Authors Electric

Angela Wyndham Lewis  with Francis Wheen & Frank Thorogood February 1994 It was late 1960s, a railway station in Austria, perhaps nine or ten o’clock at night. Beyond the lights of the station it was dark, only gleams of light reflected from tramped down snow. I was perhaps 13 and was waiting with my parents and my brothers for the snow-sports-special to take us back to England.The holiday was over, all that remained was a long night in hard bunks as the mighty train carried us back across Europe. Then my brothers and I would go back to our boarding schools and my parents would continue living semi-separately in a marriage that had lost its joy. We were joined by a small lady in a thick fur coat. Her name was Angela and it transpired that she would be travelling with us. We had seen her and her daughter in the resort. They both had fur coats, neat boots and hennaed hair. They wore eye make-up, soft cream polo neck jerseys, stretchy black trousers and looked unachieva...

Funnily enough, my post this month is along the same sort of lines as Hywela's a few days ago: the highways and byeways you can find yourself travelling down in the name of research. I'm currently writing a story set in 1893. It's another in my 'Swallowcliffe Hall' series, set in a large country house, but for the first time featuring one of the aristocrats rather than a servant as my main character: Eugenie Vye, the elder daughter, who for one reason and another has arrived at the grand old age of twenty-two with no husband on the horizon. If she can't attract an eligible suitor by the end of the season, she may be shipped off to India to try her chances there. (Completely coincidentally, I see a book by Anne de Courcy has just been published on that very subject, 'The Fishing Fleet' - note to self to request it from the London Library.) It's been fascinating looking at the house from the other side of the green baize door, and I've had t...