YouSaid · the spoken record

Flora Carr

lines on the record: 25
first: 2024-03-17
most recent: 2024-03-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, I think as I said before, I think for a long time there's been the erasure of women's stories or else the skewed representations of them, I think with your book about Margaret Caravan Dish, I know that she was much aligned for most of her life and then by subsequent historians for many centuries. And I think Mary Stewart is sort of a similar figure. I think there are parallels there. I think it's it can only be a good thing that these stories are being retold with a new original perspective and just as you've done with your wonderful biography.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is the ruins, yes, but you can access it. I think it's handled by historic environment Scotland and you can access the ruins by boat, which is a really fun experience in itself. And then it's just really wonderful to sort of walk around this place where Mary and her women would have walked. And also there as a red squirrels, there are blankets of hair.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd really recommend going. It's such an incredible space to be in. The loch is far more vast than I anticipated. There are these huge hills surrounding the loch and I think in the book I say it's almost like a giant sleeping on one side, these sort of huge rolling hills.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so I think it was during the pandemic, it wasn't during the first sort of wave of lockdowns. It wasn't in 2020 that I started researching the book. I began researching, I think, I'm trying to get my head around timings. Maybe it was right at the end of 2020. Certainly, I had done a great deal of research by the time that I visited Lochleven in earlyish 2021. Certainly they were still restrictions in place when I first visited Lochleven because I wasn't able to access the island by boat. So I had to, I remember pacing back and forth around and round the edge of the loch, appearing at the ruins and the little island.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in support of her and I assume as well there was an element of self preservation. It sets a very dangerous precedent for a group of men to be able to kill an anointed queen. But yeah, she did speak out against Mary's imprisonment and I think ultimately that saved Mary's life at quite a pivotal moment in time.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The sort of animosity between herself and her mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici, might have played into that. But yes, she does flee to England. And I think many of your viewers will know the rest of the story that she was in captivity for a very long period of her life from the age of, I think she might, yes, 25. But I think in terms of her relationship with Elizabeth, As you say at the beginning of the book, there isn't that obvious animosity. And in fact, I think if Elizabeth hadn't spoken out in support of Mary during this exact period of time when Mary was imprisoned at Loch Leivin, she may well have lost her life during that captivity. I think the fact that Elizabeth's”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I don't want to veer too much into spoilers as to when at what point the book ends, but there is an eventual escape. As you say, this period in Mary's life was extremely action-packed, which is another reason why I'm confused as to why there hasn't been like a bit of, I don't know, like a movie about this period of her life. But anyway, she does manage to escape, but she is again defeated by the rebel Scottish lords and she flees to England. And against the advice of some of her friends, because if she had fled to France, for example, she was a Dowager queen. There she could have been accorded the sanctuary that she sought. I think there are various reasons why she didn't do that. Potentially...”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there is that binary of Elizabeth I at the Virgin and Mary Stewart is the whore. I came up against that a lot when I was doing my wider reading around Mary and I think it just speaks to the misogyny of the time and the way in which we sort of pigeonhole women. Because I say Mary was a very multifaceted and contradictory person.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Letters and the importance of that because I think one of the things that really appealed to me about Mary is that I think the reason that she continues to appeal to so many people for so long is because she remains an enigma and a person of contradictions and I think that's due in a large part to the fact that for a huge chunk of her life basically from this point the sort of 1957 onwards she was forced to communicate in half-truths and coded messages often in ciphers in letters.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is a sort of speculation on my part. Obviously, the famous casket letters, which helped bring Mary Stewart down. I wanted to vaguely allude to those. But yes, she did write poetry during her lifetime. I think she was a very creative person. She had a lot of hobbies as a sovereign. She had a lot of, she did dancing. She played. I enjoyed sort of looking at her handwriting, and if you compare it to Elizabeth I handwriting, which is so dashed across a page, so very italic. And then when you look at Mary's, it's a very confident round. One imagines that if she were living in present day, she might rise almost in some bubble handwriting. But I love that you brought up some of the issue of...”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. As I said, I really wanted to give the birthing scene the proper space that it deserved because I do really think that childbirth was sort of the equivalent of the battleground when it came to this period, like inform mortality was so high. It was such a dangerous period for a woman to be in both so during childbirth and after the risk of infection was really high. So yeah, I really wanted for the reader to understand the kind of drama and the life and death stakes of that scene.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As these chambermaids have more and more access to Mary, they come up against this idea where they've revered her for all this time, but as they spend more time with her, there's also, they push up against this idea that she is just a person. The royal person is still a body at the end of the day with all those normal bodily functions.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes Yeah Because in the book, there are two chambermaids and then one lady in waiting, and as you say, the kind of the social divisions between the women over the course of the book, they begin to blur. And I think in terms of the physical touch of the queen, I think it can't be use of overstated how important that would have been and sort of how revered that access would have been during this period of time touching the queen. Some people believe that it would sort their ailments. And I think there's this real... The women sort of.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, like John Knox, her half brother, the Earl of Murray, her three husbands. And I really wanted to take the opportunity to kind of reframe her story through the lens of female friendships and all the complexities that that entails because they are very much, as you kind of allude to, there are power dynamics that sort of change and shift throughout the course of the book. And I was really interested in looking at how that would play out in this inner lives of the four women and the sort of petty jealousies and the love and the lust and the hate and all of those emotions that sort of spring up through the course of the book.