Author Interview: The Ballad of Mary Kearney by Katherine Mezzacappa
- Archaeolibrarian
- 4 hours ago
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Book details:
Book Title: The Ballad of Mary Kearney
Series: n/a
Author: Katherine Mezzacappa
Publication Date: 14th January 2025
Publisher: Histria
Pages:288
Any Triggers: Some scenes of violence, including judicial killing; rape.
@katherinemezzacappafiction @cathie.dunn1 @thecoffeepotbookclub
@katmezzacappa @thecoffeepotbookclub
"I am dead, my Mary; the man who loved you body and soul lies in some dishonorable grave."
In County Down, Ireland, in 1767, a nobleman secretly marries his servant, in defiance of law, class, and religion. Can their love survive tumultuous times?
An impoverished tenant farmer sends his seventeen-year-old daughter Mary into service at the home of his Ascendancy landlord. Viscount Kilkeel, the impulsive but idealistic son of Lord Goward, lately returned from the Grand Tour, cohabits openly there with his married mistress – but at least her presence means he is not distracted by pretty servants. When Lady Mitchelstown dies, however, only Mary is willing to lay out the corpse. Impressed, Kilkeel decides to educate her and eventually falls in love. Under the Penal Laws, a Protestant and a Catholic marriage is treasonous, so to the world, Mary is his kept woman, not accepted by Kilkeel's class and shunned by her own.
Encouraged by American independence and the overthrow of the French monarchy, the calls for liberty in Ireland grow ever stronger. Through Mary's influence, James Kilkeel joins the United Irishmen and prepares for rebellion. In the space of a few weeks, around thirty thousand Irish die in the struggle, but the rising is put down without mercy.
Set in County Down, Dublin, and London, Mary Kearney's tragic story is told through letters, diaries, testimonies, and trial proceedings, giving an authentic voice to a tragic period in Ireland's tumultuous history. "The Ballad of Mary Kearney" is a compelling must-read for anyone interested in Irish history, told through the means of an enduring but ultimately tragic love.
‘Honest and intriguing, this gripping saga will transport and inspire you, and it just might break your heart. Highly recommended.’ Historical Novel Society
'Mezzacappa brings nuance and a great depth of historical knowledge to the cross-class romance between a servant and a nobleman.' Publishers Weekly.
Personal
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I was born in Carrickfergus, near Belfast, but I have been living in Italy for the last two decades. I’ve been married thirty years this year. We’ve two sons now living in Ireland and the Netherlands and we’ve three eccentric cats.
What do you do when you’re not writing?
I help out with a secondhand book charity of which I am a founder member. When I’ve time, I love dressmaking.
Do you have a day job as well?
I do, but I have reduced my hours. I do psychological profiles of job candidates via structured interviews. This is also a very efficient way of building fictional characters; I ‘interview’ them and through that can see how they might behave in future situations, which is great for plot development.
What was your favourite book as a child?
I think that would be Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Tom Kitten. He’s so naughty. I made my elder son a Tom Kitten outfit for a visit to Hill Top Sawrey. His brother went as Peter Rabbit.
When was that point in your life that you realized that being an author was no longer going to be just a dream but a career you were going to turn into reality?
It was 2019 when I got an agent and a few weeks later got my first contract (for The Gypsy Bride and The Gypsy’s Daughter, pen name Katie Hutton). That’s when I changed all my social media to reflect that I am an author, even if I still have my job.
What book do you wish you had written?
LP Hartley’s The Go-Between. A rural setting, a cross class tragic love affair. Well, probably anything by Thomas Hardy too.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Oh dear… ten years older. I’ll be dividing my time between Dublin and Carrara, where I currently live. And I will only be writing, not doing other work.
Writing
When did you start writing and when did you finish your first book?
I tried writing for Mills & Boon in the mid 1990s but Mills & Boon didn’t agree, so I put that little romance away and forgot about it. Then my husband found the floppy disk in about 2018. I updated the book and it was published first in Canada (Tuscan Enchantment, now with Romaunce Books in the UK, under the pen name Kate Zarrelli). There was a long hiatus, even though I did a Masters in Creative Writing in the middle of it, until I started writing this book, The Ballad of Mary Kearney, in 2016 and then I just couldn’t stop. I published eight other books in the meantime but kept revising Mary Kearney as I really believed in it, and it eventually found Histria Books.
How did you choose the genre you write in?
