) and a chapter in the Four Courts Press book *Botany and Gardens in Early Modern Ireland* (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2022). “She developed and wrote the website https://ellenhutchins.com. Madeline has also been a Co-Director of the Ellen Hutchins Festival since its first run in Heritage Week 2015. She has presented exhibitions on Ellen in Bantry Bay Library and Bantry House (2015), School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin (2017), Boole Library, UCC (2018), and the Library, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew (2019)” (“Madeline Hutchins”, *West Cork Music*, 2023, online: https://www.westcorkmusic.ie/artists/2023/madeline-hutchins).</footnote>
But I waited until I had reworked the first draft before contacting her and we were both very cautious. She doesn't read much fiction at all, so she had her husband read it. He said "you don't have to worry". Also at an early stage I sent the manuscript to Clare Heardman who works at the National Parks and Wildlife Service in Cork and she was a huge help. I had the wrong birds and plants in the wrong seasons and so on.

I do feel there's a danger in showing work too early because it kills it. But if you leave it too late and people are discouraging then you've spent too much time on it.

There was real magic writing the book and I'm trying to recreate that magic with my second project.

**MM:** Do you want to write historical fiction again?

**ML:** I do, but I don't want to be known as a historical fiction writer. There are certain writers like Emma Donoghue, Rose Tremain, who switch between periods and places. I'd like to be able to do this too. On the other hand, historical fiction is appealing because I feel I don't relate very well to the modern world. Everything is political and I'm not a political writer.

**MM:** What do you mean by "everything is political"? Because you were saying that back in the day there were deep differences between social classes and strong differences between genders. Do you mean that because it was not your political environment you felt more comfortable writing about it?

**ML:** Possibly. Writing about the modern political world is not something I've felt comfortable with, so far.

You do lose some of your innocence as you write. Questions like, where are you on the shelf in the bookshop? This is difficult to know. And to decide on a subject is difficult. There are so many stories around.

**MM:** Is it important to know where your book stands on the shelf to start writing?

**ML:** It's important from a commercial point of view. Then you have to consider character and plot: these are the two key elements and if they're not extremely strong it's going to be difficult to write a successful novel.

Even with auto-fiction, you're turning yourself into a character.

My instinct and what I'm comfortable with and perhaps good at, is absorbing atmosphere and environment and communicating them back through prose. I found characterisation in *A Quiet Tide* came easily even if the characters are from history. Even with Ellen's brothers, there was always a clue to help me bring them to life. I'm still looking for the clues for my next project. They're the starting point.

**MM:** What is the function of fiction today? And do you think it has a function?

**ML:** Is it escapism? Is it entertainment? That's also what I meant by "political" earlier. I'm finding a lot of contemporary fiction almost nihilistic. There's this sort of lack of joy. As if as a writer I had to present the world as hostile and bleak and hopeless. Abuse as a means by which humans communicate with each other is highly disturbing and it's become common even in fiction.
Is the function of a writer to communicate the world they live in? Is there a way for me to describe contemporary life in Ireland, Dublin or the Midlands in a way that’s inspiring? How would I go about it? As an artist, you want to inspire. The difficulty is that “hopeful” is not the stuff of drama. It’s fear and drama that are expected. The conversation we’re having is inspiring because I realise the question is whether there’s a way out of that nihilistic approach.

**MM:** Perhaps it could start by building relationships between characters who would be less narcissistic.

**ML:** Yes, absolutely. Motivation as a power. Characters who would be able to transcend the ego part of their selves.

I’m hearing more and more that people don’t want to hear or watch the news. And I think a book like *A Quiet Tide* is an escape for them.

I love to read Thomas Hardy, all the masters. And detective stories. Particularly Georges Simenon. In detective stories you’re making sense of chaos. Someone – the hero – comes and rights the wrong.

**MM:** To me *A Quiet Tide* is not escapist. The world Ellen Hutchins lived in was very harsh. But I understand that it was also very different from ours.

What I like in *A Quiet Tide* is the fact that despite her complex family situation, her own place in society as a woman and her weak health, you show how Ellen Hutchins managed to give a meaning to her life. She had meaningful relationships with her family. She was completely at one with her environment, made the most of her time on earth and as such she was very inspiring to me as a woman reader in the 21st century.

**ML:** It’s someone negotiating with the world around her and existing. Ellen Hutchins was not placid. Nor was she a modern woman in a long dress. She was operating against the rules of her time.

**MM:** Do you have a routine as a writer?

**ML:** I try to write everyday. I have a quiet life, nothing very dramatic!

I will say it’s difficult to be engrossed in something like *A Quiet Tide* and do this every year. But last summer I wrote the screenplay and I loved doing that. I learnt that a film is about images, not dialogue. The big challenge also is that the camera describes the world, not the writer. You are left to create the drama.

But now I’d like to write a play because I do love to write dialogue.

Dublin, 24 June 2024

Marie MIANOWSKI

Université Grenoble Alpes