The Joys of Binge Reading

Bestselling author Gill Paul returns with a brilliant novel about Lady Evelyn Herbert, the woman who took the very first step into the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, and who lived in the real Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle, and the long after-effects of the Curse of Pharaohs.

Jenny: We’re in our second episode of Encore, the new show for Binge Reading On Patreon supporters, talking to favorite authors, people who’ve already been on the podcast, about their latest release.

And today we’ve got international best seller Gill Paul who’s already been on the podcast twice before talking about her latest book, The Collector’s Daughter,

Gill Paul: The Collector’s Daughter

Gill’s previous JOBR shows:

Gill Paul’s Famous Fabulous Lives, from November 2019: https://thejoysofbingereading.com/gill-paul-famous-fabulous-lives/

And: Love and Betrayal from September 2020: https://thejoysofbingereading.com/jackie-kennedy/

I love the way Gill makes historical events come alive in her fiction, and this book is no exception.

The Collector’s Daughter is a dual timeline novel moving between the 1920s and the 1970s telling the story of Lady Evelyn Herbert, the English aristocrat who was involved with the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the 1920s, and went on to live through the long-term after-effects of the supposed Curse of the Pharaohs

She’s also got the claim to fame of having grown up in the ‘real’ Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle, where the popular TV series was filmed.

Gill, It’s great to have you with us again.

Jenny: So welcome to the show Gill, and tell us about Pharaoh’s tomb and Lady Eve part in it all.

Gill: Thanks so much for inviting me on the journey. It’s lovely to talk to you. Evelyn was there with her father, the Earl of Carnarvon and Howard Carter when the tomb was discovered and opened in 1922. And all the evidence is that they sneaked in by night without the Egyptian authorities watching over them

Lady Eve first to enter tomb

And the Eve was the first one to crawl in and she was a young lady from the English aristocracy. And I thought ‘Gosh’, what would it have been like for her, I’d always been interested in Egyptian stories from school days, but it only really came home to me in 2011 when I visited Egypt. And I went to the Valley of the Kings.

We went down that long corridor that Eve and her father and Howard Carter would have gone down in 1922 and saw where his tomb had been and then went up to Cairo and saw all the artefacts in the Egyptian museum.

And that was staggering. I mean the enormous wealth of all the gold tombs and the funeral masks and the jewelry, and then little personal details like Tutankhamun’s had sandals that pictures of Nubians on the soles, the Nubians were the enemies of the Egyptians so every time he walked, he was walking on his enemies.

I loved all the little personal touches I saw in the tomb. That’s what really brought it to life for me.

Jenny: It’s amazing. Now, one of the themes of the story is penetrates the whole story really is the long-term belief that there was some sort of curse involved in opening the tomb and Lady Evelyn did actually suffer quite a lot of personal misfortune in her life, including being involved in a massive car accident, which resulted in a series of small TIA’s, as they’re called and later more serious strokes.

And part of the story is her as an older lady in the 1970s, when her memory is impaired with memory loss and things, that’s an interesting part of it because quite a significant part of the story is told by this older character who’s impaired.

That was obviously something you deliberately chose to handle that way.

Two photographs bookmarked life

Gill: My inspiration for this novel when I decided to write about Lady Eve’s part and this huge historical event or two photographs that kind of bookmarked her life.

Lady Eve at tomb entrance with her father and Howard Carter

Eve at tomb entrance with her fatherand

There’s the photograph outside the tomb in 1922 with Howard Carter and her father. And her standing there that made me realize how much she had been part of the discovery, because it wasn’t reported at the time.

It was reported as a double act between Carter and Carnarvon. And then this is another photograph of her in 1972, the opening of the exhibition at the British Museum. And she’s standing beside the Tutankhamun mask, the famous gold funeral mask, and she looks slightly dazed, and it might just be in the flashbulbs.

But then I read that she had this series of strokes and brain incidents, and I thought, gosh, these two photographs kind of bookmark her life.

Lady Eve in Gill Paul’s image at the London exhibition

And I wanted to write about the way her life was affected by being part of the Tutankhamun discovery. And, I didn’t straight away write it as a dual timeline.

I tried to write it as a chronological story, but of course, then there’s a big chunk of the middle of Evelyn’s life, but wasn’t really going to be part of my story, which is why I settled in the end on this dual timeline going backwards and forwards.

Now it was a difficult decision really to write about somebody whose memory is impaired by stroke, but it did seem to me to be part of this story she did, as you say, have this car accident in 1935, that certainly affected her health.

