Clara Sherlry-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is writer and literary blogger Finola Austin. Austin was born in England and moved to Northern Ireland when she was five, and she’s now based in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut novel Brontë’s Mistress, is a retelling of the infamous affair between Anne, Charlotte, and Emily’s brother Branwell and a long-maligned married woman, Lydia Robinson, from Lydia’s perspective. Using themes from the Brontë sisters’ novels and weaving in original and secondary sources on the affair, Austin gives voice to a woman torn between her desires and what is expected of her.

Finola Austin, welcome to Story Behind the Story.


Finola Austin (FA): Thanks for having me.


(CSA): It's good to have you here. I wanted to start by just asking: how did you first learn the story of the Branwell Brontë and Lydia Robinson affair? 

(FA): I grew up reading a lot of Victorian literature — I think like lots of people who love good books! And Jane Eyre was a book I read as a child and fell in love with. In my teenage years, I read the other Brontë sister's books, Wuthering Heights, Ann Brontë's works (including the Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey). And I also read the first Brontë biography that came across my path, which was The Dark Quartet by Lynne Reid Banks (who I already knew from writing children's books like the Indian In the Cupboard). And that book, it's about not just the Brontë sisters but the fourth member of their quartet: Branwell Brontë, the brother. So that was my first introduction to the romance of the Brontë’s themselves, outside their novels. 


The childhood they had was very strange, brought up on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors and building these and make believe worlds together, and all four of them were really key players in that. But I didn't focus at that point on Branwell's downfall, his demise, why he never reached the lofty heights that his family had expected from him; They thought about Branwell as being the genius, which is quite funny for us to look back on now. It was years later I did an undergraduate degree in classics in English and a master's degree at the University of Oxford in 19th century literature. But then I left academia; I started a career in advertising and moved to New York initially for a year, and once I'd been here 2 years I decided that the move was going to become a little bit more permanent. So I shipped my books across the Atlantic, and I promised myself that I would read every book I owned but hadn't read.


(CSA): Hm, a lofty task!

(FA): Right! And there was one book, which was Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which was the first Brontë biography. I was sitting here in this apartment on my couch, and I came across Mrs. Gaskell's depiction of Lydia Robinson — this older woman that Branwell was rumored to have had an affair with — and it was a caustic depiction of her! It called her this wretched and profligate woman. Mrs. Gaskell said that Lydia tempted Branwell into the deep disgrace of a deadly crime. She was 43, he was 25 when they met, and [Gaskell] said very clearly, in this case, the man became the victim. I just felt immediately: someone has to have written this novel! Someone has to have told this profligate woman's side of the story. So I put the biography down, I googled, and when I knew it hadn't been done, I just knew I had to write it.


(CSA): That's a lovely story. Your degrees are in English Literature, like you mentioned — not creative writing. Your blog, “The Secret Victorianist,” is primarily devoted to literary scholarship. What made you shift to novels, to fiction? Were you always interested in writing that work? 

(FA): Yes, I have always written… so, even before I could technically write, I would make books out of folded pieces of paper and dictate to my mother what the word should say. So I'd say that probably my interest in writing creatively predated my interest in literary criticism. But yes, a lot of my teenage years and early 20s were dedicated to studying literature in a pretty serious way. And after I left that field, I started the blog to share snippets of my essays (thoughts on obscure 19th century novels) but it was always my intention to write something of my own. 


Brontë's Mistress wasn't the first novel I wrote as a grown up. I wrote another novel in my early 20s, which was really me proving to myself that I could do it. That was set in the 19th century, but wasn't based on a true story; It was just totally make-believe people. And in some ways I tried to think, “Could I write the sort of Victorian novel that was published in the Victorian period?” And when I took it out to literary agents, some of the feedback I got (which I thought was a compliment at the time, and now realize it was not) was that this is so close to a Victorian Novel that it could be one. Which made sense, because it was all I was reading. And so, you'll see a shift in my blog content — Probably around 2016? 2015, maybe? — when I started constantly reviewing historical novels that were being published now. I called the series, “neo Victorian voices,” and my rule was it had to be books set in the 19th century, but written in the 21st century — so not even stuff from the 50s/60s/70s; it needed to be what was being written now. So I got more of a taste for modern preferences when it comes to historical fiction, and how you get a flavor of the time period without falling into the traps of what makes some 19th century novels pretty boring; Like long paragraphs of description, misogynistic heroes, and long periods where people are sat on trains not doing anything.


(CSA): (Clara laughs) I'm interested in this particular point as well, because your academic research focuses on 19th century novels and clearly prepares you for understanding the historical context, and providing accuracy in a novel that is set in that time period. But I am interested to hear your point of view on the relationship between a contemporary book like this — which I think we would probably call historical fiction or historical romance — and the novels of the 19th century that you're modeling it after, which almost didn't have genre at the time because the form was so new. 

(FA): Yes, so it's interesting. One thing that I think about the Brontë's gets overlooked, is that they were actually historical novelists. So when you see a production, say a film adaptation, a TV adaptation of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights now, they always costume it as if those novels were set when they were written, so in the 1840s. But if you read the books, that's not true. They set them up as the stories that happen several decades before. Wuthering Heights has a late 18th century setting, and Jane Eyre is very early 19th century as well. I just think it's so funny that probably because of our interest in the Brontës themselves, we now put them as being resolutely Victorian, when they saw themselves as writing something with a history. 


