In 2017, according to a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 39% of American couples met through online dating. It’s how my husband and I met in 2009. At our wedding half of the couples there had met online. Almost three hundred years earlier, though, Mancunian Helen Morrison was the…
Okay. Bear with me. I’ve been researching Lords Cricket Ground for my other life and, oh!, it’s rich pickings! Seriously. According to British History Online (see, I told you it was brilliant), cricket was quite the den of boozy, gambling inequity in the 1700s, quite … vulgar, if you will. But the establishment of Lord’s…
I use letters a lot in my book. I love their immediacy and how you can bring to life lesser characters in the story, giving them a unique voice through word choice and tone. It’s a peek behind the curtain. With the introduction of the Penny Post in 1840, cheap communication was suddenly available and…
I write a lot in my book about apports happening during seances. Indeed, Mrs Wood is considered the greatest apporter of her time. But what is an apport? Apports are objects that appear, seemingly from the Other Side – they can be as small as an acorn or as complicated as a complete tea set…
I’ve already written about the likelihood of Agnes Guppy, my inspiration for Mrs Wood, actually commissioning such a heinous act as an acid attack on Florence Cook, but why would it even be considered? How common was this type of barbarity in Victorian England? The first sulphuric acid attack on a person was reported in…
My protagonist, Mrs Wood, is a widow. The story begins in February 1873 and her husband has been dead for nearly three years. This means that she’s free from the more restrictive elements of the Victorian Mourning Periods. Mourning etiquette was hugely influenced by Queen Victoria during this period, her standards spreading into the grieving…
My protagonist lives and works in 1873 Notting Hill. The amount of time I spent trying to find the right place for her was SO much fun, but also VAST. Because one of the things I love about historical novels, or actually any kind of novel, is when it’s set somewhere I know. Being a…
The Past is a foreign country: they do things different there. The Go-Between, PJ Hartley Writing historical fiction is like writing any kind of fiction: your characters have needs, wants conflicts. They move about, travel, visit theatres and zoos, get drunk, fall in love. All the stuff of drama. But the difference for historical fiction…
My story centres on two Mediums working in 1870s London – Mrs Wood and Miss Bird. While both were born in my imagination, they were inspired by the apparent rivalry between two great Victorian Mediums who were working in the 1870s: Mrs Agnes Guppy-Volkmann and Miss Florence Cook. One, Agnes, was established and prominent, the…
About two-thirds of the way into my current book, my protagonist, Mrs Wood, visits an old friend and Medium who has recently been exposed, a catastrophe that has forced her from comfort and into a room above a second-hand clothes shop in Shepherd’s Bush. I saw this photo recently and it’s exactly as I imagined…