It was reported in The Times at the time. And, it was just part of her life, part of who she was. I mean, you touched on the curse story. I did toy with whether to include it, because I wasn’t, I’m not really interested in writing sort of magic realism.

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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} She wondered about the ‘curse’

Are there ‘ghosts in the room’ type books, but it was such a big part of the way that Eve saw the story. She certainly wondered if the curse could have been part of it. And there are newspaper interviews, she gives where she says, for example, that she offered to release her husband or fiancé Brograve from their engagement in case she was cursed.

So, because I was writing from her point of view and she clearly believed in it, it was something that I had to address. It was part of the way it was reported at the time. It made all the newspaper headlines, you know, Curse Strikes Again, every time somebody died, who’d been inside the tomb. So, yes, I couldn’t avoid it at all.

Jenny: Yes, her father did die from a very unusual – what was really very minor accident very soon after the tomb was opened. I guess that might’ve been one of the ways in which it started.

Gill: Well, it strikes us as an unusual way to die, but of course, in these pre antibiotic days, septicemia was a very real and, and you know, a major cause of death.

He got a mosquito bite on his cheek, for those of you who don’t know the story, and he nicked it while shaving and he got blood poisoning septicemia, and there was nothing they could do about that.

A young fit healthy man might’ve fought it off, but he had poor health from a car accident that he’d had in 1909 and he had breathing problems and he just wasn’t strong enough to fight it off. So it wasn’t that unusual.

Jenny: Just that Fleet Street wanted to write it up.

Gill: Yes exactly.

Undoubtedly the ‘first global media event’

Jenny: The current Lady Carnarvon describes the opening of the tomb as the first global media event. Would you think that’s accurate?

Gill: It absolutely was. It’s impossible to overstate how big the story was at 1922 and 1923, right through the twenties actually.

And one of the reasons is because of advances in print technology, which meant that stories could be cabled around the world instantly and Harry Burton’s photographs, iconic photographs taken inside the tomb.

So people could not even just read about it. They could see these treasures in place, in the tomb. And it was massive. I mean, it really changed so much. It changed fashions of the day. You know, the flappers started wearing the black kohl eyeliner with the flicks at the side and, and Cobra bracelets that slunk up their arms.

Um, it changed it influenced architecture that art deco architecture has very clearly got the kind of hieroglyphic Phoenix wings shapes in it. All kinds of merchandise was made out of Egyptian designs.

There were stage shows. The first film came in 1932. Boris Karloff starred in The Mummy, which is a classic; even Roosevelt named his dog King Tut.

So, I mean, it was everywhere. It was absolutely everywhere.

Jenny: That’s amazing. The Carnarvon home, which now has got a claim to fame with being the site for the Downton Abbey TV series, where it was filmed. They’ve still got quite a large Egypt collection there at their home at Highclere, don’t they?

Gill: Well, here’s the thing. When I visited Highclere, I was surprised how small it is.

Viewing Highclere – location of Downton Abbey series

Jenny: Oh, really?

Gill: In the show the rooms look huge and that’s just camera and angles. They’re actually – the drawing room, the dining room, the smoking room – they’re all quite small.

So I’m guessing they must just put the cameras down this side. The central atrium, which rises up to the height of the building is spectacular.

The rest of it is quite small and the Egyptian collection is not huge. It’s down in the basement. Two or three connected rooms. And they’ve only got replicas of Tutankhamun artifacts there. They don’t have any real ones, of course, but they have some bits and pieces of pottery and broken jewelry, mainly that Lord Carnarvon had found on earlier dates before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.

The visit to Highclere was fascinating to me because I’d written about this already before I saw them, there were some hidden cupboards in the wall between the drawing room and the smoking room that some artifacts were founded in the 1980s I think so after my story took place.

But I thought, no, that’s one of the times I have to move my timeline back so that I can have Eve there when those cupboards were open.

And I got to see these cupboards. And once again, they were smaller than I’d imagined them, but just set into the recess. In the doorway, either side of the doorway between these two rooms.

And it was fascinating to see that. I’m very glad I got there. I mean, it’s beautiful Highclere. It’s just smaller than it looks on the tele.

Jenny: Yes. And there was bitterness about the distribution of the find between the Egyptian government and, uh, the British explorers wasn’t there? I read somewhere that when they opened, they put them away almost, in slightly ‘We’re fed up with the Egyptians, we don’t want to know anything about the Egyptians’ attitude. They’d almost got forgotten about them because of this bitterness that was going on.

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Gill Paul on Encore