The other point I'd say here is I don't see my novel as a historical romance. I like romance as a genre, but I always want to throw this out because I know romance readers get upset if there's no happy ending, and of course there's no Happily Ever Afters with the Brontës. But I think that some of the denigration we see of romance as a genre is because of how women-focused it is, and naturally, especially in the past, Love/Romance/Marriage HAVE to be very central to women's stories because they didn't have many other options of what to do with their lives. There’s a very famous essay that George Eliot wrote — another woman writer from the period, and another woman writer who wrote under a male name; Her real name was Mary Ann Evans. And she wrote an essay called, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” where she distanced herself from the women writers that she saw writing genre fiction, flippant fiction; And it's exactly the same divisions that we see now, where some genres is seen as literally enough, and others are seen as bottom of the stack. I think historical fiction’s gone for a moment, in the last 5 to 10 years, where it's being seen as more and more literary and less and less as a genre like a thriller, a romance, a mystery, but of course there's crossover right? There's a lot of historical romance, a lot of historical mysteries out there, and I think it's really interesting to look at; The gendered aspect in particular. I mean, in the 19th century, novels across the board were seen as very feminine and as not being as serious as poetry.


(CSA): Yeah, there's a conversation between Branwell and Lydia Robinson in this where she expresses her view that people will see novels as being less serious. And I always remember that scene in Northanger Abbey, where Jane Austen goes on a huge rant as the narrator on novels and their silliness that is clearly satirical, and satirizing that point of view. 

(FA): Yeah, absolutely. Lydia's husband, Edmund, sees novels in the same category as the shawls and brooches and bonnets that she buys: It's just part of her frivolous expenditure each month. But these women were reading a lot. It's not like they had Netflix; getting the latest volume from a circulating library was pretty exciting stuff. And the plots became more and more sensational to keep up with the demand. I think, actually, that the modern domestic thriller really has its ancestor in 19th century sensation fiction. I think without writers like Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Bradden (who were the two I focused on for my dissertation), we wouldn't have a Gone Girl; It's the same number of twists and turns that’s still capturing the imagination now.


(CSA): So what drew you to Lydia's story in particular?

(FA): Well, One. Just how vitriolic Mrs. Gaskell was. (Clara laughs) It's always great to set yourself up in opposition to someone, even though — Elizabeth Gaskell — I like her novels as well (North and South, Mary Barton, Cranford)… so there was that. But the other part of it really was that, as much as I love Charlotte Brontë in particular, her heroines tend to be of a type; So they’re often young, plain, poor, and virginal. And, Lydia Robinson was… not old, but in her 40s, a bit more experience of the world. Beautiful, wealthy, sexually experienced. She'd had five children by the point that the novel starts — and so I wanted to talk about that sort of woman. I think far too often in historical fiction the main character is a debutant, she's 17-20 years old, she's navigating the world — especially the worlds of love and marriage — for the first time. But I was interested in what happens to women later. Even in Hollywood today, we talk about actresses in their 40s being invisible and not having any roles. They're either the young love interest, or they become the matriarch, at some point. When you're a Judy Dench or a Meryl Streep, but what happens in between? I wanted to write that sort of woman. 


I do think that Charlotte Brontë can display a lack of empathy towards women who maybe have some more advantages in particular areas. She's often pretty cutting towards women who are conventionally attractive, whether that's Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre, Ginevra in Villette — these women are often portrayed as very shallow just for being attractive, and there's a little bit of the whole “not like the other girls” vibe going on there that I wanted to combat. I certainly don't make Lydia an angel, right? She has her nasty side, but at the same time I think that's a likely outcome when you live in a world where you're being valued for one thing, and then that role goes away. People who are oppressed and repressed often are not the cuddliest and kindest people, and for good reason. 


(CSA): Yeah, and I think that brings us to another good point, which is that Brontës Mistress is told from Lydia's point of view and does (in that sense) give her a voice, but I think it would be false to say that it exonerates her. She's not an evil temptress, but she's also not a naive ingenue, so what led you to characterize her the way you have? How much of that is in the historical record? How much of it is invented, and of the pieces you invented, why that path?

(FA): I did a full year of research before I started writing the novel. The Brontës are just so well known that I knew I was going to have to hold myself to a pretty high standard in terms of accuracy here, because you're dealing with a beloved family with super fans all around the world. I really read everything that's ever been written about Lydia Robinson, and this affair, and went back to primary sources as well. I guess what it feels like when you're doing research like this is that you're discovering things about a character, and it's hard to really say where imagination takes over. In fact, sometimes I imagine something, and then I find a piece of evidence later that seems to confirm it, so I feel like I anticipated something. So now it's very hard for me… I mean, in my office note, I do run over, “What are the bare bones facts,” right? “What are the most important pieces of evidence about the affair?” But, what you're talking about — the characterization, and what Lydia is like versus what Ann Brontë is like; What Branwell’s like?; What the husband is like? That stuff is very hard to say what's true and what's not. It's my understanding of them as people based on the facts that we have available, and then at some point my imagination takes over. I think biographers have this in a similar way. I recently read Lucy Worsley's book about Queen Victoria: Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life, and she addresses this explicitly in the introduction, where she says people always ask her when she writes a biography, well do you like the subject? And she says, well the more you read about someone, the more you like them even while you see their flaws. Cos you feel like you get to know them like a real human, right? Like, you feel like you've met. And that's really how I felt about Lydia.


