223. Victorian Feminism and World Traveling Victorian Women: An Interview with Deanna Raybourn

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 223 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is New York Times bestselling author Deanna Raybourn!  We are going to talk about Victorian feminists, the changes that happened during Queen Victoria’s reign, and the ways that women adapted to technological advances throughout history, plus we take a deep dive into history and look at some of the women who traveled the world at that time.  We also talk about the real-life inspirations for Raybourn’s character Veronica Speedwell, and her latest book is out in January.

I will have links to all of the books that we talk about, plus Deanna’s new series, in the podcast entry at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast, or if you’re an iBooks type of person you can go to iTunes.com/DBSA, and you will find the last few episodes, plus the books that we’re talking about as well.

This podcast is sponsored by Elizabeth Hoyt, the New York Times bestselling author of the Maiden Lane series.  Duke of Pleasure, Hoyt’s latest Maiden Lane adventure, features Alf, the new Ghost of St. Giles and a female swashbuckling vigilante, and Hugh Fitzroy, the Duke of Kyle, a stern ex-soldier tasked with bringing down an evil group of aristocrats with Alf’s help.  This is a romance that has it all:  sword fighting, sexytimes, pants feelings, danger, passion, intrigue, and a heroine that totally kicks ass.  If you’re new to the series, you can trust Smart Bitches reviewer Elyse, who says, “You don’t have to read the Maiden Lane books in order, but they’re so much fun that you might as well.  Your credit card might hate me, but you won’t.”  You can start binge reading today.

The music you’re listening to is provided by Sassy Outwater, and I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is.

And – I say this every show; I’m going to say it now too! – we have a Patreon campaign, and if you are interested in helping to support the show and keep it more awesomer you can have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches.  For as little as a dollar a month you can help me commission transcripts, keep the show going, continue the awesomeness well into the New Year, all that good stuff.  And if you have already pledged to support the show, you are awesome!  Thank you, thank you, thank you!  I think you have marvelous taste in all things.

And now, on with the podcast!

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Deanna Raybourn:  I am so tired because I actually stayed up to watch the end of the World Series last night, and the whole time I kept thinking, crap!  I’ve got to talk to Sarah tomorrow, and I’ve got to be alert and attentive!  And awake!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Deanna:  And they just would not win the game and close it out.  It was driving me crazy.  Cleveland was up three games to one before I started watching the series, and my husband reminded me that the last time I did that was when the Red Sox were down in the series –

Sarah:  Ah!

Deanna:  – and so apparently when I watch a team, they come back and they do magnificent things, so I’m going to start renting myself out.

Sarah:  I think that’s an excellent side hustle.

Deanna:  I’m just saying, girl.  In case the writing thing doesn’t make it, this is, this is where I’m going.  This is my new plan.

Sarah:  Well, as a Pirate fan –

Deanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – I, I would be –

Deanna:  You need me.

Sarah:  – willing to discuss your rates, should there be a post season in the future.  I am, I am going to keep this in mind.

Deanna:  I’m there for you.  I’m there for you.

Sarah:  [Laughs] All right, so you ready to talk about Victorian feminism?

Deanna:  Absolutely!

Sarah:  I am so curious, because your publicist told me that you did a metric ton of research about Victorian feminism to write the Veronica Speedwell series.

Deanna:  Well, here’s the thing:  I got my degree yonks ago in History and English, and we only did white dude history.  We –

Sarah:  Oh, yeah, dead white dudes.

Deanna:  Who was fighting wars?  Who was, you know, boycotting or issuing embargos or whatever?  There was no social history, there was no material history, women were absolutely not talked about, and so I got off on my own track researching Victorian female explorers.  It just kind of became this pet subject of mine, so for the last, like, twenty-five years since I’ve been out of college, I’ve been reading up on them whenever I, I can get my hands on a new book.  There, there are actually a handful of collected biographies, which are fantastic, and then a lot of these women wrote memoirs, they left journals.  The cool thing about these women is that throughout the Victorian era, they were going everywhere.  They were going places that men had never even been sometimes.  So they were just kind of packing up the petticoats and the parasols and taking off, and sometimes they would go traveling the world with little more than a carpetbag, and other times they would travel with, like, an enormous entourage, so you, you kind of get the whole gamut of exploration with these women, and sometimes they were going out and, you know, researching.  They, they were doing botanical research, or they were doing archaeology, and then other times you see them just kind of being really curious and, and, you know, they were, they were being like Kipling’s mongoose:  they were going to go and find out what was going on in the world, and so they would just kind of turn up in places and hire a guide and, and haul themselves around on donkey back or horseback and just go see the world.  That’s what they were into, and the great thing about Victorians is, my God, they wrote about everything.  So –

Sarah:  Bless their anal-retentive little hearts.

Deanna:  Oh, my God, right?!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Deanna:  They wrote tons of letters home; they wrote, you know, some of them wrote for newspapers; and masses of them left journals and memoirs and, you know, kind of ethno-, ethnological surveys of the places that they went so that they could talk about different customs and, and sometimes they wrote nothing more than just, you know, complaining about the bedbugs and the heat, but most often they wrote these really, really sensitive, detailed, fascinating pictures of the places that they’d been.  So I had a, a group of these women that I was particularly smitten with, and there was one by the name of Margaret Fountaine who I just could not get out of my head.  Margaret was a lepidopterist, she was a butterfly hunter, and she, a, a lot of these women followed the same pattern, which is, they were devoted spinster, spinster daughters, spinster sisters, and then some kind relative would drop dead and leave them money, and so they would get to go travel the world based on that.  So Margaret was one of these women.  She gets an inheritance, decides to go traveling the world, decides to make a career out of hunting butterflies, and she does this for seventy years.  She even dropped dead –

Sarah:  Whoa!

Deanna:  Yeah, she drops dead on a Caribbean island with her butterfly net in her hand, still going after a specimen.  She was amazing.  The great thing about Margaret is, she left her entire butterfly collection and her journals to a university in the north of England and said, you guys can have this collection, but according to the terms of her will, they were not allowed to open anything for, until the 1970s.  I mean, so we’re talking decades after she’s dead, because she wanted everybody she wrote about to have passed away and not, you know, have felt the impact of, of, of her kind of indiscreet writing.  So after all these years pass they open up the collection, and her butterflies are gorgeous and amazing, but then they read her journals, and they find out that not only was Margaret collecting butterflies this entire time, Margaret was collecting dudes.

Sarah:  You go, girl!

Deanna:  I – right?!  She had lovers practically every place she went, and, and she’s really not shy in talking about it.  She would, you know, just be describing how she’s wandering through this alpine meadow chasing this festive little Lasiommata, and then her guide, Hans’s hands were in her bodice, and then you go – and you’re like, what?  What just happened?  [Laughs] And it’s –

Sarah:  Wow.

Deanna:  – it’s amazing!  They make the most fascinating reading, and, and, I mean, they’re not terribly salacious, but for the time they were, they were some pretty saucy stuff.  And she had a very longstanding relationship with her dragoman, who was of a different race, when she was in the Middle East and, and ended up moving with him to Australia for a while, and she just –

Sarah:  As you do.

Deanna:  As you do.  And, and she was just the most fascinating woman, and it occurred to me that if I – ‘cause I was in the throes of, of writing my, my first Victorian series, my Julia Grey series, when I really got hipped on Margaret, and I started thinking, if I ever do another series, I’ve got to write a character that, that is inspired by Margaret, because she’s just, she was a force of nature!  So when I left my previous publisher and I had to create a new series, that was immediately where I went is, is, I want a chance to be in this world.  I want a chance to explore what she was doing and, and, you know, kind of use that as a springboard for a very modern but very Victorian woman.  You know, she, because that’s what women in the Victorian era did!  They kind of straddled these two worlds, and you know, some of them were looking backwards, and they were, you know, sitting in parlors tatting tea cloths, but, but a, a whole lot of them were looking to the future and, and really invested in making change.

