She says she had not intended to use the British Broadcasting Corporation as background, thinking Fitzgerald had “cornered the market…in novels about the BBC during wartime.” Then she discovered there was “so much more material to be mined.”įitzgerald’s novel is set squarely in 1940, at a time when young employees “felt a certain pride scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe.” At a time when “ruth ensure trust, but not victory, or even happiness… Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth.” It was an “institution that could not tell a lie” when lies were ballast for survival.īehind the scenes in the dank basement bunkrooms of the BBC, a group of women, some as young as 16, are referred to as the Seraglio by a male-dominated workforce because the director of the Department of Recorded Programmes “found that he could work better when surrounded by young women.” In a closing author’s note, Atkinson credits Penelope Fitzgerald’s “gem of a novel” Human Voices with influencing the period and setting of her own novel.
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