On Whether I Should Have Written the Husband Plot
I have to confess: I am very anxious about releasing The Husband Plot.
When mapping out the Countess Chronicles, I focused on the heroines. One question that drives me to write historical romance is: how did people realistically fight for change? Any twenty-first century reader of Regency romance knows that the heroines are in a gilded cage, but how do the heroines come to know that, and how do they fight against that?
I started with Alice, who is new to the real world and has to learn a few lessons about how women are actually viewed in The Ideal Countess. In The Duchess Wager, Margot is more aware but hasn’t yet reckoned with the fact that she has power and can take control of her life. Ever since Lisbeth showed up in Chapter Six of The Ideal Countess, I knew she was going to be the heroine who started off a feminist, so then I had to figure out: what does she do about it, and does she look beyond her own struggles to help others?
The other question was: who will be her love interest?
I worried a lot about this. I tried to imagine many different types of heroes. I didn’t have a good answer.
Simultaneously, I had a growing awareness that Regency romance has an inclusivity problem. The genre by and large focuses on the upper crust of the British Empire, which was the wealthiest nation in the world at the time. This is entertaining (a lot like how we love reality TV shows about the super-rich), but it also repeats harmful social structures without investigating why. For example, there are very few stories about Jewish people in Regency Romance, nor people from any of Britain’s colonies. Even Irish or Polish or German characters rarely appear.
As a White woman with a healthy heaping of British in my DNA, I didn’t notice this at first. However, once I saw it, I saw it. Saying that the upper class wouldn’t run into people who weren’t very White and very British is like saying I wouldn’t run into an immigrant in New York City today. London was the center of a global empire. Ships arrived into multiple English ports every day with sailors, businessmen, and politicians who were managing that empire. Of course there were people of different races, religions, and cultures mixing in London society.
(This problem is not simply ignorance or even laziness. As I outlined in this blog post, there are organizations that actively work against allowing conversations around inclusivity. If that isn’t evidence enough, visit any Facebook or Twitter thread about whether Bridgerton casting is “historically accurate”, and you’ll see the deep racism that pervades even the historical romance community.)
I do not want to contribute to this problem. So, while still mulling over who should be Lisbeth’s love interest, I started digging into who would show up in London, so that I could diversify my cast of characters. I came across two influential books. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain is both a sweeping history and full of individual biographies across multiple eras. Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 investigates the development of racism, the shifting definitions of family, and how children of White planters and free or enslaved Black women in Jamaica navigated dual identities.
Somewhere in that research, Adrian appeared in my imagination. A hero who has spent his life on two sides of the Atlantic, with dual claims on his identity, and with a very terrible family legacy.
He and Lisbeth make a great pair. But even though he popped into my imagination, I am not sure I have the right to write his story. Yes, writers must be able to write about characters outside their own experience, and yes, there is an argument to be made that all characters in historical romance are outside my experience. However, there is a rule out there that I really like: you can and should write about marginalized characters, but if you don’t identify with them, you shouldn’t write about their marginalization.
That was my intention when I started writing Adrian. I was going to address race and move on. However, the more I researched his backstory, the more it felt crucial to his story. He is the son of a White plantation owner, which means he stands to inherit a plantation of slaves. How could that be his backstory without addressing what that means to him?
So, I wrote the plot the way it required. I followed the workshop book, Writing the Other, to do my best to do it thoughtfully and to avoid character and narrative stereotypes. I hired a sensitivity reader to double-check my work in addition to multiple beta readers.
But still, I broke a good rule. I am pretty much as White as can be. I don’t know what it is like to be marginalized today and read about someone like Adrian. I don’t know that writing his story will add to the conversation in a healthy manner. Even as I release the book, I worry that I shouldn’t.
However, I do know that Regency romance has a problem of excluding people who are not White from our narratives. I also know that the romance world feeds itself: the more books there are of a certain type, the more readers want them, and so it turns into a convention. There are some interracial historical romances out there already, but there aren’t nearly enough of them. So, I may not be the best person to write about Adrian - or a character similar to Adrian - but I hope that I am turning the problem in the right direction. Let’s stop saying there is no room for Adrian as a historically-accurate hero: let the complaint be that I shouldn’t be writing him, and give money to the people who should be.
Ultimately, writing is an act of empathy, and every time I write characters outside my personal experience, I can empathize that much more with people in my real life. That was my philosophy writing Adrian, and with all this said, I am very proud of The Husband Plot. I think it is my best book yet, from the characters to the writing to the narrative structure. All I can hope is that with each book I am a better writer and a better person, so I look forward to feedback that will help me learn.
