THE SPACE BETWEEN.

This is my trilogy, which is currently in progress.  The following article should give you a more detailed description of it; the article appeared in the December 2007 issue of Intentions, which is the Oscar Wilde Society’s official publication.

Without hesitation I chose Wilde as the subject for my MA dissertation, which I did at Manchester University in 2004. In my dissertation, Reinventing Wilde, I examined the ways in which Wilde is still with us today, in the pages of novels, on stage and on screen. Wilde has never been dead to me, but always living and breathing through his ideas and even as a person, a character, re-invented again and again. Ever since writing Reinventing Wilde, I wanted to put some of these ideas into practice in my next novel. This was a natural progression into the realm of fiction, as I primarily write novels and two of my so far unpublished works feature Wilde as a character at different stages of his life. Therefore I decided to do something different in this next novel and steer away from using Wilde directly as a character, but to keep his ideas very much a central part of the story. The Wildean ideas I’m exploring are those he discusses in Intentions, particularly Pen, Pencil and Poison where he speaks about using historical fact as a springboard for further creation. Such a wonderful idea couldn’t be laid to rest. Although I enjoyed writing Reinventing Wilde, I fully intended to return to fiction, especially since fact and fiction almost seem to merge in one chapter of the dissertation, Wilde in Fiction, which appeared in the January issue of The Wildean, the journal of the Oscar Wilde Society.

            It was while I was doing some research on The Portrait of Mr WH that I read Peter Ackroyd’s introduction to the story and was intrigued by the mysterious gap between the disappearance of its manuscript at the time of Wilde’s arrest and its reappearance in America in 1921. Though I searched, I could find no definite facts to say what happened to the manuscript between these dates - or in ‘the space between’ which became the title of the book that was to follow.  So I decided then and there to fill in the space between myself, combining historical figures and some characters taken from my own novels, thus creating a new form of fiction.

Pretty soon after beginning writing The Space Between, it became obvious to me that the ideas I had wouldn’t fit neatly into one book, so it became not one but three novels. I’d always wanted to try my hand at a trilogy anyway, so I welcomed the challenge. The working title of the first novel is The Spark, though it’s open to change before it’s finished!

            Writing The Spark has been a continual struggle not to become bogged down by the history, the facts and dates, especially as I wanted to keep the story as close to history as possible. I read several biographies before beginning work, so that I would avoid any major blunders in describing the lives of the real characters. If I was to be using such figures as Charles Ricketts, Robbie Ross and Constance Wilde then it would not do at all to contradict their historical movements, even if it was in my own fiction. I deliberately chose not to show Wilde himself, as he’s already had so much space given to him in fiction and in other books. Choosing Ricketts instead as my central character, came easily – as soon as I read about his red hair and beard and about his volatile nature, I knew he deserved a place in my fiction. Not only was I fascinated by his character, but also by his relationship with the artist Charles Shannon; nowhere could I find any concrete evidence of their life long partnership being a sexual one, but at the same time I couldn’t believe that such a man would be content to live without passion… and anyway I could make my fictional Ricketts fit in the gap left in what is known about the real man.

I’ve written about Mr Ross before and wanted to again. He’s a great chap and was very close to Wilde, so it was a useful link to the man himself without having to see him directly. Of course Constance deserved a place as well; I particularly wanted to include her fall down the stairs around the time of Wilde’s arrest, because I’ve always thought that this was such a good metaphor for Wilde’s downfall, that it could almost be fiction. Writing about these characters was really exciting for me, because it was breathing life into dead names in books and resurrecting them from the ashes so they could live, confronting my own fictional characters head on. This idea is exactly what I understood by Wilde’s writings in Pen, Pencil and Poison.

            Another character from history I decided to include as soon as I read about him in Ross’s biography was Freddie Smith; Ross’s partner for ten years in the early 20th Century. I felt I had to give him space simply because so little is known about him, particularly before he met Ross in about 1903. He became almost a fictional character for me in that I was free to embroider my own story around his childhood. I created his parents to fit in with the rest of the story; I chose London’s East End as my setting and concentrated on a character from one of my previous novels, Killing Time. Although Killing Time is mainly about Jack the Ripper, I decided to continue the story of the main character, Harriet, from where that book left off.

            I’m approaching the end of The Spark now, and have decided definitely not to end it with Wilde’s death, but rather to leave the story to go on until the manuscript of The Portrait turns up. There are quite a few years to go yet! Although I have vague ideas about the rest of the trilogy, I’m trying as far as possible to leave my options open. Perhaps I will bring Ricketts back again at some future point, or even Robbie… or perhaps someone completely different.