Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore

Author’s Note

The accident that killed Lucian’s family was inspired by a pit disaster in Silkstone’s Huskar Pit in 1838, which was one of the events prompting the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act. The public then seemed most concerned about female nudity in the mine tunnels, with the miner-friendly Labor Tribune fretting, “A woman accustomed to such work cannot be expected to know much of household duties or how to make a man’s home comfortable.” For a while, people traveled to mines to take pictures of women in trousers for commercial purposes, and the miners received a share of the proceeds. Female miners frequently defended their work and evaded the law because they needed their wages to feed their families. They very much embodied the conflict between Victorian notions of ideal womanhood (the dainty angel in the house) and the reality of women depending on manual labor for survival.

Pit-brow lasses played a strong role in the fight for women’s suffrage in the Edwardian era. In the Victorian era, the organized British suffrage movement consisted overwhelmingly of middle-and upper-class women; British society was rigorously stratified along class lines, and working-class women had low personal incentives and high practical barriers to join the movement for the vote. However, British suffragist leaders were long aware of class-based double standards—in 1872 Millicent Fawcett noted, “It is a small consolation for Nancy Jones, in Whitechapel, who is kicked and beaten at discretion by her husband, to know that Lady Jones, in Belgravia, is always assisted in and out of her carriage as if she were a cripple.” Suffrage and women workers’s rights movements increasingly overlapped toward the end of the century, particularly in the industrialized North. The full integration of the two movements was frequently hampered by the narrow focus middle-and upper-class suffragists kept on a woman’s right to vote rather than wider social reform including the rectification of wage inequality, which was a priority for female workers. On many occasions, aristocrats and factory workers did stand side by side, notably when the suffrage struggle entered its militant phase in 1905. It still took until 1928 for low-income women to vote, while their monied or university-educated counterparts were given the vote in 1918.

Art as a vehicle for change

In the late 19th century, many Victorians turned to art to address societal ills. Artists began viewing their work as a charitable endeavor and a driver for social reform, often by creating either romanticized or shockingly realistic depictions of poverty to move the public. Social photography did play a part in raising awareness about dire working conditions and the continued use of child labor in Victorian Britain.

Wedding nights

I included the artifact The Art of Begetting Handsome Children in this story to show that some Victorians acknowledged both the existence and the importance of female pleasure in a marriage. As a rule, however, middle-and upper-class women in particular were kept ignorant about sex until it happened to them. Inspiration for Hattie’s wedding-night discussions came from novelist Mimi Matthews’s blog post “Ether for Every Occasion”:

The 1897 edition ofA Manual of Medical Jurisprudence reports the case of a newlywed Victorian lady who went into hysterics whenever her husband tried to initiate sex. As a result, the consummation of their marriage was “long delayed.” According to the report: “The difficulty was at length overcome by the administration of ether vapor. She recovered consciousness during the act of coitus, and there was no subsequent difficulty in intercourse.”

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who spent much time with German suffrage leaders, pondered inThe Gay Science (1882): “There is something quite … monstrous about the education of upper-class women …. All the world is agreed that they are to be brought up as ignorant as possible of erotic matters, and that one has to imbue their souls with a profound sense of shame in such matters …. They are supposed to have neither eyes nor ears, nor words, nor thoughts for this …. And then to be hurled as by a gruesome lightning bolt, into reality and knowledge, by marriage—precisely by the man they love and esteem most! To catch love and shame in a contradiction and to be forced to experience at the same time delight, surrender, duty, pity, terror …. Thus a psychic knot has been tied that may have no equal!”

It also exacerbated the power imbalance between men and women on a most personal level. Since contentions around female pleasure exist to this day, I made it a point in the story. I believe romance novels play their part in undoing this legacy.

On leaving a marriage

Divorcing in Victorian Britain was possible but not easy in 1880, especially if the instigator was a woman. An upper-class wife usually had the means to pay for it, but she also inflicted scandal upon herself, and simply living separate lives was not so simple: until 1883, the “abandoned” spouse could petition for a writ of restitution of conjugal rights, which obliged their partner, usually the wife, to return to the marital home. If the partner served with the writ refused, they were imprisoned until they changed their mind. While Hattie trusted Lucian not to revert to such measures, I felt it was crucial for her to feel free from any legal hold a man might have over her for once in her life, and to only relinquish this freedom at a point of her own choosing. The legal separation she proposed gave her that option.

Artistic license

While Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now was published in 1875, the line cited in this novel is actually from his autobiography, which was published in 1883, three years after the events of this novel.

John Dewey published essays on aesthetics throughout the 1880s, but the full theories about art as experience as discussed by Hattie were printed after 1900.

“They look too lovely to be clever” was not uttered by Professor Ruskin, but his contemporary Professor Henry Sidgwick. He said it in reference to the first cohort of women students at one of the women’s colleges he had cofounded at Cambridge.