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Evie Dunmore’s debut romance, Bringing Down the Duke, was named as one of the best romances of the year by Publishers Weekly – a remarkable win for a first-time novelist – and even more surprising when you know that English is Evie’s second language. Now Evie continues with a new book in the series, A Rogue of One’s Own.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in this Binge Reading episode Evie talks about why she was attracted to an extraordinary group of women – the first women students at Oxford University – for her suffragist era historical romance. She tells why she swapped academia and a career in international business for romance writing.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
- How Evie swapped international business for romance
- The remarkable first women students at Oxford University
- The deep human urge for equality
- The appeal of romance
- The writers she admires most
- What she’d do differently second time around
Where to find Evie Dunmore:
Website: http://eviedunmore.com/
Facebook:@EvieDunmoreAuthor
Twitter:@evie_dunmore
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evietheauthor/
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
Jenny Wheeler: But now, here’s Evie. Hello there Evie, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Evie Dunmore: Good morning, or at least it’s morning where I am right now. Thank you for having me.
Introducing Evie Dunmore
Jenny Wheeler: You’re in Germany and it’s first thing in the morning, and I’m in Auckland, New Zealand, one day into lockdown for the second time. We’re still all being affected by the pandemic in one way or another, I’m afraid.
Evie, you embarked on a historical romance series called The League of Extraordinary Women which is set in the late 19th century, the 1880s. It deals with the suffragist movement, the women’s movement of those years. I use the word ‘suffragist’ because it is subtly different from suffragette, isn’t it? Can you explain the difference and why it’s important?
Evie Dunmore: Yes, certainly. The one thing to know is that the term ‘suffragist’ precedes the term ‘suffragettes’. At least in Britain, the term suffragette wasn’t used until 1906, which was when the Daily Mail created the term. Basically, it’s an insult for Emmeline Pankhurst’s more radical arm of the suffrage movement because those ladies were causing you a lot of trouble and the suffragists who followed Pankhurst reclaimed the term.
They said, okay, suffragette is quite nice, and it sets us apart from the suffragists. The difference between the two is that the suffragists were using peaceful methods to work for change until the vote was granted in 1918 in Britain, and the suffragettes were literally setting fire to things.
So the suffragettes are the more radical women’s rights activists that you associate with the imprisonment and the force feeding and the firebombing, and the suffragists, under Millicent Fawcett, were more focused on petitioning, lobby work, writing articles, but certainly both groups wanted the vote for women.
Feminists falling in love
Jenny Wheeler: The suffragists were working through the mechanisms that society accepted, whereas the suffragettes were willing to do extreme things like throwing themselves under horses at races and things like that.
Evie Dunmore: Exactly. At the time, in 1880, the suffragists were already considered quite a radical group. But nearly 30 years later and nothing much had happened that they wanted to happen, so things were getting more heated in certain corners in the movement.
Jenny Wheeler: They ran out of patience. Would it be fair to say that these romances are about feminists falling in love? There is a kind of dislocation between the idea of these women, who are so intent on independence, also finding romance. I wonder if the word ‘feminist’ is misleading because it’s more a term that’s appropriate for our own time, rather than the 1870s-80s. Would that be so?
Evie Dunmore: Well, yes, I’m getting to that in a moment, but first I find it really interesting what you said in the first part of your question, which is that it’s slightly incongruent being an independent woman and finding romance, because I do not see that as mutually exclusive necessarily. One of the reasons I wrote the books is to show exactly that.
There is always a certain dependency within a relationship, but maybe that goes both ways. It’s not that as an independent woman I don’t have feelings, or I don’t want romance in my life. It just becomes harder to negotiate. That space of how difficult is it to negotiate a relationship when you have goals in your own life, I find that very interesting. I think that’s one of the ideas that drive my writing.
Urge for freedom goes deep
To get to the second part of your question, I think it’s fair enough to call them feminists, because historians today would agree that these women were the founding mothers of first wave feminism. That’s on the record.
If you look at the basic definition of feminism, which is the belief that women and men should have equal social, political and economic rights, then I would say it’s fair enough to call my characters feminists falling in love. Of course, how you interpret the ways of achieving this equality and what it means for women’s agency, people have always disagreed on.
