Tasha Alexander's website says that she's a writer of "smart historical fiction," and the description is apt. Her Lady Emily novels, set in the late 19th century, bring together well-plotted mysteries, evocative settings, and a protagonist who is at once true to her era and energetically resistant to its conventions. In addition to the eight Lady Emily books, Alexander is the author
of the novel
So19: Talk about your
inspiration for the series. Why historical fiction, to begin with the most
basic question?
TA: One of the
many beauties of historical fiction is that it allows us to look at humanity
with a clearer focus than if we’re talking about us, now. The stakes seem
higher when you set a story in your own time. You feel like you’re telling it
about yourself. When you get some distance, it’s much easier to look at what’s
going on. Of course, what you realize is that the fundamental values of human
beings haven’t really changed. The historical novel lets you bask in—or revolt
against—something without feeling that it’s so personal, even though you know in
the back of your mind it is personal.
So19: The novels are set in the very late 19th century. Why did you make that specific choice?
So19: To touch on a
more frivolous note, it must have been fun devising the fictional estate, Anglemore Park
So19: The novels are set in the very late 19th century. Why did you make that specific choice?
TA: I guess what
really appealed to me about the 1890s, that late part of the Victorian era, was
how many things were converging. You’ve got women in England United States
The whole Victorian era is littered with wonderful,
eccentric people…real iconoclasts. You get these really interesting individuals
who are pushing for social change. But until you get a broader base of the
population supporting that change, pushing for that change, and eventually
demanding that change, it can’t yet happen. So the period is full of contrast.
You have Gertrude Bell traveling around Persia
We have an idea of what we think the Victorians were
like—boy, do we think we know what the Victorians were like. Everybody has an
opinion on that, and is pretty confident that they are correct. But if you
actually explore documents from the time, you discover that they were a lot
less stuffy and prudish than their Edwardian grandchildren would have you
believe.
So19: Your main
character, Lady Emily, allows you—and readers—to look at women’s lives in the
era from an intimate perspective.
TA: In the
series, I wanted a young woman who started off in really plush, cozy, pampered
circumstances, an absolutely top-of-the-society girl. What is going to get her
from that place to being a woman who is intellectual, and enlightened, and
cares about social change? That was the whole idea of the series when I was
starting and it still is. Each case she works on is helping Emily come closer
to being that enlightened woman.
So19: In a previous
interview, you talked about not making Emily unrealistically radical for her
era.
TA: Occasionally
I’ll get an email from a reader who’s reading one of the first books and wants
Emily to reject all of the obsolete conventions of her time. But that’s not how
people are. A hundred years from now people are going to look back at our
society and say, what on Earth were these people thinking? Why did they not see
what needed change, what wasn’t the way it should be? But you don’t reject overnight
everything that you’ve grown up believing.
The suffrage movement was a great example of this. Some
members thought that women really did need to go after the right to vote. But
another element, even though they identified themselves as strong supporters of
women’s rights, didn’t feel voting rights were necessary for women. It felt
almost insulting to them, as though people were saying that their husbands
weren’t capable of voting on their behalf.
In the first book, I showed Emily deciding to stay in the
dining room after dinner, to drink port and smoke a cigar. Normally, the
gentlemen would do that, while the ladies would quietly retreat to the drawing
room to shield themselves from any interesting conversation that might be
taking place. It sounds simple to say, “I’m actually going to stay in my own
dining room and drink this port that I also actually own.” But back then, it
would have been really a bold statement.
So19: There’s an
interesting dynamic between Emily and her husband, Colin Hargreaves. He’s
supportive, he believes in her, yet he clearly has moments of discomfort about
what she does.
TA: Obviously,
you need tension in books. I didn’t want the primary tension to be their
relationship, but of course there are going to be issues. No matter how
wonderful Colin is, he’s a Victorian man. He’s gone into this marriage with his
eyes wide open. He knows what Emily’s like, knows that she’s going to be
independent, knows that she’s going to keep doing this investigative work. We’ve
all done that: gone into something thinking yes, I accept this. But at the end
of the day, when the person is in danger or something bad happens, then you
start thinking, wait, hang on. And
he’s living in a society where he actually does have all the power in the
relationship. He can put his foot down and say no. Though of course that
doesn’t go over very well with Emily.
I think on the one hand, he wants to be more modern than
that. But on the other hand, when the person you love more than anything is in
danger, and you actually could stop that person, it’s very tempting to, even
when you know it’s not the right thing to do.
