Today a little tease for my followers

Synopsis

In early 20th century Britain, society was changing rapidly, but not much was changing for women. From different ends of the social spectrum, Celia Mapperley and May Hallam wrestle with rules and circumstances beyond their control and must navigate love, sex, war, and the thin line between conformity and scandal. As they each bear the shame of a devastating family secret, their stories come together in ways that neither could have imagined.    

GuestPost

Behind the Bridal Veil

As a lifelong reader of novels set in the 19th and early 20th century Britain, I’ve always wondered about how young women on the marriage market felt as they approached the unveiling of the great mystery of sex. Because British society before the First World War tried to safeguard the innocence of young, unmarried women by keeping them from any knowledge of what happens between husband and wife, many must have been startled and even horrified by what they encountered on their wedding night.

Just how badly this strategy could backfire is the theme of the two parallel stories in my novel Ancestral Virgins, set before, during, and after World War I. In the novel, I wanted to show how badly these young women could be damaged by being brought up in ignorance and hedged about with so many proscriptions.

The first of the two stories grew out of my theory that some potential brides might have been more fascinated than repulsed by what they gleaned from the few hints and whispers about sex that came their way. Thus, my character Celia Mapperley was born, a young aristocrat touched by no-one but her maid, kept in the dark but longing to discover the mysterious no man’s land that divided married women irrevocably from their unmarried sisters. Aristocratic parents tended to be distant in those days, and some treated their daughters merely as pawns in a marital lottery. I’d noticed how many of the heroines of novels written during that period had their most loving and tactile relationships with their brothers, even if it was just playing tennis or rough housing – Lucy Honeychurch and her brother Freddie in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View spring to mind. And I started to wonder what could happen if this went awry – if a young woman who feels unmoored and afraid of being married off to a stranger cleaves to the only person with whom she feels completely comfortable and safe.

The second of the two stories involves a young woman, Lily Hallam, one of six siblings who live and work on the country estate of Celia’s family estate in Nottinghamshire. Lily grows up in close proximity to her brothers but is as innocent and unquestioning as any other girl of the era about the relations between men and women. When, aged only 15, she’s sent away from home to work as a housemaid in a gentleman’s manor house in Sussex, she finds herself confused and conflicted as her charming employer becomes increasingly keen to enjoy her company. 

“Lily wished Mrs. Goodwin could see how properly he always behaved, parting from her at the foot of the stairs each evening with a bow and a peck on the back of her hand. She’d felt no urgency from him, none of the pressing attentions that Mam had warned her about when it came to men. All he seemed to want was the lightness that they had when they were together, the lightness that helped him to forget the war for a little while. Yet there were also his kisses – long, trembling, addictive – and sometimes in the night, she’d lie awake in bed in the attic, hardly able to breathe as she relived them. It was like balancing on a very high and very narrow wall stretching far ahead and far behind, and only by taking one very careful step after another would she manage not to fall.”   

As Celia and Lily’s stories draw ever closer together, the consequences for both women are dire and shocking and have long-lasting implications for all who know and love them.