You will find it difficult to find the period of time where all feminists and non-feminists agreed on what it means to be a feminist, even back then. We just talked about the difference between the suffragettes and the suffragists. Even they had their disagreements on methods and what it means. If you know the girls in my stories, they certainly want this equality and it’s funny how not new that concept of feminism is. It is deeply rooted in exactly that time period, if not earlier.
I’d like to give a good example here through John Stuart Mill. He was a huge English philosopher and economist. His work is still considered really important today for that time period. When he married Harriet Taylor in 1851, he was very upset by the marriage laws of the time.
John Stuart Mill on marriage law
He said they amounted to women being legally enslaved and he was so annoyed that this marriage conferred all power over Harriet to him that he made a public declaration against it. He said something like, because I have no means of legally divesting myself of these odious powers, I feel it is my duty to put on record a formal protest against these existing laws of marriage, and that I will never ever use these powers that I will hold, because I don’t want them.
He was not alone with these beliefs in 1851. He had a lot of supporters. It’s just that he and the women who agreed with him were up against a formidable opposition. So maybe they get drowned out over time, but certainly the idea of equal rights between men and women is not new. It has been a very long struggle.
Jenny Wheeler: The heroine of your most recent book, the one we are focusing on, A Rogue of One’s Own, is Lady Lucie. She is a perfect example of the kind of thing we’re talking about. She has been disowned by her family for political activities because they consider she’s bringing disgrace on the family name, and she’s also making it very difficult for herself to make a good marriage.
Blazing a political trail
That’s really the only point for a woman of her status, to marry well. Also, she resolves that she’s not going to marry anyway until the Marriage Property Act is amended, for that very reason. The Act, as it was framed, put women totally under the thumb of their husbands in every respect.
For her to marry in that environment, at that time, would have meant that she had to virtually declare that she wasn’t interested in having any property rights, any legal rights, that she was quite willing to be totally under her husband’s thumb like a slave wasn’t it?
Evie Dunmore: The term ‘slave’ is very loaded, of course. John Stuart Mill used the term back then, so I used it now. But it is very true that she would have been pretty much right-less because her legal persona would cease to exist. It wasn’t actually the Married Women’s Property Act that did that.
Protecting women’s property rights
The whole concept of coverage here, of subsuming a married woman’s legal persona in her husband, comes from British Common Law and to amend that they created the Married Women’s Property Act, but it didn’t go very far in protecting married women’s rights.
That’s why the suffragists were focusing on amending that, making sure that the Act actually represented married women’s rights so that they could write their own will and decide who could inherit whatever property they had inherited before they went into the marriage, they could keep their property, they could hire a lawyer by themselves, they could open bank accounts in their own name.
All these issues needed to be addressed to keep married women legal persons. That’s why the suffragists focused on amending this Property Act.
Also, voting rights, voting in national elections was tied to property rights back in the day, for men too. So the reason the suffragists were focused on this Property Act, or Lady Lucie in my story wants to amend it, is because should they get the vote for women, but women lose their property rights and their legal rights upon marriage, then it’s great that women can now vote, but married women wouldn’t have been able to vote, they would have been excluded by this property qualification.
This was the groundwork they were doing while another group was working on decoupling the property qualifications from voting rights. This work was going on in parallel.
An extraordinary group of women
Jenny Wheeler: You write your stories in very good historical fact and the basis for The League of Extraordinary Women is founded on the fact that nine women were admitted to Oxford University, the first women ever accepted at Oxford in the 1870s. Lady Margaret Hall that took those women as students didn’t approve of or support the idea of women’s rights. The women were all tutored separately from the men and they weren’t conferred full degrees, but nevertheless, it was quite historic that they even were allowed to sit at the desks and learn.
You take this group of young women as a starting point. I was curious, how far do the women in your books mirror the actual women who were the first students?
Evie Dunmore: I think Annabelle mirrors them pretty well. That’s something I found out halfway through the novel, because that’s when I became serious about writing it. I thought, you have been spending all this time writing and it’s probably time, now that I’ve decided I’m going to finish it and make it a proper book, to do the proper research as well.
