Audrey Thomas – författare

In the summer of 1806, a young Orkney woman disguised herself as a man and signed on with the Hudson's Bay Company to travel to what was then called Rupert's Land. For a year and a half she hid her identity and her deception was revealed only when she was giving birth to a baby boy. In less than an hour, she turned from John Fubbister into Isobel Gunn. Very little is known about the real woman — her birth certificate, a few entries in the Hudson's Bay Company logbook, a line in the census, her obituary. Audrey Thomas has taken the threads of Isobel Gunn's story and turned them into a compelling novel about an unusual woman, her short life, and the effect she had on those around her. Audrey Thomas first heard the story of Isobel Gunn while she was living in Scotland in the mid-1980s. She was based in Edinburgh for a year as a Canada-Scotland Literary Fellow and travelled extensively within the country. A number of years later, Thomas was on assignment in Scotland's Orkney Isles for Saturday Night Magazine when she heard the story again and decided she had to write about it. There was little factual material available, but Thomas spent four years researching the story and the colourful era in which it took place. Her research led to the rich texture of the book, incorporating historically accurate details of the period and capturing the social attitudes of the day.

Caricatured by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit as the cantankerous maid of Mr. and Mrs. Meagles, "Tattycoram" tells her own life story in this utterly compelling metafiction by the celebrated author of Isobel Gunn. Throughout her career, Audrey Thomas has repeatedly challenged her readers to follow her into new territory.In Tattycoram, she does it again, taking readers into the distant fictional world of Charles Dickens's England, where, in an unusual twist, Dickens interacts with his own characters, allowing Thomas to raise questions about the intersection of life and art. In Thomas's hands, Harriet Coram gains both a poignant personal history and a quiet dignity.Abandoned as a baby at the London Foundling Hospital and cared for by a kindly foster mother until the age of five, the young Hattie attracts the attention of the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, who hires her as the family housemaid. In the Dickens household, Charles's sister Miss Georgina takes an instant dislike to Hattie's pretty looks and trains her caged raven to tease her with the mocking nickname of Tattycoram. Although Hattie escapes from Dickens and his family to care for her dying foster mother in the country, she is later swept back under the famous author's sphere of observation as a teacher in his newly founded school for released female convicts. There she befriends Elizabeth Avis, who also appears as another minor character from Little Dorrit.In typical Dickensian fashion, Hattie meets not one, but two, long-lost brothers and falls in love with the one who conveniently turns out not to be her "real" brother. But first, she must confront her benefactor about his shameless misrepresentation of her and Elizabeth's characters in his latest novel.