When mapping out the Countess Chronicles, I focused on the heroines. One question that drives me to write historical romance is: how did people realistically fight for change? Any twenty-first century reader of Regency romance knows that the heroines are in a gilded cage, but how do the heroines come to know that, and how do they fight against that?
I started with Alice, who is new to the real world and has to learn a few lessons about how women are actually viewed in The Ideal Countess. In The Duchess Wager, Margot is more aware but hasn’t yet reckoned with the fact that she has power and can take control of her life. Ever since Lisbeth showed up in Chapter Six of The Ideal Countess, I knew she was going to be the heroine who started off a feminist, so then I had to figure out: what does she do about it, and does she look beyond her own struggles to help others?
The other question was: who will be her love interest?
I worried a lot about this. I tried to imagine many different types of heroes. I didn’t have a good answer.
Simultaneously, I had a growing awareness that Regency romance has an inclusivity problem. The genre by and large focuses on the upper crust of the British Empire, which was the wealthiest nation in the world at the time. This is entertaining (a lot like how we love reality TV shows about the super-rich), but it also repeats harmful social structures without investigating why. For example, there are very few stories about Jewish people in Regency Romance, nor people from any of Britain’s colonies. Even Irish or Polish or German characters rarely appear.
As a White woman with a healthy heaping of British in my DNA, I didn’t notice this at first. However, once I saw it, I saw it. Saying that the upper class wouldn’t run into people who weren’t very White and very British is like saying I wouldn’t run into an immigrant in New York City today. London was the center of a global empire. Ships arrived into multiple English ports every day with sailors, businessmen, and politicians who were managing that empire. Of course there were people of different races, religions, and cultures mixing in London society.
(This problem is not simply ignorance or even laziness. As I outlined in this blog post, there are organizations that actively work against allowing conversations around inclusivity. If that isn’t evidence enough, visit any Facebook or Twitter thread about whether Bridgerton casting is “historically accurate”, and you’ll see the deep racism that pervades even the historical romance community.)
I do not want to contribute to this problem. So, while still mulling over who should be Lisbeth’s love interest, I started digging into who would show up in London, so that I could diversify my cast of characters. I came across two influential books. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain is both a sweeping history and full of individual biographies across multiple eras. Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 investigates the development of racism, the shifting definitions of family, and how children of White planters and free or enslaved Black women in Jamaica navigated dual identities.
Somewhere in that research, Adrian appeared in my imagination. A hero who has spent his life on two sides of the Atlantic, with dual claims on his identity, and with a very terrible family legacy.
He and Lisbeth make a great pair. But even though he popped into my imagination, I am not sure I have the right to write his story. Yes, writers must be able to write about characters outside their own experience, and yes, there is an argument to be made that all characters in historical romance are outside my experience. However, there is a rule out there that I really like: you can and should write about marginalized characters, but if you don’t identify with them, you shouldn’t write about their marginalization.
That was my intention when I started writing Adrian. I was going to address race and move on. However, the more I researched his backstory, the more it felt crucial to his story. He is the son of a White plantation owner, which means he stands to inherit a plantation of slaves. How could that be his backstory without addressing what that means to him?
So, I wrote the plot the way it required. I followed the workshop book, Writing the Other, to do my best to do it thoughtfully and to avoid character and narrative stereotypes. I hired a sensitivity reader to double-check my work in addition to multiple beta readers.
But still, I broke a good rule. I am pretty much as White as can be. I don’t know what it is like to be marginalized today and read about someone like Adrian. I don’t know that writing his story will add to the conversation in a healthy manner. Even as I release the book, I worry that I shouldn’t.
However, I do know that Regency romance has a problem of excluding people who are not White from our narratives. I also know that the romance world feeds itself: the more books there are of a certain type, the more readers want them, and so it turns into a convention. There are some interracial historical romances out there already, but there aren’t nearly enough of them. So, I may not be the best person to write about Adrian - or a character similar to Adrian - but I hope that I am turning the problem in the right direction. Let’s stop saying there is no room for Adrian as a historically-accurate hero: let the complaint be that I shouldn’t be writing him, and give money to the people who should be.
Ultimately, writing is an act of empathy, and every time I write characters outside my personal experience, I can empathize that much more with people in my real life. That was my philosophy writing Adrian, and with all this said, I am very proud of The Husband Plot. I think it is my best book yet, from the characters to the writing to the narrative structure. All I can hope is that with each book I am a better writer and a better person, so I look forward to feedback that will help me learn.
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