Guest Post by Monica Fairview, author of “The Other Mr. Darcy”

Of Fairs, Freaks, and Fortune Tellers

Part of the fascination of writing a historical novel is not only all the information you pick up in your research, but how you assimilate the information into your novel.

To me it seems like an enormously complex juggling act, where you have to keep adding objects and discarding them, while all the time keeping your unwavering concentration on the main act itself. This is already tricky enough. But when you have a novel like The Other Mr. Darcy, you have one yet another club to juggle: going back to Austen constantly to make sure your characters stay “in character.”

To illustrate the wonderful complexity of this process, I’m going to talk about one of the topics that I researched for a long time for the novel, which was fairs and fairgrounds in the early nineteenth century, and then specifically the Nottingham Goose Fair, and then, in relation to it, the village of Stamford. I’ll use this to illustrate how historical information gets transformed as it is absorbed into a novel.

The History

In 1814, when The Other Mr. Darcy takes place, the Nottingham Goose Fair had been celebrated yearly since at least 1541, except during the Plague years, and one year in 1752 when the calendar was changed (11 days in September were dropped from the old calendar). The fair was timed for Michaelmas and the traditional dish of the feast, for, as the saying goes, “He who eats goose on Michaelmas day, shan’t money lack or debts to pay.” The geese also supplied something else, essential to writers of the time: the feathers for quills.

Geese were brought to Nottingham by the thousands (some place the figure at around 20,000) by drovers, who walked them from as far away as Norfolk. To accommodate the number of geese entering the walled city, there was a special gate for them, Goose Gate, on the east side. Of course, the Nottingham Goose Fair was a proper fair as well, and as such, had the usual displays that one could expect from that time, including Freaks and fortune tellers. There’s no room here to tell you all about this tantalizing subject, but it was also part of the research.

And one last piece of related research was about the town of Stamford, an important stop on the Great North road. The George Inn in Stamford was an important coaching inn, and in its heyday could expect 40 coaches to pass through daily, twenty towards York, and twenty towards London. Sir Walter Scott usually stayed at The George when he travelled that road. Stamford has several claims to fame, among them that it was where the popular folk figure Daniel Lambert, whose enormous size brought him fame and fortune as a Freak. It was in Stamford that he died, and his portrait hangs in The George Inn until this very day.

The Novel

Now on to The Other Mr. Darcy. You would think it’s ironic to even talk of fairs when I am writing a novel about Caroline Bingley, because Caroline would never deliberately go to a fair. It would be completely out of character. Which is exactly why she has to “brush” against a fair as she travels, and come into contact with an unfamiliar world that takes her out of her own.

Fairs have something magical about them. To me, that uncanny feeling became part of the novel as Caroline is jolted out of her normal world into one that allows her, for the first time, a glimpse of other possibilities. Yet at the same time, when we are talking about the early nineteenth century, a fair is a place of commerce. It is one of the most down to earth places one can imagine. Of all things, Caroline is trapped by the geese who surround their carriage and impede their journey to Pemberley.

And in Stamford, outside The George, Caroline is hailed by the Fat Woman who is on her way to the Nottingham Fair to be on display, a reminder of Daniel Lambert. Robert Darcy complains that the English treat him like a Freak because he is an outsider, and because many people’s interest in him came from his being “different,” another reminder.

It all came together, there, in front of The George – the novel, the characters, and the actual historical events. I felt almost transported, because the barrier between the past and the present became difficult to define. Thus when Caroline enters into the fortune teller’s tent, the fortune teller effectively tells the reader what is going to happen in the novel. Caroline’s future is already known at that particular moment. But as readers we are also revisiting the past, a past that also exists in the present, just as Daniel Lambert’s portrait exists now in the George Inn.

The connection between history and the now, the past and the present, the existence of Caroline at a time much later than when she was originally written by Jane Austen, is quite mind baffling. There I was, writing Jane Austen’s characters into a present-day novel, while at the same time I wrote of the past.

But perhaps I should quit now, before I become so baffled that I write myself out of existence.

About the Author

As a literature professor, Monica Fairview enjoyed teaching students to love reading. But after years of postponing the urge, she finally realized what she really wanted was to write books herself. She lived in Illinois, Los Angeles, Seattle, Texas, Colorado, Oregon and Boston as a student and professor, and now lives in London.

To find out more, please visit http://www.monicafairview.co.uk/

About the Book:

Did you know that Mr. Darcy had an American cousin?!

In this highly original Pride and Prejudice sequel by British author Monica Fairview, Caroline Bingley is our heroine. Caroline is sincerely broken-hearted when Mr. Darcy marries Lizzy Bennet— that is, until she meets his charming and sympathetic American cousin…

Mr. Robert Darcy is as charming as Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy is proud, and he is stunned to find the beautiful Caroline weeping at his cousin’s wedding. Such depth of love, he thinks, is rare and precious. For him, it’s nearly love at first sight. But these British can be so haughty and off-putting. How can he let the young lady, who was understandably mortified to be discovered in such a vulnerable moment, know how much he feels for and sympathizes with her?

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