Sophie ponders various assumptions that she has had to negotiate in her writing life, including her own
This week I’ve been weighing up the problems caused by assumptions verses story telling.
I stumbled over this dichotomy in my very first unpublished story, long before I thought of myself as a storyteller. Then, when it came to showing my first attempt at a publishable ms, l had exactly the same experience. Both times shocked me. Made me re-evaluate my approach, too.
It’s happened a couple of times times since, and now it’s happening again, and I’ve taken a step back to think about it. And it occurred to me that these incidents might be of interest, even helpful, to other people wrestling with their work in progress.
Assumptions Versus Story Telling Mark 1: Reader Assumptions
This was at school. The class had an assignment to write an essay on some blandly general subject and, frankly, I couldn’t be arsed. I can’t remember the exact title but it was vaguely political. The teacher of the time was an aspiring local councillor and passionately interested in politics in general. (To her credit, I had no idea then, or since, which political party she belonged to. She might even have been standing as an Independent. That was more than possible.)
I wrote a story about a chap with a real conflict of loyalties. It was actually, as Ms X later admitted, really good. But she had set us the essay expecting some sort of debate. The risks and rewards of capitalism would have done her nicely. Or the importance of old and new grievances on international hostilities. What she got was a man basically saying “A plague on both your houses.”
I got the worst mark I ever had for any assignment ever in my whole school career. “You should have read the question properly,” she said when I demurred. (There had been NO question. Just an essay title. AND it fitted my story, as she eventually agreed.)
There wasn’t an approved arbitration procedure. After a bit of muttering, I wrote off the D as a new experience and decided she was a tricky sod who bore watching. But later I realised I’d better keep a similarly wary eye on examination questions.
Papers were set by people with assumptions. And I’d better damn well remember that.
Assumptions Versus Story Telling Mark 2: Writer Assumptions
An assumption is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof.” That includes an awful lot of the habits and expectations of our everyday lives, from shopping to leisure.
I was writing a story for publication. It was a serious enterprise. I’d been ill and in early recovery I had severely impaired movement. What else could I do to earn my living if that remained permanent? (This was a while ago, you understand.)
I researched popular fiction, made a decent plot map and then launched in. The result read rather well. It was spontaneous, grounded, quite funny, HEA. It was even within the required word count. I felt proud of it.
Well, yes, said the publishers. But these book went worldwide. My heroine’s traditional family was not life as everyone – or even many people – knew it. “Nobody in Moose Droppings, Idaho, is going to know who the hell The Archers are.”
The Archers was, and is still, a BBC radio soap opera set in a medium-sized Midlands village. It was set up after the Second World War, partly as a way to keep farmers informed about innovation. In my childhood it was ubiquitous, with 11 million listeners at its peak.
My parents listened to it every night. Friends even had an Alsatian dog who put his nose round the sitting room door every evening when the final signature tune signalled his dinner time. It never occurred to me, age twenty-something, that all my readers wouldn’t know it too.
Of course these days, a mention would similarly alienate great swathes of people in the UK, too.
The first piece of advice I ever gave an aspiring Harlequin Mills and Boon author was “Don’t talk about the Archers.”
Assumptions Versus Story Telling Mark 3: Historical Assumption
This is the stuff that everyone thinks they know about the past. I’ve written about this one before on this blog – specifically the things that women could do in the past, like run businesses. We’ve got into the habit of thinking that was prohibited, in practice, if not by law.
It is certainly true that most women must have found it very difficult. Especially married woman who were identified as one person with their husband. In the UK they couldn’t even own their own earnings or any investment until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882.
But, as historical Author Louise Allen has demonstrated in her book Stagecoach Travel, two of the leading owners of stagecoach businesses were women. One, Mrs Mountain, (admittedly, a widow) ran 30 coaches a day from her base The Saracen’s Head in the CIty of London and owned her own stagecoach building company.
I don’t know whether anyone has tried to include a lady stage coach owner in a novel. But tellingly, when Libertà Books’s own Joanna Maitland published His Cavalry Lady a lot of readers didn’t believe in the heroine, even though she was based on a real woman who had served in the Tsar’s army.
It’s all there in the records. But how can the writer convince a reader who has perfectly rational and well-grounded beliefs that such a way of life just couldn’t happen, that it was indeed possible?
The answer, I think, has to be – as Joanna did in her novel – to allow the characters’ own contemporaries to ponder the extreme unlikelihood and then come to see the truth of the situation.
Defusing Assumptions on the Page
This is where I find myself now. In my current story, the heroine is the daughter of a British Army doctor. Her mother would have been one of the few (by then) women travelling with the army at the Crimean War. The wonderful National Army Museum website has an entry for (and even a photograph of!) Mrs Rogers, an NCO’s wife, who “acted as a cook and laundress for the regiment and was much admired for her bravery.”
My Louisa’s father has a full time job at the Front. He becomes sole parent when her mother dies of fever in Scutari in 1854. Lou, who has always travelled with her mother, is only 10. Like poor young Jane Eyre, she is unwanted and very much in the way.
Somebody must have cared for her, while her father worked round the clock. But who?
