Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Deanna Raybourn author of The Impossible Imposter, which is continuing in her Veronica Speedwell series. It's available now. It is set in the 1880s, and it is about our hero, Veronica, who is very much a free spirit and a lot of what she does goes against how we imagine a traditional woman living her life in the 1880s. And I think a lot of readers would probably feel like it was truly a work of fiction. However, Veronica is based on a real person; she's based on Margaret Fontain. So if you'd like to tell us a little bit about how you discovered Margaret and decided to write about her in the form of Veronica.
Deanna: I graduated a long, long time ago with a degree in English and history, I double majored and it was a university with a really small history department. So we didn't do anything aside from basically Western European history. And it was very dude centric. It was very war centric. And so I kind of left that program feeling like I wanted to know a lot more. And I started doing a deep dive into Victorian female explorers. And for whatever reason, that was just this kind of tiny little niche in history that I thought was just really, really fascinating. And one of the Victorian explorers that I was just thoroughly enthralled by was Margaret Fountain. She was a lepidopterist. She was a butterfly hunter, and she ended up earning a living at a time when genteel women weren't doing a whole lot of earning a living, right?
I mean, it was considered to be socially beyond the pale if you had to make money, but this was an occupation that didn't get you terribly dirty. You weren't in a factory, you weren't in a coal mine, you weren't doing anything like that. And it wasn't considered to be degrading in the way that shop work might have been considered to be lowly. You could still go out and hunt butterflies and pretend to be a bit of a lady. One of the reasons that we know this is because of the fact that when you sold your butterflies to collectors, you would charge in guineas as opposed to pounds. Guineas are always the currency of luxury items. You know, you would pay your dressmakers bill in guineas, you'd pay for your expensive wines and your jewelry and guineas, but you'd pay for your firewood most likely in pounds and shillings.
And so Margaret used to make a pretty good living doing this. She could earn in a month's time well over what a ladies maid would make in an entire year. And she was very much her own mistress. She was kind of boss of her own life. She traveled the world, she butterflied on six continents and she had relationships with men. And I mean that in every sense of the word all around the world, she had extra marital relationships. She had interracial relationships, the sorts of liaisons that you don't think your average Victorian woman is going to be indulging in, but Margaret did. The great thing about Margaret is like a lot of Victorians, she left diaries and journals of her travels and what she got up to. And she's really frank about these amorous exploits as well as her butterflying. And the way she wrote was fantastic because she wove them in.
So one minute you're reading about her chasing this lovely little butterfly through the Qatar jungle. And the next minute her guide has his hands down her dress. It just was so bonkers that I loved it. It was really so unexpected that I thought, you know, if I ever write another Victorian character, cause I already had a Victorian series - the Lady Julia Gray books that were being published. I thought if I create another Victorian series character, I want her to be inspired by Margaret. So Veronica Speedwell is a lepidopterist with a very independent and Intrepid spirit, very much lives life by her own lights. And in that respect, she's similar to Margaret. That's probably where the similarities end though.
Mindy: You know, it's fascinating. I also have an English degree and I minored in history. I also have a philosophy degree. So I'm a really, really useful person at Trivial Pursuit. Everything else. I mean, practical applications, things like that. I mean, I can argue people down to the ground and have a great time doing it. But, my resume and job searches are usually a little awkward. What's amazing to me is that you do run into these women in history that aren't fitting what we think of as the mold. And it does kind of make you reconsider the mold. I think very often we have a lot of preconceived notions and, and maybe that is another arm of patriarchy at work telling us the way that women were supposed to be behaving. And sometimes I have to wonder if it is more prescriptive than it is descriptive.
Deanna: Absolutely. You know, the image we have of the Victorian period is very, very much influenced by what was considered to be aspirational. What was considered to be the goal, which is this angel of the domestic hearth. That's what women are. Women are put up on this pedestal; they're gentle and sweet and demure. And that was what men wanted them to be. That's the goal is to have a woman like that. So yeah, the stories about women who aren't like that tend not to be at the forefront. We have this picture that Victorians were all super straight laced and nobody got up to sex, that they were putting skirts on the chair legs and never saying the word out loud, because it was rude. If you look at the actual records, more than 50% of the brides in England in the lower classes were pregnant on their wedding day. Okay, well, somebody was getting up to something, You know, I mean somebody wasn't, shrouding their chair legs.