A lot of it was also just thinking about people I know who are trapped for a variety of reasons; Whether in an unhappy relationship, women who maybe haven’t achieved their potential. I dedicate the novel to the women who didn't write their novels — and of course I mean the many thousands and thousands of women in the 19th century whose history has been forgotten, and in other centuries — but also women now, right? Like what Virginia Woolf wrote about needing a room of one's own and that kind of space to create, a lot of women still don't have that. I guess Lydia is a composite of all of that, right? She's a composite of my research, the people I've known, the people I've read about; We of course have more understanding of psychology now than they would in the 19th centuries so there's a little bit of that going on. Like, the novel is written in first person, but it's not a David Copperfield or a Great Expectations -style first person; It's more stream of consciousness than that, and it's about the psyche in a deeper way than I would say a Dickensian first person is. I don't know if that fully answers the question, as they say at the end and The Office, you know, there is a list of what's true and what's not, but in terms of, ‘can you ever say what was a person really like?’, I think that's really tough unless we can conjure them from beyond the grave to speak for themselves. 


(CSA): I gave a description of her, and of course readers can come up with their own assessment of who she is in the novel, but I'm curious to hear your perspective on that. How would you describe Lydia Robinson? Who is she to you?

(FA): I think Lydia is a person who's bored, a person who has more potential but no other outlets for it. She certainly feels the restrictions of being a woman in her time period. She feels annoyed that she can't go and do what she wants; that she always needs to be watched, that she can't even get her clothes on and off easily without the help of a maid. So she feels that sense of being trapped, but she's not a proto feminist in the 21st century way of speaking, in that she thinks that the worst thing that could happen to a woman is having to work for a living. And that was a very deliberate choice; I feel like in too many historical novels you have a character who totally embodies the values and the views that we have currently. Lydia definitely has blind spots: She does look down on her servants. For instance, she may have moments where she feels affection towards them, but they're there to service her. There's one particular moment, where Ann Brontë faints, and one Lydia's first thoughts is, ‘Oh no, if she's unwell I'll have to hire another governess,’ which might seem really harsh. Yet, here in New York City today, I've heard similar things from acquaintances when, you know, maybe they've lost their nanny because of coronavirus, or their childminders called in sick and they think first of the inconvenience to themselves before they have that human reaction of empathy. So she's not so far away. I also see Lydia as a person who is trying to do her best as a mother. She talks a lot about the lessons her mother has given her, and when the novel starts, her daughters are entering into their teenage years. She can be quite harsh towards them, but it is her type of “tough love.” She slaps one daughter's hand away from the butter, but it's because she thinks it's important for her to keep her figure, because the only way for her to survive is to have an eligible match and to get married. Similarly with her daughter Lydia, there's a moment where she can be tough towards her and her disappointment of a young man that she was interested in, marrying someone else. And what she says to her is just like what her own mother said to her in turn. So I'm very interested in that internalized misogyny and how it's passed on generation to generation. Even now, I know so many people whose body image issues, say, are a direct throughline from their own mother's issues with their bodies. So yeah, I see Lydia as someone trapped in every way: in the corsets that she wears, in the house that she lives in, in the conventions that she hasn't questioned till now… and in some ways her thought processes are cyclical. We see her nearly break out of them again and again, but she often defaults back. So the last letter she receives from one of her daughters, her reply is, ‘What would you have me do — change the world and our place in it?’ And I think, as a modern feminist, I and other readers would be yelling at the page, ‘Yes, that's exactly what I want you to do! I want you to break away and do your own thing, and not attach yourself to another man, and be honest about who you are!’ But, of course, she doesn't do that. She goes back into the defaults, and slides back into old bad habits, and I think that's a much more common human tragedy than the Shakespearean or ancient Greek tragedies that we see of kings and heroes. The tragedy of ordinary people is that we're doomed to repeat our mistakes. 


(CSA): I think that's a really profound point in a lot of ways. You're talking about this in the context of the 19th century character, but I think that's still… when we see barriers to progress in the present day, it's that same thing: It's well intentioned people who feel trapped by their circumstances and don't feel like they have the power to override them, and so not only do they continue on as normal, but they they pass on the behavioral values that are associated with something that they may not actually believe in.

(FA): Absolutely


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is author and literary blogger Finola Austin, whose debut novel Brontë's Mistress describes the infamous affair between Branwell Brontë and Mrs. Lydia Robinson from her point of view.
So in your book, Mrs. Robinson is obsessed with Branwell's sister Charlotte, who she's never met but imagines to be erudite, creative, and independent. What do you believe Lydia's obsession with Charlotte conveys about her?

