Hannah Kent’s new book Devotion explores same-sex love in colonial South Australia
Best-selling author Hannah Kent explores same-sex love in colonial SA in her new book as she juggles family life with her wife and their two young children
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Inspiration came in the form of an image, of a girl in a field of wheat who Hannah Kent could see clearly but only from a distance. Maybe she was regarding her as a friend might, looking on with affection at someone she was connected with.
“I thought ‘I’m going to write a book about friendship’,” Kent says of her third and much anticipated new novel, Devotion. “And then I realised that wasn’t going to cut it and I actually wanted to write a love story about these two women.”
Kent overnight became Adelaide’s most successful novelist of her generation with Burial Rites, the extraordinary re-telling of the last woman to be executed in Iceland that triggered an international bidding war, has been translated into 30 languages and is being adapted into a film with Jennifer Lawrence attached.
This time, she has come home and set a book in the Adelaide Hills where she grew up, although set in an earlier time. The two women at the heart of the story, Thea and Hanne, are the daughters of strict German Old Lutherans who in 1838 took a voyage into the unknown and crossed the seas to become settlers in South Australia, in Hahndorf and the Barossa Valley.
“I think a few paths led me to write about this – I am a descendant of these people on my father’s side, although a bit later, they weren’t with that first wave,” Kent says in a café in Aldgate. “Growing up so close to Hahndorf and being aware of that story … it was a personal connection.”
It was more than that too. Burial Rites, published in 2013, was her first novel which grew from a story that haunted her after she spent a gap year in Iceland on a Rotary exchange. Her second novel, The Good People, took her to Ireland and another story about a woman who was convicted of murder, and who claimed as her defence that she was a fairy and the boy she killed was a changeling.
This time, she wanted to write a book that let in more light, and was not about a murder.
“I think Devotion came about as a turning away from what I had previously done,” Kent says. “I was trying not to paint myself into a corner. I didn’t want to write about another murdering woman and I didn’t want to commit to that as being the only thing that I ever wrote about.”
All she had to start with was an imagined scene of the woman in a field. She recalls interviewing the author Ron Rash, an American poet and novelist who writes stories set in the Appalachian Mountains, and he told her every story begins with an image that haunts you and keeps coming back. A writer has to see what they can do with that, he said.
“Well, this is where the kind of woo-woo creative stuff comes in,” Kent laughs. “I think some things arrive very organically and for me, I take those moments as a gift.”
There is a section at the start of the novel where Hanne addresses Thea, using the formal speech patterns of the time, that came to Kent out of the blue and became the creative hub from which she could expand her story.
“I was really struggling, I didn’t know where I was going but then that section never changed,” she says. “Every one of my books has parts that never change, maybe not at the beginning but there will be a section that I write in the voice of the character that for me holds the key.”
Kent is a very modern woman who in the foreword to Devotion writes that in 2017 after Australia voted for same-sex marriage, she was proposed to by her girlfriend. But there is something about her writing that marks her as an old soul whose imagination plays best in the silence of the past, not the noise of the present. So, the book became a love story between two women that unfolds on the deepest level with neither woman aware of what a same-sex relationship might even mean, certainly not in a strict religious community where women were expected to marry and be mothers and housekeepers while still in their teens.
As part of that, she has reinvigorated the word “devotion” to mean something romantic and pure that involves surrender rather than service. It is about a form of rapture with no hint of slavery or submissiveness. “It’s not servitude although I know what you mean,” she says. “It is surrender and that was what I wanted to explore, the kind of gleeful, joyful surrender that is about a giving in, not a giving up. You allow yourself to be moved by these forces whether they be God or love.”
To explain how Kent pulls off a same-sex love story in a puritanical religious community without tainting it with secrecy or shame involves a plot spoiler too big to even hint at, but she does. The result is a great love story between women of the sort that she struggled to find when she was her younger, gay, Adelaide self.
“Growing up, there weren’t that many books that I could look to for representation,” she says. “I mean the world has changed so much in the course of my life and it’s wonderful to see new, queer generations coming up who have these points of reference and see themselves in these stories.”
So, does she see Devotion as a contribution to queer literature?