Sarah:  It’s fascinating because you see these women, as you say, who inherit money and are like, well, well, I don’t really need to get married if I don’t want to.  I can go do what I want.

Deanna:  Oh, that’s, that’s exactly it, you know, and, and you look at kind of infant mortality rates and maternal mortality rates and, and the, the rights of women under property law in the UK, which, which didn’t become anywhere even close to equitable until the 1880s, and even then it still was not a huge improvement.  It was just better than it used to be.  And, and you could understand why it would make sense for a woman who has means to say, no, I, I don’t think I’m going to buy into this traditional model that’s going to see me, you know, popping out a kid every year and possibly dying from it and, you know, always making my needs and, and my wishes subservient to this dude.

Sarah:  Yep!  Nope!

Deanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I’m going to nope on out of here.

Deanna:  That’s it exactly.

Sarah:  And what’s interesting is that that time was also a, a sort of a, a composite of women who more and more found themselves with some means of – you know, white women of certain classes, certainly – and then the invention of different modes of transportation that could get her places.

Deanna:  Oh, yeah, absolutely.  I mean, at the, at the start of these kind of Victorian adventures you see women basically going out on sailing ships and, and riding donkeys, and then by the end, they were taking motor tours of, of places, and, and it’s really, it’s fascinating to see how quick they were sometimes to hop onto whatever new technology that there was, you know, and, and it, it’s, it’s funny sometimes when you think about how much – like, I’m forty-eight, and already there’s so much that has changed just in my lifetime.

Sarah:  Oh, yeah!

Deanna:  I mean, you know, like, I, I, I saw a, a meme the other day showing a, a picture of a cassette tape and a pencil eraser, and the little caption under it was, you know, there’s an entire generation that will never know how these two things fit together.  Because –

Sarah:  I unpacked a box in my office that had a bunch of cassette tapes in it, and it’s really hard to throw away cassette tapes, even though we don’t a cassette player?

Deanna:  Right?!

Sarah:  And I have all of that music digitally?  I don’t need these cassettes –

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and I’m sort of sitting there looking at them, thinking, okay, these do not have a purpose.  You can, you can throw them away; you can donate them.  And my eleven-year-old, eleven-year-old walks in and goes, what is that?  And I’m like, oh, my God, I’m so old!  And I’m forty-one!

Deanna:  [Laughs] I know!  And see –

Sarah:  I don’t feel old; it’s all psychological, but wow!

Deanna:   It is, it is, but when we were, you know, when, when, when we were kids, because we’re, we’re close-ish in age –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Deanna:  – but when we were kids there was, there was mostly, it was mostly vinyl!

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  You know, and, and I remember 8-tracks coming in when I was probably in elementary school for their, for their little blip, and so we’d go in school –

Sarah:  My grandparents had a car with an 8-track player in the dashboard.

Deanna:  Sassy.

Sarah:  I know, right?  It was a convertible, too.

Deanna:  [Laughs] So we’ve, we’ve kind of lived through this change where tape came in and tape went out, and you see the same thing with Victorians.  You know, everything was candle power and horse power at the beginning of Victoria’s reign.  By the end of her reign you’re talking electricity and cars, but in the meantime you had gaslights –

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  – and steam power, and so people were living through these really kind of just astronomical changes because the, the, the years of Victoria’s reign were kind of just stunning in the, in the breadth of change, and there was so much, I think, that must have just constantly felt like, oh, my God, we’ve got to adapt!  We’ve got to figure this out.  And, and I see it happening so much today.  You know, there, there are so many parallels to it, which I find really, really fascinating, and it’s, it’s, you know, there’s always a question with every new kind of technology:  are you going to embrace it, are you going to resist it, or are you just going to wait for it to become obsolete, ‘cause that might happen tomorrow?

Sarah:  Or are you going to wait for it to become cheaper and then buy it?

Deanna:  [Laughs] 

Sarah:  Like, I keep looking at these voice-powered house managing devices, and I’m like, okay.  Same thing with solar, solar power.  I’m waiting, I waited for that to become a little bit more manageable in price, and it’s getting there.

Deanna:  It is –

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  – it absolutely is, but the, the, the devices that power the whole house, I’m legit terrified of those.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Deanna:  Like, I could just see that thing getting resentful and suddenly, you know, shutting off my AC when it’s 102 degrees outside.  Like, I, I can see that happening, and I’m a little scared, so – you try it out and let me know how it goes.

Sarah:  I’ll let you know.

Deanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  One of the things that you said – actually, there’re two things that I want to go back to, but one is that, the idea that women grabbed on and adapted to this new technology and all of these advances in transportation and in basic massive changes to everything that, that affected their daily lives, that’s still true!  I remember when I was doing presentations in 2007 and 2008 saying at different tech conferences to people who were making eBook readers, women are your audience.

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Like, why are you not seeing this?  Why is Sony the only one –

Deanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – that’s making eReaders in a color other than beige?  Like, what is –

Deanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – what, what are you thinking?  Like, I remember Mala Valik from Harlequin being like, I don’t understand.  These are all ugly!  What’s wrong with you people?

Deanna:  Right.

Sarah:  Don’t you understand that women are your audience?

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  We would talk about romance readers, and we would talk about the number of books we consume, and of course, you know, we were a panel of women at a tech conference, so there’re, like, nine total people in the audience –

Deanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – but one of the things that I learned then was that, to this day, women still drive most of the technology purchases in a household in the United States, because we’re the ones who –

Deanna:  Uh-huh.

Sarah:  – buy technology for the house –

Deanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – make sure that whatever, whatever devices someone is needing or getting, that it’s going to fit the, the, you know, it’s going to fit what’s needed.  We’re the ones that buy birthday presents and it, it, and of course women, I don’t know if you know this, but women also play video games?  It’s shocking.

Deanna:  Yes, I have actually heard that.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yeah, it’s a thing that happens?  Right?  So women have –

Deanna:  Yeah, I got to, I got to blurb Felicia Day’s book, so –

Sarah:  Nooo!

Deanna:  [Laughs] Yeah, yeah!

Sarah:  Oh, my God, I can’t breathe right now!

Deanna:  I know, she’s the best.  She sent me the book about six months ahead of time.  I got a very lovely gift basket from her too.  It’s nice.

Sarah:  Wow!

Deanna:  So, yeah, I was kind of geeking out, sitting there going, I’m eating Felicia Day’s food!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Deanna:  It was great.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I would lose my mind.

Deanna:  It was pretty cool.  I’m not going to lie; it was cool.

Sarah:  That’s super cool!

