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While it's cruel and unfair that roles for actresses start drying up the minute they start looking a bit worn and wrinkly, there is an upside. For if London-based Kiwi Barbara Ewing had been acting flat out she might never have made the discovery that she's also a talented writer. And then we'd have been deprived of great reads like her well-known novel The Actresses as well as her latest book, a fabulous Victorian melodrama called The Mesmerist (Sphere, $36.99).
Ewing, who is set to come home to New Zealand to promote the book, first had the idea for it while she was researching her previous novel Rosetta.
"I kept finding references to mesmerism and one corner of my brain thought it would be interesting to pursue," she says.
Mesmerism was the precursor to hypnotism, a sort of trance-like state that patients were put in for healing or pain relief. The more Ewing researched it the more hooked on the subject she became.
"I live within walking distance of the British Library so it's like my office," she explains. "I find that one book there tends to lead me to another. I ended up reading these really big tomes from the last century."
Initially sceptical about the whole business, Ewing found her attitude changing. "I thought, hang on, they were using this in hospitals before they had anaesthesia.
"There were big hospitals in London in the 1840s and they were doing major surgery like removing women's breasts but there was no ether or chloroform. That was when mesmerism was at its peak.
"So I went in thinking it would be a laugh and came out believing it was the real thing. Essentially it's the passing on of positive energy from one person to the other."
The mesmerist in Ewing's novel starts out, however, as a con artist. Miss Cordelia Preston is a beautiful but ageing actress who is tiring of the struggle to find work. So she sets herself up as a lady phreno-mesmerist and begins advising young women who are about to embark on marriage. She becomes rich and successful but eventually the dark secrets in her past come back to haunt her and Cordelia finds herself in the centre of a storm of scandal.
The Mesmerist is the best kind of historical fiction.
It brings early Victorian London, with its stinking streets and terrible fogs, alive. It has cruel lovers, lost children and some wonderful comic characters.
And, just like The Actresses, it also presents a rather bleak view of the future for women in the profession once they're no longer young and perky.
The obvious conclusion is that Ewing, who is best known for her role in 80s British comedy series Brass, feels bitter at the turn her own acting career took once she started to age.
"I was lucky that I had a good career and was able to support myself and was in a couple of hits,' she says. "Then when Glenda Jackson turned 50 she said she wasn't going to sit around and wait to be offered the part of someone's wife or mother, she was going to become an MP, I nearly fainted. I thought, I don't want that to happen to me either."
Ewing had had a novel called Strangers published back in the 70s so thought she'd try her hand at another one.
"I went in rather blindly, thinking it was easy,' she admits. "When I started working on The Actresses people kept telling me I couldn't write a book about middle-aged women because who would publish it? I put all my bile and anger about what happens to older actresses into that book. But actually I don't feel bitter myself and I do still work as an actress, although I don't get offered much.'
It's ironic that Ewing has ended up writing historical fiction since she failed the subject at school.
"We were learning about the kings and queens of England and I remember looking out of the window and thinking, I can't be doing with this. In those days we didn't learn New Zealand history.'
Although she still thinks of herself as a New Zealander, Ewing left in the 60s when she travelled to London to train at the Royal Academy of Drama Arts. She lives there still, in Virginia Woolf's old neighbourhood Fitzrovia, and daily walks the Bloomsbury streets she describes in The Mesmerist.
Like many actresses of her age, she refuses to give away much about her personal life.
But she does let slip that she returns to New Zealand often. In fact, some of the research for The Mesmerist was done here and she says she is particularly grateful to Dr Bob Large of the Auckland Regional Pain Service for the contribution he made to her understanding of mesmerism.
There's an enormous amount of interesting detail in The Mesmerist but you can, if you want, just enjoy the novel as a romantic romp through the early 19th century.
"All of my books you can read just for a read,' says Ewing, 'but there is always more going on underneath.'
- Detours, HoS
