The Importance of Celebrating Good News

Posted 6 May 2024

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One of the things I have learned about publishing is that good news must be celebrated properly when it arrives — because sometimes it can take a very long time between moments of encouragement.

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So I was absolutely delighted to learn recently that the opening chapters of my new novel, The Queen of Bushy House(then titled Mrs Jordan’s Final Act), had been shortlisted for the Historical Novel Society First Chapters Competition.

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The novel is set in late Georgian England and centres on the lives of Dorothea Jordan, the celebrated actress and long-time companion of the Duke of Clarence, and Princess Adelaide, the woman who eventually became Queen Adelaide. Much of the story unfolds close to my home in and around Bushy Park — a place that has quietly worked its way into my heart over the years.

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Around the same time as the shortlist announcement, my mother was visiting us in London, and together we embarked on several days of cultural overindulgence: theatre, exhibitions, museums and road trips.

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While visiting the National Portrait Gallery, we unexpectedly found ourselves face to face with almost my entire cast of characters.

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There was Dorothea Jordan — radiant and mischievous. Queen Adelaide. King William IV. Seeing them all gathered together in such splendour, outside the private world of my manuscript, felt strangely emotional.

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For so long these figures had existed primarily inside my own imagination and research notes. Suddenly they were staring back at me from the gallery walls, vivid and entirely real.

Historical fiction often begins with archives, dates and facts. But at some point the people themselves begin to take hold of you. Their voices sharpen. Their griefs and ambitions become familiar. You stop feeling as though you are inventing characters and start feeling as though you are accompanying them.

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I left the gallery feeling immensely grateful — for the shortlist, for the story itself and for the extraordinary real lives that inspired it.

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And, hopefully, this is only the beginning of the journey for Dorothea, Adelaide and William.