Well the likes of Mrs Rogers perhaps. And then, of course, there was the amazing Mary Seacole, another businesswoman in her own right, who set up a very rough and ready “British Hotel” a mile from the British camp at Sebastopol. There she offered food and drink to officers. But she also ventured out to the troops to whom she sold provisions. And she also used her profound experience of medicine in Jamaica to nurse casualties brought out from the trenches around Sevastopol or from the Tchernaya valley.
She and Florence Nightingale seem to have had a friendly enough relationship. But Nightingale, who was better organised and infinitely better connected, is said to have determined to protect her nurses from association with Mrs Seacole. She apparently wrote: “Anyone who employs Mrs Seacole will introduce much kindness – also much drunkenness and improper conduct.”
Between the friends and associates of people like these two women, I feel sure little Louisa should have found a temporary home. They are my real life models of what could be done.
The Nay Sayers of the Time
So I’m giving Lou a short-term refuge and, for the longer view, friends and fellowship, accompanied by a wealth of valuable life experience. And also that Can Do attitude that Victorian female education tended to suppress.
You may feel this last judgement is unfair, given the achievements of Mrs Rogers and Mrs Seacole. But wait, there is another and louder Victorian Voice to be heard.
Fanny Duberly, wife of Captain Henry Duberly, paymaster of the 8th Hussars, accompanied her husband to the Crimea and remained with him throughout the campaign. According the National Army Musum website, again, she was well loved by the troops, who nicknamed her ‘Mrs Jubilee’.
BUT Victorian polite society frowned on her behaviour. Mrs Duberly published her diary of the War in 1855. A war, let us remember, where the embedded Times Correspondent’s account of army mismanagement and, in particular, the medical and supplies disasters, had brought down Lord Aberdeen’s government. What could have been more valuable than another first-hand account?
Yet when the author wished to dedicate her account to Queen Victoria, her request was denied. “Bah, humbug,” I hear you cry.
My Louisa has certainly been a very competent and open-minded young woman ever since she arrived on my first page. I’m fairly certain she would not go down well at Court at all. The toadies, the social climbers and the terminally prim would all stand with Her Disapproving Majesty and Not Be Amused.
But then Louisa has never wanted to go to court. All she wants is to get home safe and NOT see a ghost.
She should manage at least one of those, I think. Now all I have to do is convince my readers.
You ask if anyone has written a novel about a female stagecoach owner – I have! No Place For a Lady.
Interesting post, thanks, Sophie
Must have missed that one, Louise. Thank you. Off to chase it down now.
Very thought-provoking, Sophie, thank you. And you’re absolutely right about the reactions to His Cavalry Lady which I found difficult to accept, given that my heroine was based on a real woman who really really did serve in the Russian cavalry. Some readers just couldn’t accept that as even vaguely plausible. Sad, but in the end, readers are perfectly entitled to their views (and assumptions) and we writers have to deal with that. Somehow.
Well of course there are always some people – possibly when in a particular mood – who are just looking for a reason NOT to suspend disbelief.
As Louise has said, this is a very interesting post. I do find myself – when referencing some iconic British institution – asking how this will read in Osaka. I do sometimes include it, but do my best to find a way to explain it. If it needs too much explanation I leave it out. But you can’t win them all. I had someone, in a review, strongly asserting that we don’t eat Hashbrowns in England. Or go to High School. Or have school proms. A British ex pat, I suspect, who hadn’t been to England for a very long time.
Actually I find myself astonished by things that are now regular occasions which would never have happened when I was at school/ going out to parties with other teens/working in the City. I’ve learned to limit answers to “Would a Brit do X?” with yes or no plus the caveat in my day/neck of the woods.
Your story sounds wonderful. I have always maintained that women in the past often did things we assume were impossible — but they did them. Then they were frequently written out of the narrative. In Australia, John Macarthur was celebrated — even graced a banknote — as a pioneer of Australia’s Merino wool industry. But he spent years in the UK, while back in Australia his wife, Elizabeth “looked after the sheep.” That’s how some of the history books of my day described her, giving her a Little Bo Peep kind of aura. But she managed the convict workers and dealt with all kinds of serious problems, supervised the breeding program, and built up the business while her husband was swanning around London quarreling with people and defending himself against various legal charges.
Luckily the narrative is beginning to change. This is what Google now says: “Elizabeth is today recognized not just as a supportive wife, but as a sophisticated manager, botanist, and key architect of the colony’s early prosperity.”
Oh Elizabeth’s revised standing is a tremendous shift to the Good SIde, Anne. Much cheering here.
And now you mention it, I think my daughter of an army doctor may have been inspired by your Gallant Waif. Different period, different army, different war. And she was much younger at the time than your Kate and far less close to her father, and I am writing about her when she’s 25 in the now of my story. But yes. There are definitely tendrils of similarity between them.
Have only just realised that. Absolutely beaming too. I’ve always loved that book!
And it wasn’t just the Victorians. Women were consistently written out of their scientific discoveries in the twentieth century.
A great post, Sophie, thank you, and a timely reminder that we mustn’t assume our readers know everything, it’s up to us to convince them that it could have happened. I am already hooked on your Louisa and cannot wait to read her story!
Thank you, Sarah. I’m getting more and more caught up with her myself!