It’s amazing the disparate topics a writer needs to research in the course of writing one book: the early British film industry (what sort of studio might Philippe be working in?); river barges (what did they look like? How much room was there on board? How did people access the Thames?); society debuts (how might an Aristocratic family without much money debut their daughters?); horticulture (what might be flowering in Essex in Summer?); theatrical history (which play might Alfred invite Grace to attend in 1922?). Some research areas can be anticipated from the beginning of the project, other subjects crop up unexpectedly.
I believe there are two types of research that writers undertake: conscious and unconscious. The former is self-explanatory: you know the information you are looking for, and set out to find it. My favourite type of research is the latter. That’s when I immerse myself in books/letters/memoirs related to the period and presume that some of it will become important to me later. The best thing about that sort of research is you’re never wasting time because it all helps get a feel for the milieu, and you never know when a piece of information is going to solve a plot problem you haven’t even encountered yet!
When I was researching Riverton I read all sorts of books: social, cultural and personal histories. My favourite types are autobiographies, memoirs and biographies. The best of those breathe life into a forgotten time. Two such memoirs are Frances Donaldson’s Child of the Twenties and Beverley Nichols’s The Sweet and Twenties. Nichols’s memoir not only brings to life the world of the 1920s society-darlings and literati, it is written retrospectively, giving additional insight into how someone who had lived through the time might perceive it from decades later, after the horrors of the second world war.
Personal letters are also excellent historical sources. One of my favourite anthologies contains the complete communication between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh—two such sparkling wits—providing entertaining and vibrant evidence of the way certain people thought and spoke and behaved in the period. I also found resources like Punch magazine an excellent way of observing the social mores of the decade without having them filtered through the lens of twenty-first century scholarship.

Last updated on December 21, 2009 by Kate Morton