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THE INSPIRATION FOR
Regency Rumours: Scandal Comes to Wimpole Hall
I lived within a short drive of Wimpole Hall for almost twenty years and grew to love it. A walk in the park in the evening followed by a drink at the Hardwicke Arms at the gates was a perfect way of unwinding after a hard day and on summer weekends I’d take pad and pen and write under one of the great beech trees.
When I had the opportunity to set a novel in a National Trust property I jumped at the chance and I had no doubt which great house I would choose. The only problem was trying to decide when in Wimpole’s long history I would set the book and who the hero and heroine would be.
The discovery that one of my favourite real-life Regency characters, Sir John Soane, was so much involved with the transformation of the house fixed my attention on the Third Earl and his family. Mr Soane, I decided, had taken one of the young men from his drawing office as his protégé and the Earl and Countess seemed to be a warm, caring couple who would offer sanctuary to a young lady in distress—my hero and heroine had arrived.
I stood in the Entrance Hall on a cold, drizzling afternoon, my nose pink, my toes decidedly damp and my clothes unflatteringly practical, and imagined who would be the person I would least like to see me looking like that. A devastatingly handsome young man, was the answer— and suddenly there was Giles Harker, snubbing Isobel with one chilly look down his perfect nose.
A privileged visit to the nursery rooms made me realise what Isobel’s secret was, an hour of bird-watching at the lakes gave me the idea for Lizzie’s accident and I was able to hold on to my romantic image of the Hill House even after almost breaking a toe on one of the few remaining pieces of its masonry embedded in the grass. And, of course, my favourite room, the Bath House, had to be the setting for the scene when Isobel and Giles finally discover that they can be together after all.
LOUISE ALLEN—BIOGRAPHY
I was born and bred in Hertfordshire, but spent many married years in Bedfordshire, on the border with Cambridgeshire, which is how I came to know Wimpole Hall so well.
My professional life was spent as a librarian and then head of property for a library service. I began writing with a work colleague after we noticed the huge popularity of Mills & Boon® titles and, once we had worked out—by trial and a lot of error— that we should be writing historical fiction, we jointly wrote eight novels as ‘Francesca Shaw’.
But that was very slow and work changes separated us geographically, so I began to write on my own as Louise Allen. After twenty books I stopped the ‘day job’ to write full-time, and Regency Rumours is my forty-third book for Mills & Boon.
Virtually all my novels have been set during the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, although the very first Francesca Shaw was an English Civil War story, and I have ventured into fifth-century Italy and late eighteenth-century India.
Now I live with my husband on the North Norfolk coast—which is lovely until the cold wind from Siberia reaches us! We travel as much as possible, gaining lots of ideas for plots and settings in the process, and I also collect early nineteenth-century prints and printed ephemera and books about the period.
As well as novels I enjoy researching the history of London, which has resulted in two books of historic walks and I am working with my husband on the story of the Great North Road during the coaching years of the nineteenth century. That’s what I love about history—you never reach the end of your discoveries.
LOUISE ALLEN ON WRITING
What do you love about being a writer?
Most of all I love the storytelling. I am not a writer who can sit down and plot a novel in great detail in advance: if I do that I find I have told myself the story and the freshness has gone. The downside is the horrible moment when I realise I don’t know what happens next—but sleeping on it usually works!
I love the moment when it really starts to flow and all the pictures in my head come to life on the page. Getting the finished book is a great delight too—finding a world I have created there on crisp pages inside a gorgeous cover.
Hearing from readers is a constant pleasure. Perhaps they have fallen for my hero, or they identify with my heroine. Sometimes, movingly, reading something I ha
ve written has helped them through a difficult patch.
Where do you go for inspiration?
I have never had to go looking for it—the problem is always that there is too much in my head at once, clamouring to be written about! Situations—the ‘what ifs?’—can come from anywhere: newspaper articles, historical research, TV programmes, gravestones, prints or artefacts. All scatter little seeds that grow and then combine, when I least expect it. Characters sometimes appear from the situations, or they may look at me out of a portrait, or I hear their voices. Sometimes they even walk into a book, fully formed from somewhere. Jack Ryder, the hero of The Dangerous Mr Ryder, turned up in another book altogether when I was expecting an elderly Bow Street Runner. Jack promptly set about to out-hero the hero, so I had to deal firmly with him and promise him a book of his own.
How important is historical accuracy to you as a novelist?
It is very important to me, both as an author and as a reader. I find myself jerked right out of something I am reading if I come across an anachronism and, as a writer, I feel a sense of obligation to the past to try and get it right.
You can’t always, of course. Besides the fact that we will never know all of the truth about the past, some aspects and attitudes would simply be unacceptable to modern readers.
I try and work around them, rather than distort the facts. My heroines tend to be a little older, or perhaps come from unconventional backgrounds, which means I can give them more freedom than most respectable young women would have had. Women ran businesses during the Georgian period, including one of the largest stagecoach companies in London, and widows had more financial freedom.
With language I work hard to avoid words or expressions that would not have been used at the time rather than to use consciously ‘period’ language. A large set of dictionaries lives by my desk, although sometimes the age of a word might surprise me: Jane Austen uses the word ‘jargon’, for example.
How much research do you do before you start writing?
I tend to start writing and then identify what
I need to research, rather than the other way around—although I do work out the geography of where the opening is set in some detail. With an imaginary town, village or house I will probably draw a map or plan. If there is a journey I use original route books, maps and coaching timetables.