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I certainly think that lockdown was very inspirational in terms of being able to imagine that kind of sense of claustrophobia and people being on top of one another. And yeah, I think the relationship between the four women is so important because another one of the reasons I really wanted to write this book was because I feel like Mary Stewart's story has been for a very long time defined by her relationships with men.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I'm trying to remember the exact book which I found that in, but essentially with humoral theory, which I'm sure you're very familiar with with your work, the idea that some men are hot, women are cold, they're sort of Number of key central humours and there are ideas in which so if someone is ill for example the idea is that their humours are imbalanced and I came across a reference to the idea that women who had same-sex desires potentially were too hot that they had too much of the male humours within them and vice versa which I just found really interesting. I found that the whole idea of that very very interesting and the idea that one has to sort of balance oneself in order to be well it's not a huge huge leap from some of the ideas that come up today in sort of holistic medicine and things like that”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I found that fact absolutely extraordinary. No, I can't remember off the top of my head where I heard it. It might have been on the very excellent podcast, not just the Tudors, which is hosted by Professors Susanna Lipscomb, which I'm a huge fan of. But yes, so many of viewers might be familiar with Mary Stewart's third marriage to the Ella Bothwell and their relationship, I contend, began with sexual assault. And I just found it extraordinary, this idea, because Mary Stewart, again, it's a conjecture, but she became pregnant quite quickly. And this idea that a woman needs to be in pleasure in order to conceive is Just hugely Like a really dreadful concept when you think about it. Yeah, again, I'm really glad that you picked up on that.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. I think with Hillary Mantel's wreath lectures, which I adored, she talked about how the sort of erasures and the gaps within history as an aspiring historian when she initially came across those, she found them quite difficult to deal with, but then she talked about how those erasers helped make her a novelist. And I definitely think Feel similarly, and also I feel more specifically that there has always been a great deal of erasure when it comes to women's stories and LGBTQ stories. And I think fiction is a really useful tool in terms of trying to imagine those stories.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think sometimes historical fiction writers, when they're writing about real life people, sometimes they can be asked the questions of, well, how do you feel about writing about someone who really existed and also writing about someone's very real pain? And I think when it came to writing the without going too much into spoilers, there's quite a traumatic miscarriage in the book and I found that I really wanted to give that moment space and sort of the time that it deserved because as I say when I had read about summaries of that period in Mary Stewart's life, the events that she went through were very much sort of I don't want to say glossed over, but very neatly encapsulated, and there was nothing really about the kind of the dual trauma of miscarriage and then being forced to abdicate only a matter of days afterwards.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I had no idea about this. I think it's just an extraordinary irony that this monarch who became, his name almost became a byword in terms of witch hunts, was actually born via the aid of a spell. So Mary Stewart, she had an extremely difficult childbirth with James and she enlisted the help of I think it was the Countess of Athol to sort of place a spell to try and ease the pains of labour. And then James was born. So I thought that was extraordinary. I'm so glad that you picked up on that little detail.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think in terms of the reasons for why she was forced to abdicate, I completely agree that her religion certainly played a very key Gender played a huge role, and also the fact that so at the beginning of my book, Mary is just 24 years old. She turns 25 during the course of the novel. During that period of time, there was a law which stated that once a sovereign turned 25 in Scotland, they would be able to redistribute land and property, which would have been a huge headache for many of the Scottish lords who had previously rebelled against her and sort of developed a difficult relationship with her. For example, Lord Lindsay, who I mentioned, who appears very early on in the book, he certainly probably would have been stripped of many of the perks of him being a lord.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I decided to write the books off the back of that first trip, which I found hugely inspiring. And then the second trip, when I was finally able to access the island and the ruins of Lochleben Castle by this strange twist of fate, the boat that carried us across from the shore to the island was actually called Mary Seaton, who you mentioned before in your introduction, who is one of the ladies in waiting to marry Stuart and is probably sort of well known as one of the four Marys, one of four noble women who served Mary Stuart, who all sort of coincidentally were called Mary, as many women of this period, as I'm sure you found in your research.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of research, firstly, I should preface all of this by saying that I am not a historian, I am, I think all fiction writers are hugely indebted to historians such as yourself. A lot of my research was so I began with just reading everything that I could get my hands on biographies of Mary Stewart, books about the time period. I also listened to academic podcasts, watched documentaries. I'm a member of the London Library, so that was amazing in terms of access to online and physical resources. And then I think also I'm someone who's very much inspired by place. So I visited Edinburgh and I visited Lochleven. Twice the first time was just before I started writing and I really wanted to get a sense of the atmosphere and really it was a sort of deciding point as to whether or not I wanted to write this book”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of undeserved in terms of representation in her life, I attended an otherwise amazing exhibition at the British Library, retrospective on her life and Elizabeth I's life. And I remember going in and looking for whether there'd be any references to this period of time to Lochleven. And I could only find a sort of one line summary of this very eventful impactful pivotal time in her life, her captivity there. And the empty space when it came to that was really the jumping off point for me. The fact that I had never heard of that period in her life before.”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lit historical fict In 156 Pregnant Mary Queen In an island fortress in the middle of Loch Mary Stewart, otherwise known as Mary Queen of Scots. Her life is very well documented, I would say. She's probably best known for the events at the end of her life and also her long captivity in England on the orders of her cousin Elizabeth I. But my book sort of charts a 11-month sliver of time in her life which I feel has been”
2024-03-17 · Intelligence Squared · Reimagining the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots, with Flora Carr · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT