And Only to Deceive

The history behind the story

On writing And Only to Deceive

One day, while I Was engrossed in Dorothy L. Sayers's wonderful Gaudy Night, a sentence leapt off the page at me:

If you are once sure what you do want, you find that everything else goes down before it like grass under a roller-(all other interests, your own and other people's.

I had been saying for as long as I could remember that I wanted to be a writer. Now I realized that if that was truly what I wanted, I had to sit down and write a book. No more excuses. At the time, my son was three-and-a-half years old and had reached the age where he stopped napping. I had to take advantage of every free moment I had-and in bursts of fifteen minutes, a half an hour, whatever time I could steal-I spent the next two months writing the first draft of And Only to Deceive.

I knew I wanted to write about an English woman in the late Victorian period and had a strong image of her standing on the top of the cliff path on the Greek island of Santorini, one of my very favorite places. Once I started asking questions about how she came to be there, the story started to invent itself.

I was determined not to create twenty-first-century characters, drop them into bustles and corsets, and call them historical. Fundamentally, we may have much in common with those who lived before us, but sensibilities have changed greatly. A strong-minded young woman in 1890 would not think in precisely the same way one would today. Emily's search for independence had to make sense in the context of the society in which she was raised. So she rebels in small ways at first, gradually becoming more steadfast in her convictions, more confident in herself, but she's vulnerable because she's not prepared to absolutely renounce her position in society. And, really, I think it's that sort of compromise for which we all search: How much of our culture, our society, do we accept? How much do we reject? Can we live according to our principles without sacrificing anything? It's very easy to have strong opinions when holding them does not threaten the comfort of our daily life.

The paramount goal for an aristocratic woman in Victorian England was to make the best possible marriage, one that would preserve fortunes and estates while increasing her standing in society. The marriage market was a competitive one. A family might have many eligible daughters but could only have one eldest son, who, alone among his brothers, stood to gain a significant inheritance. A young lady would feel a great deal of pressure to catch a respectable husband in as few seasons as possible after making her social debut. If two or three years passed and she was not engaged, she would be considered a failure.

Emily, coming from a wealthy, titled family, would have been in an excellent position to make a good match, and although I wanted her to be independent, it would have made no sense, historically speaking, for a girl in her position to avoid marriage. Her parents would never have allowed it. As an unmarried woman, she would be subject to her mother's rule, a situation, that, given Lady Bromley's character, would hardly have allowed her to do the things I wanted. But I did not want her to be married. A Victorian gentleman, even an enlightened one, would still have a decidedly Victorian view of marriage. To make her a widow seemed the perfect solution. I would be able to give her a certain degree of freedom without having to sacrifice historical accuracy.

Once I had Emily's character and situation firmly in my mind, I started to consider what might inspire in her an intellectual awakening. I've always been struck by the graceful beauty of classical art and fascinated by the enduring nature not just of Homer's epic poems, but of Greek mythology in general. It's astounding to me that these stories, first told more than two thousand years ago, still resonate with people. Can you imagine writing something that could permeate Western culture for that long? I'd be afraid even to try!

Regardless of how many times I've read The Iliad, I always hope, hope, hope that this time Achilles won't kill Hector, even though I know it's impossible. I fling the book across the room every time I get to the part where Hector dies. I can't help it. It slays me. But that's part of the brilliance of the story; even though we know what happens, we still care desperately about these characters.

(If you like Hector, read the lovely, heartbreaking poem Irish poet Valentin Iremonger wrote about the night before the Trojan hero's death.)

As I was concocting the plot for the novel, I decided to have part of the intrigue involve art forgeries, which can be immensely difficult to detect. Two of the pieces I've mentioned in the book, both pointed out as fakes by Mr. Attewater, were actual objects found in the museum. The first, a bust of Julius Caesar purchased by the British Museum in 1818 for approximately thirty pounds, was not only exhibited, it was reproduced extensively as well, becoming one of the most famous images of the great Roman. It is not an ancient piece at all, dating instead from approximately 1800.

Second, the fragment Mr. Attewater confesses to having sold under false pretenses is based on an object that came to the museum in 1889, a piece depicting a boy's head. It was not until 1961 that it was determined it had been copied, sometime after 1840, from a slab of the North frieze of the Parthenon.

Bernard Ashmole, a former Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum and Lincoln Chair of Classical Art at Oxford, recognized that both of these items were forgeries, and they were included in a marvelous exhibition staged by the British Museum called "Fake? The Art of Deception."

To me, the most fascinating thing about forgeries is that they make one think about the true definition of art. If a work is copied so perfectly that no one can detect it as a fraud, why isn't it art? Why does only the original count? Yet, of course, the original is different somehow. But how can we quantify that difference?