Falling Angel

Acknowledgments

The acknowledgments is the only section of a novel that reveals an author’s “normal” voice. As a result I always read them looking for clues that will shed light on writers and their working methods and lives, as well as their connections with the real world. I suspect some of them are written in code. Alas, however, there are no hidden meanings in this one-just an everyday voice that wants to express gratitude for help in several forms.

Sometimes I wonder if acknowledgments are even necessary, or if they break the illusion that books emerge fully formed from a writer’s mind. But books don’t come out of nowhere. Other books and other people contribute to them in all sorts of ways. I used many books in the making of this one. The most helpful were The Victorian Celebration of Death by James Stevens Curl (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), Death in the Victorian Family by Pat Jalland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Death, Heaven and the Victorians by John Morley (London: Studio Vista, 1971), and, best of all, On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries, and on the Improvement of Churchyards by J. C. Loudon (1843; facsimile published Redhill, Surrey: Ivelet Books, 1981).

It is a novelist’s privilege to make up what she likes, even when real people and places enter the story. The cemetery in this book is made up of a lot of fact and a fair bit of fiction-concrete details and flights of fancy interwoven, with no need to untangle them. While a real cemetery exists where this book takes place, I have not tried to re-create it completely accurately; rather it is a state of mind, peopled with fictional characters, with no resemblances intended.

Similarly, I have toyed with a few details in the suffragettes’ history in order to bring them into the story. I have taken the liberty of putting a few words into Emmeline Pankhurst’s mouth that she did not actually say, but I trust I have kept to the spirit of her numerous speeches. Moreover, Joan of Arc and Robin Hood did march in a procession, dressed as I have described, but it was not the Hyde Park demonstration. Gail Cameron at the Suffragette Fellowship Collection of the Museum of London was very helpful in providing me with useful resources.

Finally, thanks go to my quartet of minders-Carole Baron, Jonny Geller, Deborah Schneider, and Susan Watt-who remained steady when I wobbled.