She was initially based on my grandmother who grew up in the mill cottages in Fairford, Gloucestershire, which is where May lives in the book. I certainly lived and breathed her from start to finish.
Was the idea behind the book sparked by real life stories? Oh yes, I really like women’s motorbike fiction, that should definitely be a genre all of it’s own! Your main character May, the motorbike rider, feels like a very real person, with a deep sense of her place in time – her story would have been very different if only set ten years earlier or later. Actually ‘women’s motorbike fiction’ has a nice ring to it. You could call The May Queen historic fiction but you could also call it motorbike fiction, if you wanted, because there’s a motorbike in it.
When writing The May Queen I got really obsessed with the idea of telling a modern story set in a past time because inherently there isn’t anything different in the way people acted then to how people act now.
I don’t even know what ‘women’s fiction’ is. I’d probably tell them to go visit a museum. When you say it’s historic and it doesn’t have enough period detail, people get upset. I never set out to write ‘historical fiction’ as such because it gives more importance to the notion of genre rather than content. We (us authors I mean) are always being asked to class our writing as one genre or another, and I suppose I’d class The May Queen both as women’s fiction and historical fiction, have you decided which it is? Will you write more in that genre, or is the May Queen a one off? Hello Helen and thank you for taking the time to answer my questions about your novel. It’s a light yet poignant coming of age novel, opening just before the start of world war two, following May as she struggles against the expectations of society and the privations of war to find herself and her love. For the next in our series looking at Indie debuts, we’re speaking with Helen Irene Young about her novel The May Queen.
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