Tower and Town, October 2019

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Hiscox Debut Authors

The Lit Fest has had an event for first time authors for many years sponsored each time by Hiscox Insurance.

This year, having invited Elizabeth Macneal and Stacy Hall, we find their books The Doll Factory and The Familiars are already appearing in the charts.

“The Doll Factory” by Elizabeth Macneal

This book is set in London in 1850. The Great Exhibition is being built in Hyde Park. Among the crowd watching the spectacle, two people meet. For Iris, an aspiring artist, it is forgotten seconds later, but for Silas, who is a collector of curiosities which artists use in their paintings, that meeting marks a new beginning.

When Iris, stuck in a doll factory painting dolls’ faces, is asked to model for the Pre Raphaelite artist, Louis Frost, she agrees on condition that he will teach her to paint. Suddenly her world begins to expand, to become a place of art and love.

But Silas has only thought of one thing since their meeting, and his obsession is darkening….

In writing this story, Macneal has drawn on her fascination with the life of Lizzie Siddal who was plucked from the obscurity of a milliner’s shop to be transported into the bohemian world of talented young artists, to be a muse and model.

Macneal is not only a writer but also has her own ceramic business with a kiln at the bottom of her garden.

“The Familiars” by Stacy Hall

Stacy Hall, now a journalist in London, grew up in Rossendale, Lancashire and so visited Gawthorpe, a large house near Lancaster. There she looked out of the window onto Pendle Hill and realised her fascination with the Pendle witches who were put to trial in 1612.

The tale focuses on the heroine, a 17 year old bride struggling to have a successful pregnancy and the girl she believes in and befriends her, who becomes involved in the trial. Although this is a novel, it depicts pretty accurately the story of that trial, the people involved in it and the real paranoia at that time of witches and their familiars (the supernatural entities often seen as animals) who assisted them in their practice of magic for doing things both good and bad. Hall has used as her main source the book written by the Clerk of the Assizes for the trial.

It is a fascinating subject for a first novel which carries you into the hardships of life for many in the early 17th century