Read and reflect on other works where female figures from history or literature are cast as the main character—for example, The Paris Wife, Mrs. Poe, Loving Frank, and Z. Consider how the retelling of their stories gives voice to women whose history and perspectives are often glossed over in a telling of history and a literary canon written almost entirely by men.
You can find the fully designed book club kit at finolaaustin.com/book-clubs. In it, you can read Finola Austin’s travelogue of her visit to the grounds of Thorp Green Hall and see a map of the buildings mentioned in the novel.
A Conversation with Finola Austin
Q: How did you first become interested in the Brontës? What made you decide to tell Lydia Robinson’s story?
A: I’ve always loved nineteenth-century literature. Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens were probably the first two Victorian novelists I read as a child, and in my teens, I raced through the works of all three Brontë sisters. After doing an undergraduate degree in Classics and English, I stayed on at the University of Oxford to complete a master’s in Victorian literature. While my dissertation focused on sensation novelists Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, I also wrote a paper on Charlotte Brontë (particularly on romantic relationships between students and teachers in her novels).
It wasn’t until 2016, though, when I was reading the first biography of Charlotte Brontë (by fellow nineteenth-century novelist Elizabeth Gaskell), that I came across Lydia Robinson’s story. I was immediately fascinated—by Gaskell’s assassination of Lydia’s character and by what a contrast this Mrs. Robinson would be to many of Charlotte’s protagonists. Brontë heroines are often poor, plain, young, and virginal. But here was a woman who was wealthy, beautiful, in her forties, and sexually experienced. I realized hers was a very different story, and one that I wanted to tell.
Q: You’ve done a great deal of research in order to write this novel. Where has your research taken you, and what was the most surprising thing you discovered?
A: I spent a full year researching Brontë’s Mistress before I began writing, and I went on a research trip to Yorkshire (“Brontë country”) after completing my first draft. I detail a lot of my research in the Author’s Note at the end the novel, but some of the highlights for me were taking tea in Dr. Crosby’s front parlor, holding Lydia’s letters and Edmund’s accounts book, seeing the wonderful statuette of a monk above the front door of Monk’s Lodge, and, of course, visiting the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
A particular focus of the research for me was doing justice to the Thorp Green servants. I wanted to understand their roles in the house, but also who they were as people. These details really helped me to picture them as individuals with stories of their own and families at home, even when I wasn’t able to include all of them.
Q: It seems that you were drawn to a woman who was wronged by history’s telling of her life. Are there any other such women in history or literature who spark your interest?
A: Lots! While Lydia was cast as the villain of the Brontës’ story, many women have been wronged by history because their stories haven’t been told at all. Women have often been confined to the domestic sphere rather than acting center stage in politics or standing on the front line of battlefields, but for me, this doesn’t make their histories less important.
Q: Branwell says to Lydia, “Charlotte talks from time to time of the novel as the ‘literary pinnacle of our age,’” and Lydia thinks to herself, “I’d always assumed my taste for them was confirmation of my feminine frivolity.” How were novels regarded in the mid-nineteenth century? Did the Brontës’ works cause novels to be held in higher esteem at the time, or did their fame come later?
A: In the nineteenth century, women were major consumers of novels, just as they are today. They read them in three volumes, borrowed from circulating libraries, or serialized chapter by chapter in their favorite publications. Perhaps because of this association with femininity, novels were often regarded as inferior to highbrow literature such as poetry.
Victorian novelist George Eliot (another woman writing under a male pseudonym, like the Brontë sisters) wrote an essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” in 1856, criticizing the formulaic genre fiction so many women wrote about and enjoyed. Her title clearly linked femininity to frivolity.
While the Brontës’ works (especially Charlotte’s) have always been regarded as a step above the writing of many of their contemporaries, I think even today we see a repetition of this pattern. When I’ve told people I’m writing about the Brontës, many respond to me by dismissing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as “just romances” and “for women.” While for me, Brontë’s Mistress doesn’t seem romantic, I don’t see writing romance as lesser than other genres or writing for women as a weakness.
Q: Why did you decide to make the dynamic between Lydia and her daughters a more distant one? Was that common for relationships between women in families at the time? What historical texts and examples did you refer to when shaping this relationship?
A: Attitudes toward parenting have shifted dramatically since the nineteenth century (in fact, the word parenting started to emerge only in the late twentieth century as theorists started to understand the formative nature of our early experiences). The Victorians engaged in many practices we typically turn away from today, including employing wet nurses to feed their infants and regularly using corporal punishment to discipline children. Lydia then might not have seemed like a “bad mother” to her contemporaries as much as today we might question her choices in the novel. With sons much more valuable to families at that time, due to women’s limited options, it also made sense to me that Lydia might have a strained relationship with her daughters, believing that “tough love” was the right way to prepare them for the realities of their position as women.
I had two main literary models in mind here. First, Mrs. Bennet from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Mrs. Bennet and Lydia are very different in terms of temperament, but their outlook is similar: their daughters should seek to marry well, but be practical and unromantic about their prospects. The second model was a character named Mrs. Winstanley from a lesser-read Victorian novel—Vixen, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mrs. Winstanley is a mother obsessed with her daughter Violet’s size (similar to how Lydia worries about Bessy’s figure in Brontë’s Mistress). Braddon eventually reveals that Violet is five feet six inches with a 22-inch waist (she could probably fit into a US size 0 today). Braddon is clearly playing this for laughs. She’s pointing out the maternal character’s ridiculousness, but she strikes at a truth: when women are valued solely or largely for their physical appearance, mothers can and do become hypercritical of their daughters’ looks. Even today, I know many women who can trace a direct line between their insecurities about their appearance and their mothers’ own warped body image.
Q: There are many letters throughout the book between the characters. Are these letters based on actual letters from the time? Are any of them the letters that the historical figures wrote?
A: None of the letters in the novel are real, though the poem Branwell includes in his letter dated August 1, 1845, is. Eighteen letters written by Lydia are extant and part of the Robinson Papers collection at the Brontë Museum Parsonage. I was lucky enough to be able to read these. They are business letters written to the agent Lydia mentions employing in my chapter 16. From these I took her distinctive sign-off, “yours very truly,” and details about the honeymoon and the yacht meeting Lydia and Sir Edward in Marseilles, which shaped chapter 20 and Lydia’s final letter to Bessy.