Lucinda Riley’s The Pearl Sister shines light on strong women from Australia’s past
LISA REDMOND
The Pearl Sister is the fourth book in Lucinda Riley’s internationally bestselling Seven Sisters series. The series is very much influenced by the mythology of the Pleiades, the star cluster also known as the Seven Sisters. Although The Pearl Sister is the fourth book in the series, Riley has ensured that the books can be read in any order. Each book is narrated by a different sister, each seeking her own ancestry and purpose. Riley says, “The myths of the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, are the main influence in this series. For millennia, they have been objects of wonder and fascination across the globe, and almost every culture has crafted stories around them — and in every single culture, the seventh sister is always missing. Their tales have been passed on through poetry, art, music, and architecture, by Greeks, Australian Aboriginal people, Native Americans, Egyptians, Japanese … to name only a few. When writing the series, I decided to use the Greek myths, although while I was writing The Pearl Sister I fell in love with the Australian Aboriginal stories, and their deep abiding love and respect for the sisters.”
There is a great deal of Australian history and culture explored in The Pearl Sister. I asked Riley if the locations provided the spark for the story or whether it was characters that came first. “The initial motivation to write usually starts with me finding a certain location intriguing and wanting to know more about it. Once the first inspiration has struck me, the characters and story begin to gather in my imagination very quickly. It is the characters that guide me — I live with them in my head during the lengthy writing process, and it is they who tell me where their journey leads them.”
The protagonist of The Pearl Sister is Cee Cee (Celaeno) and following the death of her adoptive father and her apparent failure at art college she travels to Thailand and Australia to discover more about the legacy she has inherited and to escape the disappointments of her life in London. The book explores not just Cee Cee’s journey across Australia but also the Aboriginal Art scene and the history of Aboriginal Art in Australia. There are two interlinking narratives: Cee Cee’s and that of her great-grandmother Kitty in the early 20th century. Kitty also travels across the world from Edinburgh to Australia and unexpectedly finds love and family. At the heart of the novel are Cee Cee’s ancestors, especially the women.
author photo by Boris Breuer
“I am constantly humbled and awed by the tenacity and courage of women who came before me,” Riley explains. “When I initially developed the idea of the Seven Sisters series, I was very attracted to the fact that each one of the sisters was, according to their legends, a unique and strong female. Some say they were the Seven Mothers who seeded our earth. Through my novels I can celebrate the achievements of women, especially in the past, where so often their contribution to making our world the place it is today has been overshadowed by the more frequently documented achievements of men.”
The series is currently in development as a television show and I asked the author if she feels that there is a greater appetite now for stories about the ordinary people of history, especially the women.
“Fundamentally, what readers are interested in is a wonderful story and characters they can connect with. The dual time-narrative that I use enables me to explore parallels between the past and the present…The historical fiction genre has grown in leaps and bounds, and I’ve found that readers are hungry to discover more about their pasts and about the wider world.”
About the contributor: Lisa Redmond is a writer, reviewer and lover of books. She is currently working on a novel about 17th-century Scottish witches. She blogs about books, writing and women in history.
