Writing Authentically Independent Female Heroines in Victorian Romance

By Mimi Matthews

The Victorian era is known for its suffocating societal rules, restrictive clothing, and the limited rights it afforded women. Writing independent female characters who exist authentically in this space can be challenging. There’s a temptation to simply substitute contemporary characters in historical costume—ladies who speak, think, and act no differently from women in our modern world. For my own novels, however, I love writing Victorian heroines who assert their independence, push social boundaries, and take their romantic fates into their own hands, all while remaining true to the era. 

In The Belle of Belgrave Square, socially-anxious Victorian beauty Julia Wychwood doesn’t look much like a contemporary romance heroine. Constrained by the rigid rules of fashionable society (and by the oppressive expectations of her overbearing parents), she’d rather stay home in bed, eating chocolates and reading novels, than navigate her way through the perilous London social season. Nevertheless, Julia still finds way to assert herself, often to dramatic effect.

Julia’s choice of reading material is, initially, her biggest act of rebellion. Novels were frowned upon in the mid-Victorian era. Some believed that reading them was hazardous to a lady’s health. Novels, it was said, had the same intoxicating effect as drugs or alcohol, overstimulating the imagination and polluting the mind. These concerns don’t prevent Julia from reading what she pleases. During the course of the story, she binge reads during a ball, patronizes independent bookstores, and discusses her favorite romance novels with the beastly, battle-scarred war hero Captain Jasper Blunt.

When not reading novels, Julia enjoys riding her horse, Cossack, in Hyde Park’s Rotten Row. Horseback riding was one of the few athletic pursuits available to well-to-do young ladies. Like everything else in fashionable society, it was governed by strict rules of decorum. Ladies were expected to ride at a sedate pace on suitably gentle mounts, making it less of a sport and more of an exercise in displaying the gracefulness of their figures. A gifted horsewoman, Julia refuses to hide her skill to suit society. She rides with passion, often galloping in the Row with her friends, despite the risk of creating a scandal. 

Reading novels and riding horses may not seem like the most daring of activities, but in each of them, Julia asserts her right to mental and physical liberty. These small acts of independence help her to gain confidence such that, when a crisis occurs, she’s able to rise to the occasion by performing her most audacious act yet—proposing marriage to Captain Blunt

Writing historically accurate Victorian heroines doesn’t mean confining oneself to insipid and unrelatable characters. On the contrary. History shows us that Victorian society was full of women who refused to abide by its restrictive rules. Young women like Julia who asserted themselves in ways both large and small, pushing up against the boundaries of their world until that world expanded to accommodate the full scope of their individuality. I never tire of writing their stories!

USA Today bestselling author Mimi Matthews writes both historical nonfiction and award-winning proper Victorian romances. Her novels have received starred reviews in Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus, and her articles have been featured on the Victorian Web, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and in syndication at BUST Magazine. In her other life, Mimi is an attorney. She resides in California with her family, which includes a retired Andalusian dressage horse, a Sheltie, and two Siamese cats.

The Meaning Behind the Title Find a Place for Me

By: Deirdre Fagan

When we are in the early throes of grief, our lost loved one dominates our every thought. We find ourselves angry that other people are going about their days doing ordinary things like getting gas or groceries, going to work, or kissing a partner, because we feel that our own lives have stopped. How can the world be going on when our loved one is no longer in it? How can anyone be thriving when our world feels ended? If we grieve wholly our world has truly stopped. But this feeling does slowly begin to pass. Soon we not only have to but can get up from our place of grieving and emotionally begin to place one foot in front of the other. We can begin moving towards a future where we are still alive while without the one we miss so terribly. When someone we love dies, we hold them in our hearts and minds forever, but we can eventually thrive despite the grief we will now forever carry.

My husband Bob and I experienced two great losses together five years before he was diagnosed at the young age of forty-three with the terminal illness amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Five years before, my father and brother had died two weeks apart, both suddenly, and we had been those people in shock and stunned into a world without them, wandering through it in a fog wondering how we would ever be able to look fully forward again. For Bob and me, it took nearly a year and a pregnancy with our second child before we began to comprehend that we and our son, and now soon daughter, had a future without my dad and brother where we needed to be very much present. We needed to not only embrace this future but learn to thrive in it for our children and for those who had left us behind. After all, our loved ones would not want anything less for us. They would want the best, and the best would mean a life of full-throttle living.

When Bob was diagnosed, we were both devastated, but ever the philosopher—Bob had a doctorate in philosophy and was a university professor—the day after his diagnosis, Bob told me he wanted me to love again. He said he had come to terms with his death in his twenties and he was also well aware how much his love blessing would mean to me and the children. Bob knew we would not thrive if we always remained in that early place of mourning. He knew he didn’t want me to be alone. He also wanted the children to have another person invested in their lives to guide them. Bob could do nothing to stop his illness from taking his life but he could help us continue in ours.

