Deborah, congratulations on The Fortune Keeper. What drew you to Renaissance Italy?

I’ve always been fascinated by Renaissance art and science and its effect on cultural life. In these novels I explore the artist Bernini and the legacy of Galileo Galilei as well as the influence of major cities such as Rome and Venice and their unique religious and architectural heritage. For a fiction writer you are looking for a period that can immerse people quickly into a recognisable setting, but one that is also different from today, and the Renaissance has a visual appeal that is both familiar, in that people do already have some visual ideas about it, but also with much left to uncover to tempt and enthral the reader. The grandeur of the Vatican or the shimmering canals of Venice offer opportunities for writing scenes that few locations can match. In the end though, it was the people and the characters that drew me, and one person in particular – Giulia Tofana.

Professional poisoner Giulia Tofana is an important character in this series. How much did you know about her before you started this project?

I knew very little, except what was available in books and online. The thing that fascinated me about her was the difficulty all the sources had of being definitive about her age, her activities, and the date and manner of her death. Despite this, her name had lived on and she was credited with the poisoning of more than six hundred men. That seemed to be an extreme number, and led to my interest in uncovering more about her and in particular to explore her motives through fiction. Why did she do it, and why was she never caught? My interest was ignited and it was a golden opportunity to explore and find out more. I was also intrigued by the fact nobody else had written a novel about her.

It soon became apparent why. I learnt from researching her that we were in fact talking about three women rather than one. The three women were Giulia’s mother Theofania, Giulia herself and her daughter Girolama (later discovered to be a step-daughter). This idea helped to make sense of the conflicting evidence from the different sources. Or so I thought. Later, as I was researching the third book, lost documents emerged from an Italian archive that threw all the existing knowledge about her into question. The daughter Girolama is the main character in The Fortune Keeper, and I enjoyed exploring how she came to live with Giulia, and how it shaped her life.

The Fortune Keeper features some fascinating female characters. Was it a challenge to find sources about women in the Italian Renaissance?

In fact there are some excellent books which chronicle women’s lives in the Renaissance. I was particularly grateful to the book Women in Italy 1350 – 1650 by Mary Rogers and Paola Tinagli,  here is ‘how to bring up a daughter’, a passage from that book written in 1547, ‘as soon as the girl reaches the right age to learn to read and writer; I want the father to have two aims for her; one is religion, the other the management of the household.’

This seems to have been a common view, with the priority for girls being to remain ‘chaste’ for the marriage market, and also to have good practical skills in running a household or ordering servants. In Italy marriage then was a contract, with young women as young as twelve married off to older men whose previous partners had died in childbirth or from disease. Of course every society has the rebels who refuse to conform, and the more oppressive the society, the more underground the rebellion has to be. In a patriarchal society where women’s rights are few, the drastic action of poisoning an abusive partner was often the last recourse of a woman at the end of her tether.

What is your research process like? How do you strike a balance between the historical events and your story?

 For me the story comes first. I’m in the business of entertaining through fiction. Of course this doesn’t mean to throw out the history, but to use it intelligently, to choose eras where the story would naturally fit, and use the history to support the story, or particular version of events you are trying to tell. A novelist always makes choices about how to use the known facts at their disposal. I could have made Giulia a monster and turned it into a horror story, but instead I chose to focus on the ambiguity of women’s role as both prostitute and saint, how the Catholic religion both supported and undermined women, and to make the narrative a bigger exploration of the way women fight back when they have few options left to them.

Can you recommend any books to readers who want to learn more about this period of Italian history?

A book I thoroughly enjoyed reading was The Ceremonial City by Iain Fenlon, which gives a sense of the myths and rituals that drive life in Venice. Not only is it lavishly illustrated (always a bonus for a fiction writer) but I appreciated the way he explored the way religious and secular life intertwined Monica Chojnacka’s book Working Women of Early Modern Venice was a wonderful book that made me consider life outside the grand palazzi that readers often associate with Venice, and which gave an good insight into the working class.

If you could meet any historical figure from this period, who would this be and why?

I would love to meet Giulia Tofana herself of course, to find out the answers to all my burning questions. I suspect the real Giulia will be quite different from my fictional version which is based both on the real person and the myth and glamour that has grown up around her.

 You’ve written novels set in a variety of places and time periods. Do you have a favourite period to write about?

 I really enjoy the early modern period, and have set novels in the period not only in Italy, but here in England, and also in Spain. I think what appeals to me about the period is that it was a period of massive expansion in trade. And by trade, I mean not only commodities and goods, but also trade in ideas. It was a time when the world was incredibly outward-looking and open to encountering ‘the new.’ These days, we have seen it all – a two minute soundbite on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter can connect you to almost everywhere on the planet, and it is now hard to find anything genuinely extraordinary in the way perhaps people flocked to see a Rhinoceros when it was shown in Lisbon in 1515.

 Can you tell us about your next project?

I am currently engaged in writing a series of WW2 novels, and the first one, The Silk Code will be out in the Spring with HQDigital, with two more to follow. After that I’d like to return to the Renaissance with a fourth book about Giulia Tofana and her step-daughter, which will complete the series.

Deborah Swift is a USA Today bestselling novelist and author of The Fortune Keeper.

Interview by Chantelle Lee.