Deanna:  Yeah.  But, no, women, women have always been, throughout history, women have always been the, the kind of perfect consumer, you know, because of the fact that they’re the ones who generally tend to manage on the home front –

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  – and so, you know, and, and in Victorian times, you look at them, there were two main pieces of technology that women really hopped on.  Literally in once case, which is the bicycle –

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  – and the other was the typewriter, and, and in both cases, the reason for women embracing those types of technology is because these are the things that made it possible for them to break out of the traditional roles that they’d been pigeonholed into.  Bicycles mean you can get the heck out of Dodge.  You know, you can, you can go and do your own thing without being dependent on a man, because it was, it, you know, it, it’s, carriage driving is, is, is a tricky thing to do.  A lot of times, you know, women weren’t encouraged to do it because it was viewed as unladylike, or it was too expensive, or it was considered to be too dangerous, and so women are not usually, often, given the opportunity to, to hold the reins, literally.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  Where a bicycle, bicycle’s not hugely expensive.  A bicycle, you know, it, it’s, it’s not something you have to manhandle or muscle into submission like you do a horse, you know?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  A horse has a mind of its own; not a bicycle!  You can do whatever you want!  And, and so for women who could not afford to stable a riding horse of their own, and, and, and certainly they weren’t, like I said, encouraged to, to take out any other form of transportation, the bicycle is suddenly the way middle class women are able to bust loose.  And then you get the typewriter coming along, and suddenly there is a space for them besides shop girl.  There’s something that they can do that is, that is different from going into service, which was the main source of employment if you were a young woman who needed to make money.

Sarah:  Right.

Deanna:  You were going into service or, you know, and a shop girl was really not what you wanted to be if you had any sort of pretensions to gentility at all.

Sarah:  No.

Deanna:  If your family had come down in the world and you suddenly needed to make money, you really did not want to be working at a counter.  If you were even in an establishment that employed women, because the, you know, huge numbers of them would far rather have men working at a counter than, than girls, so when you’ve got a typewriter now, oh, this is, this is, this is different.  This is a little more refined, this is a little more, you know, this is a slightly classier way of earning a living, and, and you’re not subjected to a lot of the, you know, kind of the depredations of service.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  You don’t have the master of the house, you know, kind of feeling you up on the back stairs, and you don’t have all those hideous cans of hot water to, to haul everywhere or to scrub out a grate or, you know, whatever it is that you were doing in service, this is a much cleaner, much nicer way to, to make a living.

Sarah:  And then there’s blogging, the natural offshoot of typewriters.

Deanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Then they all became bloggers.

Deanna:  Yep.  You know what?  They, they are your metaphorical mothers.

Sarah:  Yeah, they really are if they were writing all this down.  I’m like, oh, my gosh!  I’ve, I’ve, I’ve found the lineage!  [Laughs]

Deanna:  ‘Cause you know that, that’s what these Victorian female explorers were doing too.

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  You know, because when they kept their journals, and they published them –

Sarah:  The world’s first travel bloggers.

Deanna:  That’s exactly who they were!  They were saying, hey, I went to this place.  It was cool; let me tell you about it.  And people gobbled it up.  They loved that crap!  Like, you know, you pretty much could not claim to have traveled unless you tried to publish, and you could say, well, yes, you know, I went riding with the Tuareg, and this is what I learned, and, you know, and, and people lapped it up.  Victorians loved armchair travel.  They were so into it, and that’s when the, the Cook’s Tours really took off, and so suddenly there were ways for people to, that, I mean, the Victorian era was when the world finally was kind of shrunk down –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  – and, and people, you know, started becoming much more global.

Sarah:  When it was more comfortable to travel farther.  Not by much, but it wasn’t, like, incredibly perilous.

Deanna:  You know, it, it depends entirely on where you were going and how you were traveling, but absolutely.  You could, you could make a very, very comfortable trip, particularly compared to, you know, what it’s like now riding, you know, on an airplane stuck in coach.  Your, your means of transportation would have been much more elegant then.  I’ve, I’ve studied some safaris where, I mean, you could just see the sketches that people made of, of how they would have an entire bathtub, and it started to, you know, there’s a separate tent for that, and, you know, oh, but I’m, you know, so glad that Stefan remembered the caviar, and you’re just like, yes, bless your heart.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Deanna:  So nice to be you!

Sarah:  Can’t have a safari without caviar!  Come on, now, don’t be unreasonable!

Deanna:  Oh, one of my, one of my favorite travelers was a Dutch girl with the name of Alexandrine Tinné, and she inherited a huge amount of money from her father, and she and her mother at first decided they were just going to travel on the Mediterranean, and, and they did that, and, and every time they traveled they went a little bit further, and finally Alexandrine persuaded her to go as far as Egypt, and so they started hitting North Africa.  They did Egypt and, and eventually just kept pushing further and further, and you would read the accounts of, like, how many people would travel with them.  Dozens and dozens and dozens of people would come along as bearers and porters and guides and guards and, because they traveled with so much really expensive stuff!  I mean, they, they had a full silver dinner service and –

Sarah:  As you do.

Deanna:  As you do.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Deanna:  And, you know, they had their, their clothes and their jewels, because they would dine well, you know, they would dress for dinner every night, and, and it’s, on the one hand it’s so appallingly ridiculous, and on the other hand it’s, it’s so fabulously interesting to read about.

Sarah:  Yeah, which is, which is part of what makes Miss Speedwell interesting, ‘cause in the first book she gets in a carriage with a bag and a net, and she’s like, all right, let’s go!  I’m done!

Deanna:  Exactly.  Exactly.  It –

Sarah:  This girl travels very, very light!

Deanna:  She does, and in that respect I, I was really inspired by Mary Kingsley, who was a woman who did a, a fairly extensive bit of travel around West Africa.  She was the first white woman that had kind of traveled through these parts, so she was, she was something of a curiosity to the people who lived there, and she fell into a, what she claimed was a tiger pit, which obviously couldn’t be, because there are no tigers in West Africa, but it was a, a large game pit that had sharpened stakes coming up from – just like you see, like, in every ancient Tarzan movie.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  And she fell on that, but her, her thick petticoats saved her, so that’s the only reason she didn’t get impaled is because she was still dressing like a traditional Englishwoman, and she used to travel with a very limited amount of, of baggage, and so I, I tried to strip it down.  Between Mary Kingsley and Nellie Bly, who famously only took one carpetbag on her trip around the world, I though, okay, I, I can do this.  You know, Speedwell can, can travel light.

Sarah:  You know, it’s funny; there’s a whole society of people who are now digital nomads who work remotely and travel from place to place, and many of them are one-bag travelers and show, like, their bags –

Deanna:  Oh, yeah!

Sarah:  – and their traveling, trav-, and their packing lists and everything, and a couple of years ago in 2012 I was invited to three different writers’ conferences in Australia that would have kept me there for almost a month, and I did the whole month in one bag.

Deanna:  Nice!

Sarah:  And it was a, it was a backpack, too, so it was, like, a, a square-styled, suitcase-shaped backpack, but it didn’t have any metal structure, and it didn’t have wheels, and there were times when it was really difficult, but when I needed to get up and move, I could get up and go in a, in a, in a heartbeat, and since then I’ve learned is, even, even going to a conference, I can do this in one bag.

Deanna:  Yeah, exactly.  It’s very freeing, isn’t it?

Sarah:  It is very freeing.

Deanna:  Yeah, I have, there’s a, another great traveler by the name of Isabella Bird who, she traveled a lot in what were then the Sandwich Islands, but are actually Hawaii, and she traveled through Colorado.  She had, she was one of those people – and this is something I find really interesting, ‘cause it happened a lot – these Victorian women, when they were stuck at home, a lot of times didn’t enjoy great health, and Isabella Bird was one of those, and the doctors kind of said, well, you need some, you need some fresh air, you need some change of scenery, you need to, to get out a little bit, and, and she –

Sarah:  I’ll go do that in Hawaii!

Deanna:  Right?  She was practically bedridden at home, you know, would just take to her bed and not get up.  She was an invalid; everybody waited on her.  She goes to Colorado and hires a horse and, like, rides up a mountain in the middle of a snowstorm –

Sarah:  Sure!

