Cassie McCullough

So there's Stella and she is a bearded woman and she is sort of forthright and she's plucky and I suppose she's got a little bit of Sophie Feathers from Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter in her.

Oh, absolutely.

You know, she just leaps off the page.

And I sort of wanted to inject a little bit of that sort of refusal to be cowed refusal, you know, that she just wants to take up space.

And she actually loves that sort of the world that she's in.

But on the other hand, there are those characters, there's Brunette, who's known as the Welsh giantess.

And for her, the circus is a miserable and exploitative place where she does not invite the stairs.

And she feels that she has nowhere else that can go in, which, of course, you know, in this very industrial society where people's bodies were commercialized so much, you know, she wasn't seen as economically productive like many people like her because she was frequently in pain, right?

And so for her, the circus doesn't offer that escape route.

And she just she doesn't want to change, but she wants the world around her to change.

Yeah, it was I found getting into both Stella and Brunette's perspectives.

It was interesting and it was it was at times hard to write, I suppose.

I first sort of came across the idea of the Crimean War and even the Napoleonic War being linked with circus because of all of the horse tricks that so many ex-soldiers came back to England after the wars were over.

And they were incredible horse jumpers.

And they could so they were instantly absorbed into the circus.

But then the more I looked at war, the more I realised kind of that the parallels did not end there anymore.

You know, I always think of war and military as well as sort of the more harrowing elements you think of sort of brass bands and uniforms.

The military itself can be this kind of spectacle, as well as the fact that the Crimean War was really a war of so much mythology.

Whether that was, you know, Florence Nightingale, the lady in her lamp that, you know, people had this enduring image of.

And it was also a war where there were so many conflicting reports which were being passed around because of the invention of the telegraph, which meant that reports could be sent very quickly to London and to newspapers there.