Eileen Kernaghan: Other Times, Other Places

Alexandra David Néel

In the course of her long and adventurous life, Alexandra David-Néel (24 October 1868 – 8 September 1969) was an opera singer, scholar , spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, author of more than thirty books on Eastern religion, and intrepid explorer of the Himalayas. In 1924, at the age of 55, after many unsuccessful attempts to enter Tibet -- long forbidden to foreigners -- she disguised herself as a male pilgrim and, accompanied by her adopted son, Sikkimese monk Aphur Yongden, she became the first European woman to reach Lhasa. Out that journey came her best known book, My Journey to Lhasa (1927). Alexandra’s writings and her adventures inspired not only Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg, and philosopher Alan Watts, but generations of Himalayan travellers

Many years earlier, as the 20 year old Alexandra Néel, she studied oriental languages and philosophies in London and Paris.  This younger free-spirited Alexandra appears in my novel Wild Talent: a Novel of the Supernatural.  For Alexandra’s adventures in those early years, I drew on her journal entries, published posthumously as Le sortilège du mystère. Though Wild Talent was meant to be the story of my fictional hero Jeannie Guthrie, her friend Alexandra seemed determined to take over the narrative.

In Sophie, in Shadow, a quarter of a century on, the middle-aged Alexandra is comfortably ensconced in her Himalayan hermit’s cave, ten thousand feet above Gangtok, and is still making plans to visit Tibet. Meanwhile, I’ve given her a new role as spiritual adviser to my young hero Sophie Pritchard.


Sir Charles Bell

 During their stay in Sikkim Sophie and the Grenville-Smith family  are guests of the British Resident, Sir Charles Bell, Britain’s political officer in Sikkim, and his wife Cashie. Sir Charles was a respected Tibetan scholar, a friend of the 13th Dalai Lama, whom he met in 1910, and influential in Sikkimese and Bhutanese politics, However, as we see in Sophie, in Shadow, his relationship with Alexandra David Neel was an uneasy one.


Prince Sidkeong Tulku Namgyal

Prince Sidkeong, Maharaja and Chogyal of Sikkim for a brief period in 1914, was a close friend of Alexandra David Néel. When he died suddenly under suspicious circumstances at the age of 35, Alexandra was distraught. Prince Sidkeong’s reformist plans were opposed by the rest of the Sikkimese royal family, and there was a suggestion that his stepmother, the Dowager Queen Drolma, might have had a hand in his death.

Tanita Davis reviews Sophie, in Shadow at Finding Wonderland : The Writing YA Weblog.

"This book is heartily recommended to anyone re-reading A Passage to India this summer, and to anyone whose childhood summers included Kipling's Kim, which is worth a re-read this summer as well. This book is for anyone who fears that young adult books are short on literary value and too long on popular culture. In the timeless style of L.M. Montgomery and E.M. Forster, this book is simply a treat. (Readers who have enjoyed other fantasy fiction on India during colonial times will find this much finer fare,and delight in finding that that this book is somewhat of a companion to Wild Talent: a Novel of the Supernatural, which tells the story of Sophie's cousin Jeannie.)

You can read the full review at the Finding Wonderland site.

Sophie, in Shadow continues a narrative which began in Wild Talent: a Novel of the Supernatural, set in London and Paris a quarter-century earlier.

Though Sophie, like Jeannie, is a fictional character, her story too plays out against real historical events. The details of the 1915 Christmas Day Plot to seize Calcutta and overthrow British rule in India were not revealed until thirty years later, when a former Viceroy of India mentioned them in his memoirs. That particular plan was discovered in time, and a bloodbath averted. However, as Sophie learns, where there is one conspiracy afoot, there are likely to be others.

Sir Charles Bell’s uneasy relationship with Alexandra David Neel, and Alexandra’s persistent attempts to cross the border into Tibet, are well documented in Government of India files and in Alexandra’s own writings. (Eventually Alexandra did fulfill her dream of travelling in Tibet, to Sir Charles’ immense displeasure.)