Deanna:  – for fun.  You know, as you do.  And, and she was another one of those who would just travel so light and kind of, one bag, would decide where she wants to go, and then just pick up and go.  She would meet somebody who, who would tell her about an interesting place and, you know, oh, there’s a settlement of people, but they’re on the other side of that mountain, and she’s be like, all right, let’s go!  And so she would just pick up and go, and, and because of the fact that she only took a bag with her, she got to do whatever she wanted.  And it gave her a certain spontaneity to her travel, which I always find really interesting when I’m reading her stuff because it’s, so many of the places that she went were just not places that people went.  I mean, they, you didn’t have visitors.  What you had were pioneers who were trying to, you know, kind of create a life for themselves, but they weren’t used to strangers just showing up out of nowhere.  I mean, they were so far off the beaten path, and that didn’t stop her.  Didn’t slow her down.  You know, it was, have small bag, will, will travel –

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  – and she did, so it’s, it’s very liberating.

Sarah:  That’s fascinating!  Now, I do want to ask you –

Deanna:  I told you, these are the most interesting women.  They really, really are!

Sarah:  They really are.  I want to ask you about dragoman.

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  These were interpreters and, like, tour guides, but they would stay with you.  Am I, am I interpreting that right?

Deanna:  Yeah!  That’s, that’s pretty much what it was.  You would, you would generally hire one for the duration of your stay, and they would, they would kind of act as tour guides and interpreters and concierges and fixers, and so they would arrange for you to kind of do whatever you wanted to do when you were in their country, because of course a lot of the places that these women were traveling, they didn’t speak the language, and so they would, as expansive as the British Empire was, you, you certainly, you know, were not going to roll up speaking Turkish, so you, you would have to hire a local, or at least someone who, who was from the, the general vicinity who could speak multiple languages, who could, who could basically hook you up and who could see to it that you had the transportation that you needed, you know, if you wanted to take a cruise up the Nile or if you wanted to go, like, if you happened to be in Damascus and you wanted to ride out and, and see the ruins of Palmyra or, or something like that, you would have to have help.  You couldn’t just, you know, instigate that on your own, so that, you would hire usually one person for the duration of your stay, and he would kind of take you under his wing, and he would take care of everything for you and, and smooth the way.

Sarah:  Right.  So there’s a, there’s both a freedom and a necessity of having someone help you at the same time.

Deanna:  Yeah, and, and so it leads to a really kind of weirdly intimate relationship where, you know, if, if you need medicine or you need a doctor or, you know, you’re, you’re craving a different kind of food, or you’re just coming down with something and you need an extra few days to rest or whatever, this is the person you have to go to and say, hey, this is what I need, and, and then depend on him to take care of you.  There, there’s a really interesting, there’s always this interesting dichotomy when you read about the travels of these women that, that so often they end up in situations where, on the one hand, they’re so intrepid, and they’re so dynamic, and they’re so empowered, and yet there’ll come a moment where they are just completely dependent on someone, almost like toddlers who are traveling because –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Deanna:  – they, they can’t do whatever needs doing, either because they’re women or because they don’t speak the language or whatever, and they push on through this, but, but so many of them had a remarkable ability to kind of find people who would, who would be there for them and, and, and help them out, and it is amazing how many times these women had to rely on the kindness and generosity of, of strangers, and, and how many times it, it, it worked out really well for them.  Sometimes it didn’t.  Alexandrine Tinné, the one who, the Dutch girl with all the money, unfortunately every woman in her party ended up dying of, of an epidemic, and she insisted on embarking with the, the guards and the porters and everybody else out across the desert, and they were slaughtered by Tuareg.  So she made a, a, a nasty end, but by and large these women fared really well, and the funny thing is, even when they didn’t, they usually found it an amusing anecdote to write about.  They could have people who were menacing them or who had held them up or stolen things or were, you know, they, they met with a lot of local officials who would try and hit them up for bribe money, because of course they’re, they’re European, so they must have money, and, and yet these things just become witty little anecdotes in their books, and, and they don’t seem – like, you read these accounts of what they’re going through – they might be sick, they might have a fever, they might be, you know, spending the night on the floor of some jail somewhere because it’s the only building where they could put a stranger up in this village, and yet they’re, they’re writing through it!  They haven’t had anything to eat in a day and a half, and I’m thinking, I would be fetal under the nearest rock, and these women just powered through!

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  It’s, it’s a-, it, it’s really quite inspiring to read, and, and it tends to make me a, a little more patient then, when I’m in an airport and, oh, my flight’s delayed by ten minutes?  Fine.

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I can manage.  I’m not on my own in the snow –

Deanna:  Exactly.

Sarah:  – by myself –

Deanna:  Exactly.

Sarah:  – on a mountain, in a, in a, in a giant dress with five petticoats.

Deanna:  And a corset.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And a corset, yep.  Don’t, no deep breathing!  No taking a deep breath.  Sorry!

Deanna:  Yeah, exactly.  And, and that’s the, you know, that’s the other thing to look at, too, is, is how, there, there were lots of, of really dire things about the, the British Empire and about colonialism.  A good thing that you can take away from it is the fact that, that they were very ardent about keeping up their own standards of behavior and, and kind of not knuckling under to despair or to, you know, just being poor –

Sarah:  Futility.

Deanna:  Yeah!  And being poor representatives of, of, of Britain in that regard.  They, they tried very hard to keep that stiff upper lip and to keep going and, and to push through whatever, whatever trauma they were suffering at the moment in time.

Sarah:  So how do you combine all of this history into Miss Speedwell, and can you tell us about book two?  Because I know that’s coming out in January.

Deanna:  It is, it is.

Sarah:  You know, piece of cake, just tell us about your whole book, the whole thing.  Just –

Deanna:  Right?  Okay, day one – no.

Sarah:  Yes.  [Laughs]

Deanna:  No, so, when, when the time came for me to, to create Veronica, I knew I wanted her – as an homage to Margaret Fountaine, she was going to be a lepidopterist, and I also like the fact that butterfly hunting gives you an excuse for going all around the world, because there are very few places where you can’t find decent butterflies, and it also gave her means of making a living.  Margaret Fountaine did quite well.  She could charge three guineas for a good specimen, which was a really decent amount of money at that time.

Sarah:  Wow.

Deanna:  You know, fifty guineas a year would keep you in, in, in, at least in food and shelter, so, and, and reasonable comfort, so in order to, to, you know, to, to be able to earn three guineas for a, a single good specimen, that, that’s not too shabby for a woman, so –

Sarah:  No.

Deanna:  And, and I knew I wanted her to be her own mistress, so that kind of dictated limitations as far as, you know, she’s – my first series character was an aristocrat with, from a family with ten children, and so I wanted to do the opposite with Veronica, and I wanted to, to really kind of make her this orphan foundling who doesn’t have anybody to rely on except herself, and her –

Sarah:  And her net.

Deanna:  And her net!

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  And her net!  And over the course of, of the series, the, the idea is that she will make her own family and kind of form, and, and that’s something that, that I think we’re inclined to do through the Internet.  You know, we, we, we make our own families and, and create our own clans because we, it enables us to kind of connect with people who have similar interests and similar values, and, and, and we find our own types, and I, I like kind of exploring that but in a Victorian setting, and so she’s, she’s encountering people through the books who she’s kind of collecting as people who are important to her.  She’s forming connections, which I think is great, but, you know, perhaps more to the point, she’s stumbling over a fair number of dead bodies.  Murder is –

Sarah:  As you do.