I went to Oxford, to Lady Margaret Hall, and got access to the Archives to learn more about these women because 2-3 years ago their online presence was fairly underdeveloped. It was quite difficult finding enough information about who exactly they were, how old they were, what their backgrounds had been, so I felt it was necessary to go into the Archives.
The first women students at Oxford
Lady Margaret Hall had a lot of good information on them and I was glad to find out that Annabelle happened to match the profile of these early women students at Oxford. At 25, she would have been too old realistically to enroll, but the majority of students for a long time came from clergy households, like Annabelle because her father was a man of the church, or from academic households around Oxford. So that matched pretty well.
Hattie, who was also a student, she would have been an outlier because she is the daughter of a very wealthy banking family. But the first daughter of an industrialist to attend Lady Margaret Hall was Gertrude Bell, another famous woman. That was only several years later.
Jenny Wheeler: Annabelle is the heroine of the first book, Bringing Down the Duke. That focuses on her story, and that, your debut novel, was picked as one of the best romances of the year by Publishers Weekly, which is a great achievement for a debut novel – for any novel, but particularly for a debut one.
And you had a little secret, which we haven’t discussed yet, that you were writing in English as your second language. Did you find that a challenge, and why did you choose to write it in English?
Personal experience to the page
Evie Dunmore: To be honest, that wasn’t really a decision. The story just happened to come to me in English. My written English is better than my spoken English, so it is easier for me to write in English than to speak.
Why it happened? I don’t know. I have always loved the English language. I read most books that are written in English originally, in English. I suppose that is how it happened. There’s a really strong connection for me between reading and writing. Also I lived in Britain for four years and I lived in the United States. I have always had English on my mind.
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned that you lived in England. You were actually a student at Oxford yourself, weren’t you?
Evie Dunmore: Yes, I was.
Jenny Wheeler: Did that give you an advantage in terms of access to those research materials you’ve mentioned?
The fascinating historical record
Evie Dunmore: I think anyone with a good reason would be able to access the archives of Lady Margaret Hall. You just have to get in touch with the Archivist and present your reasons. It certainly was an advantage for me to get into the Bodleian Library, which is the largest library in Oxford. As an alumni, I have access to the Bodleian for life and I can renew my library card every four years and I can go in, which is wonderful, and certainly less complicated than if you have to go through the whole process as an outsider.
In general, I would think that you could access those materials if you wanted to, even without having been a student.
Jenny Wheeler: Your own studies were quite a long way away from this turn you took towards writing romance. Tell us what your first or second or third degree was in – I’m not sure how many there were – and why you changed paths to writing romance.
Evie Dunmore: I studied International Politics and Economics and I did a Master’s degree in Diplomacy, so it is quite a long way away from romance, as you say. I did not start out as an author. I went to work for many years in Business after I graduated. I started reading romance during my long commutes to clients and back and after long work days to unwind.
But I started writing my first stories when I was six years old. That’s when it started. I was reading a lot at that age too. In a way, I think I’m coming back to myself now. Maybe I’m growing into what I was always meant to do at this point.
Winning the Lord’s support
Jenny Wheeler: In A Rogue of One’s Own there is some very interesting material buried in there amongst the romance – letters that women wrote about their support of the idea of women’s rights and talking about how their personal lives were affected. I understand that was a survey you yourself organized.
Can you tell us how that material came about? It is quite touching the way it is bought into the story and her male counterpart, Lord Ballantine, is very much touched by these personal accounts. It helps him to understand what women are thinking and feeling.
Evie Dunmore: Thank you. I made up the survey, the numbers, and to my knowledge there wasn’t ever a survey that large, that women actually published in the national newspapers. What I did do is, I did read real letters from women at the time about the topic of rights in a marriage, domestic violence, being owned.
There are lots of diary entries and letters out there you can look into because exchanging big ideas with writing buddies was a big deal in the 19th century. It happened a lot, especially since you couldn’t really talk about these things openly with your girlfriends. In the nineteenth century you didn’t just sit down with your girlfriends and have a chat about this guy or that, or what happened in your marriage. It was a very private matter.
