An exclusive excerpt of AN ARTFUL DODGE & thoughts on "historical truth" versus "verisimilitude"

Karen Odden - every other Thursday

I'm thrilled to be able to share the sneak preview, first three chapters of my new book! There's a link at the bottom to read them for free!

But before you do ... I want to say a few words about writing about the Victorian period and the tension between historical truth and verisimilitude. 

One of my favorite anecdotes that illustrates this tension comes from my friend Susan Elia MacNeal, who writes the Maggie Hope series, which begins during WWII, with Maggie serving as a secretary in Churchill's office. For her research, Susan went to the War Rooms, where she read facsimiles of Churchill's letters in his handwriting. In his letters, he uses the abbreviation "OMG." If you think about it, it makes sense -- it's the age of the telegram, when abbreviations saved money.

Now, if Susan were to put that detail in one of her books, she would be sustaining historical truth but destroying verisimilitude -- which we could define as what the reader believes to be true about the period. Imagine the outcry! I can hear the chuckling Goodreads reviews now ... "What's Churchill going to write next? LMAO?" 

None of us writers want to push the reader's "disbelief" button. When it comes to including elements that pull readers out of the story -- well, we have to pick our battles. Sometimes we hit that button inadvertently. 

For example, a few years ago, a reviewer wrote something along the lines of, "I love your books, and they're pretty accurate, except you have Inspector Corravan drinking coffee, when Victorians drank tea."

I've been explicitly warned not to engage on social media platforms over reviews. But had I engaged, I would have replied, "Yes, Victorians drank a lot of tea, and the image of women drinking tea has been widely documented both in words and images (such as this painting, above). But in the 1870s, there were still 7 million tons of coffee being imported annually into England, most of it arriving through the London docks. Elaborate silver coffee services (that you can still see in museums) were still being produced."

That said, even though it's historical truth, I might not have had Corravan drink coffee had I realized it was going to hit the "disbelief" button.

However, there are elements that I'm willing to hit the "disbelief" button to include. The most important is giving my Victorian heroines agency. 

Sometimes, I receive comments along the lines of, "I just don't believe [your heroine Annabel or Nell or whoever] could go running around London the way she does. Weren't Victorian women confined to their homes?"

It's a valid question. TV shows and movies show Victorian women indoors, at balls, drinking tea, languishing in chaises, reading novels, riding in closed carriages. Books by Victorian writers including Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins and Mrs. Henry Wood often show women in somewhat stifling surroundings. 

But keep in mind two things. First, these characters are mostly unmarried, upper-class women who are going on the marriage market. They need to be watched and guarded lest their honor be lost and they become unmarriageable. That was a real, historical risk for women of a certain class -- but not for all classes. Second, these characters are fictional! Writers (for TV or of novels) gain a lot of plot advantages by constraining their female characters in particular ways -- in making certain acts impossible. It creates tension, anxiety, stress, frustration -- all good plot drivers and conflict-generators. 

I don't believe in giving women characters undue amounts of agency and justifying it by calling them "spunky." I try hard to be accurate, and that includes showing my heroines behaving plausibly within the strictures and mores of the time.

 

However, one of the ways I work around the conventional constraints in fiction and give my heroines legitimate agency is by having them be members of the lower and middle classes, or orphans with no father or older brother to oversee their actions. In real-life Victorian England, who's watching these women? Virtually no one! Their honor and virtue and morality didn't need to be so desperately protected. Their goal wasn't necessarily to marry. Working women walked all over London alone, without chaperones. They went to shops, they bought breakfast from street vendors, they visited galleries and museums and the Crystal Palace in 1851. They worked in hospitals, in wealthy families' homes, in dressmaking shops, in bakeries, in music halls, in shops, and in brothels. 

And in AN ARTFUL DODGE, they work as thieves. Kit Jimeson is a member of an all-women thieving gang operating out of the Elephant & Castle area of Southwark (above), south of the Thames. My fictional gang is based on the historical (real) gang of women thieves who were working out of E&C beginning in the 1870s. In later years, especially in the 1920s, they'd become known as the Forty Elephants, and they were active into the 1930s. Scotland Yard tried repeatedly to shut them down. To read more about the real Forty Elephants, you might look up Brian McDonald's excellent book Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants: Britain's First Female Crime Syndicate. 

To read the first three chapters of AN ARTFUL DODGE and to meet Kit and her friends for yourself, click here: https://bit.ly/4uoYSIN