A supposedly unsinkable ship, an iceberg and a catastrophe that circulates through popular culture – the Titanic disaster is one of the most retold events in modern history. But familiarity comes at a cost. Repeated retellings tend to simplify what happened and reduce the real people involved to a basic story.

Retellings of the Titanic disaster often focus only on the sinking itself and forget what happened afterwards. Many lives were deeply affected by the disaster long after it ended, including people who were not even on the ship.

One such life is that of Helen Melville Smith, daughter of Captain Edward Smith, the man who commanded Titanic on its maiden voyage. While researching my new novel Daughter of the Titanic, I became increasingly struck not by the scale of the disaster itself, but by the quieter afterlives that followed it. Melville was 14 when her father went down with the ship in April 1912. Overnight, she inherited not only personal grief, but a public identity she had not chosen: the captain’s daughter, permanently attached to a disaster she did not witness but could not escape.

What followed has often been framed through the language of fate. Over the next decades, Melville’s husband died in an accident, her mother was killed in a road incident, her son died during the second world war and her daughter died of polio.

Taken together, these events........

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