(FA):  I think Lydia is very competitive, especially when it comes to other women. She doesn't like Charlotte from the beginning, even before the novel starts. She talks about an incident where she read a letter that Anne Brontë (who's the governess in the household) was writing to her sister Charlotte, so she feels very judged by them — in the kind of way I'm talking about, the judgment we actually see in Charlotte Brontë's novels as well, so she's not incorrect about that. They are laughing at her and her family. And I do think that relationship of having someone else in the house raising, or partially raising, your children is an interesting dynamic that even today can be tough for people. That sets it up for that feeling of competition. It really comes to the floor in her first meeting with Branwell, where he mentions Charlotte and says she's the cleverest woman that I know, and Lydia has a reaction that I think is from two places; One, she just doesn't like hearing about any woman being spoken about in a superlative way, because she wants to be the best at everything — but she says, “Was I clever? I'd never really considered it.” She says that her mother had told her that she was good looking, that had praised her for sitting quietly, going to church, doing her needlework — all of the things that women were meant to do. But no one ever has praised her for being clever, and it opens up, or starts to open up, another possibility. She also hears later that Charlotte is in Brussels working at a school there, and Lydia has only been abroad once, and it was on her honeymoon, so it's a feeling of: She thought there was a requirement, like, you had to have a husband to see the world, and then you go where he wants on his terms. And here's a young woman — younger than her — who has just gone off to Brussels, alone! And that's a shocking idea to Lydia. So I think that plants the seed even more. And then we mentioned earlier her conversations with Branwell where they discuss poetry and novels, and there is a moment where Branwell says, ‘Charlotte says that the novel is the literary pinnacle of the age.’ Where, Lydia's been seeing novels as frivolous, in the same category as her shawls, and so this is a pretty radical idea. There is a moment in the novel very near the end when I now do have them meet, and that's a meeting that is not a matter of historical record. I have it where it could have happened, but I thought it was an important confrontation to have, because it is sad that these two women — who actually have more in common than either of them think — are never going to sit down and discuss and see each other's point of view. They feel fundamentally opposed, especially because of what's happened with Branwell, and Charlotte certainly blames Lydia for the tragedy that befalls her beloved brother's life. I mentioned Mrs. Gaskell — the biography that set this all off — Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë were friends, so that sort of vitriolic depiction of Lydia — Yes! Mrs. Gaskell was the one who wrote the words, but she'd heard the story first from Charlotte. They really are set up as the antithesis of each other, and yet, if they just spoke, they might find that the position of the mistress of the house and the poor governess... neither of them is great.


(CSA): So I think now would be a good time to have you read an excerpt from the book. Why don't you set it up for us first: just tell us what we're going to be hearing.

(FA): Yeah, I'm actually just going to read from the beginning of the book; I just thought it was better to come in where you don't need any knowledge whatsoever. I'm just going to start from the top and, as a writer, I think in my early writing as a child or that first novel I didn't sell, I would not have started at the beginning — I'd want to skip forward to an interesting bit. And I think what's made me a better writer is knowing that every bit should be an interesting bit from the very first page.


(She reads)
Chapter one
January 1843 


Already a widow in all but name. Fitting that I must, yet again, wear black.


Nobody had greeted me on my return, but Marshall at least had thought of me. She’d lit a feeble fire in my dressing room and laid out fresh mourning in the bedroom, spectral against the white sheets. I smoothed out a pleat, fingered a hole in the veil. Just a year since I’d last set these clothes aside, and now Death had returned—like an expected, if unwanted, visitor this time, not a violent thief in the night.


What a homecoming. No husband at the door, no children running down the drive.


I’d sat alone in the carriage, huddled under blankets, through hours of abject silence, with only the bleak Yorkshire countryside for company, but I didn’t have the patience to ring for Marshall now. I tugged, laced, and hooked myself, racing against the cold. I had to contort to close the last fixture. My toe caught in the hem.


The landing outside my rooms was empty. The carpet’s pattern assaulted my eyes, as if I’d been gone for weeks, not days. Home was always strange after an absence, like returning to the setting of a dream.


But it wasn’t just that.


Thorp Green Hall was unusually still. Silence seeped through the house, except for the ticking of the grandfather clock that carried from the hall. Each home has its music, and ours? It was my eldest daughter banging doors; the younger girls bickering; Ned, my son, charging down the stairs; and the servants dropping pails and pans and plates with clatter upon clatter. But not today. Where was everyone?


I halted before the closed study door and gave a light rap, but my husband did not respond, much less emerge to greet me. Edmund would be in there, though. He was always hiding in there. I could picture him—taking off his glasses and squinting toward the window at the crunch of the carriage wheels on the gravel, shaking his head and returning to his account book when he realized it was only me.


I shouldn’t have expected anything else. After all, I hadn’t bid him good-bye on my departure, just turned on my heel and exited the room when he’d told me he wouldn’t come with me to Yoxall.


“Your mother’s death was hardly unexpected,” he’d said with a shrug, and something about how she’d lived a good life.


He was right, of course. Or, at least, the world’s opinion was closer to Edmund’s than to mine. Mother had been old and ill. Her life had been happy and her children were many. Few thought it fit to weep, as I did, at her funeral.


But something had come over me after the service when the splintered crowd stood around her open grave, although I wasn’t sure it was grief for Mother at all. The wind howled. The sleet smacked against us. My brothers flanked our fading father, their faces uniform as soldiers’. My sister was solemn, with her eyes downcast, as her husband thanked the vicar. But I had been angry, with an anger that leaked out in pathetic, rain-mingled tears and made me angrier still.


I didn’t knock again but went instead to the schoolroom—to the children. I needed them— anyone— to embrace me, touch me, so I could feel alive.


I could not suppress my disappointment when I reached the threshold. “Oh, Miss Brontë,” I said, my voice flat. “I didn’t know you’d returned.”


