Looking up

Imagine a servant’s-eye view of history: quiet witnesses to everyday intimacies; unseen observers of life’s dramas and tragedies. That’s what historical novelist Stacey Halls does, to outstanding effect. Each of her three novels puts a woman of the servant class at their heart as Stacey explores witchcraft (2019’s The Familiars), abandoned children (last year’s The Foundling) and in her new novel Mrs England, a family where everything is not at all what it seems.

‘As a historical writer, my favourite people are the servants, the domestics, the people under the surface,’ says Stacey. ‘I’m particularly drawn to them. I’m very interested in the footnotes of history. I’ve used the term the absence of presence. With the footnotes, you have a bit more creative licence to write their lives, their back stories. I can’t imagine fictionalising someone known, it makes me shudder a little bit. I like to take these little-known stories and make a little world around them.’

For her first two novels, Stacey based her fiction on real lives and events relating to the Pendle Witch Trials and the tragic stories of the women who left their children at the Foundling Hospital in the 18th century.

‘One of the things that draws me is that the characters have existed – Alice Grey in and in women who left their babies in the Foundling Hospital,’ says Stacey. ‘I’ve gone to the Foundling Museum in London and I was hugely inspired to write the novel from going there. 25,000 babies were left