I was lucky enough to be invited to visit a book club last week. It was a cozy mystery book club that meets at Barnes and Noble in Hillsboro, Oregon and they were reading my first book, A Lady’s Guide to Etiquette and Murder.
Now, I haven’t answered questions about that book for a long time. It was published in 2018, but I finished writing it in 2016, so I had to go through it and refresh myself on the details and what I was thinking when I was writing it.
The time period chose me rather than the other way around. I knew Frances was going to be an American heiress, who got caught up in the craze of trading US dollars for a British title. I give a lot of credit to the young women who did that. They were generally outsiders in New York society, often due to their fathers’ unscrupulous business activities, so they weren’t likely to make a match at home. They were usually highly educated, but women of their class couldn’t work for a living. At that time, an unmarried woman really couldn’t do much with her life, so these women made what would be termed an advantageous match.
But they were really taking a risk. The money that made up their dowries was handed over to their new husbands. They moved to his home thousands of miles from their own and any protection their families could afford them. At that time, a wife wasn’t even considered to be her own person, she was legally just a part of her husband. Regardless, many of these women managed to claim agency, to become someone in their own right. And that fascinated me.
There’s a false belief that women in the past were subservient, or worse, helpless creatures. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though they didn’t often get credit for it, the real heiresses from the era of my books ran their husbands’ political careers, households that could consist of hundreds of servants, and were heads of large charities. They also quietly and persistently pushed boundaries that surrounded even the smallest things. The fact that today a group of women can dine at a restaurant without a male escort is thanks to a push from respectable women around the 1890s.
Etiquette and Murder was meant to be a celebration of women staking a claim for agency, for selfhood. And while she’s at it, solving a crime or two.