So19: Emily travels
to places like Vienna and Normandy England
TA: I wanted her
to go somewhere more exotic, where she would see a very different kind of
culture, a different society. I thought that this particular place would be
interesting, because I assumed that Ottoman women would be so much more
repressed than the English women at the time. But in fact, when I started doing
the research, I found that it wasn’t quite that simple. Yes, Ottoman women were
veiled. But they could own property, they could demand a divorce, they could
still see their children if they were divorced, they would get money if they
were divorced. In truth, they had more rights than an Englishwoman of the
period. I read the letters of two different Englishwomen who lived there, one
in the 18th and one in the 19th century. They talk about
the freedoms these women had. It turned my preconceptions about the period
completely on their head.
So19: In your latest
book, Behind the Shattered Glass, you
bring Emily home to the heart of England, and put her amid a wide range of
people of different classes and roles.
TA: There’s a
domestic reason that makes it important for Emily to be at home—the birth of
her twins. But it’s not simply that. I think it’s important in her development
as a character to travel, to see other parts of the world and other cultures,
to meet people who are not of her class and not her servants. But you’ve got to
then take all that experience and knowledge back into your own world. How do
you bring these new views into that existing world?
So19: Emily is now a
mother, at a time when parenting practices were very different from
contemporary ideals on that subject. How did you research this aspect of her
emerging story, and what most surprised or interested you?
TA: The typical
mother of Emily’s time and class would have very little to do with the raising
of her children. Nurses and nannies handled the daily routine, and children
generally were brought downstairs to be viewed by their parents for a short
period of time each day. Often boys were packed off to boarding school by the time
they were eight—it’s easy to see why many kids felt more fondly toward their
nannies than their mothers and fathers.
While doing research, I was surprised to find that many,
many of her contemporaries were appalled by the way Lady Randolph Churchill
dealt with her sons, especially Winston, when they were young. An American
heiress, Jennie relied on nannies and boarding school (which she rarely
visited) as much as her British compatriots. But she also allowed them to give
opinions and speak freely. This was thought to be in extremely bad form, and
Winston was considered spoiled as a result. Daisy, Countess of Warwick,
commented that Jennie, “true to her American training…did not check Winston
when he asked questions or argued with her.”
So19: You often
include some kind of alternate perspective—journals, letters, the 15th-century
manuscript in Death in the Floating City.
In this new book, Behind the Shattered
Glass, a servant’s viewpoint provides a glimpse of an otherwise hidden
world.
TA: Right from
the first book, I knew I wanted to add a servant’s point of view. But I wanted
to use it only when Emily’s intellectual development was far enough along. She
couldn’t look at servants as she would have while growing up, which would have
been as furniture.
The whole master/servant relationship in England
By late Victorian times, you’re starting to get people who
reject the idea of working in service like their parents did. On the other
hand, you have people who still love that work. In Behind the Shattered Glass, Emily’s butler has that point of view.
He’s immensely proud of his work, he holds the top household position for a
very well respected family, and he lives very nicely in relative terms. He
looks at people who say they’re going to work elsewhere and wonders how that
really puts them in charge of their lives. Yes, they can choose where to live
and where to work, but their options were limited and often unappealing. Work
in Victorian factories was far from pleasant, and a man like Davis
would cringe at the idea of living in a slum in London ’s
East End . However, people who chose a path
other than service often felt that they had much more control over their
circumstances. There’s no right or wrong—both sides of the argument had valid
points. But in the end, very few members of the working class remained in
service after World War I. An overwhelming number of people eventually rejected
the idea that they were born to serve a higher class—and who could argue with
that?
TA: While doing
research, I visited as many country estates as I could and wound up making
Anglemore completely different from what I’d expected I would when I started. I
had thought it would be like Castle Howard, a house that has played large in my
imagination ever since I saw Brideshead
Revisited when I was about ten years old. But when I started exploring a
variety of great houses, the ones I liked the best were the ones that had grown
over time, kind of sprawled from their medieval origins.
My fictional Anglemore
Park Yorkshire .
There, the kitchen has a wonderful vaulted roof, the housekeeper has stunning
views of the gardens, and the servants’ hall radiated warmth. These were not
cramped, dark spaces—instead, they were well-lit, pretty, and comfortable.
So19: Is it too early
to ask about the next installment?
TA: Next year’s
book is done and dusted. It came from two bits of research I had done
separately, years ago, neither of which fit into what I was working on at the
time. The first arose when I was doing research for my second novel. I came
across a fantastic archive of photographs taken at the Devonshire House Ball in July, 1897, held to celebrate Queen Victoria
The second item was Huguette Clark’s 2011 obituary in the New York Times. Miss Clark, heiress to a
$300 million fortune, died at 104 in a hospital in New York
The book—tentatively titled The Counterfeit Heiress, though
that could change—opens at the Devonshire House Ball, where Emily and her dear
friend Cécile are looking for an old friend of Cécile’s, Estella Lamar. Cécile
has had limited contact since her friend abandoned Paris
two decades ago for adventures in Egypt ,
India , Persia London
and Paris