Lucie’s story was inspired by a Victorian verse and a letter I had come across during my research for Bringing Down the Duke, the first book in this series.
Below, some of the stanzas of the verse:
Woman’s Rights
The right to be a comforter
Where other comforts fail
The right to cheer the drooping heart
When troubles most assail.
The right to train the infant mind,
To think of Heaven and God;
The right to guide the tiny feet
The path our Saviour trod
The right to be a bright sunbeam,
In high or lowly home
The right to smile with loving gleam,
And point to joys to come
Such are the noblest woman’s rights,
The rights which God hath given,
The right to comfort man on earth,
And smooth his path to heaven.
By M.C.M.R.
The following excerpts are from a letter by Mrs. Anne Brown Adams, daughter of U.S. American abolitionist John Brown. It was addressed to Canadian abolitionist Mr. Alexander Ross, sometime between 1870 and 1880. For A Rogue of One’s Own, I took the liberty to repackage it into two letters that had been sent to Lucie by British women:
“. . . The struggle for a married woman’s rights will be a longer and a harder fought battle than any other that the world has [inserted: ever] known. Men have been taught that they are absolute monarchs in their families, (even in a republican country,) ever since the world began, and that to kill a wife by inches, is not murder, women are taught from infancy that to betray [inserted: by look or word] or even to mention to an intimate friend the secrets of their married life, is worse than disgraceful, There in lies the power of the man, He knows that no matter what he does, the woman will keep silent as the grave [2]
I could tell you things that have come under my observation, that would make the blood boil in your veins (. . .)
Women are taught that their only hope of heaven, is to ‘endure to the end,’ (. . .) I know a man who tells his wife ‘I own you, I have got a deed (marriage license and certificate) to you and got it recorded, I have a right to do what I please to you,’. . . .”
I found the contrast between the poem and a real woman’s private thoughts rather startling. Clearly, the Victorian cult of domesticity had a dark underbelly—behind closed doors, it was the luck of the draw for the Angels in the House: wives had very little legal recourse if their husbands mistreated them, and they could not just discuss matters with their friends, either.
I wondered how a woman like Lucie who had her eyes wide open would fall in love under such circumstances. What would make her say “I do” to effectively being owned?
I took a closer look at real-life Victorian couples, such as Millicent Fawcett, who led the British suffrage movement, and Harriet Taylor Mill, who influenced John Stuart Mill’s famous essay “The Subjection of Women.” Both women were proponents of women’s suffrage before they got married, neither had acute financial pressures, and both decided to give their few rights away anyway. I made the wild guess that they had fallen in love and wanted to be with their husbands, come what may. It is well documented, however, that their husbands were at the forefront in the fight for women’s rights in Parliament.
Lucie would have married Tristan in 1882, when the Married Women’s Property Act was amended, though women in Britain were not allowed to vote until 1918. The Property Act still exists in British legislation; it was last amended in 2016 to allow a widow in her own right to enforce her late husband’s life assurance policy.
All policies mentioned in this novel existed at the time. Unfortunately, so did the collection of debris that Lady F. W. Harberton, head of the Rational Dress Society, detailed in her battle against the train in female dress.
Tristan’s character was inspired by the artists who were part of the British Decadent Movement, which was led by Irish writer Oscar Wilde.
I took artistic license with some timings: the poem “When You Are Old” by Yeats was first published in 1889. The excerpt from Millicent Fawcett’s lecture at the LSE dates to the 1870s. Ruth Symthers’s advice for new brides was not published until 1894 and is widely considered a hoax in any case.