It sort of chose me. I was quite introverted as a teenager and escaped into books, so I had read all of Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, the Brontës &c. by the time I was fourteen. All of that got into my literary DNA, to the extent that when I was on the Masters course one of my tutors told me I wrote in quite an old-fashioned way. That felt to me like a gift for the writing of historical fiction. It meant I could get the ‘voice’ right. I do write a bit of contemporary fiction, my Kate Zarrelli romances, between the big projects, but for those I have to eavesdrop on people much younger than I am!
Where do you get your ideas?
All kinds of places. The spark for Mary Kearney wasn’t in Ireland but at Gibside, near Chester-le-Street in County Durham, and concerns the marriage of the 10th Earl of Strathmore to his servant. I transposed that to Ireland, made it a clandestine marriage rather than a deathbed one – and because it was Ireland during the Penal Laws there was the treasonous aspect of it, a Protestant and a Catholic marrying.
My 2024 novel, The Maiden of Florence, started with me riffling through a medical journal dedicated to erectile dysfunction that I found in a doctor’s waiting room. There was a tiny historical column about a #MeToo episode in Florence in 1584. I just had to write that story.
My first full-length novel, The Gypsy Bride (writing as Katie Hutton) came about after I read a chapter in WH Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Year (1904) which I found in Oxfam. I read the chapter ‘The Dark Men of the Village’ and I could see the hero of my book, Sam Loveridge, walking out of the trees.
Another book, Annie of Ainsworth’s Mill (also as Katie Hutton), was inspired by seeing my great-grandparents’ marriage certificate for the first time. The clerk had begun writing my great-grandfather’s father’s name, then scored it out partway through the surname and wrote ‘illegitimate’ above.
Do you ever experience writer’s block?
No, which doesn’t mean I don’t get stuck. I usually have at least two books on the go, or short fiction. When I get stuck on one book I work on the other project for a bit, and when I go back to the first one, the problem has usually unknotted itself.
Are you a planner or a pantser?
Pantser, mainly. I am writing a Renaisssance crime novel at the moment which requires more planning than I am used to.
Is there any particular author or book that influenced you in any way either growing up or as an adult?
I loved Leon Garfield’s novels when I was a child, especially Smith – the teeming squalor of Georgian London. And then Thomas Hardy, and more recently, Elizabeth Gaskell and Arnold Bennett.
Can you tell us about your challenges in getting your first book published?
The real challenge was getting an agent. I hopped about all over the alphabet in the list of agents in The Writers & Artists Yearbook, when I should have just started at the beginning, as the agent I got is the lovely Annette Green.
If you had to go back and do it all over, is there any aspect of your novel or getting it published that you would change?
I just wish I had started earlier.
Have you written a book you love that you have not been able to get published?I thought that was going to be the case with Mary Kearney, but I just stuck with it and kept revising it until it found a home.
How do you market your work? What avenues have you found to work best for your genre?
As I am traditionally published with four different publishers, the marketing varies. Some publishers prefer to follow their tried and tested avenues, while others in the submission process ask for ways in which the author will publicise. I always like doing a blog tour. It’s hard to calculate how may sales are as a result of blog tours, but a tour always increases the online footprint for a book and starts the process of getting reviews. There are interviews, like this one, that can be reposted.
I do as many author events as I can, now they are possible. My first full-length novel was published in 2020, right in the middle of Covid. The first author in-person event I was able to do was in the public library in Cleator Moor in 2022 (my third book, Annie of Ainsworth’s Mill, was set in the town. The people were so welcoming and so pleased I had set my book there. Since then I have done events in Dublin, Carrickfergus, Florence, Livorno, Carrara, Massa, Fivizzano and shortly Madrid and Oundle Literary Festival. But I will never forget Cleator Moor.
Can you tell us about your upcoming book?
In County Down in 1767 an idealistic young viscount, not long returned from his Grand Tour, falls in love with his servant and clandestinely marries her, in defiance of class, law and creed; under the Penal Laws of the time intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics was forbidden. But the winds of change blow through Ireland, from America in one direction, revolutionary France in the other. Can their love survive tumultuous times?
Is anything in your book based on real life experiences or purely all imagination?
It’s imagination based on historical fact, and crucially, on historical places. The dying breed of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy formed part of my childhood. My father worked for the Public Record Office in Belfast and would take me with him on occasion when he went to visit these grand but often crumbling ‘Big Houses’ to persuade the owners to put their archives into safe keeping. I’d be sitting on a sofa, my little legs sticking out in front of me, listening to these pukka English voices belonging to people who had been born in Ireland but who belonged to a different world from that behind their demesne walls. James Goward belonged to that class, but he looked outside it when he fell in love with Mary.
