Hi, I’m Marisa Linton
– author and historian
I inhabit two writing worlds.
In one I’m a professor of history, a historical consultant for television, and the author of scholarly history books on the French Revolution.
In my other world I write fantasy for adults and young adults that draws on my fascination with ancient Celtic Britain and its folklore, and my love of stories about magic and the occult, ghosts and the supernatural.
Early life
I was born in Barnes, in south-west London, to an immigrant Italian mother and an English father, inhabiting different worlds and cultures, not wholly Italian or English, but something of both. My mother’s family had known poverty in Mussolini’s Italy before the war, and she had to leave school at 11 – the education of girls was considered an unnecessary luxury. Like so many girls in those circumstances she became a cleaner because that was the only skill open to her. She did what she had to do. I’m very proud of her, but I count myself lucky to have been born in a place and time where girls who love reading and writing can find their way in the world. I would never have been much good at anything else. As a cleaner I would have been decidedly second-rate.
Academia and the French Revolution
In my early twenties I became fascinated by the French Revolution, and the men and women who devoted themselves to it, their hopes and ideals, their achievements and their desperate tragedies. I studied first at Middlesex University and then at Sussex University, completed my PhD, and worked for many years as a professional historian at Kingston University. My love of the French Revolution resulted in my writing several books and many articles and chapters on the ideology, experiences and emotions of the Revolution’s leaders. I came at political history from an unconventional angle, exploring such themes as friendship networks, fear of conspiracy, and the perspective of women who were excluded from political rights. Eventually I gathered up the disparate threads of my work to tackle the biggest and darkest subject – why revolutionaries who began with the desire to create a better, fairer, happier world, turned to the use of terror. How did they get from the ‘rights of man’ to the guillotine? It wasn’t an obvious or an inevitable journey.
Folklore and witch-hunts
Equally fascinating to me is the history of folklore, fairytales and legends, not just because they are great stories, but for what they reveal about past lives, how people experienced the world around them, and shaped that experience into narratives – telling each other stories as they gathered round their fires on a long winter’s night. There’s a huge oral culture of such tales. Storytellers changed and adapted them, according to their own interests or local beliefs. Many of those tales are predicated on belief in magic, and magic practitioners – witches. Magic was focussed on animist thinking – the idea that everything has a spirit and an inherent value, every tree, every stream, as well as every bird and animal. Such beliefs were founded on respect for nature and the environment. People made offerings to appease the spirits, or to ask for their help. There’s much we can learn from how people in the past understood the natural world and their relationship to it. Witches and witchcraft are very much part of that narrative.
Of all the subjects I taught, one that really intrigued me – and was often my students’ favourite too – was the history of the witch-hunts of early modern Europe. A history of fear, persecution and death. Ironically, almost the only time the authorities took an interest in the magical beliefs of the poor and marginalised, especially women, was when they became convinced that such people were witches, with genuine power. The persecutions ended when the educated elite stopped believing that the power of witches was real. Today ‘the witch’ is being reclaimed by many women as a figure of empowerment, a symbol of harmony with the natural world, and resistance to patriarchy, big business and exploitation – a resistance centred on women’s right to autonomy over their own minds, hearts and bodies. It’s an idea that fascinates me, that connection with the historic past, reconfigured into the needs of our modern world.
Academic turned … author?
While still a historian, though now freelance, I became more interested in exploring folklore and magical belief creatively through writing fiction. I was nervous about embarking on a new career at my time of life. Academics are highly specialised. We tend to stay in our research groove. But there was a whole other side to me that wanted to explore a different creative world. I had drafted a novel that started out as a story I told my daughters when they were small. It drew on my fascination with ancient beliefs, folklore, fairytales, and the history of magic, but set in an edgy modern landscape. I’d finished it, then put it aside, thinking it unpublishable.
I might have continued in my groove, and never become a novelist, but when my history department was shut down, as part of ongoing attacks on the Humanities, I decided to see the experience as a liberation. I would seize the moment. Carpe diem. So I rewrote the novel. Then I tried to publish it. That went badly. I was a novice in the world of commercial fiction publishing: it’s very different from academic publishing, and a really tough industry to crack. Any fiction writer will tell you their tale of being met by rejection and indifference. My experience was no exception. But I persisted, knowing that there was nothing else I wanted to do so. I really would have been a lousy cleaner.
The Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction competition
Then, in November 2023 I won the Times/Chicken House writing competition with my fantasy novel for young adults, then called The Pouka King, now published as The Binding Spell. It was a seismic moment for me. It signalled my entry into a new writing world – this time as a novelist. After I finished writing The Binding Spell, and before it won the competition, I turned to adult fantasy. I wrote a second novel, this one about a young woman in Edwardian Britain who becomes an occult detective. It’s dark academia, in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes and M.R. James, but seen from a female perspective. That pre-World War One era has always intrigued me. It was a time of fast technological change and a growing movement for social and political rights for all. But it was also a time when tales that dealt with the realm of the supernatural and the occult reached their zenith. Many books written at that time featured psychic detectives and ghost hunters. My latest work is founded in that tradition.
I’ve lived for many years in Brighton where I’ve raised my three children. It’s a place that suits me: it has all the buzz of London, but it’s smaller and walkable (no relying on the tube), plus it has the sea and the Sussex Downs. It also abounds in cafes where I can escape from my laptop to hang out with my friends. The city’s full of writers. What’s not to like?
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