The light amongst the shadows

AFTER a break of 20 years, author, journalist, editor and passionate horse lover Candida Baker, has returned to the world of fiction with a tour de force.

Her intimate and poignant third novel, Light and Shadow, is a work of historical fiction based on one of the 19th century’s greatest scandals.

Baker’s story, however, didn’t start with the scandal, but with a single photograph.

“I’ve always loved horses and photography. The idea for the novel began because I fell in love with Eadweard Muybridge’s photograph of a galloping horse captured at the exact moment when all four hooves are off the ground,” she said.

“When you gallop on a horse, it’s as if you’re flying, and it was the first time I’d seen a photograph portraying that feeling.

“The desire to understand how Muybridge achieved that photograph just kept pulling me back in.”

When Baker discovered that the world-famous photographer had shot and killed his young wife’s lover, but was found not guilty on the grounds of justifiable homicide, she became even more intrigued.

“I discovered that Eadweard had married a young woman, Flora, who was 20 years younger than him,” she said.

“Not long after they married, she’d taken a lover, Harry, and within a short space of time, a child was born, and not long after that, Eadweard shot Harry dead.”

It was a man’s world in those days Baker said.

“Once Muybridge was acquitted – by an all-male jury – he quickly went off to South America,” she said.

“Flora died not long after, penniless and alone, and their son Florado went to an orphanage in New York. These are all known facts.”

But the facts began to create the fiction, and Baker extrapolated from that sad ending.

“I was very interested in the little boy. Was he Eadweard’s son, or was he in fact Harry’s? He could have been either,” she said.

 

“He languished in the orphanage until he was 10, when Eadweard suddenly reappeared, took him to a ranch in Texas and left him there, where Florado spent the rest of his life, dying in his 50s.”

Light and Shadow reimagines the historical story and its repercussions through the life of Rosa, Muybridge’s fictionalised granddaughter, exploring love and desire, identity and belonging, women’s agency, resilience and how the past impacts the present.

“In all my research, there was no mention that Florado ever had a relationship, but I began to ask myself, what if he did?” she said.

“If he spent his life working on a ranch in Texas, it could be possible that he might have formed a relationship with a Mexican housemaid, couldn’t it? And what if they’d had a child?”

The ‘what if’ questions led Baker to Rosa, either Muybridge’s or Harry’s possible granddaughter. At 80, Rosa sits down to write her memoir and the story of her family so that she can come to terms with her past.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ‘family’,” said Baker.

“Is it the family we’re born into, or is it the family we create during our lives?

“And what if you have a family, but it turns out that it isn’t the family you thought you had, as is the case with Rosa.”

Rosa leaps off the page in the novel, a strong and yet also vulnerable character, who finds herself on shaky ground more than once, including being seduced into a coercive relationship.

Rosa is repeatedly duped until she finally finds herself in the isolated beauty of the Snowy Mountains, completely alone.

“I think all of us experience a moment of extreme existential loneliness at some point in our lives, but I wanted it to be a pivotal moment for Rosa,” Baker said.

“Men throughout history who have committed wrongdoing are often Teflon-coated, bouncing back without, apparently, a care in the world.

“A lot of women carry shame in their souls, and bouncing back is not something we do easily.”

It’s in the Snowy Mountains that Rosa discovers a love of horses, a love that grows and sustains her through life’s challenges.

 

Horses are one aspect of Baker’s personality that she’s given to her character, and as the years have gone by, she’s become closer to her occasionally prickly heroine.

“Rosa had to love horses, that was a given,” Baker said.

“When I started writing the book, I was 55, and she was 80 – now I’m 70, and I’m only ten years away from her age.”

In the intervening years, Baker said she has come to understand much more about old age, loss, death, and grief.

“Unfortunately, death is inevitably in front of us all, but while we are alive, we have choices,” she said.

“I resonated with Rosa as a strong woman who has grown up with lies and duplicity all around her, which creates its own trauma, but who finally learns to make decisions that are right for her.”

Baker has written numerous books in the past two decades, but this novel was a long time in the making.

“It was a hard journey, and I almost gave up a few times, but something, or someone, mainly Rosa, prompted me to keep going,” she said.

“Rosa became very real to me, as did all my characters. That’s what I’m hoping for the reader, that they become as real to them as they became to me.”

For information, visit fairplaypublishing.com.au/products/light-and-shadow