Ed West

If many Renaissance tales like to focus on the beautiful art, music, literature and architecture of that period, Dunant’s is a grimmer biological-historical tale about the women who were thrown into the system because “they were younger daughters, or were poor, or had clubbed feet”.

Most of the residents, in all probability, were not there by choice. There’s a startling fact I’ve heard Dunant use in interviews elsewhere - that is, that during this period half of all Italian women were being put into convents, the highest proportion since the immediate aftermath of the Black Death. 

Dunant, a history graduate and history obsessive who already has two Renaissance novels under her belt, has thoroughly researched her area, and spent some time in a 14th-century convent just south of Milan. 

“I was very interested in how powerful that night service is, and that limited amount of sleep,” she says. “That sleep is very important in convents. The peace is almost a cliché. But then, I thought: ‘What would it be like if there wasn’t any peace?’”

There probably was not for many of the unheard voices of the period, a time of great anguish for many in Christendom. In Dunant’s view, after the Reformation things only got worse for women. Luther’s outbursts against “naughty nuns and naughty priests”, like all good propaganda based on some truth, inspired the Council of Trent, just as it was about to convene, to clamp down on the independence and privileges of convents. 

There were also economic reasons - they were controlled by certain aristocratic families, who provided most of the women and money, and the Church wanted that power back. Luther’s revolution also inspired a clampdown on mystics, many of them women.

“Having a living saint was a spiritual credit to the city,” Dunant says. “‘If she had a relationship with God maybe she’ll be a talisman to help us.’ Then Luther turned up and said: ‘Actually, anyone can have a relationship with God.’ The power of the priest is not so important anymore. When the Counter-Reformation moves in it makes sure there aren’t too many maverick women out there having relationships with God without anyone defining it. Living saints become a problem.”

However, she notes, correspondence found during the following decades show there was a discussion within the Church about convents and the role of women.

“Although the Council of Trent is very oppressive to convents, it does recognise there is a problem,” she says. “It doesn’t do a lot about it, because what it technically says and what’s going on on the ground are different, but it’s a recognition. It’s a beginning of a dialogue when people are talking about inequality.”

However, it would be some time before women were burning bras, as Dunant’s contemporaries famously did. Born in 1950 and attending university in the late 1960s, Dunant is very much part of the baby boomer generation, the “68ers” who abandoned God and replaced religion with sexual liberation and Marxism, and who have ruled the political and media establishments ever since. 

She was raised in Shepherd’s Bush and attended the Godolphin and Latimer in Hammersmith, a school that produces media figures like a production line. Her father was a “Welsh agnostic” and her mother a Catholic born in Bangalore in “the French Raj” (I confess I had never heard of such a thing) to a French Indian mother and a father who was an ex-monk, having left the Church in his native Ireland to become an itinerant dentist in India.

Like her grandfather, Dunant also struggled with the Church. “I probably had a crisis of faith around my teenage years. A good Jesuit would have whipped me into shape in minutes but there wasn’t one available in my parish.

“I had problems with the literalness of the Bible. At the age of 14 a mission came to our church and I thought I’d take my doubts to the priest. At the end of Confession I said: ‘Actually, Father, can you help me? I’m having doubts about the faith. I’m very unsure if I should be believing in elements of the Bible.’ I said I don’t believe in Genesis.

“He said: ‘I think you’re watching too much television.’”

This is the only moment during the interview, which is conducted by a small pond in the garden of her lovely Victorian house off the Holloway Road where she lives with two teenage daughters, when I notice that Dunant getting angry.

“The attitude was: ‘You’re just a young girl.’ Well, I’m not just a young girl, I’m a smart young woman. Help me.”

After leaving school in 1968 Dunant worked as a nanny in the famous hippy district of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, before reading history at Cambridge the following year. She then spent her early 20s travelling the globe, an experience that would be extremely handy training for a novelist. 

“My father worked for British Airways. It was the great thing of my life, which meant I could travel for almost nothing, although I couldn’t afford to do much when I got there. After uni I went to Japan. I worked teaching English in a nightclub as a hostess. An innocent job, I should add.”

She then worked for two and a half years for the radio show Kaleidoscope, before quitting to use up her last year of free travel before the BA_family voucher ran out. South America - and a tale of drug traffickers in Colombia - inspired her first solo novel, Snow Storms in a Hot Climate (she had previously written two with a friend, Peter Busby).

During the early 1990s she became a household name - at least in households where people watched late-night arts programmes - presenting BBC Two’s The Late Show. She describes it as “a golden age of arts television, we could do whatever we wanted. It was a very young, dynamic team.”

But, she points out, “it made everybody think I was a television presenter. I had to stop broadcasting, so people thought: ‘Oh that girl in the red glasses, she’s written a book.’”

Since then she’s produced 10 novels, among them three featuring the hugely successful private detective Hannah Wolfe. But she was also attracted to historical novels, a genre that has blossomed in recent years, thanks, she says, to new levels of research and knowledge that were just not available until relatively recently. 

Her view of the Church’s attitude to sex is not one most Herald readers would agree with. “History is not entirely about politics, culture, biology, religion and economics,” she argues. “There’s no doubt that when the Church makes the decision to make the people who bring the message celibate, it is for economic reasons. It was completely understandable in the circumstances but it has been a disaster ever since because of the tension it has brought.”

She is passionate and angry about the way women were treated, which she describes as “20 years of being a breeding machine, burying some of your children, no space to be your own person”. But she concedes with a smile that it was not exactly fun for most men at the time either. Yet, she says, “inside convents women also had a certain amount of freedom denied to them outside.

“They were putting on plays and dressing up as men. We know this because we have letters from bishops. And Zoula finds herself in a convent where she has a herb garden and a dispensary. Where else in the outside world would she do that?” 

She says she is in awe of the women who stood up during this period and that it is not the job of the novelist to judge the Church or churchmen of the time.

“You cannot write history from the point of view of the present,” she says. “These women didn’t know something called feminism would emerge, which would totally change women’s place in the western world. 

“This is not a book written from an atheist standpoint. It’s important to say that, because if you’re going to write honestly about history you cannot go marching in there like Richard Dawkins. You have to soak yourself in the period - and there ain’t any atheism here. 

“Everyone has a relationship to some kind of divinity. I wanted to be honest. I don’t answer whether anything there was divine revelation or a trick of the light. I don’t know, but I do know that they believed.

“I left the faith. We have gone through the most powerful secular movement of the past few centuries, and I’ve ended up writing about religion and sexuality set in the past,” she says: “I’m ending up full circle. And it’s a lovely place.”