The Seven Sisters
The Seven Sisters
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Lucinda Riley on The Seven Sisters
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
A Norfolk sky and a Brazilian mountainThe series concept did not arrive at a desk. It came during a stolen moment outside a crowded house over the holidays, when Riley looked up and saw the star cluster she had known for years suddenly lock into place as the architecture of eight books.
The idea of The Seven Sisters came to me rather unromantically, standing outside the back door of our home in Norfolk. It was that time between Christmas and New Year when I still had all the family staying with me. I went outside to get some air. As I stood there, looking up into the sky and thinking about whether to cook turkey again or spaghetti bolognese, I looked up at the Seven Sisters, as I often did. I knew at some point I wanted to write a series, and it was then I had this light-bulb moment. I rushed in and sat in front of the fire with the family gathered around me, and I told them about it. I knew I’d found my inspiration.
The Norfolk moment gave her the frame; a 2012 book-promotion tour gave her the first book. Standing before Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado Mountain, Riley noticed the absence that would become her subject: no novel she had ever read was set in Brazil.
I was in Brazil promoting my book and, having fallen in love with the country and its people, realised I had never read a book based there. I went up Corcovado Mountain to see ‘Christ the Redeemer’, stood in front of him and marvelled at the statue. I wondered how on earth it had been built and what stories lay behind its construction over eighty years ago.
The construction history of the statue, and the unresolved mystery of whose hands served as its model, became the spine of the first book’s historical plot.
Behind both triggers was a longer-standing commitment. Riley wanted the series to act as a corrective to the record, giving sustained attention to women whose contributions history had filed away under the names of the men around them.
I wanted to celebrate the achievements of women, especially in the past, where so often their contribution to making our world the place it is today has been overshadowed by the more frequently documented achievements of men.
How she wrote it
A rooftop in Ipanema and a neighbor’s archiveAfter her first visit, Riley returned to Rio for a month and rented a rooftop apartment in Ipanema. The research took its decisive turn when she learned who lived next door.
By coincidence, I discovered my neighbour was Bel Noronha, the great-granddaughter of Heitor da Silva Costa, the architect and creator of Christ the Redeemer. She gave me access to his diaries and a vast number of documents covering the period of construction.
English-language material on 1920s Brazil was sparse enough that Riley read Landowski’s biography in French. She also traveled into the mountains outside Rio to stay at the Fazenda Santa-Tereza, an old coffee farm that became the childhood home of her historical heroine Bel.
From Noronha’s archive came one specific discovery that went straight into the plot. The mystery of the statue’s hands, thought settled for decades, had been reopened on a deathbed.
For years she was thought to be Margarida Lopes de Almeida, a famous and artistically gifted Brazilian woman. But on her deathbed she admitted it was not her, creating the mystery of whose hands they really were, and giving me a wonderful idea for my plot…
Riley’s method on the page drew directly on a career she had left behind. She trained as an actress at Italia Conti in London and spent her teens and twenties in British film and television; when the Epstein-Barr virus ended that career, she moved to writing but kept the body in the work.
As an ex actress, I write by walking around with my dictaphone and acting out and dictating the dialogue and movements of my characters.
srutis.blogspot.com, “Sruti’s BookBlog: Author Interview: Lucinda Riley, author of ‘The Midnight Rose’”That physical involvement in the characters’ inner lives had a cost she described in a video conversation with her son Harry Whittaker, recorded after she had finished the seventh book in the series.
she goes through all the emotions her sisters experience, and when something terrible is happening in the story, she sits there dictating with tears falling down her face. She also said she never plots before she writes, so some of what happens in a book genuinely surprises her as she’s writing it. [paraphrased from audio]
The seven-book structure was mapped from the start, but it contained a layer only Riley knew. Each book follows the myth of one of the Pleiades stars, and the family name itself is a family invention: her daughter Leonora worked out that ‘D’Aplièse’ is an anagram of ‘Pleiades,’ then added P for Pleione to produce ‘Pa Salt,’ the sisters’ enigmatic adoptive father.
Not only am I allegorically following the myths and legends of the Seven Sisters, but there is an overarching plot that runs through each one, only revealed in the final book — the details of which are hidden in the stories and known only to me!
shazsbookblog.blogspot.com, “Shaz’s Book Blog : Lunch with Lucinda Riley to talk about The Seven Sisters”The personal thread
Her father, refracted into fictionPa Salt, the sisters’ adoptive father whose death opens the series and whose identity runs beneath every book, was not invented from nothing. Riley’s own father was a director at Courtaulds who traveled constantly and returned from each trip carrying a gift and an aura of elsewhere.
He cut a mysterious figure and myself, my mother and my sister really didn’t know what he did when he was away. We would wait with anticipation for him to return, always with a gift from another exotic country.
The favela chapter in the first book was among the hardest to write, and the difficulty came from proximity rather than distance. During her month in Ipanema, Riley had a favela immediately behind the apartment; she watched kites from the rooftop and heard drums at night, and had visited it in person.
I seriously wept buckets writing that chapter, because I’d been there and seen it.
What she wants us to sit with
Love, history, and one word in capitalsAcross many interviews, Riley pushed back against a reductive reading of her feminist intent. The series celebrates women, but she wanted that celebration to include rather than exclude the emotional life.
My definition of ‘feminism’ is equality, not domination, and the women I write about, both in the past and present, accept that they want and need love in their lives, not necessarily in the traditional form of marriage and children. The Seven Sisters series unashamedly celebrates the endless search for love, and explores the devastating consequences when it is lost to us.
Riley’s passion for history dated to childhood, and she had a specific argument about why fiction delivers it more effectively than the classroom. Historical fiction, in her view, bypasses the defenses a reader puts up against being taught.
History has always been my passion since I was a little girl. If I wasn’t a novelist I would be in the bowels of The British Library, surrounded by dusty history books. The way the subject is sometimes taught can put students off — you’re just given a lot of dates. In historical fiction, you’re not patronized but you learn through the characters. Like osmosis, it makes history interesting by turning it into a story.
Riley named one moral she wanted running through every book in the series, connecting the historical women in each volume to the contemporary sisters finding their way in the present.
The underlying moral of all my stories is forgiveness and the understanding of one’s past, in order to live happily in the present and also to embrace the future. I believe that redemption and some level of forgiveness is always a possibility.
When Riley stated what the whole series is finally about, she set aside the mythology, the geography, and the dual timelines and came down to a single word she chose to put in capitals.
The Seven Sisters is a story about humanity: love, family, joy, loss, fear and pain. And above all, the one gift that is more important than any other, and has kept us humans alive throughout unbearable suffering: HOPE.