And if you look at the upper classes, you see a very similar situation, you know. Amongst the aristocracy, once you get lower than Victoria and Albert, you're looking at people who had country house parties, which were not that different from key swap parties in the seventies. There's nothing new under the sun. But there is this image that this era was completely buttoned up and everybody was pure. And there were things that were just completely never, ever spoken about and much less ever done. And the truth is no, they were being done, not openly done. And a lot of this goes back to Prince Albert himself because his mother was kind of kicked out of the family when he was about five years old because she had an extra marital affair and this had a huge, huge impact on him.
He was a very moral, very upright sort of man. And so when he married Victoria, who came from this incredibly wild and wooly Hanoverian family that got up to all kinds of shenanigans, he had this much more straightforward, upright, moral posture. And that was how they were going to kind of direct their family. And that was going to be the aspiration for the nation. And they failed wildly where their oldest son was concerned. But you know, it really did create this picture.
This is where you see this huge, huge rise in consumer culture. The very beginnings of our celebrity culture that we have now, where, you know, pictures of the Royal family are, are in the newspapers. And you know, so these pictures are being circulated with an idea of - look at this beautiful, pink cheeked, freshly scrubbed family, having a picnic in the Scottish Highlands and everybody's behaving themselves. And everybody takes that as the model for how they're supposed to be living their lives, that this is the picture that you aspire to. And the reality was, usually quite, quite different.
Mindy: Yes, you're right. We do think about Victorians when we think about a lot of these staples of behavior, but I do a lot of genealogy and my family has been here, like where I live in Ohio for a very, very long time. And what you're saying about women being pregnant when they got married, I was teasing my mother because she's from a very, very long line of German people. And we live in a very, very heavily German community. Actually. It's still very German. I told her, I was like, you know, what's really interesting about people 200 years ago around here is that their gestation period was actually shorter. And mom was like, oh really? And like yeah, it appears to be about six months.
Deanna: So crazy, all those premature babies,
Mindy: Like I dunno how we got all the big strapping Germans out of it because everybody was born three months early, Mom. And my mom would just be like, Oh, Mindy! And I'm like, dude, everybody was going out to the haymow, Mom. Everybody.
Deanna: It's so much more common than we think it is.
Mindy: Yes it is. It's especially interesting to me, like as a woman, see that behavior swept underneath the rug and, and of course not celebrated, I would come across instances where, especially if they were like out on the edges of the frontier, if you were like, it's time to get married, they would be living together. And you just kind of wait for a minister to come to your area and then you get married. Because you don't have time to wait for the blessing of God. You know, people have always been people and we've always had genitals.
Deanna: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I come from a genealogy heavy family too. And my parents were just doing some digging and literally last week discovered that, you know, a great grandmother so many times over, we knew that she had married this particular gentleman. Well, they went digging into the census records and found out that she had two illegitimate children when she married him and that her mother had been the housekeeper to this gentleman. And so all of a sudden you can start to put the pieces together and say, oh, well, those were probably his kids. Nothing is as straightforward as you think it is.
And basically the Victorian age is when advertising really started to take off. And that's when you see the idea that you could construct this picture of perfection and sell people products based on how close it could get you to that picture. What are we gonna hold up as our ideal? What are our standards going to be? That's very much where this came from.
And you know, I think there's a certain element too, because you have a lot of people moving into the middle class for the first time during this time period. I think there is a kind of an ideal of, we need to be super clean. We need to kind of wash the dirt literally off of the shopkeeping and the factory work and the, the more practical hands on type of work. And so that's why you see so many ads for things like soap. That's why you see the idea of clean bodies being clean morality. And this really uptight overlap between scrubbing everything to death. Of course, germ theories are coming out during this century too, right? So you have people suddenly realizing, oh, I really do need to wash things, if I wanna be healthy. It's this really interesting kind of cocktail of what advertisers are pushing and, and where the morality is going.
