Regency Rumours (29 page)
Authors: Louise Allen
When I had the opportunity to set a novel in a National Trust property I jumped at the chance and I had no doubt which great house I would choose. The only problem was trying to decide when in Wimpole’s long history I would set the book and who the hero and heroine would be.
The discovery that one of my favourite real-life Regency characters, Sir John Soane, was so much involved with the transformation of the house fixed my attention on the Third Earl and his family. Mr Soane, I decided, had taken one of the young men from his drawing office as his protégé and the Earl and Countess seemed to be a warm, caring couple who would offer sanctuary to a young lady in distress—my hero and heroine had arrived.
I stood in the Entrance Hall on a cold, drizzling afternoon, my nose pink, my toes decidedly damp and my clothes unflatteringly practical, and imagined who would be the person I would least like to see me looking like that. A devastatingly handsome young man, was the answer— and suddenly there was Giles Harker, snubbing Isobel with one chilly look down his perfect nose.
A privileged visit to the nursery rooms made me realise what Isobel’s secret was, an hour of
bird-watching at the lakes gave me the idea for Lizzie’s accident and I was able to hold on to my romantic image of the Hill House even after almost breaking a toe on one of the few remaining pieces of its masonry embedded in the grass. And, of course, my favourite room, the Bath House, had to be the setting for the scene when Isobel and Giles finally discover that they can be together after all.
I was born and bred in Hertfordshire, but spent many married years in Bedfordshire, on the border with Cambridgeshire, which is how I came to know Wimpole Hall so well.
My professional life was spent as a librarian and then head of property for a library service. I began writing with a work colleague after we noticed the huge popularity of Mills & Boon
®
titles and, once we had worked out—by trial and a lot of error— that we should be writing historical fiction, we jointly wrote eight novels as ‘Francesca Shaw’.
But that was very slow and work changes separated us geographically, so I began to write on my own as Louise Allen. After twenty books I stopped the ‘day job’ to write full-time, and
Regency Rumours
is my forty-third book for Mills & Boon.
Virtually all my novels have been set during the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, although the very first Francesca Shaw was an English Civil War story, and I have ventured into fifth-century Italy and late eighteenth-century India.
Now I live with my husband on the North Norfolk coast—which is lovely until the cold wind from Siberia reaches us! We travel as much as possible, gaining lots of ideas for plots and settings in the process, and I also collect early nineteenth-century prints and printed ephemera and books about the period.
As well as novels I enjoy researching the history of London, which has resulted in two books of historic walks and I am working with my husband on the story of the Great North Road during the coaching years of the nineteenth century. That’s what I love about history—you never reach the end of your discoveries.
What do you love about being a writer?
Most of all I love the storytelling. I am not a writer who can sit down and plot a novel in great detail in advance: if I do that I find I have told myself the story and the freshness has gone. The downside is the horrible moment when I realise I don’t know what happens next—but sleeping on it usually works!
I love the moment when it really starts to flow and all the pictures in my head come to life on the page. Getting the finished book is a great delight too—finding a world I have created there on crisp pages inside a gorgeous cover.
Hearing from readers is a constant pleasure. Perhaps they have fallen for my hero, or they identify with my heroine. Sometimes, movingly, reading something I have written has helped them through a difficult patch.
Where do you go for inspiration?
I have never had to go looking for it—the problem is always that there is too much in my head at once, clamouring to be written about! Situations—the ‘what ifs?’—can come from anywhere: newspaper articles, historical research, TV programmes, gravestones, prints or artefacts. All scatter little seeds that grow and then combine, when I least expect it. Characters sometimes appear from the situations, or they may look at me out of a portrait, or I hear their voices. Sometimes they even walk into a book, fully formed from somewhere. Jack Ryder, the hero of
The Dangerous Mr Ryder
, turned up in another book altogether when I was expecting an elderly Bow Street Runner. Jack promptly set about to out-hero the hero, so I had to deal firmly with him and promise him a book of his own.
How important is historical accuracy to you as a novelist?
It is very important to me, both as an author and as a reader. I find myself jerked right out of something I am reading if I come across an anachronism and, as a writer, I feel a sense of obligation to the past to try and get it right.
You can’t always, of course. Besides the fact that we will never know all of the truth about the past, some aspects and attitudes would simply be unacceptable to modern readers.
I try and work around them, rather than distort the facts. My heroines tend to be a little older, or perhaps come from unconventional back-grounds, which means I can give them more freedom than most respectable young women would have had. Women ran businesses during the Georgian period, including one of the largest stagecoach companies in London, and widows had more financial freedom.
With language I work hard to avoid words or expressions that would not have been used at the time rather than to use consciously ‘period’ language. A large set of dictionaries lives by my desk, although sometimes the age of a word might surprise me: Jane Austen uses the word ‘jargon’, for example.
How much research do you do before you start writing?
I tend to start writing and then identify what
I need to research, rather than the other way around—although I do work out the geography of where the opening is set in some detail. With an imaginary town, village or house I will probably draw a map or plan. If there is a journey I use original route books, maps and coaching timetables.
With
Regency Rumours
, once I knew the date and the main historical characters, I needed to know what the house and park were like at the time and glean what information I could about the real people who would appear in my story.
Usually I know enough about the period to start and then look up things as I need to—mostly using my research collection of almost a thousand books. I know now what I
don’t
know and have to be very careful to check: politics, for write every example, is a grey area!
When I go into completely new territory, as I did with a book set in 410AD, I established the chronology of the real events and wrote leaving blanks, or highlighting areas in different colours where I needed to go back and fact-check. What was the name of the road out of Rome the Visigoths would have taken? What was the layout of a public bathhouse? Were togas worn in 410AD? And so on. By doing that I try and avoid the research taking over the story and dominating my characters.
