The Misbegotten

When I first told a friend that I was writing a book set in Bath in the early 1820s, her immediate response was Oh, good, something like a Jane Austen? To which I slightly recoiled... The more I thought about it, the more I decided that I was in fact writing the anti-Jane Austen – by which I don’t mean I’m opposed to the author in any way, but more to the romanticised vision of the early nineteenth century that countless adaptations of her books have left us with. All of her heroines are in need of husbands, and it’s all fun and games and occasional pining as they set about finding them… But as Austen herself knew, it wasn’t all plain sailing. And if you couldn’t find the right man – or any man – what then? Austen was lucky enough to have solvent male relatives, and in later years her writing, to support her. What if you had neither of those?

So, as well as writing a mystery about a girl who disappeared, I wanted to explore how easy it would have been, back then, to slip into poverty and destitution, and how deadly serious that was in an era with no social safety nets. I wanted to show how easy it might have been for a girl to just disappear, and for powerful men, at every level of society, to treat the women in their lives however they saw fit, with no fear of legal or peer censure. The theme of women being trapped by their situations, however outwardly respectable those situations might be, runs throughout the book. There’s also a theme of sisterhood, and what that means to the different female characters. Ultimately, however, no matter how bright, wily or demure these women are, the only real security they have is through the men in their lives – however unworthy those men may be. I took a small liberty, perhaps, in having my some of my female characters wind up with a modicum of independence – it was rare, but it could happen.

Bath is such an historic city, with so much of its beautiful architecture unchanged since the late eighteenth century; it’s a wonderful place to set a book – and countless other authors have done so. I love being able to go and see the exact places, and walk the exact streets, that famous literary figures and their characters saw and walked, and I hope that, in some small way, The Misbegotten becomes a part of Bath’s long literary history.