When I had published Court Lady, my first novel length work, I worked on 2 very different stories. One was a shorter story (10k words) set in Romano-Celtic Britain after the departure of the Roman garrisons, called Roman Bride. The other was a Victorian story, set in the great age of industrial development – Malvina’s Boudoir. Roman Bride is about an arranged marriage between a soldier who is one of the Emperor Arthur’s Companions, and a lady of Roman descent, Flavia, who is serious-minded. She is rather shocked by the more free and easy ways of the Celtic peoples, who have their own marital customs and who allow their women more liberty. However she admires the Emperor and makes the match willingly. Her new husband is a soldier and she finds him rough for her tastes, but he is intelligent and willing to be kind to her. She begins to find him attractive. This story had a built in conflict between a refined lady and a soldier, and between Flavia’s Roman ways and her husband’s British customs.
I also worked on Malvina’s Boudoir, which is set in the mid Victorian age. I’m not a great expert on industrial history but I know a bit, and I am very interested in that age, where new inventions and changes in society caused great upheaval. The rising middle class became increasingly rich and began to have a greater role in ruling the country. The upper classes, which had depended mostly on agriculture to add to their wealth, were under threat from the middle class. However many of them also got involved in trade in a “discreet” way and used that increase in wealth, to subsidise the big houses, the lavish lifestyle and their land, which was gradually producing less income for them. In the 19th Century, American farming, which was on a much larger scale, began to overtake British agriculture. So I find the changes in British society fascinating. My hero in “Malvina” is a middle class man from the North, Matthew Bradshaw -who has made a fortune in business and who is now looking for social acceptance. Malvina is a young widow who has been a political hostess and whose late husband was an amateur artist. The clash here is between different classes.
