Irene asked Jacqueline Winspear:

I have learned so much about the WWI time period from your novels! I just finished A Lesson in Secrets. Maise & James are an item & are sleeping together. Did other women do this then too or is Maise more liberated than most?

Jacqueline Winspear We often look at the past and attribute certain behaviors that are not completely true to the times. The "new woman" in Britain, emerging in the late 1800's and early 1900's wasn't as straight-laced as we might imagine. Having said that, it certainly wasn't common for people to cohabit outside of marriage as it is today - but people lived together and slept together, without doubt (and it was easier for the "upper" classes to cohabit than the lower classes). Marie Stopes founded her first birth control clinic in London in 1921.

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