What one piece of advice would you give to a writer at the start of their career?
Not one piece, but three. Firstly, read everything you can get your hands on: first for pleasure and then with an analytical eye.
Why
did that make you laugh, make you cry, make you identify with the heroine or impatiently flick over a few pages?
Secondly, develop your writing muscles. Try and write every day, even if it is only a few paragraphs, and then apply that same analytical eye to what you have written.
And, thirdly, don’t despair if it takes a while.
No one manages to play a musical instrument, run a marathon or paint a great picture the first time they try. Writing is a craft and an art and it has to be practised.
Where and when?
I have a heated studio in the garden that has my desk, PC and my library. What it doesn’t have is a kettle and I have yet to persuade my husband that I should have a flagpole to run up a signal for ‘send tea and cake’. Because I spent so many years writing in the evening after work I find it very hard to write in the morning or early afternoon. I can do proofreading and so on then, but not the creative stuff, so not much gets written before four o’clock.
Paper and pen, or straight on to the PC?
My handwriting is dreadful and I think too fast to get the story down coherently, so I write straight on to the computer using a very fast, very inaccurate, ‘three fingers and two thumbs’ typing style. I read back every few paragraphs and sort out the typos. The next day I edit what I wrote the day before. When I get about a third of the way through I revise from the beginning and again at halfway and two-thirds. Then I let it settle for a few days and revise right through.
Music or silence?
Silence. I can’t work with music on because I find myself listening to it and not to what I am supposed to be thinking about.
Do you have a writing schedule?
I couldn’t manage without one! When I have
agreed my deadline with my editor, I work out how many days I have free before that date and divide my target number of words by that figure. Then the first day I write that many words and some over. The next day I recalculate and, again, aim to go over target. I end up writing about a thousand words a day, and that gives me time at the end for final revisions and also builds in a little space for unexpected events —getting flu or revisions for a previous book arriving.
Coffee or tea?
Definitely tea! Assam, for preference, with loose leaves and made in the pot.
The National Trust was founded in 1895 by three Victorian philanthropists—Miss Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley.
‘The need of quiet, the need of air, the need of exercise, and…the sight of sky and of things growing seem human needs, common to all men.’
Octavia Hill (1838-1912)
Concerned about the impact of uncontrolled development and industrialisation, they set up the Trust to act as a guardian for the nation. For more than a hundred years the National Trust has looked after places which connect the present and the future to the past. It works to preserve and protect the coastline, countryside and buildings of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
The Trust does this in a range of ways: through practical caring and conservation, through learning and discovery, and through encouraging millions of people to visit and enjoy their national heritage.
Without its many members, visitors and volunteers, it would be unable to carry on with its work. However, it is not just through visiting properties that people help out. The Trust’s many commercial activities include National Trust tearooms and shops, and also holiday cottages—an increasingly popular choice for places to stay.
The Trust protects over seven hundred miles of coastline and in total it looks after 626,051 acres (253,349 hectares) of countryside, moorland, beaches and coastline.
Among the historic properties in the Trust’s care
are two hundred and fifteen houses and gardens, forty castles, seventy-six nature reserves, six World Heritage Sites, twelve lighthouses, and forty-three pubs and inns.
The millions of objects in the care of the National Trust reflect its diversity. Conservation staff and volunteers care for an astonishing range of structures and contents—from over twenty-six sets of samurai armour and nineteen magnificent paintings by Turner, to the Oscar awarded to George Bernard Shaw, the national collection of lawnmowers, fifty-seven meat strainers and a photograph album the size of a postage stamp.
An estimated fifty million people visited the National Trust’s open-air properties in 2012.
Visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk to find out more.
© National Trust 2013
Adapted from
Houses of the National Trust
by Lydia Greeves
(National Trust Books, 2013)
When Rudyard Kipling visited his daughter Elsie at Wimpole, a few months after she and her husband Captain George Bambridge took up residence at the house in 1936, he was moved to remark that he hoped she had not bitten off more than she could chew. Two years later the Bambridges embarked on the restoration and refurnishing of the largest house in Cambridgeshire. From 1713 to 1740 the house was the property of Edward Harley, Second Earl of Oxford, who entertained a brilliant circle of writers, scholars and artists there, Swift and Pope among them. Lord Harley commissioned eminent architect James Gibbs to build a strikingly opulent baroque chapel. Gibbs also designed the long library to house Harley’s exceptional collection of books and manuscripts, the largest and most important ever assembled by a private individual in England and later to form the nucleus of the British Library.
Wimpole’s next owner, Philip Yorke, First Earl of Hardwicke, commissioned architect Henry Flitcroft to design a gallery as a setting for his finest paintings. Now used to display pictures particularly associated with the house, such as
The Stag Hunt
by John Wootton, who frequently visited Wimpole in Lord Harley’s time, the room has long sash windows framed by red curtains and its grey-green walls help to create an atmosphere that is both restful and warm.
Wimpole’s most individual interior, John Soane’s Yellow Drawing Room, was added fifty years later, in the early 1790s, for Philip Yorke’s
great-nephew, the Third Earl. Running from the north front into the centre of the house, the room opens out into a domed oval at the inner end that is lit from a lantern in the roof above. Yellow silk on the walls sets off blue upholstery on the gilt chairs and on the long settees curved round two semicircular apses on the inner wall, with a large painting of cherubs at play above the chimneypiece that divides them. The overall effect is of a chapel transformed into a room of exceptional elegance and grace.