Writing The Elopement

Writing The Elopement

Summer 2020 probably isn’t a time that most people want to spend time remembering. The first UK lockdown, isolation and anxiety… Like many people I found solace in the sunshine and my garden. As a writer, working from home was nothing new and I felt lucky to be able to continue to work – in fact, with fewer interruptions than usual. Doubly lucky, that my work by its nature meant escaping into another world. 

At the start of the lockdown I was finishing my sixth historical novel, The Rose Garden. After a hectic few months, suddenly there was nothing to do but write. And write I did. To sink into the story and be transported to late Victorian Hampstead, to a world of social divides around class, sex and race, and create it so that everything worked out for my protagonists, was the most blissful escapism. 

The momentum and flow carried me through the end of The Rose Garden and into the beginning of The Elopement without so much as a pause. I didn’t even have a contract for The Elopement at that time! I literally wrote the last sentence of one, then the first sentence of the other the next day. Here’s why. 

I always knew I wanted to write another novel set in that world. I was captivated by the idea of a fictional community, and the different lives that might hide behind all the different homes and facades. As I wrote The Rose Garden, many minor characters intrigued me: Mr Miles the feisty Quaker elder, Julia Morrow the sorrowful, kindly divorcee, Jill, the canal worker living far from her Caribbean home… But by the end of the book, the character who had stepped forth and absolutely insisted that her story be told was one I would have considered very unlikely!

The protagonist of The Elopement is Rowena Blythe, wealthy, stunning and spoilt. We glimpse her in The Rose Garden only as the nemesis of Olive Westallen. She appears in just two scenes and Olive, whom I loved very much as I wrote her, detests Rowena! The Elopement isn’t a sequel, but a standalone story and I suppose the process of writing it was in some ways an exercise in contrasts. Olive’s family are as grand and wealthy as the Blythes, but they are socially conscious, unpretentious, liberal, caring… The Blythes were painted in The Rose Garden as the polar opposite! I wondered what on earth I could find to write about a character so apparently shallow and lacking in admirable traits.

My mind wandered inside the Blythe’s Highgate mansion and there I met Pansy, a housemaid. She was as disenchanted with her employers as it’s possible to be; her resentment towards them all, and especially Rowena, comes through loud and clear in the first chapter. In it, we find Pansy imagining Rowena’s perfect face while she beats the drawing room rugs! What on earth had Rowena done to inspire such hatred?

The way that I find the answers to such questions is always to… keep writing. I write in a receptive, organic way, rather than planning ahead and this is enjoyable for me as the author because I’m as surprised as the reader by what comes next. When the second chapter switched to above-stairs, there I discovered Rowena and her best friend Verity, bored and restless on a dreary February day. I did hesitate: was it possible to make a sympathetic character of this entitled heiress? But then I glimpsed something under the surface of Rowena’s high society veneer. I sensed a dissatisfaction, even a melancholy. I was intrigued. And the story went from there. 

I wrote it fast and felt quite dizzy by the end. In some ways it was easy to write because the setting and period were the same as The Rose Garden, so much of the research was already done. Other aspects of the story, like the experiences of the servants in the Blythe household required extra investigation. Likewise, later in the story, I went down rabbit holes of research about Victorian hat making and the first women in the law profession! The story always throws up new things to learn as it develops. But at least that basic background was established. 

It was also easy to write because Rowena’s narrative was utterly insistent and compelled me from start to finish. I even dreamed at night that I was Rowena, undergoing her various trials and tribulations. My characters always possess me to a certain extent, but this was quite extreme! On the surface, The Elopement might seem like a straightforward romance: a beautiful young woman falls in love with an unsuitable man. But I realised as I wrote that the reasons for her predicament still have relevance today. Although things have changed for women in many ways since 1897, I believe that we’re still brought up to be attractive, pleasing, sweet and so on and that society can come down hard on women who prioritise other values, for example self-expression, authenticity or ambition.

As to whether I made Rowena sufficiently sympathetic, that’s for my readers to decide! I will say this: she has one of the biggest character arcs I’ve ever written. From society beauty on a pedestal to utter disgrace. From blind obedience to forging her own path, sometimes disastrously. From riches to rags to… well, I won’t spoil it. 

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Tracy Rees, author of Amy Snow, was the first winner of the Richard and Judy ‘Search for a Bestseller’ competition. She has also won the Love Stories Best Historical Read award and been shortlisted for the RNA Epic Romantic Novel of the Year. A Cambridge graduate, Tracy had a successful career in non-fiction publishing before retraining for a second career practising and teaching humanistic counselling. She has also been a waitress, bartender, shop assistant, estate agent, classroom assistant and workshop leader. Tracy divides her time between the Gower Peninsula of South Wales and London. The Elopement is Tracy’s latest mesmerizing historical romance.

Website: www.tracyrees.com

Twitter: @AuthorTracyRees

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THE ELOPEMENT

Tracy Rees’s latest novel The Elopement is an elaborately imagined historical novel full of delight and temptation, spanning the luxury and poverty of late Victorian England.

A wealthy heiress . . .
1897. Rowena Blythe is wealthy, entitled and beautiful. As her twenty-fourth birthday approaches, she’s expected to marry – and to marry well.

An unsuitable match . . .
Her parents commission a portrait of Rowena to help cement her reputation as a great society beauty. However, Bartek, the artist’s young assistant, is unlike any man Rowena has met before – wild, romantic and Bohemian. While society at large awaits the announcement of Rowena’s engagement, it is Bartek who captures Rowena’s heart along with her likeness.

A scandal in society . . .
Rowena knows her parents would never approve of Bartek, who in their eyes is nothing but a penniless foreigner. As her feelings grow, she has no-one to turn to. Dare she risk everything for love?

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Category: On Writing