Edwardian Period and the 1920s

I am fascinated by the period in English history, when nineteenth century gave way to twentieth, and the world as we now know it began to take shape. Queen Victoria died, and with her, old certainties were consigned to the grave: the aristocratic system began to crumble, the cash-strapped gentry was displaced by a new type of upper class made powerful by money rather than by birth, humanity suffered battle on a scale undreamt of, and women were freed somewhat from rigid pre-existing expectations of social function. What would happen, I wondered, if two sisters were born to such a crucial time, the elder falling victim to certain of society's demands, the other, just a few years younger, escaping them? And what might happen if each sister hankered after a privilege she perceived in the other's life? What sort of envies might such differences provoke? And what might happen to their sibling loyalties if I threw in a man perceived by each sister as a means of escape?

Victorian Novels

I’m very attracted to nineteenth-century narrative structure. As a reader, I love dense, rich, textured storybooks that I can become lost in, like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, or Bleak House. I wanted The House at Riverton to be the sort of book a reader might miss when it was finished, whose characters, story, and location seemed very real. Indeed, the character of the novel's location was as important to me as that of its human players. Riverton Manor, the Hartford family's ancestral home in country Essex, is in a phase of grand decline when we meet it. Its fading gilt-edges, peeling wall-papers, and fraying tapestries mirror the state of the Hartford family: minor provincial nobility, clinging desperately to the last moments of Victorian splendour as it gives way to the modern era.

Mystery

I discovered the Famous Five and the Secret Seven when I was very young and have been hooked on mysteries ever since. While I love to read traditional whodunits and procedurals (Sue Grafton’s alphabet series, Elizabeth George’s Lynley books, Ruth Rendell’s Wexfords) it’s mysteries without detectives that really excite me. Confessional narratives, whydunnits, stories about family secrets, especially those told by guilty narrators. Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell’s nom de plume), Patricia Highsmith, Morag Joss, and Thomas H. Cook are all excellent writers of this type of mystery.

Gothic

I adore books that use themes from the literary gothic in combination with a central mystery. Such gothic themes include the haunting of the present by the past; the insistence of family secrets; the return of the repressed; the centrality of inheritance (material, social, psychological); haunted houses (particularly haunting of a metaphorical nature); suspicion concerning new technology and changing methods; the entrapment of women (whether physical or social); character doubling; the unreliability of memory and partial nature of history; mysteries and the unseen; confessional narrative; and, embedded texts. Gothic themes are often used in fiction to explore issues of anxiety—whether related to class, gender, race, technology, identity, or some other—and certainly came in useful in The House at Riverton, set during a period of such huge social transition.