Romance, female emancipation and streetwalkers - it's all in a day's work for novelist Iris Gower. Kate Griffin discovers the secrets behind her success.
Ask the average English person to tell you what they know about Welsh literature, and they might name Dylan Thomas, or mutter something about the Mabinogion. Poetry from the post-Glyndwr years and 17th-century religious writings have hardly made a blip on the modern world's literary radar.
However, a woman from Wales beat Terry Pratchett in the Public Lending Right Scheme's most recent list of most-borrowed authors, and over 17 of her novels have become bestsellers. Step forward Iris Gower, world-famous writer and modest Swansea girl.
Her work has probably done more than the Cool Cymru music scene to give the world a taste for things Welsh, but Iris explains that it was never her deliberate intention to promote Wales in her writing; it's just that her "love [for it] comes across". Most of her books are centred around Swansea, the city where she was born and still lives - she cites the view of the sea as one of the great attractions of her current home - but she mixes local description with scenes set further afield, combining the exotic with what she knows so well.
The combination seems to have struck a chord with people from all over the world; she's had fan letters from America, Dubai, Holland and Zimbabwe, among many other places. Her fame is such that letters addressed just to "Iris Gower, Swansea" have been known to reach her. So who is she writing for? "For myself," she answers immediately, explaining that she only wants to write books that she would be happy to read herself. Her readership is mainly female, although there are a few male exceptions; she tells me that "men have got to look past the cover" before they will read one of her books.
The covers certainly do shout "romance", as they usually feature beautiful, fiery-eyed young women, although this belies the wealth of historical and local detail that makes each book an education as well as a pleasure to read. Her Firebird saga, for example, takes in the Rebecca Riots and the laying of the first railway lines into Swansea, as well as being full of passionate characters, feuding, and well-written sex scenes. She details the misery of being a homeless 19th-century prostitute as effectively as she observes the flaring-up of a row between husband and wife or the feelings of a naive girl in love for the first time.
I ask if her intention is to educate her readers about history, and she tells me that her intention is more to entertain them: "I like people to enjoy reading - and hopefully [what I write] will touch someone." Iris is herself a very keen reader, picking up "anything and everything" in spare moments. On the modern side of things, she likes Colin Dexter and Barbara Erskine (among others), while she's also a great lover of the Mabinogion and is currently absorbed in Virgil's Aeneid. Her writing spans as many different periods as her reading does, because, as she says, "History just fascinates me". I ask which is her favourite era to write about, and she settles on the 1920s, because it was a time "full of romantic clothes, and women were becoming emancipated".
Female emancipation is a clear theme throughout her books; her feminism expresses itself through the creation of sympathetic women characters who rise above difficult circumstances. For example, Rhiannon, the heroine of Paradise Park, Iris' most recent book, is a streetwalker who manages through guts and hard work to find a respectable place in society and true love; Iris describes her as "a strong woman who made her own way in life".
Throughout the Firebird saga, of which Paradise Park is the final novel, characters are strongly drawn and seem - like more of us than would care to admit it - at the mercy of their passions and desires. Some, like Rhiannon, use this as a spur to make a better life, while others, like Dafydd, the former Rebecca Rioter, use it as an excuse to lapse into cruelty. Jayne, Dafydd's wife, is the only character in the saga who seems able to put her desire to be a successful businesswoman over other feelings, but the events of Paradise Park reveal another side to her.
Now that the Firebird saga is complete, Iris is already working on a new novel, set to be published next year. It features yet another strong woman, one from Wales who becomes a herbalist and follows the cattle drovers of the early 1800s to London. Apparently this journey is attested by various historical sources as well as the presence in today's London of shops of Welsh origin - for example, Dickens & Jones, the hosiery establishment.
I ask where Iris gets the inspiration to write so many stories in so many different settings. She tells me that her historical research is usually done the traditional way, through books, but she draws on contemporary paintings in order to get a "feel" for different eras. While researching the earlier books in the Firebird saga, she spent some time with American Indians, and developed a fascination for their culture. She is interested in the link between South America and Wales, and assures me that this is not a myth, as many cynics claim. Indeed, the language of the Mandan tribe, in whom Iris became chiefly interested, boasts Welsh words like "nant" in its vocabulary. This tribe's specialisation in ceramics resonates with the pottery theme of books in the Firebird saga, and the character of Joe, the American Indian, draws heavily on the real characteristics of those people.
However, how she creates her plots is a mystery even to Iris herself. She refers to Pinter's "warehouse in the sky" as the storage depot for future stories, and seems to subscribe to the Jungian notion that the stories already exist, buried in her mind: "The subconscious works it all out."
She admits to suspending her own disbelief while in the act of writing, letting plots and characters do what they want to do; the miracle is that the endings of her books are so neat they seem meticulously planned. One reviewer wrote of her, "Gower is capable of clever concatenation", and it's easy to agree with this on reading her books, but she swears that she usually begins a book without any real idea of how it will end.
She does believe, though, that it is essential for a writer to mix with other people for inspiration, "or your ideas become stale". She points out that many people think seclusion is the ideal state for creating anything, but that this is not the case. This is lucky for Iris, since seclusion seems something in short supply for her at present; she has two sons, two daughters and a large but lovely dog. The recent death of her much-loved husband is a blow from which she is still recovering, but she finds that working on her novels keeps her sane by taking her mind off her loss.
What started her writing in the first place was the experience of writing a poem as a child and having an illustrated copy of it put up in the hall in her school. She was first published when she was only 23, and has barely stopped for breath since. She has, however, been well-rewarded for her labours; she received an Honorary Fellowship from the University of Wales, Swansea, as well as an MA in Creative Writing, from Cardiff University. This year, she received another Honorary Fellowship, this time from Swansea Institute, for bringing the history of the area to life through her work.
She is modest about all these achievements, repeating that the increased profile of Swansea is a happy result of her work, but no her original intention. Perhaps her most revealing answer comes when I ask her if she would call herself a romantic. She repeats something she has said in the past about the Welsh people: "The Welsh person has the eye of the cynic and the heart of the poet." This seems the perfect way to sum up the spirit that pervades her novels.