(She finishes reading)


(CSA): Thank you for that. So I wanted to talk a little bit about setting, because Thorp Green Hall, and many of the other locations in this novel, are real places that existed in the 19th century, but the landscape of England has changed significantly in the years since. How did you think about setting as you were writing the book, and what did you do to reimagine and reconstruct the Yorkshire of that time?

(FA): I started, as I mentioned, I did a full year of research before I started writing the book. I then drafted the book in 6 months, and then I went to Yorkshire. I always knew it was going to be an important part of the process: actually going. So, of course, you can look at old maps, you can look on street-view now; Rural Yorkshire hasn't changed as much as some parts of the world, right? We're not talking about a big cosmopolitan city. But on my trip I only had five days; I work fulltime in New York and had family to visit back in the UK as well, so it was a very planned out trip in those five days. I went first to the area where Thorp Green Hall once stood. So, there's two villages very close together called Great and Little Ouseburn. I took a bus from York that goes once an hour and went there. One thing I had with me was a map that showed all the houses in the village that were there in the 19th century, so as I walked around, I would glance down at my map and then up to see which buildings they would have seen, and which ones they didn't. And the past feels very close in the UK, much more than in the US. So, really you got a good sense of what it might have been like. Yes, the road now has tarmac, but otherwise that center road of the village, a lot of the buildings, remain the same. There was particular information I wanted to get. One of my main characters is the doctor, Dr. John Crosby, and in particular I wanted to know which house was his. The census records were very unhelpful because they just gave his address as “Great Ouseburn” because the village was one street, and everyone knew where everyone else lived. There were no house numbers. I was staying in the out building of the post office, which was the Airbnb in town, and shortly after arriving I was chatting to the post Mistress and her daughter (my host) about why I was there, mentioned that I'd love to find this house of Dr. John Crosby (who was the doctor in the 1840s), and an elderly lady is in there looking at greeting cards and she leans around the display and says to me, ‘The doctor's house? That'll be Rosehurst.’ And points out the door. And I’m afraid I thought she was confused. I said, ‘Oh no, not the doctor now — the doctor in the 1840s.’ She said, ‘Yeah, that's him! Rosehurst! That one!’ And points down the street. I was still slightly skeptical but I went, knocked on the door, was greeted by the woman who lived there and her husband. I think they thought I was going to try and sell them something, so I was speaking at the speed of light, trying to say, ‘Don't worry, I'm not here for any of that reason!’ And when I mentioned Dr. John Crosby they said, ‘Oh yes, his name is on the deed!’


(CSA): Oh wow!


(FA): Do you want to come back later for tea? So there's only one scene in his house — a pretty shocking scene, and I was quite worried about what that couple would think of it when they read the book, but they enjoyed it. They sent me a lovely email, so I feel better about that now. But it was wonderful to sit and have tea where Lydia and Dr. Crosby do, and I was able to take details of: what they see out the window, the layout of the house, the fact that there's a … there WAS a passageway that led to the rear where he holds his surgery as the local doctor. So that's the example of something that I found on the ground, which was really fun. 


I can't drive, so one thing that was good about that was I walked everywhere, which, of course, they walk a lot in 19th century novels. You think about how often weather and walking plays a role in the novels of Jane Austin, for instance. I walked from Great Ouseburn to where Thorp Green Hall used to stand. The building has not been there since the late 19th century. There's another house there now, which is now a school (It's called Queen Ethelburgas Collegiate), so I'd emailed ahead to the school. The janitorial staff gave me a tour, but unfortunately it does not look much like it did in Lydia’s time, apart from the types of plants, the environment, how flat the land is compared to the hillier mores around Haworth, I wasn't getting much of a sense of what it would have looked like in Lydia's day. But one of the outbuildings — the monk's house where Branwell sleeps — is still there. It's a private home, but it was just incredible for me to see a house where Branwell Brontë lived. Some details I have, like the statuette of a monk above the door — That was something I only saw from being there on the ground and slightly trespassing on their lawn, which was, you know, great fun. And I had to take details out, like I used to have him climbing out the window, and when I was there I saw those windows were far too small for a grown man to be climbing out, so it was great to get that on the ground experience. I saw a lot of the graves of my characters, and a really great thing I'd done was email ahead to the local vicar, so she'd put out a call to the congregation of anyone who knew anything about local history. I had maybe five or six people turn up holding documents that they kept in their house, newspaper clippings from the 80s and '90s, stacks of letters with Brontë academics from when everything was done with typewritten letters versus emails — I just photographed everything. One man even brought a commonplace book, which was something that 19th century ladies of leisure did to amuse themselves, where they draw, write fragments of poetry, quotes that they liked... Think about the inspirational quotes that people share on Instagram now? They did this in their commonplace book, and then showed each other. And he had one of Miss Caroline Thompson — who's mentioned in my novel as one of the fancy neighbors of Lydia and her family — so as I turned every page I was holding my breath, because it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that there could have been a Brontë fragment in there from Ann or Branwell. Unfortunately, there wasn't, but there was a signature from William Wilberforce, for instance, who was a famous British politician and abolitionist, so that was amazing. I did try and encourage this gentleman to take this to a local museum, but he was very proud that it was in the family possession. 


