Kate Mosse on writing about women pirates: ‘This is a proper buccaneering, swashbuckling book’

Writers know only too well that nothing – not a stray fact, a scrap of colourful detail, a striking image – is ever lost. For Kate Mosse, whose novel The Ghost Ship takes us from 17th-century Paris, Carcassonne and La Rochelle to the Canary Islands, Amsterdam and Cape Town, it was the memory of a stirring childhood read: A Ladybird Book about Pirates, one of a series of vivid introductions to key historical moments, which she first encountered as a child in the 1960s.

There, she was captivated by the story of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two 18th-century women who took to the high seas in what became known as “the golden age of piracy”; and despite the fact that they were portrayed in a way that was “utterly, ludicrously inappropriate – they were both wearing very, very white blouses, frilly, which didn’t really appear to have any buttons, and they had long, flowing black hair”, something about them stuck in her mind.

Several decades later, and in tandem with research for last year’s Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries, a collection of nearly 1,000 accessible, condensed biographies of powerful but sidelined women throughout history and across the world, Mosse began to assemble stories of other women pirates. There was Jeanne de Clisson, the 14th-century “Lioness of Brittany”, who avenged her husband’s death at the hands of the French crown; the great Moroccan pirate queen Sayyida al-Hurra, who fought against Portuguese and Spanish colonialism from exile in Tetouan; and Ireland’s own Gráinne O’Malley, who negotiated woman to woman with Queen Elizabeth I.

Among all these historical figures, she found women who, like Mary Read, lived as men in order to enjoy greater freedom and self-determination, and she realised that she could weave a story into the French historical setting that has provided her with so much inspiration and success. The result, the third book of a projected quartet of Joubert family chronicles, reprises characters such as Minou, familiar to readers, but breaks enough new ground to work as a stand-alone novel.

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She is at pains, as we talk over Zoom, not to romanticise piracy, particularly in its “awful and violent and dangerous” modern-day manifestation, in which, as she notes, “the people who least can afford to suffer are suffering the most from it”. But it is undeniable that the past exercises a fascination, not least because “there is a justice within pirate society. It is very codified, but it’s also democratic. And it’s not what is going on on land, where people know their place, and you can’t rise out of your station; it’s incredibly unfair, and there’s a great deal of poverty. There, on the pirate ship, you follow the rules, you get the treasure, and everybody gets a share of the treasure.”

Mosse describes herself as an adventure writer, whose books are driven by revenge, secrets, love and murder. But, as her novels demonstrate – from her Languedoc trilogy, which includes the phenomenally best-selling Labyrinth, her great breakthrough book, and the Joubert novels, which began with The Burning Chambers and The City of Tears – she has a keen sense of the continuing resonances of history.

She is particularly interested in those moments when societies and countries have stood at crossroads. “All of my books are set at a turning point in history,” she explains, on cusps at which “if things had gone the other way, the whole of what happened would have been different. So in City of Tears, obviously, it’s the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. It looked like there would be peace. And because of that, there wasn’t, and it went on for another generation. In The Burning Chambers, the first one, it’s if the Duke of Guise had not opened fire on people praying in Vassy on the first of March 1562, the wars of religion would not have happened like that.”

Similarly, with the caveat that she is not a historian, she believes that had Henry IV of France not been assassinated in 1610, there is a case to be made that the French Revolution might not have followed or, at least, not in the way it did. “Because what happened at that moment was that his toleration, his attempt to build a modern society, which is what he was doing, his understanding that Huguenots – you wouldn’t use this phrase, but it’s essentially what they were – were the working middle class. And the wealth was there – that wasn’t to do with aristocracy, or what would have been seen as the peasantry at the other end. He was building a modern state that could have stood against anyone.

People don’t want to read a book about the refugee crisis, but they can fall in love with characters and feel their hearts broken when they have to flee their homes and have nowhere to live

“Because he was assassinated, and his son and then his grandson went back to persecution, they essentially bankrupted France, and divided it into a country of the nobility with the wealth, and everybody else starving, and that leads directly in the end to the revolution. At the same time, because tiny little Holland took in so many refugees, who brought their skills and their energy and their enthusiasm and their gratitude with them, it became a global superpower.”

The term “refugee” itself was coined to describe the Huguenots, and all of Mosse’s fiction is interested in those who have fallen foul of the machinations of powerful elites. “This is a proper buccaneering, swashbuckling book,” she says of The Ghost Ship. “But underneath it, themes of displacement, of women in a man’s world, about how we treat people who are dispossessed of their land, well, sadly, they’re not historic. They are exactly where we are today. And it’s always the thing that fiction can do: people don’t want to read a book about the refugee crisis, but they can fall in love with characters and feel their hearts broken when they have to flee their homes and have nowhere to live. So that’s why I think fiction is so powerful, that you can stand in somebody else’s shoes and tell a different kind of story.”

Mosse has, for many years, been a full-throated advocate for the power of books and reading to provide fulfilment, entertainment and education. Perhaps her greatest achievement beyond her own fiction is her creation, in 1996, of what is now the Women’s Prize for Fiction; its winners have included the very first, the late Helen Dunmore, Carol Shields, Zadie Smith, Eimear McBride and the recently victorious – and two-time winner – Barbara Kingsolver. Now, with Mosse as founder director, it has just launched its inaugural nonfiction prize, as a response to research showing that women who write nonfiction are less likely to be reviewed, to be shortlisted or win prizes, than their male counterparts. The work of ensuring that women writers’ work is judged on a level playing field continues.

If that weren’t enough, Mosse spent the spring on a new kind of venture: touring a one-woman show to accompany Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries, with another planned for next year. The key, she tells me, is never to turn down a fresh challenge, and to accept that the worst that can happen is that it doesn’t work out quite as you’d hoped.

“I’ve just got better as I’ve got older,” she tells me, “at leaning in to the disappointments or the failures, and letting myself feel sad about them, or a bit demoralised about them, and then drawing a line rather than trying to pretend that I don’t mind.”

To fill out whatever time is left in her schedule, she also writes plays, and sits as the president of the arts festival and the patron of the flower festival in her native Chichester, where she lives with her husband, Greg.

[ Barbara Kingsolver wins Women’s Prize for Fiction with Demon Copperhead ]

Also part of their household is Granny Rosie, Mosse’s mother-in-law, who will turn 93 this year and who, as we speak, is sipping the lunchtime gin and tonic Mosse has prepared for her. The writer and her husband are Rosie’s carers, and it is that experience, along with having cared for her own, much-loved parents, that formed the basis of Mosse’s memoir An Extra Pair of Hands, with its evocative subtitle, A Story of Caring and Everyday Acts of Love.

“I wasn’t sure I was going to do something like that,” she says of the book, “but I was asked to and then I realised that it was about the invisibility of carers, and therefore there was a sense of a responsibility. If you have any sort of platform and you are a carer you should be saying, I’m one too, because we are everywhere hidden in plain sight.”

But her years of caring for family members have also paid another, perhaps unexpected, dividend. “I’m aware that some of the scenes I write in my fiction have been absolutely given more depth because of the emotions that I have experienced in real life. None of my characters are me, none of the characters are doing things that I want to do or wish to do. But the emotions that go into a novel, they come from somewhere, don’t they?”

The Ghost Ship is published by Mantle