Deanna:  Yeah, murder’s a hobby, unfortunately, and so she’s, she’s one of these people who, Veronica is very intrepid.  She really doesn’t doubt herself.  She has a lot of faith in her own ability and her own intelligence and, which, that’s the kind of person who would hop into the middle of an amateur murder investigation and say, I got this.  I can figure this out.  And enjoy doing it, because it’s an, it’s an intellectual puzzle.  She’s got a, a very firmly developed sense of right and wrong, and as far as she’s concerned, right and wrong don’t necessarily have anything to do with the law.  They have to do with right and wrong, and so she, she’s more than happy to break or bend a law if it serves what she feels is a greater good, which, you know, makes her frequently troublesome.  Which I like; I think it’s fun.  It’s, she’s a great deal of fun to write because she’s always dashing off doing things, which I love.

Sarah:  She is the, she’s the type of character who doesn’t like to be told things.

Deanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  She, she doesn’t like to be told what to do.  She doesn’t like to be informed what she should be doing.

Deanna:  No.

Sarah:  You know, she does –

Deanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – she, she knows already, and probably knows better and has probably seen better.

Deanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  One thing I really liked about her character in the first book – I haven’t read the second yet, ‘cause I just got my ARC this week –

Deanna:  Ooh, yay.

Sarah:  – I really like that she spent so much of her youth after she sort of came of age, like, okay, butterflies, I’m going to go travel.  I’ll be back.  See y’all later, and off she went, and then she’d come back.

Deanna:  Yeah, and that is, that is actually what you see over and over again with these Victorian explorers is that they would take off, sometimes at very young ages, most times unchaperoned, not even a lady’s maid to go with them, and they would take off.  They knew that it would put them beyond pale with certain elements of society, and they absolutely didn’t care.  They went off and did their own thing, and then, you know, after many, many months, even a year, they’d come home for a little while, and what you see over and over again is, they would relapse into ill health or into boredom and, and just, you know, kind of drape themselves on the sofa suffering from ennui, and then they would get up another expedition and take off again.  And so I, that, to me, was, was always going to be kind of Veronica’s pattern, that she would come home long enough to check in, drop off her butterflies, and then she’d be out again.  And, and so her life from eighteen – she, she’s turning twenty-five in the course of the first book – so her life from eighteen to twenty-five is on the road.  You know, you can see a lot of the world in seven years, even, even in the 1880s, and so I, I’ve placed her in some interesting settings during those times that, that are, they’re not show directly, but they’re alluded to.  Like, she was on hand when Krakatoa exploded, and, you know, was, was first-hand witness to, to that whole eruption, and she’s been shipwrecked, and she’s hung out with Corsican bandits, and she’s had all sorts of interesting little adventures before.  I just thought it would be fun to have her this kind of well-rounded person who’s got a lot of experience and a lot of adventure and a lot of travel under her belt before she turns up in the first book so that when she comes across murder and mayhem in Victorian London, she’s not really thrown by it.  You know, she’s seen so much that she’s not going to be the girl kind of weeping into the hand-, the, the handkerchief hysterically and, and waiting for someone to, to save her.  She’s got this.  You know, she’s, she’s, she’s got a plan, she reacts, she knows what to do.  And even if she doesn’t, she’ll make it up as she goes a long.  But, yeah, you’re absolutely right, she does not like to be told what to do at all.

Sarah:  [Laughs] She doesn’t like to be told anything.

Deanna:  Yeah, pretty much.  That is a, that is a, I, I will admit to that being a hugely autobiographical thing that I stuck in there.

[Laughter]

Deanna:  Ah, so –

Sarah:  I’ve also, I’ve been looking intently, lately, at the pattern of women characters operating both in a sense of, of rage?  Like, I think that a lot of the contemporary thrillers being published right now about women deal with women operating outside the law from a place of rage and justice, and so there’s this sort of answering catharsis to –

Deanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – the general feeling of frustration and anger among many women, and –

Deanna:  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I absolutely see that.

Sarah:  And so I look at characters in historical mysteries in a similar way, because you have this incredibly limiting set of behaviors that you’re expected to operate within –

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – but if you go travel, who knows what you’re up to?

Deanna:  Exactly!  Exactly, and that is –

Sarah:  [Laughs] And Veronica’s like, listen, I have met many men, and I left them there.

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.  Exactly, and that is when, you know, what you see through their memoirs and their journals is that they did as they damn well pleased, and they –

Sarah:  Who was going to stop them?  Or punish them?

Deanna:  Right!

Sarah:  There was no punishment.

Deanna:  Right, and they felt suffocated when they came back to England, and you know, they, they –

Sarah:  No wonder they got sick.

Deanna:  Exactly!  I mean, these were, I think, I think a little bit of it was climate and pollution, and the vast majority of it was psychosomatic, because I think that they, they were feeling very much like they had been stuffed back into a cage and couldn’t come out, and, and, you know, throughout history, what you see is the, the erasure of, of women from the, the public stage.  You know, women were in the background getting a, an amazing amount of things done and wielding influence, but they weren’t allowed on the front, you were never allowed to, to appear as if you were acting, and, and you certainly couldn’t do it on your own behalf.  I mean, you know, even, even in this country, you’ve got Abigail Adams writing to her husband basically saying, get your business done.  You know –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  – you, you’ve got to do things for the women, because they knew that they, they did not have a voice that was respected.  They were, they, they were not going to be heard!  And so they had to rely on men to do it for them by proxy, and, and, you know, by the Victorian era, you see more women breaking out of that saying, yeah, I don’t think so.  I’m not here for that.

Sarah:  How about no.

Deanna:  Yeah, exactly, and, and in Veronica’s case, she’s not rage-y at all.

Sarah:  No, she is –

Deanna:  Veronica is just not –

Sarah:  – very happy.

Deanna:  Veronica is just not here for your bullshit, and, and that is what is so enormously fun about writing her is because there is absolutely a historical precedent for that!

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  She is one hundred percent rooted in history with regard to her attitude and her actions in choosing not to lead a conventional life, which is, of course, the, the one thing I get asked about the most is, well, but you’ve made her so twenty-first century.

Together:  Nope.

Deanna:  Nope, nope.  But we don’t know about these women, we don’t talk about these women, so we don’t realize they were there doing this stuff –

Sarah:  Right.

Deanna:  – but they were.  In the same way that we don’t tend to talk about people of color in history.  We don’t tend to talk about LGBTQ people in history, and, but they were there!  They’ve been there all along, and that’s why it’s so much fun, I think, to tell their stories, and – you asked about the second book, and in the second book she, she, she’s able to add even more people to kind of her, her –

Sarah:  Her found family?

Deanna:  Yeah.  Yeah!  Exactly!  I love that:  her found family.  Exact- –

Sarah:  Yep.  That’s a tag we have on the site to track books with found families, ‘cause it’s one of our favorite themes.

Deanna:  Yeah!  Yeah, I, I love that, and, and she is very – I like, too, the idea that for seven years traveling the world without a guide, without, you know, she, she would have individual guides in some of the places that she went, but as far as having one companion the entire time, Veronica hasn’t had that –

Sarah:  Right.

Deanna:  – and so I very much like the idea that for the first time in her life, she is choosing connection.

Sarah:  Yes.