A forbidden topic in 1880s
And so I had this idea of creating a survey based on the material I had read, but again, I probably exaggerated the numbers and also that it’s been sent straight to the suffragists for publication. So I took some artistic license there, but I very much liked the idea and it’s not implausible. It is something that could have happened.
Jenny Wheeler: I think you also mentioned that a lot of these letters came from middle class or even upper class women, and they helped to banish the idea that it was only the lower classes who were interested in women’s rights, because they expressed things that were happening in that world of the middle and upper classes that the ruling classes didn’t want to even acknowledge were going on.
Evie Dunmore: Yes, that is true. Of course, letters exchanged by upper classes and middle classes are the letters that survive, usually. It is not as easy to find written documentation from the working classes, maybe because they shared their stories differently or because nobody paid great care to preserve what they produced.
Women knew what was going on
What we do have is evidence of middle-class women being very aware of what is going on and being vocal about it in their letters. The idea that the working classes or even the non-working classes, the poor, have a drinking problem and a casual prostitution problem and a domestic violence problem, was something that was more talked about in newspaper articles, for example. You wouldn’t hear about Lord So-and-so slapping his lady around in the newspapers.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s absolutely right. Was there anything that you uncovered in your research that particularly surprised you?
Evie Dunmore: For Rogue or for Bringing Down the Duke or in general?
Jenny Wheeler: For either of them.
Evie Dunmore: I think what fascinated or surprised me was the absolute, stark contrast between what I read in those private letters and diary entries from the women that I found, and the public narrative around family. The family home in Victorian England was this peaceful oasis, this refuge from the big, bad world. It was where all the good things happened and where you raised the noble next generation.
It was a really sacred space and it was very much contingent on women performing certain roles and functions. All the poets and the poetry you read from the time and the narratives and literature were all focused on this angel of the house, the woman being the angel in the house and making everything lovely for everyone.
And reading these personal accounts where women are writing, I’m losing my faith in God, how horrible husbands are, there is obviously a huge mismatch between what women are supposed to perform and believe and how they really feel. That space in between I thought was super interesting, which is pretty much what inspired the Lucie story.
The myth of the Victorian family
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Certainly, in her case, her mother has not had a very happy time in her marriage at all but is absolutely committed to keeping that all secret and presenting a good face to the world.
Evie Dunmore: Yes, I agree, she does. I think that would not have been unusual for the time. I think that would have been the more usual way of doing it.
Jenny Wheeler: Certainly I can speak for New Zealand right through to the 1950s, it was probably only in the 1960s and 70s that women started to talk more openly about what was really going on in their lives.
Evie Dunmore: Yes, I think in Germany it would have been the same. The revolutions of the late sixties, seventies, was when these things were put on the table more openly, definitely here too.
Jenny Wheeler: Mentioning Germany, have your books been published in Germany? Is there any interest in this topic in Germany?
Evie Dunmore: Yes. The publisher has bought the rights to the whole series and the first translation for Bringing Down the Duke is scheduled for late spring, early summer, 2021. So that’s exciting.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. Moving away a little from the actual books and talking about your wider career, I always like to ask, is there one thing you’ve done more than any other that you would credit it with your writing success?
Evie Dunmore: My writing success. To be honest, I am still very new at this. I had a very unusual case of trying my first book and landing a publishing deal right away, which is very unusual. I have only written three books at this point. Only one of them is published at this point. The second one is launching on September 1st.
Taking writing seriously
I think what I can say after this short period of time is that two things are important. Number one, take your work seriously, take your writing seriously and make space for it accordingly. It is very easy to put your writing and your needs to write onto the back burner because there are other important things competing for your attention and for your time.
But if you really want to write and finish a book, give yourself the permission to take it seriously, shut the door, make the time. Understand it’s going to be hard. You need to sacrifice for it. Some people won’t understand, but if it’s your calling and if the story really wants to be written, then it’s probably the right thing to go ahead and to stick with it, even when it’s hard.