After a couple of days there I left and then went to Haworth where the Brontës lived, and most of them died. I did archival research there to get some of the documents that I used as primary sources, but I also just walked. I was with a friend by then; We walked over the moors. Of course I was in the house where the Brontës spent most of their lives; I saw their graves, all of them, but Ann. Ann is actually buried in Scarborough — another important setting in my novel because of the wonderful holidays that she'd spent with the Robinsons there. It was a place that was very important for her which is why she went there to convalesce, ultimately to die. So if I'd had all the time in the world there were more places I would have gone. I would have loved to go to Scarborough. I would have loved to see Great Barr Hall and (Ulstry?) hall, two of the other houses that feature in the novel. Both of those are still standing, but they're essentially wrecks. They're ruined; They can't be knocked down because they're protected, but no one has the money to restore them. I discovered a crazy sub genre of YouTube video where men with GoPros break into abandoned British stately homes and film, so I saw Sir Edward's house, Great Burr Hall. By that, I saw some pictures on Pinterest at the inside of Ulstry hall that allowed me to talk about the steps, for instance, where Lydia notices that her sister doesn't keep up on dusting the way she does. So, great details there, but I did not have all the time in the world to go to every single place. But it's just so wonderful to see those fragments of the past that still survive now, and to put it together and to imagine what it must be like in its heyday. And yes, I feel like Yorkshire is relatively unspoiled and there are moments when you're walking around, whether in Haworth or Great and Little Ouseburn, where you know that it looks the same as it did for Anne Brontë. 


(CSA): That's incredible. It's really lovely to hear about. I liked especially what you were saying about walking through that area, because I do think that's a big difference between the way that we think of that time period now, and the way that people who were writing it at the time were actually living in it; just, the difference in the time scale of basic tasks, like getting from point A to point B.


(FA): Yeah, a couple of comments there: One: I got blessed with crazy good weather for an April in Yorkshire so I actually got that comment from my agent where she said, “Why’s it so sunny?” (Clara laughs) So I had to do an edit and introduce a bit more rain to feel more realistic, so that's great. I also wish that Google maps, you know how you can select traveling by car, public transit, I think bicycle in some places, walking… I wish you could select by carriage, because it's always hard for me to imagine how long things could have taken because I don't know enough about horses, like how often they need to be refreshed and fed, or you need to change your horses. It's just… it's tough for me, not just on this novel but generally. 


The other thing I'd say: walking, you just notice more, so there's lovely details about the hedgerows and the puddles that I include that was from one particular walk. This is why I say to historical novelists, that often it's good to go on research trips alone, because when you're with someone, you don't take in those details because you're talking. I was with a friend in Haworth, but when I was in Greater and Little Ouseburn, I did do that as a solitary trip, and very deliberately. Because one: people talk to you more when you're alone and you never know who's going to tell you something helpful, and two: when people aren't talking to you, you can really tune into your environment and get those details that are irreplaceable, and you're never going to get from digital research. 


(CSA): So you mentioned earlier that you dedicate Brontë's Mistress to the women who didn't write their novels. Why is that?


(FA): I think the Brontë's were exceptional, and we remember them for being exceptional because they were some of the few women in this time period that did produce incredible works of art. Their life story is quite strange; From the education level they got from their father, the early tragedies, the concentration of genius within so many siblings in the same house. But what about people who are not exceptional, or don't think themselves exceptional? And I'm very interested in women's history, and a lot of women's history is domestic and small, and gets lost. No one thinks it's worth talking about, so that was part of the reason. And as I say, I still think there are women now who feel the same; who maybe don't feel that what they're going through is worthy of being spoken about. And you know, at the very end of the novel, Lydia says that there are people ‘from here,’ (she's in France by then), ‘From here to England crying over curtain fabric.’ And I think that sometimes, women's pain can seem like it's around the small things — like your mother-in-law hanging up curtains you don't like in your dressing room, but it's not really about that, of course. When Lydia cries about the current fabric, it's crying about a lack of agency, not having control over her own life. And that's the story that she nearly doesn't tell. The conception of the novel is that she does ultimately tell it; She writes it down and this manuscript is found. But the last words of the novel are her saying that she feels inadequate, and she doesn't see what the use would be of leaving a record of everything that she's gone through. And I think about everything we've lost — not just with women, right? But all sorts of different groups of people who maybe didn't feel that their lives were worth recording, that they count enough to be History with a capital H.


***AD BREAK***


(CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is writer and literary blogger, Finola Austin, whose debut novel Brontë's Mistress describes the infamous affair between Branwell Brontë and Mrs. Lydia Robinson from her point of view.


One of the things that struck me in the novel about Lydia is the lack of intimacy in her life, and I don't just mean the romantic intimacy which takes center stage — She doesn't really have that with her husband, she doesn't have it with her daughters, she doesn't even have it with her sister or the other women who are part of her life in some nominal sense. The person she probably has the greatest intimacy with, outside of this brief bubble moment with Branwell Brontë, is her chamber made. So tell me about that: was this something that you gather is true of women generally at the time, is it something specific to her? 