Deanna:  She’s choosing to let people in, and she’s choosing to have relationships with people, and I really, really like that.  The second one has got a more, a more artistic bent to it.  We, we have a, a colony of artists.  I would hugely inspired, last, last summer I went to London and visited the house of Frederick, Lord Leighton, the painter, in, in Holland Park, and it is a stunning, gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous property.  They have left it the way it was since he was painting in the, the late Victorian era, and so I walked around there and said, yep, hundred percent using this, and so – and the funny thing was, I had had the, the first draft of the book done before I went there, and it wasn’t until I walked around that place that I said, oh, okay, now I have the book, and went home and completely tore it apart and rewrote it and, and used that as the setting, and it, and it really, everything just kind of clicked into focus for me at that –

Sarah:  And the, and the interior, if you look at pictures of, of Leighton House online, it is incredible!

Deanna:  It is even more stunning in person.  It is, it is shockingly beautiful, and –

Sarah:  It looks like the Alhambra in Technicolor.

Deanna:  Yeah, it does!  It does!  The tile work is magnificent, and, but it’s the choice of color, which was so – and I, I stood in that house, and I remember thinking, you know, I wish that every person who thinks that Victoriana is a study in brown and grey could stand here.  You know, this is not a sepia world.  These are not sepia people.  They were really, really fascinating, and I, I just, I thought it was such a dynamic setting and such a perfect kind of jewel box and really unusual place that, that I had to use it, so, yeah, so that, that ended up getting used, which was a lot of fun.  I’m not going to lie:  I love my job.

Sarah:  Goodness.

Deanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I can imagine!  Whoo!  My gosh!  One of the things I find so interesting is that when you have women who, who travel alone?

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  You reach a, they reach a point, I think, where, say, for example, with, with Veronica, she leaves a world in England where there’s a very long list of things that she’s not supposed to or can’t do –

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and then she goes off on adventures on her own, and not only is that list a lot shorter, but there are things that she has to do, because she’s the only one who can take care of herself –

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – and I love the, there’s one scene early in book one that I really liked because it sort of illustrated the, the difference between the enforcement of women from other women and the enforcement of women from men?

Deanna:  Oh, yeah.

Sarah:  So she’s having tea with the vicar –

Deanna:  [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah:  – and, and the minute the vicar’s wife would tear into her about her, you know, her immoral life and the rumors of what, the things that she got up to, you know, abroad, you know, the vicar would have to tie his shoes, or he’d have his mouth full.  He couldn’t step –

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – in front of his wife, and he didn’t interrupt her –

Deanna:  Right.

Sarah:  – and Veronica, who takes no shit from anyone, is like, okay, well, yes, I’m going to go travel world now, see you, very nice to see you, bye, and the, and the vicar leans and goes, butterflies?  And she says, well, of course!  And he, he, he doesn’t have any of that judgment.  He’s sort of like, oh, you’re going to go do that thing you do?  Okay.  Meanwhile, his wife is like, oh, my gosh!  You’re going into a life of sin!  This is unacceptable!  And it’s, it’s unacceptable because to her it represents loss of control.

Deanna:  Well, I think that, as much as, as, as we are policed by men in a patriarchal society, we are sometimes policed much more heavily by our own.

Sarah:  Oh, there’s no doubt about that.  I think that we are the –

Deanna:  Because –

Sarah:  – we are the, we are the most damaging tools of the patriarchy to each other.

Deanna:  Yes!  There, there’s, yeah, the idea that, that we will judge each other, that we will slut shame each other, that we will criticize each other, that, I mean, all you have to do is look at what stay-at-home mothers versus working mothers say about each other, and, and you realize that, that we are so adversarial –

Sarah:  Oh, yeah.

Deanna:  – and we are, we are our own worst enemy.  Instead of just saying, you know what?  You do you; I do me; everybody’s happy.  We, we don’t do that, and it’s, it’s because of the fact that when we see other women making choices that we don’t feel free to make, we feel threatened, and when we feel threatened, we lash out, and we judge the choices because, you know, the vast majority of the time we’re, we’re upset.  I, I just read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, and she was talking – no, no, no!  I think it was, no, I’m sorry, it was the reissue of Eat, Pray, Love, that’s right.  Because she was, she had written a new foreword for it, and she was talking about the fact that after the book came out the first time, she got the most vicious letters from women saying –

Sarah:  How dare you.

Deanna:  – bitch!  Bitch, I stayed in my marriage!  What are you doing?  Who gave you the right to go off and do whatever you want to do?  We’re all miserable!  That’s how, that’s how the game is played!  And I’m, you know, and, and she was absolutely just gobsmacked by that, and, and, and I am too, but we see it all the time, don’t we?

Sarah:  Oh, absolutely.  Absolutely.

Deanna:  I mean –

Sarah:  If your choices in some way threaten or invalidate another person’s choices, rather than making room and saying, okay, that, you do what’s good for you; I’ll do what’s good for me –

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – there’s, there’s this almost outraged panic attack of –

Deanna:  Yeah!

Sarah:  – your choice is different from mine, and your choice has made mine less valid, so I need to go and, go and bring you down a notch and punish you.  I, I, I felt like when I had my first child I had been dropped into this completely bizarre, nonsensical world?

Deanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Because every choice I made had the biggest impact, and whatever choice I made, I got judgment from the other side.  Like for example, I am physically unable to breastfeed.  I had a breast reduction when I was nineteen.  I had no ability.  Like, none.  None at all.  But I still got shamed at the hospital, I got shamed by the volunteers who came in to tell me that I had to do this, and I was like, well, I almost need to make sure my child doesn’t starve, so pass the formula.

Deanna:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And my kids were, like –

Deanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – okay, that was a really great snack, mom.  That was really a very unacceptable total dinner.  Where’s the rest?

Deanna:  Right.  Right.

Sarah:  So I was like, okay.  I have to ignore you, and then once I realized I don’t have the option to make a choice, I have to make the choice of necessity, I realized, okay, if I choose everything based on what my child or my family needs or what’s best for us, all the other choices don’t really matter, and so –

Deanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – I had to sort of sit down and really think about it, because I was in, I was so anxious and miserable and plus hormonal –

Deanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – and post partum –

Deanna:  Oh, sure.  Sure!

Sarah:  – and feeling like shit generally, and then I realized that, you know, in thirty years – this is my philosophy of parenting – in thirty years you’re not going to be able to tell the difference between children who were breastfed, who had formula, who had a nanny, who had a stay-at-home mom, who had a working parent, who went to a daycare, who went to a big daycare, went to a little daycare, had a stay-at-home individual nanny, had a small home nanny.  You won’t be able to tell the difference between kids who watch TV and kids who never watch TV, or who had all organic food or nonorganic food, but you can always tell the children whose parents were miserable.

Deanna:  Exactly.  Exactly!  And, and, and you know the really crappy part about that is, pretty much the minute your child is born, you’re second-guessing yourself.

Sarah:  Oh, totally!

Deanna:  I mean, that, that is, that is the burden that comes with parenthood.  It is –

Sarah:  Just accept you’re doing it wrong.  [Laughs]

Deanna:  Right!  And, and no matter how strong and powerful and confident you feel before you have that kid, childbirth brings with it the, oh, crap, what now?

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  And, and at the very moment when you most needed support and understanding –

Sarah:  No.  No, no, no, no, no.

Deanna:  – you were getting torn down by people for something that you couldn’t control.

Sarah:  Nope, not at all.

Deanna:  And that is just so much lavish bullshit.  And it really –

Sarah:  Oh – [laughs] – lavish bullshit!

Deanna:  Lavish bullshit.

Sarah:  [Laughs more]

Deanna:  And I mean, I have such a problem with that, and I, I, I’m actually, I’m hugely grateful, because my daughter was born in 1994, and so all I had to deal with was the What to Expect the First Year book, which I ended up throwing away.  I, there was no Internet then.  There, there were no, you know, mommy blogs; there were no message boards.  There was none of that stuff to deal with, and, and – which I would not have done well on them anyway, because I dropped out of childbirth class?