And there's a return to church because people are getting scared by Darwin and his ideas. And they're thinking, oh, well, we better go back to Jesus, double down on religion. And this really interesting time period where there are new ideas and old ideas, and they all keep coming into conflict and the pendulum keeps swinging. It's such a fascinating time period to dig into because the further we get into our century, the more you realize when you look back, there really is nothing new under the sun.
People have always wrestled with the same questions. How do we use technology? How do we open our borders to immigrants and integrate them? How do you make your way in the world? How do you take care of people who are less advantaged than you are? What rights should women have? Everybody's rights and everybody's responsibilities and how society functions, are questions we never solve. We just keep asking them over and over again. I think human beings are kind of hardwired to like the idea of story. And so we like to fit things into a narrative. We like tidy endings and we like lessons to be learned from our stories. And if you've got an English degree, you do this stuff in your sleep, man. That, and Jesus imagery.
Mindy: I'll find you Jesus. And I can probably locate 20 to 30 penises as well.
Deanna: Oh my God. You know, that's day one on your English degree, find the phallus.
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Mindy: Well coming back to Veronica then and how she's moving through the world, whether it’s necessarily how the reader expects and her behavior may not necessarily be what the reader expects. How do you go about combining these two things? What the reader probably expects and how things may have actually been? Plus of course, Veronica moving through the world, how she's interacting with some of the expectations versus the reality?
Deanna: My rule of thumb, when deciding whether or not to put something into a book, it doesn't even have to be particularly plausible. It just has to be possible. If it was historically possible, then I'll include it. I don't mind at all the idea that Veronica could push people to broaden their thinking a little bit about what Victorian women may have been like. I love that idea, in fact, because I think there's so many women whose stories have gone unclaimed and untold and unshared, and we need those women. We need to know that there were women who were engaged in astronomy and women who were engaged in philosophy and women who were engaged in all sorts of different occupations. Because I think that those are the women that we look to and say, oh, okay, well, you know, she threw herself under a horse race and got trampled to death in order to secure the vote for women. Maybe I can make a donation to the League of Women Voters. You get a sense of perspective that I think it's essential to remember the people who have paved the way for us.
And a lot of times there were women in the background who were doing these things and paving the way and making sacrifices. And we don't know their stories. And I feel like that does such a grave disservice to them. So I love the idea that Veronica might encourage people to go and find out a little bit more about what our fore mothers were getting up to. I kind of figured out early on that reader expectations about a particular period or particular historical facts were something that I couldn't spend too much time worrying about. My first series character Lady Julia Gray is the daughter of an Earl. And so there's a very specific way that she's supposed to be addressed.
She's married to a Duke and the notes that I would get from people saying, well, you did this wrong. And then I would have to respond with citations from Jane Austen, from Burke’s Peerage explaining why no, it's actually correct. And that's when I realized people, a lot of times will magpie their knowledge, taking, you know, little pieces here and there. And a lot of times it may be from something like a Jane Austen adaptation, or it may be from a book that was written in order for you to have fun. It wasn't necessarily written to teach you something. You know, it's not a nonfiction book about English aristocracy. Maybe it's a Regency romance that is fantastic, but got the titles just a little bit wrong. So I realized that a lot of times people were taking those things as gospel. And so I thought, okay, all I'm gonna be able to do is write it as correctly as I can.
And if people think that it's anachronistic or that it's wrong, I know it's not. Those are things, sometimes if readers ask me, I'm happy to explain. I used to explain this stuff a lot. When I kept a blog regularly, I would do blog posts about it. This is a question I get a lot - here you go. It's always this little dance that you do with readers, trying to make sure that above all you're entertaining them. If they wanted to be educated or informed about something, they would go get a nonfiction book. They want entertainment. They want to be in a different world for a little period of time. So I try to do as much of that as I possibly can because of the fact that I have a history degree, I'm not gonna go and just violate what I know is historically factual, just because that would grate on my own particular senses. If I need it to be particularly bright out at night, when I'm writing a certain scene, I'll check the moon phase and see what it was doing.
