Elodie Harper

And the presence of the two daughters on that statue, somehow they've had a wardrobe malfunction, so their boobs have popped out, nice and objectifying, but anyway, a different time period.

But they're crouching in their mother's shadow.

And this is really what they're doing in the historical record as well, because they played such a key role in the rebellion, and yet we don't even know their names.

We just have the barest bones of their story

from Tacitus.

And so obviously, as a novelist and massive ancient history nerd, this is just too tempting to pass up the idea of filling out the monumental gaps in this extraordinary story.

So there was quite a lot of cultural exchange going on between Britain and Rome before Rome's conquest of parts of the British Isles in exchange of trade.

The Romans were pretty snooty about the Celtic cultures of Gaul and ancient Britain.

So one of the difficulties is that all the written records come from them.

So you can see their snootiness even in the words that they use.

They say opidae,

rather than cities or town, which is kind of like calling them settlements.

But we don't have to take the Romans completely at their word as to what these people might have been like.

So the idea of these opida, I called them cities in the book and towns because why should they have a different terminology?

It was a very different culture from ancient Rome.

We don't have the same visual representation of it.

Roundhouses was still the predominant building at this point, but the idea that they were kind of scampering around in mud huts and this being a very sort of primitive society is, I think, completely unjustified given the archaeological remains and also

the complexity of the social structure.

It was a society where women appear to have had much more power.

It was a society that produced some incredible pieces of artwork, Boudicca specifically, you know, of this time period.