I put off writing this book for a long time because I felt intimidated by the challenge of writing historical fiction and of tackling a story that has been retold multiple times over a millennia. I had to go back to first principles: Who is this character, what’s her story and what’s the best way to tell? Everything else had to come from that. So instead of thinking of this as ‘historical fiction’, I thought of it as Agnes’s story; instead of worrying about how my interpretation would line up against others from the past, I focused on writing from inside Agnes, of telling the truth of her experience as best I could imagine it.

Once I gave myself over to the character, all the rest fell away. It was as though she was there urging me on. Any time my doubt about moving from contemporary to historical fiction crept in there she was telling me to stop being distracted by labels and commentary. This character and this book showed me that the only way to move forward with my craft was to throw out preconceived ideas about genre and form, to silence the mental chatter and ideas about what I should or could do and to just do the work I needed to tell the story I was burning to tell.