Don’t be discouraged by it being hard, it’s part of the process. Something I didn’t know before. I thought, wow, I’m writing, I’m living my dream, why is it not easy, why is it not fun half the time? I think it’s normal. Push past that.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s funny. I’ve been doing this podcast now for coming up two years, and it’s funny how even the most experienced authors will admit that with practically every book they come upon a dark hole or a place where they have this crisis of confidence about whether they’re going to be able to finish it, whether it’s any good. Almost every book, even for people who are on number 19 and 20. I find that quite encouraging.
Evie Dunmore: It’s a gloomy prospect on the one hand, but on the other hand, maybe you get less discouraged by it being that way. At some point you just need to decide that you’re going to do it anyway.
Living with uncertainty
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it’s part of the process. We mentioned the pandemic. I’m not sure what’s happening in Germany with COVID at the moment, but are you being affected in the launch of this second book by the way things are in the world at the moment? A Rogue of One’s Own, as you’ve mentioned, is coming out in a couple of weeks. Would you be normally doing book tours and things like that, and can you still do that?
Evie Dunmore: I wouldn’t have been doing any book tours in Germany because I do have German readers, but not in the numbers that would merit a book tour. Most of my readers are in the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, and I don’t think I would have been doing book touring there. But it has certainly affected, firstly, the mood, everyone’s mood about how to promote books. It doesn’t feel amazing to promote love stories and romances during such difficult times.
Even though I did see that romance novels gave a lot of people a lot of comfort during the lockdowns and during COVID, a lot of people took refuge in that world, but it’s dragging on for a really long time.
Nobody knows what is going to happen to the economy. We don’t know if bookstores are going to shut down again in a couple of weeks’ time in the United States or anywhere. There is lots of uncertainty and anxiety involved with that and I’m sure there are better conditions to launch any product or to do anything.
What Evie is reading now
The good thing is people have reacted very quickly. They’re shifting a lot of things online. There are lots of virtual author chats going on now, and people are still reading books, so it is still possible to meet readers and to have a chat like we have now.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s lovely. We call this series The Joys of Binge Reading because we know that in this digital age, people like to binge read, particularly digital books. They can get them at any hour of the day or night so if they are reading through a series and they finish a book at midnight, they can choose to buy the next one immediately and keep going.
Do you like to binge read and if so, what sorts of authors do you normally like to binge read?
Evie Dunmore: Yes, I sometimes do go onto reading binges. I think the last time I binge read and neglected everything else was when I discovered Kresley Cole’s Immortal After Dark series. It’s not historical, it’s like a paranormal romance, and I think I read the whole backlist in four days and didn’t come up for air in between. That was a bit crazy, but it was a lot of fun.
It is easy to binge read entertaining literature, like YA fantasy. I recently discovered Leigh Bardugo and read her Grishaverse books. I am also reading books by fellow authors, especially the ones that are up and coming. At the moment I’m reading a contemporary by Denise Williams, How to Fail at Flirting, which is a lot of fun so far. I was really looking forward to Diana Quincy’s, Her Night with the Duke, coming out soon. The focus is really interesting for me because it features a heroine who’s from the Middle East. I like that representation in the book because I’m half Lebanese so it’s good for me to see that that character represented in romance more.
Reading romance
Jenny Wheeler: How did you get started in reading romance?
Evie Dunmore: I mentioned earlier that I had very long commute when I was working full time as a business consultant and it was very comforting to read romance novels. That’s when I started to read them a lot, but originally I started because – I keep telling the story – I was a guest with relatives in the United States when I was 17 and something dropped and I went to pick it up under my bed and found a brown paper bag. I thought, that feels like a book inside. I pulled it out and it was Johanna Lindsey’s Hearts Aflame.
I thought this looks really interesting. I had never come across a book like that before, so I read it and read it a couple of times more and thought, really interesting.
I did not go on to buy any books like that because I was a bit embarrassed buying them. It took a couple of years until I came across Sarah MacLean’s Love by Numbers series. I loved those books. I loved them so much. That’s what I returned to when I was working a lot, and I never looked back.
