What was the inspiration behind The Hawthorn Oath?
There were three main inspirations behind this novel: Beauty and the Beast, Irish folklore and history, and the idea that every villain is the hero of their own story.
Beauty and the Beast
I can’t remember exactly what I was reading when the idea first came to me, but I remember being fed up with Beauty falling for the Beast.
No matter how monstrous he was, somehow we were still rooting for the heroine to end up with him. And the more I thought about it, the more frustrating I found it. Here was a woman who had been abducted, trapped and, depending on the version, abused or threatened, and yet the happy ending was for her to stay with the man responsible.
I wanted to look at a different version of that story.
What if Beauty saw the Beast for what he was? What if she wasn’t enchanted by his possessiveness, his power or the luxurious life he could offer her? What if love didn’t transform him into someone better?
That became the starting point for Aoife and Lord Halverton.
Irish folklore and history
I’ve always loved Irish folklore, and as I’ve learnt more about Irish history, pieces of that inevitably found their way into the world of the novel too.
Some of those influences are obvious, while others are only mentioned briefly. The roads to nowhere that come up during the dinner party, for example, were inspired by the real roads built during the Great Famine. People were required to work on public works projects in return for relief, and some of those projects became notorious for roads that seemed to serve little practical purpose.
I didn’t want to write a historical novel or recreate Ireland directly. Instead, I wanted those echoes of folklore, famine, class and empire to sit underneath the fantasy world and shape the lives of the people within it.
Every villain is the hero of their own story
Finally, there’s the saying that every villain is the hero of their own story.
I don’t think that’s true.
Every villain is certainly the protagonist of their own story, but that doesn’t make them the hero. In fact, I’m not sure many people see themselves as heroes, even people we would consider heroic.
What interests me more is the way people justify their own actions. Someone doesn’t have to believe they’re a hero to believe they’re right. They can be selfish, cruel or controlling and still have an explanation for why what they’re doing is reasonable, necessary or even deserved.
That was something I wanted to explore with Lord Halverton. Not a villain who sees himself as a hero, but a man with his own understanding of the world and his place in it.
Those three ideas eventually came together: a Beauty and the Beast story where Beauty doesn’t have to save the Beast, a fantasy world shaped by Irish folklore and history, and a villain who is the protagonist of his own story without ever needing to be its hero.