Or, you know, when I was writing the book before, An Impossible Imposter is called An Unexpected Peril. It's set in January of 1888 and I needed a snowstorm. I needed a reason for one of my characters to be out of London for a little while. Well, I went ferreting through the weather archives and found out there was this massive snowstorm in the south of England on this particular date. And all the trains were shut down. Like the whole second half of my book was taken care of. Then I know when she can conceivably get back. And so I worked with it. Now, whether or not any reader is ever going to go check that I don't have a slight idea. I assume they won't, but you never know. It was fun for me. And I do push the boundary sometimes, but I try to keep it as, as true as I possibly can. You must know this as well as I do, anything you study in history, you find out is probably not what you thought it was going to be when you went into it.
Mindy: Oh, absolutely. And I, as a writer, myself and a historian, I struggle so much with these exact things. My book that came out in 2015 is set in what is ostensibly, a real town here in Ohio, but I never name it. And I was working with all of the material and the data because it's set in an insane asylum that is fairly famous regionally. And so I used that as the basis, but I also never said it is this asylum and it is this town. There's a mystery involved as well. There's a killer on the loose. And so I was striving so hard. You wrote about Jack the Ripper as well. So you know that they did have criminal profiling back then. It wasn't fantastic, but they had the beginnings of it. Because my book is set in 1890, I had to give them the ability to actually catch this killer, but not give them things that they wouldn't have.
And I had to have insane asylum. And the question of - like you were saying about lighting, if my character walks into the room in this building of this socioeconomic level, what is this room lit with? Is it fire? Is it gas? Is it electric? You know, all of these things and I will go and I will find the answer to that before I even write the person walking into the room.
I ended up get going so deeply into having this great fidelity to facts that at one point, because of the nature of my serial killer, they had to be in a certain profession. And I was like rolling. And I'm checking the census data for this town. There were only two men practicing that particular profession in this town at that time. And I'm like, oh my God, this is horrible. It's a 50/50 - which guy is the killer? I just made this so easy. And I wander downstairs and the man that I was living with at the time just takes one look at me and he's like, oh my God, what's wrong?
And I'm like, I just wrote this entire book predicated upon this profession, and I just found out that this town was so small that there were only two men in that profession and everything just fell apart. And I have to rewrite the whole book and restructure my killer and he just looked at me and he went, this is fiction. Right? And I'm like, yeah. So just make the town bigger. And I was like…. oh.
Deanna: Yeah, you can get very much in your own head about this stuff. You really, really can. A couple of decades ago I read a fantastic book written by Persia Woolley. It was part of the, um, writer's digest series and it was How to Write a Historical Novel. And she gave a fantastic piece of advice, which is of all the research you do for your book - 70% of it should just be for you. No more than 30% should go into the book. It was so smart. It's such a great rule of thumb because one of the things that readers tend to really skip over are these really dense long paragraphs of narrative where you're going into just the most minute detail. Readers don't need that. For me, it's always about trying to figure out, okay, what do I put in that a reader's gonna go, huh? That's cool. Didn't know it. But keep on reading.
As you mentioned, I have one book that does deal kind of tangentially with Jack the Ripper, which is A Murderous Relation. When you're writing a series and it's set in London, you know, your timeline is coming up to the autumn of 1888, you start twitching because you're gonna have to deal with this somehow. Because it was the story, everyone, all of London, this is the story. It dominated everything. Life kind of was taken over for everybody. I absolutely did not want to write a Jack the Ripper book. I was adamant about that, but I knew I had to kind of set the scene and make sure that people knew this is what's going on at the time, and this is influencing how people behave.
And one of the cool little facts that I was able to throw in, again with nothing new under the sun, is that there were tent cities of unhoused people in Trafalgar Square. I'm writing this right when Occupy Wall Street is happening, people are putting up their tents outside. Now they're protestors. They're not unhoused people, but the idea of sleeping rough in the middle of a city and this being something that was newsworthy is not new at all. That's something that readers would be, be able to look at and say - oh yeah, I totally get that. There are news stories that just seem to repeat themselves.
Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let readers know where they can find the book, The Impossible Imposter and where they can find you online?
Deanna: The Impossible Imposter is at your favorite book seller in multiple formats. You can get it hardcover, digital or Audible, whatever makes you happy. You can get signed copies from The Poisoned Pen, signed book plates from Murder, By the Book or Fountain, which are all three great independent bookstores I love. And you can find me at deannaraybourn.com. And most days on Twitter!
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