What was your favourite chapter (or part) to write and why?
Hard to say. It might be the opening pages, where Mary’s father gives an account of his family to a Quaker benefactor, because it sets the scene: the poverty of Irish tenant farmers in constant hock to their landlords, the hard grind of their lives, their fear of losing their children to the Charter Schools.
How did you come up with the title?
Good question! I don’t remember. I think it just came, once I had Mary’s name.
Are there certain characters you would like to go back to, or is there a theme or idea you’d love to work with?
I’ve written books before where characters have resurfaced or been spoken of by other characters in later books, but I don’t think I will do this with Mary Kearney. I think this is mainly to do with the arc of the book, as it covers about thirty-five years and in some cases the entire lives of characters.
Do you have any advice to give to aspiring writers?
Read loads and write daily. It doesn’t matter how crappy you think your writing might be sometimes. You can go back and revise it the next day. You can’t revise a blank page.
What does your protagonist think about you?
She’s probably puzzled I wanted to write about her. All she wanted was to have a quiet life with the man she loved, until the turmoil of events in late eighteenth century Ireland upended all of that.
Would he or she want to hang out with you, the author, his creator?
Good question! I’d be honoured if any of them would. They do all feel real to me, to the extent that I found myself looking up the name of the hero of The Ballad of Mary Kearney in the indexes of the books I had used in my research. He wasn’t there, of course.
What has been the toughest criticism you’ve been given as an author?
It was perhaps intended as an observation more than a criticism. It came from a fellow student on my Masters in Creative Writing course who became a friend. It was that the way I expressed the research in my writing might leave some readers behind. I took that to heart and have strenuously avoided information dump ever since.
What has been the best compliment?
One that stands out was from a Romani lady. She said I had got all the details in The Gypsy Bride right. I’d really worked hard at that, because I was well aware that there had been a lot written about Romani people but not written by Romani people, until relatively recently.
Which character speaks the loudest, to you? Do any of them clamour to be heard over the others?
That’s probably James Goward, Mary’s husband. This is symptomatic of the times. Men had more agency and occupied more space. He is also impetuous though principled; Mary worries at what he gets involved in, and she’s right, as this ultimately leads to tragedy. Then there is Meg Samuels, wife of the Church of Ireland rector, timid and kind, who struggles to be heard above her drunken and disappointed husband, but who is a crucial figure in Mary’s life as she teaches her to read.
What sort of Starbuck’s coffee would your characters order? Simple coffee or some complicated soy-non-fat-extra-espresso-half-caff-nightmare?
I live in Italy so hardly ever drink Starbucks. I’ll have a caramel cold macchiato (or some name like that) if I am in a UK airport. Nice, but not really coffee. If they were alive now, I think my characters, apart from Letty Mitchelstown, would probably drink simple coffee.
What sort of writing environment do you create? I.e. music or not? Pen and paper or laptop/PC?
Laptop, and no music. I will write a scene in a notebook if it comes to me and then I’ll transcribe, but mostly it’s the laptop.
Is there a certain type of scene that is harder to write than other? Racy? Love? Action?
Not really. I’ve never written the kind of book that has guns-going-off action scenes anyway. I have written scenes of sexual assault and found them hard, especially in The Maiden of Florence, but if I’d softened those scenes or left them out I’d have been denying what actually happened to the heroine of that book (who was a real person). I can write love scenes. I even wrote a short erotic novel once, to see if I could (The Casanova Papers, as ‘Kate Zarrelli’). I managed it, though I’d never tried that stuff at home (pity, really).
Is there anything that you would like to say to your readers and fans?
In a way The Ballad of Mary Kearney was the book I always wanted to write but didn’t realise it for a long time. I learned about the United Irishmen and the rebellion of 1798 in primary school in Belfast in about 1973. A movement that encompassed all Irishmen, regardless of religion (and which in fact was led largely by Protestant intelligentsia) felt to me at that time and place as though it had been the last chance for Ireland. Somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people, mainly civilians, were killed in the space of a few weeks. A French general landed with his troops, but too late in the day to make a difference. Yet most people in the UK have never heard of it. Reader, I hope you are moved by Mary’s story.
Is there one subject you would never write about? What is it?
Anything involving the killing of a child or cruelty to animals. There’s enough horror of that kind in real life without having to invent it.
