![]() ![]() ![]() Cora and Will encounter a Fata Morgana, for example, an optical phenomenon and form of mirage. Perry’s fascination with where the line is drawn between what is natural, supernatural or spiritual drives her characters’ journey. “I am especially interested in the ‘sublime,’” explains Perry, “a key component of the Gothic and something which, according to the essayist Burke, is a sensation which moves us beyond merely experiencing a sense of beauty into a transport of awe, and wonder, and even terror.” ![]() ![]() The influence of the gothic tradition is pivotal. The original Essex serpent caused uproar in the real village of Henham-on-the-Mount in 1669, but Perry brings her serpent into being in the later years of the nineteenth century. Characters came quickly into Perry’s mind: emotional Cora and her ‘foil,’ the scientifically-minded vicar, Will Cora’s son, an autistic boy living long before such disorders could be diagnosed and Cora’s faithful admirer, Dr Garrett, the Imp, as she calls him, a London surgeon at the forefront of developments in medical science. The story of a young widow, Cora Seaborne, and the people of a village called Aldwater, falling prey to superstition that a dangerous serpent lurks in a local estuary, was instantly formed. When Sarah Perry’s husband told her the legend of a winged serpent menacing villages deep in the Essex countryside, her imagination was engaged. ![]()
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