Sarah:  [Laughs] No, well, no childbirth for you.

Deanna:  So boring.  It was just so boring.  And I, I kept thinking, I don’t need to know all these.  I really don’t, because at some point nature is going to take over, and there’s not really going to be too much I can do about it.  And it all ended up being pointless anyway.  And I still got a baby!  So –

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  – nobody, nobody checked!  Nobody asked if I’d actually made it through and gotten my little diploma, so they just gave me a baby and sent me home!

Sarah:  Yep!

Deanna:  But, yeah, but the, the whole thing, I, I think, has brought with it, you know, and, and that’s the dark side of, of technology, too, is when it brings with it the, these kind of unintentional consequences.  There’s always the great stuff, but then there’s this, this shadow side of it when you go, well, I can live without that.

Sarah:  Yeah.

Deanna:  The, the judgment would be, would be super awesome if it wasn’t there, but, you know, we also have communities that, that raise each other up, and, and, and that, as long as we always have people who are, who are fighting for that, I, I, I think we will always, we will always be okay.

Sarah:  And then of course there’s the judgment that comes when you decide not to have children at all.  Ohhh, mercy!

Deanna:  Which is, again, much more lavish bullshit, because I think that should be as valuable and lauded an option as having one child or having twenty children or whatever you want to do with your life –

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  – is between and your partner.  Knock yourself out!  I, I don’t understand, and, and honestly, I mean, I know people who have only had children because of societal expectations.  They’re miserable parents; they have miserable kids.  I’m like, you should have just gotten an iguana.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Deanna:  Like, seriously.  Like, not even a dog, because I don’t think you’re that good.  But an –

Sarah:  An iguana.  Something that – a turtle.

Deanna:  iguana you’d be awesome at, you know, and these are people who had exciting and worthwhile things that they wanted to do that were fulfilling to them and made them super happy.  That’s what they should have stuck with!

Sarah:  And the message to do, if you’re a female, the message to do what makes you happy is, is hardly ever heard and buried under, well, before you go, before you help yourself, you have to do this and this and this and do all of these things to serve other people, and the message to do what makes you happy is so dim and, and hard to hear behind all the expectations.  With the –

Deanna:  Well, the message, the message is, do what makes you happy, as long as it conforms to my idea of what should make you happy.

Sarah:  Yes.  All right, long as it doesn’t inconvenience anyone else.

Deanna:  As long as it doesn’t make me rethink my happiness –

Sarah:  Yes.

Deanna:  – and my choices –

Sarah:  Yes.

Deanna:  – and doubt what I’ve done because, oh, shit, I wasted my life.  That’s the kind of stuff that, that just sends people into a tailspin completely.  Yeah!  And, and we would be, I, I think, the more we’re able to – and this is why I think it’s hugely important that we have advertisers who show different composites of what family can look like –

Sarah:  Oh, yes, please.

Deanna:  – and, and what community looks like, because I think what, the, the sooner we break down this idea that, you know, that we still have this hangover of people must marry.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  You know, you must find a life partner.  No, you don’t.  No, you don’t!  You can be happy without that!  I know people who are happy without that, but I also know that the, the vast majority of the world feels sorry for them –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Deanna:  – or feels like their life should be on hold, and that’s so insane!  You know, people –

Sarah:  Oh, it’s horrible.

Deanna:  – people who, people who choose to lead those, those lives doing what they want, engaged in work that they enjoy and, you know, hobbies and friends and – awesome!

Sarah:  It’s –

Deanna:  And, and the people who want their, their friendship to be, like you said, the found family, the, the people that you put together, great!  And the, and, you know, every one of those little, why are we so locked into this extremely, you know, kind of stratified, I, actually Victorian holdover idea of, of this nuclear family that’s got to look exactly this way, and everybody’s got to buy into it.  It’s so strange.

Sarah:  I was just going to ask about your research because I’m curious, while you were reading, all of the women who you were, who you’ve been talking about are remarkable for their time, and yet anyone who does that now is remarkable for their time.

Deanna:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Who combines any of the aspects of what these women did, whether it’s traveling independently repeatedly and going to the other side of the planet ‘cause they want to –

Deanna:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – or not being married, or having affairs in different countries.  That’s not supposed to be extraordinary.

Deanna:  Or having a long-term relationship with someone who wasn’t a dude.

Sarah:  Yeah, that too.

Deanna:  You know, I mean, yeah.  It, it is, it’s fascinating.  What you see over and over again, a handful of the women that I’ve researched were, were married and usually managed to combine their travel with their husband’s work.  Either he was an archaeologist or a diplomat or in some way a, a traveler by his own right, and, and, and she would – but, but these are women who, who by and large took a very, very significant role in what he did.  But the vast majority of these women I’ve researched reject the traditional gender roles of wife and mother.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  They just could not reconcile that, or they chose not to reconcile that.  They had no interest in reconciling that.  They wanted to, to make their own choices and go do their own thing, and that’s what they did.  I just, I find it so interesting that, that when you see these women who have means –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  -and they, they, they have an out, marriage is not the thing that’s going to put a roof over their heads and food on the table, they very often don’t choose it, and that’s not to say that they don’t choose to have connection and that they don’t choose to have men in their lives or, or even in some cases women, but they don’t choose convention.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  They, the, many of them had relationships, very fulfilling romantic relationships, but they were conducted as unconventionally as they did everything else.

Sarah:  Right.

Deanna:  And, and they just chose to kind of rewrite the, the boundaries for themselves and, and kind of just redraw what they were going to accept as, as a limitation.

Sarah:  You said that when they were traveling and then they would write about it, because travel bloggers, that the, the memoirs and the records of their travels, when published, were very popular.  Were they popular among both men and women?  Was there a varying reaction to them from other women?  Were they more accepted by societies of men in terms of talking about their experiences?  Was there any difference at all in how they were received?

Deanna:  Well, you know, you, you see a difference because of course the, when, when men went exploring, they usually had the imprimatur of some sort of organization behind them.

Sarah:  Right.

Deanna:  Women were not allowed to join the National Geographic Society or the Royal Geographical Society.  They, they, they went off on their own.  A lot of times, if men were exploring, it’s because they were either diplomats, or they were zoologists, or they were archaeologists, or they had a job to do out there.  So when they came back, they were presenting papers and giving public lectures and things like that.  Sometimes the women would give lectures, but their popularity tended to skew more towards a kind of pop culture, as opposed to academic, and so the, the men were taken more seriously with regard to, this is important information that we need to remember and we need to pay attention to, because they were off doing dude stuff, and, and they had the backing of institutions.  They had museums sending – because at this time, you know, the, the modern museum the way we think of it – and I’m talking about natural history museums here – did not exist, so they were, they were trying to kind of create the, the, the modern natural history museum, and what you would find is that these explorers were sent out with the brief that, hey, you know, we want, like, as many specimens as you can get from this region of the world, so go forth and get them.  So these guys would go out, they would hunt the specimens themselves –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  – then they would field dress them themselves.  You know, so, if you were a natural historian and you were a guy, you were a hunter, you were a lot of times a tracker.  You would, you would do a lot of field taxidermy.  You might even do the finished mount once you got home for the final taxidermy.  So you had to kind of be a jack-of-all-trades, and then you would write about it, and you might even be the one who kind of decorated the, the, the display and, and lectured about it when it was done, so you were doing all these different things, and you had the backing of sponsors –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  – you know, who, who – people were not sponsoring women to go do this stuff, you know, unless you were –

Sarah:  Back then, we funded ourselves.

