#HistFicThursdays - Strait Lace by Rosemary Hayward - Guest Post

For this week's #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm delighted to be welcoming Rosemary Hayward to the blog with a guest post about her new release Strait Lace, as part of her Coffee Pot Book Club tour. Read on to discover the history surrounding this fabulous book. But first, let's meet the book...

Blurb

It is 1905. Edwardian England. Harriet Loxley, the daughter of a vicar and niece to a prominent Nottingham lace manufacturer, spends her days playing cricket with her brother, scouring the countryside for botanical specimens, and never missing an opportunity to argue the case for political power for women. Given the chance to visit the House of Commons, Harriet witnesses the failure of a historic bill for women’s voting rights. She also meets the formidable Pankhurst women.

When Harriet gets the chance to study biology at Bedford College, London, she finds her opportunity to be at the heart of the fight. From marching in the street, to speaking to hostile crowds, to hurling stones through windows, just how far will Harriet go?

Strait Lace

is available on via this Universal Link

Guest Post

Strait Lace and History

Edwardian England, its politics and opinions are close enough to us to be quite accessible and, at the same time, replete with information that is confusing and contradictory.

The story of Harriet Loxley, a suffragette, unfolds between 1905 and 1914, a historical period that was easy to research because there is an abundance of primary and secondary sources available online, or to purchase, or to borrow from regular lending libraries. And if those sources didn’t answer my questions there were helpful living academics, such as the amazing Elizabeth Crawford, who happily responded to my questions about suffragette medals and House of Commons notepaper.

Wonderful primary sources include newspapers of the time, Hansard’s Parliamentary reports and the collection of suffrage material at the London School of Economics - the third tower of LSE is built on the site of what was Clement’s Inn, the headquarters of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Then there are the personal recollections of the Pankhurst women. Except the women don’t agree with each other. Not so much in basic facts and events but in what is emphasized and what is left out. Sylvia, Emmeline and Christabel all wrote down their versions of events after the split between Sylvia and Adela on one side, and Emmeline and Christabel on the other. What was significant, what was right and what made a difference tends to vary in their accounts.

Secondary sources, the biographies and historical commentaries and the near contemporary novels, such as H.G. Wells’ Ann Veronica, have much the same issue for the researcher looking for a story to emerge. They vary widely in their perspective, ranging from The Strange Death of Liberal England, which sees the militant suffrage movement as one of the major reasons of the disappearance of the Liberal Party as a major force after 1922, and a biography of H.H. Asquith which has only four index references leading to a few sentences on women’s suffrage, despite Asquith being prime minister at the time.

And then there is the rapid rate of technological change. Cars, taxis, telephones, electric lighting and indoor water closet toilets all came into common use between 1900 and 1914. Add to that the enormous pace of building – public buildings, railway stations, slums cleared away and underground railways constructed. The problem for me, constructing Harriet’s story, was exactly when did change happen? For example, Harriet travels to London by train in 1905. The station she would have left from is not the current Nottingham Station. It is a station that was recently built in 1905 but no longer exists in 2025. Also, I originally had a reference to treating tuberculosis by sending people to sanitoriums. Luckily for me, a member of my writing group happened to have done a lot of research on TB and sanitoriums and pointed out that this was not common practice until some five years after I had it happening.

In the end the novelist has to make a decision and create a world. My hope is that it is an accurate world, but it is, of necessity a world coloured by the choices I made, and the conclusions I came to, about what happened, what people thought and why they thought it.

There are many delightful back lanes and alley ways to explore while researching. I found out a lot about many things that didn’t make it into the book, some of which I’d have loved to have shoehorned in somehow. For example a wealthy family near Bristol offered their home as a haven of recovery for suffragettes who’d been imprisoned. The suffragettes each planted a tree in the grounds of this house, and were photographed doing it. Could I use this? In the end no. But the story of the trees continues to delight me. The house and grounds were later demolished to make way for housing. Volunteers ran ahead of the bulldozers collecting the plaques from the trees. And sometime after that an enterprising woman went round the new houses offering new saplings of the suffragette trees to the residents if they would be willing to plant them in their gardens. 

Recent commentary on the fight for the vote has offered new perspectives, such as Jill Liddington’s Rebel Girls, which investigates the stories of women in the North and the Midlands and uncovers what can be found of the activities of Adela Pankhurst, the almost forgotten third Pankhurst sister, who was a major organizer in the North and Scotland and, apparently, even more of an inspirational speaker than Christabel. But I had to leave this amazing seam of material where I found it. A work of fiction can’t go off rambling around the countryside. It needs boundaries.

All but one of the principal characters in Strait Lace are purely fictional and the one that isn’t is not a major historical figure. This is a deliberate choice on my part. I didn’t want to try and get into the mind of a well-known person. I completely avoided that particular difficulty that historical novelists face. However, there are historical figures in Strait Lace, a lot of them, as I discovered when I listed them at the back of the book. Emmeline, Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst all have their moments on stage. As does Emily Davison. Asquith. Lloyd George and Churchill are frequently referred to. These are people my readers could well already have opinions about. To make them come alive, rather than seem co-opted, I read things they wrote and speeches they made, in order to find their own voice. But when my invented characters referred to them I made sure it was in my character’s voice talking about them, not theirs, or mine.

In places where speeches by historical figures are given apparently verbatim, they are in fact no such thing. The speeches are real enough, but highly edited, mostly for length. The Edwardians were far more verbose than we are. But it wasn’t only a matter of taking out words. There are attitudes and assumptions that are problematic now, such as the role of empire. There is a fine balance to be had between showing attitudes as they were and not alienating a modern reader. Equally, a sophisticated reader of historical novels will object to modern opinions in a historical setting. Luckily for me there were many radical thinkers in the Edwardian period and I made the Loxley family in their image.

Edwardian England was no more at one in its attitudes than our own age, but the colours of its thoughts and opinions were its own. To write Strait Lace I had to be so immersed in the period that those colours emerged as a complete world on the page. Initial, constant and repeated research was that world’s bedrock.

Now, let's meet the author:

Rosemary Hayward is the author of Margaret Leaving, a historical mystery uncovering little known events that occurred in the immediate aftermath to World War II. She is also the creator of Your Next Book, a deeply nerdy monthly newsletter describing a book picked from her bookshelf, or Kindle. 

She is British by birth but now lives part of the year in California and part in southern Spain.

You can follow Rosemary on these links:

Website - Facebook - LinkedIn - Instagram - Threads - Pinterest - Amazon Author Page - Goodreads

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