Do you have any strange writing habits? Like writing in the shower?
Can’t say I do! But I can write just about anywhere. Airports are quite good. I do a lot of writing sitting on my bed with a pile of pillows behind me and the headboard. It was good enough for Mark Twain.
If you could cast your characters in a Hollywood adaptation – who would you choose for which character?
Jonathan Bailey as James Goward and Emma Canning as Mary Kearney.
How important are the names in your book?
They are very important, in all my books. For Mary Kearney, because it’s set in the north of Ireland, a name is indicative of religion.
Did you choose them based on how they sounded or looked, or was it completely random?
No, they’re never random. For Mary Kearney and her husband James Goward, the source was a megalithic dolmen near Newry, Goward Dolmen. A local name for it is Pat Kearney’s Big Stone; Pat was once the caretaker and lived in a cottage on the site.
Do you have any name choosing resources you would recommend?
Because I am writing mainly historical fiction, set in times when people were less mobile than they are now, I look in graveyards for names that repeat, family graves grouped together. War memorials are another source but I never use a name in its entirety (so surname from one person, first name from another). For the heroine of my last contemporary novel (Coincidentally in Venice, by ‘Kate Zarrelli’) I looked up the most popular baby girl’s name in the UK for the year she was born: it’s Ashley. There are also websites with the commonest names per county. I’ve used them for Ireland and for Italy. A writer living in the UK and giving a hero who is from Tuscany the name of the proprietor of their local chip shop won’t do; what if that gentleman is from Naples?
Do you read your reviews?
Oh yes!
Do you respond to them, good or bad?
I’ve occasionally looked up someone on social media and sent them a thank you. Not everyone is easy to find.
Do you have any advice on how to deal with the bad?
Ignore them. You will never please all of the people all of the time. I once had someone criticise The Maiden of Florence for being an imitation of The Marriage Portrait. Guess what? I haven’t read it! I will some day.
What is your best marketing tip?
Network. Get yourself on stage at conference events. This could be about your book or because you’re interviewing a more established author. But most of all, write the next book. Keep feeding the pipeline.
What is your least favourite part of the writing or publishing process?
That’s really hard to say. Most editors I have really enjoyed working with, because their outside eye really helps in polishing up a book. I did have an editor come back to me once after I’d submitted a book set in the 1950s (and that was the agreement, as the advance synopsis clearly showed), saying that the marketing department wanted me to set it in the 1940s as they said that decade sold better. It really wasn’t going to be a case of taking out references to Suez and giving the heroine a different hairstyle. People behaved differently in the 1950s; they were morally very buttoned-up, stuffy even, in comparison to the post-war period. I wrote two new chapters for the beginning of the book describing the contrasting childhood of the lead characters, one on a hop farm near Canterbury, the other in a Nottinghamshire pit village. That satisfied Marketing.
Photo: Tony Bowden, Wikimedia Commons
Katherine Mezzacappa is Irish but currently lives in Carrara, between the Apuan Alps and the Tyrrhenian Sea. She wrote The Ballad of Mary Kearney (Histria) and The Maiden of Florence (Fairlight) under her own name, as well as four historical novels (2020-2023) with Zaffre, writing as Katie Hutton. She also has three contemporary novels with Romaunce Books, under the pen name Kate Zarrelli.
Katherine’s short fiction has been published in journalsworldwide. She has in addition published academically in the field of 19th century ephemeral illustrated fiction, and in management theory. She has been awarded competitive residencies by the Irish Writers Centre, the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators and (to come) the Latvian Writers House.
Katherine also works as a manuscript assessor and as a reader and judge for an international short story competition. She has in the past been a management consultant, translator, museum curator, library assistant, lecturer in History of Art, sewing machinist and geriatric care assistant. In her spare time she volunteers with a second-hand book charity of which she is a founder member. She is a member of the Society of Authors, the Historical Novel Society, the Irish Writers Centre, the Irish Writers Union, Irish PEN/PEN nahÉireann and the Romantic Novelists Association, and reviews for the Historical Novel Review. She has a first degree in History of Art from UEA, an M.Litt. in Eng. Lit. from Durham and a Masters in Creative Writing from Canterbury Christ Church. She is represented by Annette Green Authors’ Agency.
Author Links:
Website: https://katherinemezzacappa.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katmezzacappa/
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/katherinemezzacappa
Tour hosted by: The Coffee Pot Book Club
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