For background material I am especially indebted to the following titles: Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire, By Peter Hopkirk (Kodansha America); Women of the Raj, by Margaret MacMillan (Thames and Hudson); Calcutta by Krishna Dutta (Interlink Books); Calcutta by Simon and Rupert Winchester (Lonely Planet Books); Forbidden Journey: The Life of Alexandra David-Neel, by Barbara and Michael Foster (Harper & Row); and Two Under the Indian Sun, Jon and Rumer Godden’s delightful memoir of their East Bengal childhood, 1914- 1919 (Alfred A Knopf)

On a personal note: in 1912 my maternal grandfather, Arthur Pritchard, decided to give up his struggling farm in Worcestershire and emigrate with his wife and five children to Canada. Their plan was to make the crossing on the much-publicized maiden voyage of SS Titanic, but they were too late to book accommodation, and travelled instead on the next available ship out of Southampton. In the years leading up to the centennial of the Titanic disaster, I was reminded of how such random events can decide the very fact of our existence.

Sophie’s story, like all family histories, is a narrative of “What If’s?”

It's 1914. Sixteen year old Sophie Pritchard, orphaned two years earlier by a famous sea disaster, is about to begin a new life in the unfamiliar world of British India. For Sophie, still devastated by her parent's death, India proves a dangerously unsettling environment. Are her terrifying experiences in Kali's temple and the Park Street cemetery hallucinations, or has she somehow been drawn back through the centuries as a witness to dark places in Calcutta's past?

Sophie it seems has become an unwilling traveller in a timeless zone where past, present and future co-exist. Kidnapping, enemy spies, and terrorist plots all play their part against the background of a world at war and growing unrest in the Indian subcontinent. Soon Sophie's powers of precognition will be called upon to help thwart a conspiracy that could incite a bloodbath in Calcutta, and deliver India into enemy hands.

"Sophie, in Shadow deftly weaves intrigue, spies, and mystics with more than a dash of the occult into a story that will captivate any reader."  –  Linda DeMeulemeester, author of the best-selling Grim Hill series.

Thistledown Press, YA novel,  228 pages / paper ISBN: 978-1-927068-94-6

Buy an eBook version of this book at Kobo, Amazon Kindle Store, or your favourite eBook store  

"When I write in the cracks and empty spaces of documented history, I try not to change the things that we know to be true". You can read my guest post, "The Alchemy of Historical Fiction" at Kristene Perron's Warpworld website, where  Kristene is running a series of guest posts, "The Truth Inside the Lie",  about using real people, places, or events in science fiction and fantasy.

Who really authored Shakespeare’s plays?  Was it  Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh,  Francis Bacon – or, as the movie Anonymous would have it,  Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford?

Personally, in spite of all the arguments to the contrary, I’d like to believe that the Bard of Avon was responsible for his own plays. (Well, okay, maybe not Titus Andronicus.) But if there is a serious contender for secret authorship, my money would be on Lady Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. The sister of Sir Philip Sydney, and one of the most gifted and prolific women writers of the Renaissance, she was the first woman to publish a play in English, and was generally acknowledged as the second most intelligent woman in England. (First place of course went to Lady Mary’s friend Elizabeth I) At her family estate, Wilton House, near Glastonbury, Lady Mary hosted a famous literary salon, “The Wilton Circle”, attended by most of the well known writers and musicians of the age. Among her guests were Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Sir John Davies, and a promising young poet, Will Shakespeare of Warwickshire.   

Apart from her accomplishments as writer, editor and translator, Lady Mary had a keen interest in medicine and alchemy (she had her own alchemical laboratory at Wilton House) and she pursued such esoteric interests as secret musical codes, spiritual magic and invisible ink.

Recognizing a promising young talent, she may well have served as Shakespeare’s mentor. But did she have a hand in writing Will’s plays? Her background, education, fields of expertise and writing talent all lend credibility; but until we discover some Shakespeare-attributed work in Lady Mary’s handwriting, the jury will have to remain out.

Lady Mary and her Wilton House colleagues make an appearance in my 2004 historical fantasy, The Alchemist’s Daughter.