“I hope it is! It’s a queer book, I’m happy for it to be thought of that way,” she says. “It was a joy to write. I wrote it for my wife but there was also a part of me that was aware of contributing a story that I, growing up, needed to read.”
Kent is very good at research and casts her net wide when she wants to understand a particular time or place, absorbing material wherever she finds it. In Iceland, living in an isolated, small town, she was travelling on a ring road to the capital, Reykjavik, when she heard the story of the beheading by axe of Agnes Magnusdottir, a servant condemned to death for her part in the murder of two men.
Kent at that point wasn’t sure if she was going to be a writer, even though writing had been a part of her life since she was six. In Iceland she had insomnia and wrote notes and journals during what was meant to be night but it wasn’t until she was home and in her fourth year of creative writing at Flinders University that she decided to write about Magnusdottir and the circumstances that led to her execution.
As part of her research into Magnusdottir and her brutally bleak life, Kent read old newspapers which published stories about foreign executions. In the course of this she stumbled on material for her second book, The Good People, and the woman who used the existence of fairies as a murder defence in Ireland at a time when folklore and the forces of malice and mischief were part of everyday life.
She spent time in Ireland where she spoke to academics and trawled through folklore archives, reading old files. Preparing for Devotion was different. It required research into a period of history but she knew the terrain, or at least the South Australian end of it. She read not just from archives and history books; she pored over recipes from the time, found out what hymns they would sing and looked at exhibitions of art.
She rarely knows at the time what she will use and what will fall by the wayside. This time, she read up on how food was cooked thinking this would be a major part of the book but in the end it wasn’t. When she writes, she does it without notes and draws on whatever comes to mind.
This was fiction and she didn’t know what the story was. She had to write creatively while understanding the lives of strict Lutherans who fled their Prussian homeland of Silesia and spent six months cooped up in a disease-ridden ship that made its way to South Australia. Kent says she relied heavily on Captain Hahn’s record of the crossing in the 1830s of the Zebra, and did so deliberately.
“Whenever you’re writing something that is awful, it is important to lean on the historical record so you’re not mucking around in misery for entertainment’s sake, which I think is a bit unpleasant,” she says. “It is good that the representation is informing people, even if it’s just to let them know that this is how it was.”
Her freedom to write has been curtailed since marrying and becoming a mother of two girls. She was pregnant in 2017 and 2020 and was ill with morning sickness both times. As well as 18 months of pregnancy, she was also breastfeeding, not sleeping much and raising a young family.
“I was very fortunate in that Heidi, my partner, just stopped working and was looking after the children but it was a different process where I was continually interrupted, which didn’t happen last time,” she says. “Also, the nature of this book, being more purely fiction, meant I needed more time.”
It took her five years instead of three – subtract a year for each child, she laughs – but she has also moved into screen writing which has opened up a new field for her. It happened after she was approached by the Australian producers Anna McLeish and Sarah Shaw from Carver Films who had loved Burial Rites and wondered if she had ideas for the screen.
She pitched a potential idea for a book about the return of past lives and a fertility doctor whose daughter behaves strangely. Called Run Rabbit Run, the project has funding from the South Australian Film Corporation, Screen Australia and Film Victoria and will be partly shot in South Australia.
“It was a huge learning curve,” says Kent. “You are trying to convey the hugest amount of meaning in the shortest available time with fewer tools available to you. It’s more like poetry; with a novel you are just languishing in prose.”
She has also completed a film adaptation of The Good People, which gave her the chance to think about how she could rewrite her own book. An Australian production company, Aquarius Films, is involved and is seeking an Irish partner.
As for Burial Rites, Jennifer Lawrence is still attached but Kent sold the rights and is at an arm’s length from the production which has been adapted for screen by others. “I am hugely fascinated but at the same time I know how different it will be,” she says. “I am not terrified of what it will be turned into. I really see it as another retelling of those events and the book exists completely independently.”
At some point she may find herself ready to write a contemporary novel, but not yet. She says there are so many wonderful books out there already and is happy not to be occupying any of that space.
“I love research too, so I think it would be something that would at least involve a period of research, not for its own sake but I find that a lot of my creative ideas come from encountering other bodies of information – who wrote this, why did they write it and what’s not being said?” she says. “It’s the lure of that silence.”
Devotion, by Hannah Kent: Picador Australia $32.99
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