(FA): Yes, it is very deliberate. I think one thing we hear about women now, especially mothers, is that they're… I've heard this phrase of being “touched out.” Like you’re touched too much, especially in those years when your children are young. Maybe you're breastfeeding, you have toddlers clinging to you, you're trying to maintain a sexual and romantic relationship with your husband, and I read stories about women hiding in the closet just to have a moment alone. Women who can't even shut the door when they're in the bathroom without their children complaining, and feeling like their body isn't their own anymore, but almost public property; And where a bubble bath or a night alone in a hotel room — it’s heaven! But for 19th century women of Lydia's class, it was the opposite problem. So this is talked about a little bit in the novel, but breastfeeding was discouraged. So, Lydia has had five children. The first four babies are whisked away from her. The second they're born, they're sent out to wet nurses. She doesn't get to raise them. She doesn't get to bathe them. She's denied that, and I think that has a profound psychological effect on women and children in the period, as well as the physiological consequences of not prioritizing breast milk. While wealthy people could afford a wet nurse to fully dedicate to a baby, for people in lower echelons and society, they were often sharing a wet nurse with many other families. So babies were not getting the nutrition they needed, and formula at that time did exist, but it was very poor quality and infant mortality was incredibly high for that, and other reasons. So Lydia, as well as her mother dying, before the novel starts in the last two years she's also lost her youngest daughter and, I mentioned that with her youngest daughter she insisted on nursing her herself, which is seen by her husband and those around her as very eccentric and demanding. But she does have a closer, more intimate relationship with that child than any of her others, and when that child dies, she almost feels like God has punished her for being too close to that child, taking too much pleasure in her. She talks about her fists, her little baby fists; counting her fingers, her toes, just enjoying those moments of physical closeness, which we take for granted with motherhood but were denied many women like Lydia at the time. So that's certainly the maternal part of it. 


The lack of other intimacy is important too because very early in the novel we see that Lydia is trying to instigate sexually with her husband, and he is rejecting her. He says that she's too old for that later. He doesn't see the point now that her procreating years are essentially coming to a close and going to be behind her, and so she’s just utterly denied sexual pleasure, and that has never been a part of their relationship. It's always been sex on his terms, and I think that is building on — certainly not every 19th century marriage. I'm sure there were some sexually fulfilling ones — but it was certainly true that women's pleasure was not understood or widely spoken. Wherever women's orgasm is, their anatomy was not a key focus of sexual conversation at the time. Lydia with Branwell… I wouldn't necessarily say it's a love affair, but one of the things she finds with him is the centering of her own sexual pleasure. And while I wouldn't say the novel is graphic — there's no erotica in it — there are descriptions of the sex that they have, and they sometimes include him performing oral sex on her and her not reciprocating, or not having a penetrative intercourse with him, which is a pretty powerful move for a woman at her time to redefine what sex is and have it on her terms. Of course, that's not uncomplicated by the power dynamic between them. He is essentially her employee, and younger than her and a very vulnerable man. But in some ways it is a pretty powerful feminist move for her to decide, “This is the way I want sex to be.”


And then you mentioned her ladies maid Marshall. Yes, I think it's so interesting that ladies maids did have the greatest level of intimacy with women of Lydia's class. Not only did they dress them and bathe them, they emptied their chamber pots. They'd scrub their menstrual pads. They knew these women more deeply than anybody knows us today when we're fully grown. And again, there is a power imbalance, right? Someone knows everything about you —  you're dependent on them in some ways, and yet they're dependent on you for their livelihood. I also wanted some suggestion that maybe the relationship between Lydia and Marshall has moments where it could be sexual, but it's never quite clear. So we certainly don't know what Marshall feels about all of this, and Lydia, again with her cyclical thinking, she never quite brings herself to think about that with Marshall, or think about, could she get that sort of happiness, love, affection and sexual pleasure with a woman? But there are moments where I would say that I very deliberately wanted to suggest that that was a possibility between them, albeit a romance with a… yeah, there's definitely a power imbalance, and so a slightly abusive edge. There are moments where she grips Marshall's hand too hard, she slaps her away. She can be very unkind to her, but she's pretty devastated when Marshall leaves her, and she feels the lack of that intimate figure in her life. 


(CSA): So you rightly pointed out that Lydia Robinson did not have the choices that a woman might have today, even as a comparatively wealthy white woman in the 19th century. But of course she had significantly more choices than say Marshall or her other servants, even the Brontë sisters or women of color of that time. How did women's lives differ in the 19th century according to their birth? 


(FA): Yes, so Lydia is absolutely like… she has moments of extreme White feminism. So I was working with an old real caste of people in 19th century Yorkshire, which was one of the whitest places imaginable. But it was important for me to have moments of nodding to a wider context. Two important ones I would call out here: One: Lydia talks about her delight at manumission at a dinner party in order to make a good impression, so it's pure virtue signaling. She does it to get the reverent Brontë to like her. She does it because she knows that men like him, sort of similar in belief system and religion to her own father, that this is a key cause of theirs, but it's entirely for selfish reasons. And you know I mentioned people sharing inspirational quotes on instagram a second ago, I would say this is the equivalent to maybe just posting a black square on blackout Tuesday, and then forgetting about it the rest of your life. Lydia is very much of that mold. 


