The Belle of Belgrave Square (Belles of London #2)(129)
“Good riddance to him, I say,” Julia retorted. “Though, I confess, I was rather looking forward to your latest novel proving his opinions wrong.”
“I don’t care what he thinks,” Jasper said. “I don’t care what anyone thinks.” His arm slid around her waist, drawing her near. “No one except you.”
Julia leaned into him. Four months of marriage had only made their union stronger. It was more than a love match. It was a friendship, a partnership, all wrapped up with bonds of loyalty and mutual respect.
And passion, of course. A passion that still made her heart thrill whenever she looked at him.
Captain Blunt or James Marshland, he was hers. All hers.
And she was his.
“Shall we call for the champagne now?” she asked.
“Yes, let’s.” He held her close. “We have a great deal to celebrate.”
Author’s Note
When writing The Belle of Belgrave Square, I found inspiration from a variety of sources. As always, I first turned to Victorian history. My research included Victorian views on the dangers of novel reading, the efficacy of bloodletting, the legalities of marrying under a false name, and the appalling conditions soldiers endured during the Siege of Sebastopol. I was also heavily inspired by myths and fairy tales—and by my own girlhood struggle with shyness, which often had me retreating to the safety of my bed to lose myself in the pages of a good book. For more info, see my notes below.
Literary Inspiration
The love story of Julia Wychwood and Captain Blunt owes a lot to myths and fairy tales, particularly the stories of Hades and Persephone, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, and the tale of Bluebeard’s wife. In addition, I drew inspiration from three historical novels: The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins (1875); Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862); and The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery (1926).
If you’ve read The Law and the Lady, you’ll have recognized my easter egg for it in chapter 18. There, Julia mentions having accidentally signed the wedding register with her married name instead of her maiden name, thus incurring bad luck for her new marriage. This is a direct reference to an incident at Valeria Brinton’s wedding to Eustace Woodville in The Law and the Lady. As Valeria relates:
The last ceremony left to be performed was, as usual, the signing of the marriage register. In the confusion of the moment (and in the absence of any information to guide me) I committed a mistake—ominous, in my aunt Starkweather’s opinion, of evil to come. I signed my married instead of my maiden name.
This mistake does indeed foreshadow worse things to come. Like Julia, Valeria later learns that her husband has married her under a false name.
My references to Lady Audley’s Secret similarly foreshadow hidden identities, as well as illustrating the popularity of sensation novels. Chock-full of bigamy, murder, and madness, Lady Audley’s Secret was an enormous success with the novel-reading Victorian public. They devoured the story—and many others like it. As a novel reader herself, Julia would have been well aware of this trend. It’s why she encourages Jasper to revise Reunion at Waterloo, ultimately helping to make it a hit.
My nods to The Blue Castle are a little more straightforward. Like Julia, Montgomery’s heroine, Valancy Stirling, proposes marriage to a man with a bad reputation in order to escape her family. Barney Snaith agrees to marry her on the condition that she never enter the locked lean-to on his property. At the end of the novel, Valancy finally disobeys him, only to discover that Barney is the author of some of her favorite books.
I’d always intended to make Jasper a secret romance author, but the Bluebeard element—along with the Blue Castle connection—is what compelled me to give him a locked writing room in the tower of Goldfinch Hall. The vague rumors that Jasper is a forger are also an allusion to Montgomery’s novel.
Victorian Views on Novel Reading and Bloodletting
The views on novel reading espoused by Dr. Cordingley and Lady Wychwood aren’t as outlandish as they may sound. At the time, the effects of novel reading were often compared to that of drugs or strong spirits. For example, Books and Reading by Noah Porter (1871) refers to “excessive novel reading” as “intellectual opium eating,” while The Local Preachers’ Magazine and Christian Family Record (1875) calls it “mental gin drinking.”
Some of Dr. Cordingley’s quotes are paraphrased from an editorial in The Mother’s and Young Lady’s Annual (1853) that claimed reading novels tended to “inflame the passions, pollute the imagination, and corrupt the heart,” that morality was weakened by “the false sentiments” that novels provoked, and that “in young ladies, especially, do the sensibilities and imagination need to be repressed rather than stimulated.”
When blood was believed to be overstimulated or polluted, Victorian physicians often resorted to bleeding a patient to calm the inflammation and rebalance the humors. Bloodletting was considered a viable treatment in the 1860s, with physicians employing either leeches, a lancet, or the mechanized scarificator that Dr. Cordingley uses on Julia. As the century progressed and new scientific methods were introduced, the practice gradually began to fall from favor.
False Names, Marriage, and the Law