I’ve wanted to write this story for quite some time. English suffragettes and American suffragists have been my personal heroes for most of my life, since I first encountered real information about the fight for women’s suffrage. Not long after I caught the author bug, I began thinking that I wanted to tackle a story about a woman like my heroes. But I needed to get some experience under my feet before I could feel confident enough to take on a historical project so important to me.
When I finally started, I knew only a few things about the structure of my story: I wanted it to be a romance, or at least a love story, because, as a writer and as a reader (and just generally as an experiencer of stories), that’s the kind of relationship I respond most strongly to. I knew my female lead would be English, and I knew her love would be American. I decided that she would be nobly born because I’d read a great deal about commoners in the English suffrage movement and much less about noblewomen. There are a lot of factors that made this struggle primarily a common one, but I was captivated by the idea of the tensions and trouble for a noblewoman trying not only to be politically aware and politically active but politically controversial.
That choice took me in a different direction from the one I had first envisioned. Instead of a woman at the heart of the suffrage movement from the beginning, my Nora, the daughter of an earl, struggles to find her place in it—and in the world itself.
I set the story to begin in 1910 because that’s not long after the suffrage movement in England became overtly invested in a strategy of civil disobedience. I didn’t quite realize it at the time I started writing, but opening this story in 1910 put it on a trajectory with a whole array of important cultural trends and historical events in addition to women’s suffrage.
I chose to make William, the male lead, an American industrialist and give him a suffragist mother so I could explore similar features of wealth and politics in both places. That choice, too, to make them a transatlantic couple, ended up converging my characters with important national and world events.
Each chapter, each move forward in time, each coincidence of history and story, made this novel’s range wider, its scope grander. I don’t like the idea of using the word ‘epic’ to describe my own work—I believe that’s for other people to decide—but I’m struggling to find a better word for all that Nora and William see and experience in the ten years (including the epilogue) represented here. By the time I finally reached the end, this story was about so much more than a suffragette and her industrialist love. So I’ll simply say that this novel has an epic scope.
And oh, such pretty clothes and places. The Edwardian era was the end of La Belle Époque—and it wasn’t known as “The Beautiful Era” for nothing.
I’m writing fiction, and not a historical record, so I allowed myself to take some liberties here and there, serving authenticity rather than rigid accuracy. To that end, my characters take part in events they obviously were not part of in reality, and some fictional versions of real people appear in the story—and often have small speaking roles as they have cause to interact with the main characters. I’ve done my best to represent the events and people authentically, though in this story they are entirely fictional, and events sometimes transpire in my fictional world a bit differently from reality.
Below is a list of the real people with significant fictional representations in the story, and links to information about them—beware of clicking those links, though, before you’ve read the story; some of them might be spoilers.
This story is a true labor of love for me. The subject is close to my heart, and these characters are as special to me as any I’ve created. It’s been a joy to write this book, from start to finish. I hope you enjoy my long, sweeping journey through the Edwardian Era and the fight for women’s suffrage.
Cheers,
Susan
PS: A quick final note. As usual for my work, this story is written in dual POV. Because Nora is English and William is American, I use the spelling conventions most appropriate to their points of view. Hence the spelling variations from chapter to chapter.
Key real people named (listed in order of mention/appearance):