When Bob first told me to love again, I wasn’t at all ready. I could not go there. I was one foot in the grave with him and I didn’t want to get out of it. It was going to be a lot of work and I was going to not only be grieving the love of my life, but managing our children’s grief, and the full lives that we had once managed together. I was going to be a single mom doing all the work of a household, continuing to be a university professor myself, and somehow getting myself out of bed in the morning when I would want to do anything but.

As time went on, I began to realize Bob was right about love. The way to thrive was going to be to open my heart to the future just as we both had after losing my dad and brother, or I had earlier in life when decades before I lost my eldest brother and mother. “You have done it before and you can do it again,” Bob would tell me when I wanted to give up and said I could not go on after losing him. He believed in me. He believed in love and in my ability to love. After all, the measure of our grief is the measure of our love. If we love deeply, we grieve deeply. If we love deeply, we can also love again.

When Bob was sick, he made videos for the kids and me. At the end of mine, Bob says, “You are going to need to find a place for me,” and knowing Bob so completely, I knew exactly what he meant. In his absence, I needed to find a place for him that would not dominate all of my feelings or thoughts. If there was going to be room for me to go on, love again, and thrive in the face of the devastation of losing him, I was going to need a different place for Bob.

When I first started writing Find a Place for Me, I titled the book after Bob’s book of poetry, written during his illness and self-published a month before he died: After Thunder. My manuscript was therefore titled, After Lightning. During the publishing process, however, I realized that that title, while meaningful to me, didn’t say much to readers about the book itself

Find a Place for Me: Embracing Love and Life in the Face of Death is very much about Bob teaching me and others how to not only live well but die well. It is about our love for each other and how it transcends. Bob’s parting gift to me was to generously help me find a place for him that was forever and wholly his but also made room. I have found a place for him in this memoir and in my life. I hope upon reading it, readers will find a place for him too

Deirdre Fagan, D.A., is a widow, wife, mother of two, and associate professor and coordinator of creative writing at Ferris State University. Dr. Fagan, also a divorcee and the sole survivor of her birth family, is the author of the memoir Find a Place for Me. For more information visit deirdrefagan.com

Larry Atlas on the Inspiration for South Eight

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. 

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Larry Atlas, author of South Eight, the story of a young doctor’s collision with the demands and contradictions of modern acute care medicine, both its power and failings, and the moral questions it ultimately provokes.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

My background as a writer was entirely in plays and screenplays, exactly zero in prose fiction. So when, quite by accident (honest, it’s true!) I found myself working in a hospital first as a nurse, and then within a few years as a nurse practitioner hospitalist, my initial thought was to write something for the stage. In fact, I tried that twice, and within pages knew that it wasn’t going to work. What I wanted to write, the internal experience of treating hospital patients, could only work as a novel. That was a starting point, a hospitalist physician, in the heart of that world, his experience of it, and of the patients and co-workers.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

I set out thinking of South Eight as “literary fiction,” but built a plot around events and a patient from the central character’s past, how they intersect with the main character’s present position, the power the current position.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Well, this is my first novel, but as with plays and screenplays, I was surprised by how the story did actually, in important ways, assume a life of its own. I remember reading somewhere, about playwriting, that the characters will tell you how the story should unfold. I think that was true here. Also, I love mysteries and thrillers, so perhaps it was natural that I’d incorporate those elements as I wrote.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

Often. On any given day there’re a dozen possibilities in the news, or someone will tell me a story they’ve heard that has interesting twists, possibilities. The question always is, will it hold up, will it hold one’s interest the next day, a week later, a month. And if it does, will it have enough “room” for expansion into a complete work, whatever the form.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

Well, in my case I’m still working in medicine — can I say active sideline in medicine? — which takes a lot of time and energy. So, the question is, do I have a story, a single story, that is so compelling that I simply have to find the time and energy, to write it. One can have a lot of ideas percolating, as you say, but having that one that comes to a boil in a sense, chooses itself.

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

I have a four-year-old black Labrador who comes into my writing space and lies on the blue couch there. Once in a while she’ll bring me her ball to remind me it’s time to take a break.

Larry Atlas is a former Drill Sergeant who served in the Army. After his service, he attended Bennington College, earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees before declining admission to medical school —and moving to New York to begin a successful career as an actor, playwright, and screenwriter. Among his produced plays are Total Abandon and the award-winning Yield of the Long Bond which premiered at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles. He worked on multiple studio film projects including Sleepless in Seattle. He conceived and implemented the first nationwide online actors’ casting service, and then later co-invented and patented the first navigable nonlinear video architecture. Larry lives in upstate New York with actor-turned-therapist Ann Matthews, and their dog Ruby.