The other moments where it's very much there in the background is casual references to the colonies, to the sourcing of her shawls — her Indian shawls — the things her brothers have given her. She's not thinking about where are these products coming from and the impact that she's having. It's just entirely off her radar. But it wasn't off my radar as an author, and I think that's where the author/character distinction is important. And it's very hard in a first person novel, of course, and especially in a first novel because people don't know me as a writer outside of the voice of Lydia. But I hope there are moments where you can see that there's an authorial nod to, you know… that I don't agree with Lydia — all of her choices and all of her words. So more widely, I think you're right that in some ways, of course Lydia has many more options than people lower in the class spectrum, but with an important caveat: which is, that if you're working class, you're actually freer to do some things, like: to go out alone, to maybe have a more traditional courtship before you choose to marry; Whereas someone of Lydia's class… similar to the wet nursing, right? She's more circumscribed, even her clothes are more restrictive. She can't really go out and walk alone, she's more watched when she goes to parties… and so, in some ways the servants, their lives were physically extremely tough; Poverty was always around the corner. Certainly, a distinct lack of healthcare — as I mentioned, high infant mortality — and there are moments when the servants will mention things like this. They'll say how many children they have at home, and Lydia can be vindictive and threatening people's jobs and to get rid of them if she doesn't like what they're saying or doing. And, of course, all of the characters are real — the servants are real, so I did look into their histories: how many children died, the number of people they were supporting… but with all that, your life was freer, you weren't as watched, and maybe in some ways, would be a little bit closer to a life that we would know now. 


And then, of course, you had the Brontë's, who were somewhere in between. Poverty is not knocking at their door, they're not going to starve to death, they're educated… but the sisters are still women, and they have very few options. The Brontës as well are not conventionally attractive, so marriage is unlikely as a prospect for them. Ultimately and ironically, of course, Charlotte Brontë does get married, and then dies in the early stages of pregnancy from acute morning sickness — another danger that women face even if they do get the financial security of marriage. But for them, their options are extremely limited to essentially become dependent on someone else as a governess or a lady's companion, and… well Lydia says at some point, she's like, ‘Well, I've got either got to be scheming, or what are the alternatives? To be a drudge or burden?’ And a drudge is someone who you know has red hands and bad nails, like her housekeeper who she mocks for those things, and a burden is someone who's living on the whims of others (as she briefly becomes with her sister). And that's not an experience that she likes at all, so she does everything that she can: She calculates, and manipulates in order to escape, and I got to say: in that case, I don't really blame her. 


(CSA): So this is not the only novel about the Brontës to come out in the last few years, as our listeners will be aware if they tuned into last week's episode of Narrative Species. Why do you think they continue to captivate us? 


(FA): Yes, there've been so many great front inspired novels over the last few years. Some that I'd recommend… The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë, which is an imagination of her love affair with her husband, who I just mentioned, Arthur Nicholls, and Bella Ellis's Brontë's Mystery series (which I think you heard about last week), which casts the sisters as sleuth's going around and solving crimes. Ill Will was a great novel by someone from the north of England which imagines what happens to Heathcliff in those years where he goes missing from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. So, so many interesting reactions to the source material! An incredible graphic novel called Glass Town as well, that really illustrates the make-believe world that the Brontë siblings made together, which I just thought was so in the spirit of the Brontës, and Isabel Greenberg — I talked with her about her process which was absolutely fascinating. And it's not just the Brontë's! So Jane Austen often gets brought up in the same breath as the Brontës. So I think about the Jane Austen Society, which came out last year, about the foundation or the fictionalized foundation of the society to commemorate that writer. I think about Pride and Prejudice and Other Flavors, which takes an Indian American family and a retelling of the Pride and Prejudice story, and A Recipe for Persuasion is the next one in that series. I absolutely love how so many people with diverse perspectives are finding inspiration in these literary greats, and the great women writers that so many of us discovered (like me) as teenagers when you were reading books in bed. I think there's a few things here. One: there's the enduring appeal of the source material, especially for the Brontës as well — there is the romance of their lives and the fact that there are still stories that haven't been told, like Lydia Robinsons. So we're still discovering new material, which is incredible! But then I think there's probably a desire to update them and talk about our current realities, right? Like, I think it can be fun to escape into the past — I certainly enjoyed Bridgerton over the last few weeks like everybody else — but often you can see current concerns and considerations coming up in how people respond to the past. That can be as literal as setting a book in the 21st century but having Austinian or Brontë inspirations and references, or it could be something like what I did, which is still setting it in the 19th century but looking back with a different lens about what is feminism today? And some of the things we were talking about, about Lydia's brand of White feminism that can certainly have some very large blind spots. So I hope that it continues, but at the same time I also hope that a lot of those novelists that I talked about, that we don't only write things inspired by those who have gone before, but that we’re also getting to new material. Certainly for me, I can't talk too much yet about my next project, but I want to tell stories of real women — but maybe real women who've been totally overlooked, unlike the Brontë's. People you haven't heard of, but you should have heard of. There's a wealth of material out there, and digitization has meant that researching the past has never been easier. I feel much more fortunate than historical novelists and biographers of the mid 20th century, for example, because what might have taken months or years to research before is now available with a few clicks of the mouse. 


(CSA): Well, Finola Austin, thank you so much for joining me today. This was lovely. 


(FA): Thank you for having me. It was great fun.


(CSA): To learn more about Finola, or to order a copy of her book, visit FinolaAustin.com.
Catch Story Behind the Story on the first Friday of every month from 5 to 6 p.m. on KSQD, 90.7 FM.


To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at Clara@KSQD.org. The Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons; He also wrote our theme.