Victorian Dark Magic Mingles with Identity in The Golden Key

Marian Womack brings a touch of Spain to this heartfelt gothic fantasy.

Holding degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities, Marian Womack is a bilingual author born in Andalusia, Spain. Today, she lives at the edge of the Fens outside of Cambridge where she writes ghostly, strange tales.

The Golden Key is set in séance-obsessed England soon after the death of Queen Victoria. In this uncanny adventure, readers meet Helena Watson-Cisneros, one of London’s most renowned mediums. An elusive aristocrat hires Helena to solve a gut-wrenching mystery: the disappearance of three girls who vanished without a trace twenty years ago.

Have you ever been to a séance?

I confess that I have never been to one. I think I would be too scared. Growing up, we had a lot of respect for the supernatural. Andalusia can be a very haunted place, and there was magic in the everyday. I remember the way my grandmother used a religious image of the Virgin hanging from a gold chain to tell if my aunties were going to give birth to a boy or a girl. My other grandmother taught me how to read the cards, not the Tarot, but the Spanish deck. All those mysterious things were part of our daily life, and we knew to leave the dead well alone.

Is Britain still haunted by the many distinct peoples who lived there over the centuries?

One of my favorite folklore theories is that the English fairy tradition is derived from successive waves of conquest. The Romans came, and the Picts were transformed into some kind of “other” then developed into magical beings. You see this in the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Ruin,” in which the work of the Romans is recognized as the handiwork of giants. I hope I have this idea in everything I write—that magic can derive from a lack of knowledge.

In the US, many prominent spiritualists were women who supported causes like women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Why do you think mediums tend to be progressive?

Spiritualism gave women a certain kind of freedom and power to be themselves and to organize their own affairs and businesses. In certain ways, they controlled their lives at a time when being a woman meant having very little freedom. I have played a bit with this in the novel, making sure that my detective and my main scientist are women. History is filled with the stories of progressive women who rewrote the rules like the American scientist Eliza is obsessed with, Eunice Foote. Spiritualism allowed a lot of women to navigate society and make their own decisions.

How are you influenced by the literary traditions of Spain?  

The mid-twentieth century female generation of Carmen Martín Gaite and Ana María Matute is perhaps the one that has influenced me most. These novels are very well-known and widely studied in Spanish departments in American universities. Some of these authors’ works have been translated into English. After the dictatorship ended, they gave some hope to future generations of female writers.

The character of Helena has an Andalusian Roma great-grandmother. How does the Romany culture inspire Helena and THE GOLDEN KEY?

This is the aspect of my own family’s heritage that we find most difficult to talk about. Perhaps for that reason it fascinates me. I have taken aspects of things I discussed with my parents and grandparents and fed them into Helena. I also have a scholarly interest in Roma culture, and have tried to learn as much as possible about it over the years. I could never claim that my identity is Roma; but equally I don’t want to let it fade. I hope that these connections feed politely into the story as told. 

How does Helena navigate around the confines applied to women in Victorian society?

Ah, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question! When you write a book set in the Victorian world, it’s difficult to establish the difference between your knowledge of the past and your sense of what deserves to be visible in our present. I hope that the choice of Helena as protagonist might make this calculus a little easier. She is so obviously alien that it might be clear that she doesn’t fit into the paradigms laid out for her. She finds it difficult to live in this world, but on a very deep level she doesn’t give a toss for its demands and received ideas.

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