Jenny Wheeler: You overcame the cringe factor of being a serious academic who read romance.
Evie Dunmore: Well, sometimes you need them. I think especially when life gets tough or challenging, it’s great to have a refuge that doesn’t offer more uncertainty about, is there going to be a happy end or not? When life is challenging and work is tough, I really liked reaching for that happy end and reading it and knowing it is going to be okay. So I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive.
The Happily Ever After
Jenny Wheeler: What they call in romance jargon, the HEA, the happily ever after.
Evie Dunmore: Exactly, yes.
Jenny Wheeler: I know you say that you’re only at the start of what is already proving to be a very bright career, but if you were doing it over again, even at this stage, is there anything you would change?
Evie Dunmore: No. To be honest, it has all gone better than I could have ever imagined, so I suppose lots of things were done right. I am just really grateful and excited about how things are going.
Maybe I would have talked to more experienced authors about second book syndrome, because writing the second book was not easy. All the parameters have changed and I felt, I’m doing this wrong because it’s so tough. I was struggling with that for a long time until I reached out to a couple of wonderful authors who were very nice and supported me, telling me, look, second books are a special beast. You have to push through that. It helped hearing that from different authors. I would have done that earlier, before struggling on my own for a while.
Jenny Wheeler: What is next for Evie, the writer? What are your plans over the next 12 months in terms of your writing? You’ve got more of The League of Extraordinary Women coming along?
Evie Dunmore: Yes, there’s a new contract with Berkeley for two more novels. At least one of them is going to be for The League of Extraordinary Women. What I am going to do in the next 12 months, hopefully, is write the fourth book. I’m already working on that. It’s Catriona’s story.
Third book in series is coming
I have to edit my third book, which is Hattie’s story. I have to tell people about the second book, A Rogue of One’s Own, coming up September 1st. I have to think about what is going to go into the fifth book and hopefully do a day job project in between somewhere. So it is definitely going to be busy.
Jenny Wheeler: How far are you with Hattie? Have you got the first draft of Hattie done?
Evie Dunmore: Yes, it’s all done. I’m expecting edits any moment now. I really liked that book, I have to say. Right now I’m still very enamored with that story, which is a new one. It’s not a given that, at this stage, you will be in love with everything you’ve done, so I’m quite happy about that right now.
Jenny Wheeler: You found number three easier than number two.
Evie Dunmore: I think I was a bit more experienced during the writing process. It’s very hard to have favorites, I love them both in a way. The characters are all very close to my heart. It will be sad saying goodbye to them when the fourth book is done.
The process of writing the third book, despite the pandemic, was a bit more assured. I was more confident writing it. It felt less like a challenge.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s marvelous. Do you enjoy interacting with readers and where can they find you online?
Evie Dunmore: Yes, it’s always lovely to hear from readers and to have a chat. I am absolutely online. I’m on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook. It’s probably best to head to my website at www.eviedunmore.com because that’s where all the links are that take you directly to those platforms.
Where to find Evie online
Also, you can sign up for my newsletter. I am sending out the first newsletter on August 25th and I think this is probably going to air after August 25th?
Jenny Wheeler: It will only be a few days after August 25th, so that will fit in very nicely.
Evie Dunmore: Yes, it would fit in very nicely. I did write a bonus chapter for Bringing Down the Duke, the wedding chapter, between Annabelle and Sebastian, if you sign up.
Jenny Wheeler: That sounds great. We do full show notes for every podcast, a transcript of our conversation, and we include links in that transcript so people will be able to go online and find them there for evermore. They don’t have to rely on scribbling them down while they’re listening to us.
Evie Dunmore: That sounds brilliant.
Jenny Wheeler: Evie, it’s been wonderful talking. I think you’re doing a great job with your suffrage romance and we’ll look forward to the coming book.
Evie Dunmore: Thank you so much for having me.
Jenny Wheeler: Our pleasure.
If you enjoyed Evie Dunmore’s historical romance you might also enjoy Elizabeth Kingston’s provocative comments on White Mythos in Romance.
LISTEN TO ELIZABETH ON BINGE READING PODCAST
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