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ABSTRACT
For authors of historical fiction, landscapes and ruins can suggest a means of reanimating the world inhabited by the subject and breaching any gaps in the historical record. In 1868, a Breton-born poet, Émile Péhant (1813–1876), wrote an eight-thousand-line epic about the life of fourteenth-century Breton noblewoman turned militant rebel, Jeanne de Belleville (1300–1359). Published during a popular resurgence of Breton culture and regional tourism, his narrative maps her adventures to specific and identifiable locations in his native countryside. I visited Brittany in October 2018 to encounter the landscapes and locales that were witness to her life and crimes, to accurately portray them in historical fiction. Using my itinerary as a chronological framework, this creative essay blends travel writing with historical biography to set out some of the known biographical details of Jeanne’s life alongside Péhant’s romanticised account. In doing so, it reflects on the role and potential of landscape in crafting immersive, authentic historical fiction.
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Notes on contributors
Ellen O’Brien
Ellen O’Brien was recently awarded a doctorate from The University of Notre Dame, Fremantle. Her usual area of research is domestic service in the English country house tradition but this paper emerged from a side-project combining the lives of women during fourteenth-century France with French poetry of the late-nineteenth century.