How ANU set the scene for Emily Maguire’s award-winning novel, Rapture

When readers pick up Rapture, the award-winning seventh novel by acclaimed author Emily Maguire, they’re immediately immersed in the world of 9th century Europe.

But there’s a little bit of modern-day life at the Australian National University within those pages too.

“Canberra is in the soil of the book,” Maguire says.

Maguire worked on Rapture, which recently won the Queensland Literary Award for best work of fiction, as an HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the University.

The Fellowship allowed Maguire to live and work on campus for three months and “go really deep” on her historical novel, which is inspired by the story of Pope Joan.  

“I had already finished a draft when I came to Canberra, so at that point I knew what I needed to know more about. Having access to the Chifley Library was so valuable to me at that stage,” she says.

“My office in the AD Hope building was completely bare when I moved in, and I soon filled it with piles of books. The collection was so much richer than anything I could access on my own.”

Maguire says this research helped her to build the evocative and detailed world of her book’s protagonist, Agnes, from the ground up.

“I am not a medievalist – not by any stretch of the imagination – so to write this book, I was really starting from scratch with my knowledge of the medieval world. I had to ask the question, what would be a plausible life for a girl in ninth century Mainz, in northern Germany? And then at each stage of writing keep asking, what was it like there?

“I wasn’t trying to write an actual history, but at the same time, it’s not a fantasy novel, either. It was really important to me to have it, as much as possible, be based in a specific time and place.

“So, while all of my other books have been pretty much contemporary, with this one, I’d start writing a scene and I would literally stop and be like: what is a cup in this context?” she laughs.

“You know, what even is a chair? I was having to dig deeper into certain elements, especially about a lot of arcane religious things and life in the monasteries.”

Maguire also took the opportunity of being on campus to ask the historians working around her one important question.

“My first question to any of the history academics I spoke to was always, ‘When your period is written about in fiction or depicted on TV, what do you hate? What do fiction writers always annoyingly get wrong?’

“That’s a really fun question anyway, but also it was quite reassuring to hear their answers and think, ‘Okay, I’m not doing any of that stuff!’ I’m not doing that thing of saying medieval people are all dirty, or stupid.”

But it wasn’t only access to the University’s expertise and research resources which helped to shape the novel, Maguire explains. It was the very feeling of being on campus, which included her walk to work every day, via the ANU Classics Museum.

“Being in that environment, there’s an element of absorbing a sense of seriousness about words and writing and thinking and history. It’s a hard-to-describe thing, but it’s about taking extra time to really dig into something, to really think it through.

“There’s a section of the book where Agnes is in the monastery, and I write about this idea of Lectio Divina, divine reading, where you just completely let yourself go into that task of reading.

“And it sounds laughable in some ways to compare a campus to a monastery, but there was something monastic about being in the University, and seeing other people all around, in training on very focused task, a lot of it around books and reading, and studying things that, outside of that space, many people would wonder why it’s important.”

Maguire reflects that it was “a really, really lovely place to work.”

“There were days when there would be sunlight streaming in through the beautiful big window in my office, and then, all of a sudden, I’d notice that it was getting dark outside. I’d get so deep in the work that I wouldn’t realise I’d been there all day and now my back was sore and I was actually very hungry.

“That hardly ever happens to me because usually I’m easily distracted. But it happened more than a few times when I was there, and I think it was something about working in that environment.”

Maguire is returning to Canberra soon for the Canberra Writers Festival. She’ll be bringing a little bit of the campus back with her, in the form of the book it helped to grow.

Tickets for Emily Maguire’s October 25 event ‘Lonely, Sacred, Desperate and Divine’ are available to purchase from the Canberra Writers Festival.