And, of course, I don’t have the decades of experience that others do. “I certainly feel more concerned about my place in the industry,” she says, “than some young male historians who have fewer degrees than I do.
Her publisher leapt at her idea for Messalina, which may suggest an easy route to success – yet Cargill-Martin tells me that a degree of imposter syndrome nonetheless persists. She has been criminally underrated.”Ĭargill-Martin was brought up in London, and studied at St Paul’s Girls School, where she began her children’s book series (which includes Diary of an Accidental Witch) with her mother Perdita, a former lawyer. It was only afterwards that I began to feel anger. “I wrote it because it’s a cracking story. “I didn’t write this book with a revisionist feminist agenda,” Cargill-Martin tells me. For in the years after her death in AD 48, Messalina was damned as the “Whore Empress”: an insatiable nymphomaniac, the very archetype of corrupting female desire. It’s both a primer on the ghoulish excesses of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and a sharp reimagining of one of the most infamous women in the ancient world. Messalina is a biography of the wife of Claudius (AD 41-54), the fourth Roman emperor. The classicist, halfway through a PhD at Oxford, is already a successful children’s novelist, and is about to release a much-heralded history book. Few 24-year-olds have achieved as much as Honor Cargill-Martin.
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