Elizabeth Hopkinson's Hidden Grove

  Back in February, I wrote a piece for LGBT+ History Month about the castrati singers of the 18th century , and my character Carlo in the forthcoming Cage of Nightingales. In that piece, I said, “It’s impossible for us now to know what the leading castrati really sounded like.” That may still be true. (The intense levels of training they went through from boyhood would probably be illegal now, never mind the actual castration). But just this week, I made a discovery I can’t believe I have not made before. There are real-life male sopranos. True sopranos, as opposed to counter-tenors, who sing in their falsetto range, thereby only using part of the vocal cord. (Imagine plucking a guitar string while holding the string a long way down the bridge, to make the note extra-high). True sopranos sing with all their vocal cord vibrating (unless they go into falsetto, which is extra-extra-high!) Which means you’re going to get a much more resonant sound. Entirely by accident, I saw a news r...

Two mermaid dolls 27th January is the feast day of St Muirgen, also known as Li Ban or Liban. She appears in a number of old Irish annals, such as the Martyrology of Donegal and the Annals of the Four Masters. There's nothing unsual about that: the history of Ireland is crammed to bursting with saints and martyrs. But what's unusual about Miurgen is that she is a mermaid. According to the stories, she was three hundred years under the sea, until the time of the saints. At that time, a man called Beoan was on a mission to Rome, at sea in his curragh (ship) when the ship caught a mermaid (liban) in its nets. She told him she was the the daughter of Eochaidh from Lough Neagh, who was changed to a mermaid when her family was drowned. They brought her to land, where she was baptised by St Comhgall under the name Muirgen (traverser of the sea). The calendar of St Oengus says of her: My God loved Muirgen, A miraculous triumphant being. I love it that there is a mermaid saint! That som...

Who doesn't love Lettie Lutz, the Bearded Lady character in The Greatest Showman, who sings   the iconic anthem, This is Me ? Yesterday, my daughter took me to a singalong version of the film for a Mother's Day treat, and we both belted out This is Me at the tops of our voices. Both Lettie and the song have become symbols for anyone who feels marginalised or different. It so happens that last week I watched another film about a hairy woman, the very beautiful Norwegian coming-of-age film,   Løvekvinnen , or The Lion Woman, based on a book by   Erik Fosnes Hanson.   It tells the story of Eva Arctander, who is born in a small town in the early 20th century and struggles to find her place in the world. Especially, it concerns her relationship with her stationmaster father, widowed at her birth. I loved this film - which I watched on Netflix - and I definitely want to see it again. One of my best reads of last year was Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Bi...

I don't normally write about stuff like this on my blog - I hate controversy and arguments of every kind, which I find distressing - but I felt I must respond to the many adults I read of who have expressed the opinion that educating children about gender diversity somehow amounts to "child abuse." To that end, I would like to share with you some extracts from The Fieldway Five , a story I wrote when I was about nine years old.  It is my homage to the Famous Five stories, an improbable tale of gypsies and gold mines, which ends with the children triumphantly pushing enormous slabs of gold home to their parents. In my very un-subtle homage to Enid Blyton, Timmy the dog is replaced by Ann the cat, and tomboy Georgina, who you will remember dresses as a boy and insists on being called George, is replaced by Philip, who prefers to wear a dress while being addressed as Philipa.  As a child, I saw nothing sinister in this; I was just being creative.  Also, my best fr...

            Tilda Swinton as Virginia Woolf's Orlando from the film of 1992: BFI Player I recently listened to a fascinating online lecture by Cheryl Morgan about gender fluidity in science fiction and fantasy.  Regular readers will know that issues of gender and (a)sexual identity feature a lot in my blog.  So I was interested to read some of the books featured in the lecture.  Here's what I managed to find in my local library:  Orlando by Virginia Woolf This famous literary novel is quite strange, and I doubt anyone truly knows what Virginia Woolf meant by everything in it.  The title character, Orlando, begins as a 16th-century nobleman and favourite of Elizabeth I.  By the end of the book, she is a woman (still called Orlando) and living in Virginia Woolf's own day, the 1920s.  The part where Orlando becomes a woman is spectacularly unspectacular.  He goes to sleep a man and wakes up a woman.  (I...

As I work on my current project, the Angelio Trilogy - about the friendship of castrato Carlo and bird-charmer Tammo in the fictitious city of Angelio - all sorts of interesting things come up in research.  This week, I've been writing a poem for use in book 2, and have turned for inspiration to the castrato poet, Filippo Balatri da Pisa (1676-1756).   As far as I know, Filippo is the only castrato who wrote about his feelings and experiences publicly.  He wrote a memoir in verse called Frutti del Mondo (The Fruit of the World) which tells of his travels as a singer, and some of his feelings about himself.  It is probably one of the best insights we have into how a castrato singer saw himself, his life and his fate. Here are some examples (in translation):- "I am young, Italian and castrated and seek my glory only through singing." "I was already made into a mixed gender, That is a soprano, and was quite young. I apply myself to singing in the most human style Doing ...