Deanna:  – unless you were Nellie Bly, and, and you had a newspaper behind you, by and large, women were, were private travelers doing these things for themselves.  Whether or not they were able to make money off of it was a, a secondary concern.  A lot of the times they, they didn’t.  A lot of times they just would have things printed up to share with friends and family, and then they kind of ended up in circulation.  But, yeah, it, it was, it was very different, just because of the fact that for women travel was viewed more as a hobby, whereas for men it was part of, you know, hey, go out and do this awesome thing and then come back and tell us about it.  And we’ll pay you.  And so that, you know, they, they got the opportunity to do that, and of course they jumped on it, ‘cause, you know, why not?

Sarah:  Right!  I mean, why wouldn’t you?  So, one question that I always ask people when I’m doing a podcast interview is, is what are you reading that you recommend?

Deanna:  Ooh!  I just, two books came out in the last couple weeks that I’m super happy about.  Ashley Weaver’s newest Amory Ames mystery came out, Death Wears a Mask, and Sherry Thomas’s, the, the beginning of her Lady Sherlock adventures, A Study in Scarlet –

Sarah:  Oh, my God, I love that book.

Deanna:  – A Study in Scarlet Women.  Yeah, I, actually, I, I got to read it six months ago, ‘cause I got, we have the same publisher.

[Laughter]

Deanna:  So, perks, yes!  But I, I cannot say enough good stuff about this.  I think it is amazingly well done, super excited, and I’ve saved the latest Alan Bradley, Flavia de Luce.  My book is due on Monday, and so when I turn it in I, I will sit down and get to read the, the latest Flavia de Luce.  I’m super excited about that.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  So do you read a mix of mystery and romance or more mystery?

Deanna:  Oh, much more, much more mystery.  I, I actually end up reading not a whole lot of romance, because of the fact that I have a crapton of research that I have to keep up with?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Deanna:  I have about a 160 books in my TBR stack right now, and that’s not –

Sarah:  Nice!

Deanna:  – that’s not counting my Kindle.

Sarah:  As you do.

Deanna:  Yeah, and, and I read a lot of mystery just because of the fact that mystery structure is very specific –

Sarah:  Yes.

Deanna:  – and if you, the more you read of it, the more you internalize it, and the easier it is, then, to write it, so I, I can only read romance when, when I kind of am unplugged from all of that and I’m taking a break, and I’m like, okay, I want pure pleasure.  And, and I, I just want to immerse myself in something that’s going to just bring me joy.  And that’s, so that’s, that’s what I do in that case.  I, I’m trying to think what was, I read a Naked series – oh, God, what is her name?  I just blanked on her name.  And it was so much fun.  It was different ranks of nobility –

Sarah:  Ooh!

Deanna:  – and they were all naked.  Each one was naked.

Sarah:  Oh, my goodness, I can actually pic-, like The Naked Duke?

Deanna:  Yes!  Yes, yes, yes!  These dudes were all missing clothes.  Yeah.

Sarah:  Sally MacKenzie.

Deanna:  Yes!

Sarah:  The Naked Earl, The Naked Gentleman, The Naked Marquis –

Deanna:  Yes, yes, yes!

Sarah:  – The Naked Baron, The Naked Duke, The Naked Viscount, The Naked King.  Yeah, that’s Sally MacKenzie.

Deanna:  Yeah!  Yes!  I just, I binge-read all of those, and, and so those are the last, the last romances that I read, so I, I tend to do that.  I will, I will find one kind of series or set of books by somebody, and then I’ll tend to binge read them and then, and then go back to mysteries and research for a while –

Sarah:  Awesome!

Deanna:  – and do that.  Yeah.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  So, but I’m, I’m, on the whole, always stumped for as much reading time as I would like.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Yeah.  I know that feeling.

Deanna:  That’s the hardship is because, you know, if I’m, if I’m reading Agatha Christie, technically it’s work.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Well, of course.  It’s, it’s –

Deanna:  But I have to –

Sarah:  – study of structure.

Deanna:  I, I feel like on some level I always have to justify if I’m, if I’m reading, you know, a French style book or something, and then I, I always feel like somewhere in my head I’ve got to justify it, which is ridiculous.  Getting to geek out about what I love is, is – because, you know, we spend so much time immersed in this stuff –

Sarah:  Yep.

Deanna:  – and so much time invested in it that getting to share it and saying, God, every, you know, for every badass woman that you love in fiction, there is an actual historical precedent for that.  You know, go –

Sarah:  Or ten of them.

Deanna:  Yes!  Exactly!  And that I, I, that I’m kind of evangelical about, is because I, I, I, it’s important to me that their stories are not forgotten and that we, we understand that they, they are our foremothers.

Sarah:  Yes, that they, the, the kickass heroine is rooted in many, many women in history whose, who don’t get talked about most of the time.

Deanna:  Exactly!  Exactly.  They’ve been erased, and it’s, it’s important to know who they were and what they were doing.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s podcast.  I want to thank Deanna for hanging out and talking with me.  I had so much fun doing this interview, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.  I do have a few pieces of information and correction.  First:  Deanna says that when she was talking about the real-life Dutch explorer Alex-, Alexine or Alexandrine, her last name is Tinné, but I will have links to her Wikipedia page, as well as the other explorers we mentioned so that if you are curious you can go learn more.  I will also have links to Deanna’s website, Twitter, Facebook, and of course links to her newest book which comes out in January, A Perilous Undertaking, the sequel to A Curious Beginning, which introduces Veronica Speedwell.

The podcast this month is sponsored by Elizabeth Hoyt, the New York Times bestselling author of the Maiden Lane series.  Duke of Pleasure, Hoyt’s latest Maiden Lane adventure, features Alf, the new Ghost of St. Giles and a female swashbuckling vigilante, and Hugh Fitzroy, Duke of Kyle, a stern ex-soldier tasked with bringing down an evil group of aristocrats with Alf’s help.  This is a romance that has it all:  sword fighting, sexytimes, pants feelings, danger, passion, intrigue, and a heroine that totally kicks ass.  If you’re new to the series, you can trust Smart Bitches reviewer Elyse – and you totally can trust her in most things – who says, “You don’t have to read the Maiden Lane books in order, but they’re so much fun that you might as well.  Your credit card might hate me, but you won’t.”  You can start binge reading today.

If you want to find out more about this book, any of the books we mentioned, you can head on over to the podcast entry at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast or to our iTunes page at iTunes.com/DBSA.

The music that you’re listening to, also featured in both of those places, is provided by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is “Ascent of Conival” by the Peatbog Faeries from their album Dust.  You can find that on their website at Amazon, at iTunes, or wherever you buy your funky music.

And if you are thinking, I’ve got questions, I have a suggestion, I want to ask a question or make a suggestion or do both at the same time, awesome!  You can email us at [email protected], or you can call and leave a voicemail at 1-201-371-3272.  I love hearing from you guys ‘cause y’all are really smart and you know all the things.

One last thing:  We have a Patreon.  If you’ve had a look, thank you!  Patreon.com/SmartBitches.  It helps enormously that people like you are pledging a dollar or three dollars a month or five dollars a month to keep the show going and to help me commission transcripts and get other cool things done with the podcast.  I super appreciate that you listen, that you come back each week, that you hang out and talk about romance novels with me, and most of all I appreciate that you’re listening right now, so thank you very, very much!

And on behalf of Deanna Raybourn and myself and everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[funky music]