About the Book

Closed Doors and Open Windows

I wish I could say that the premise for The Gown came upon me in true “eureka!” fashion, but the reality is a little more prosaic. It was the summer of 2016, I was having lunch with my editor and literary agent, and we were brainstorming ideas for my next book. After agreeing that I ought to write something set in Britain after World War II, we’d begun to flounder. I’d floated a few suggestions, none of them terribly compelling, and was starting to feel a bit desperate. So I posed the question: What felt important to the people who lived through that time? What was significant and memorable then? And that’s when I remembered one event, late in 1947, that had transfixed the entire world: the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten.

Nothing could have stood in greater contrast to those draining, dispiriting, and miserable postwar years than the glittering and bejeweled spectacle of a royal wedding. The great celebrations of VE Day and VJ Day were over and the hard work of rebuilding the world had begun, but Britain’s economy remained in a calamitous state after years of ruinously expensive warfare. Not only did austerity measures such as rationing remain in place, but in a number of respects they also became even more stringent. For many people, life seemed to be getting worse, not better.

That is the world I set out to explore when I began work on The Gown. What would it have been like to live through those lean, hard years? And what did the royal wedding mean to the people of the time—was it indeed “a flash of color on the hard road [they had] to travel,” as Winston Churchill famously said? Or was it a bitter and unwelcome reminder of how little they had and how much they had lost?

From the start, I didn’t want to tell my story from the point of view of Princess Elizabeth or anyone in her inner circle. Not because I feel the princess—Queen Elizabeth II as we now know her—is in any way uninteresting, but rather because I believe her true character is a mystery to anyone beyond her close family and friends. The queen has never given an interview and never will, her thoughts and opinions on most subjects are largely opaque, and the woman we think we know is, I believe, largely a projection of our individual feelings and beliefs. Here I want to be clear: I am fascinated by the queen and her family, but no amount of research will ever allow me to know them; and if I cannot truly know and understand them, I feel it is better to remain at a distance.

But back to my lunch and the brainstorming session, because I still needed a hook for my story—even more so once I’d discounted the possibility of telling it from the point of view of the bride or anyone in her inner circle. And that’s when two words popped into my head: the gown.

A few seconds later, we were admiring pictures of the royal wedding on my phone, and I had the central question on which my story would turn: who made Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown? I knew it had been designed by Norman Hartnell; what I wanted to know, rather, was who constructed it. Who were the women who created the dazzling embroidery that embellished the gown, and what were their stories?

As a writer and a historian, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of sacrificing historical authenticity for dramatic tension, and that’s why my first four books have as their protagonists entirely fictional characters. While the same is true of The Gown—Ann, Miriam, and Heather are entirely products of my imagination—its cast also includes a number of real-life figures, among them people who were known to have worked at Hartnell, but whose personal stories were never recorded and are now all but impossible to accurately recount.

This uncomfortable truth dawned on me not long after I began work on The Gown: I would have to fictionalize the stories of real people, as well as insert fictional characters into a setting populated by known and recognizable figures. I would also have to take some liberties with minor aspects of recorded history, if only to make the story I was telling more comprehensible.

Germaine Davide, for instance, the formidable Frenchwoman employed by Hartnell as his chief fitter and known to everyone in the workrooms as Mam’selle, was mentioned by name in any number of sources, among them Hartnell’s memoirs, but she wrote no memoir herself and gave no interviews, and details of her personal life, at a remove of more than half a century, are now impossible to unearth. The same is true of Edith Duley, who was known to have been a senior figure in the embroidery workrooms: I came across her name in several newspaper articles, and I believe she is the woman described as the “head of embroidery” in a photograph that appeared in a Picture Post article in the autumn of 1947, but that is all. In his memoir Silver and Gold, Hartnell also mentions a woman named Flora Ballard, but she proved even more elusive, and so for the purposes of narrative clarity I elected to streamline the number of women in supervisory roles in the workroom. To that end, Miss Duley is not only a composite of several people, but also a fictional character in every respect apart from her name and the barest details of her physical appearance.

Even more daunting, for me, was the mystery of the embroiderers themselves. Dozens of articles were written about the creation of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding gown—nearly every British magazine and newspaper ran one or more in the latter half of 1947—but no one, it seems, thought to interview a single embroiderer.

If anyone from Hartnell were to read The Gown, they might reasonably protest that they don’t recognize any of my characters: not Mr. Hartnell, not Mam’selle or Miss Duley or Miss Holliday, and certainly not Ann or Miriam. In this I hope I may be forgiven, not only for conjuring their characters from the ether, but also in attaching real names to largely fictional creations. Only one person, within the walls of Hartnell, is true to life: Betty from the sewing workroom.

Betty Foster, née Pearce, was one of four seamstresses who worked on the wedding gown, and it was only by the purest stroke of good fortune that I met her at all. For months I had attempted, with diminishing success, to get in touch with anyone who had worked at Hartnell in the 1940s, and although many decades had passed I was hopeful that I might yet find someone who could tell me about life in the workrooms.

I had tried, and failed, to gain access to Sir Norman Hartnell’s personal papers and archive, which are held privately. I had contacted the curators at the Royal Collection, with the hopes that they would be able to put me in touch with one or more of the women who had once worked at Hartnell, but they were unable to help me.

With those doors firmly closed, I consoled myself with a trip to London to see the wedding gown itself, which was on display at Buckingham Palace as part of the Fashioning a Reign exhibition. I also wandered around Bruton Street and Bruton Place (though I was never brave enough to knock on the door and ask to go inside), and I searched online and in person at every library and museum with holdings related to Norman Hartnell and the royal wedding of 1947.

I was gathering ever more information, but it still felt incomplete, for I was never able to find more than the barest scraps of information about the women who sewed and embroidered the wedding gown. A few photographs, some maddeningly vague details in Hartnell’s published memoirs—that was all. With barely more than a year until the first draft of my book was due, I was still bumping up against closed doors.

I wasn’t willing to give up, however, so I asked myself: if I can’t speak to those who worked for Hartnell, or read their stories, or even unearth basic details such as the shape of an ordinary day in the workrooms, can I speak to someone who does similar work today? And that’s how I ended up at Hand & Lock, London’s oldest and most prestigious bespoke hand embroidery atelier, on another trip to England in early 2017. I wanted to know how it felt to sit in front of an embroidery frame for hours on end, to take those first stitches on an immaculate piece of silk, to feel my eyes blur and my neck ache after hours of concentration on that same piece of silk and the motifs I had been tasked with creating.

The day I spent at Hand & Lock happened to coincide with the visit of a documentary film crew, part of the team who were working on A Very Royal Wedding, and as I chatted with their producers I mentioned how difficult it had been to research my book, and how much I would have loved to speak to someone who had worked at Hartnell at the time. To my astonishment, they offered to put me in touch with Betty Foster.

The next day I went to meet Mrs. Foster, and I listened to her stories of life at Hartnell, and the memories she shared with me made all the difference to how I approached the story I was writing. She opened a window into the heart and soul of Hartnell, and I am deeply grateful for her insights. It was she who told me how Miss Holliday kindly allowed all the women in the sewing workrooms to add a stitch to the gown, and thereby say they had worked on the princess’s finery; and it was Mrs. Foster who described the royal ladies’ visit to the workrooms and the unpracticed curtsies she and her friends offered their guests. She told me about the workroom interiors, Mr. Hartnell’s kindness, and Mam’selle’s impenetrable accent, as well as dozens of other details that brought my story to life. With Mrs. Foster’s permission, I later added her to The Gown as a character, and so it is Betty herself who accompanies Miriam to the palace on the wedding day.

Here I need to make one last confession: on the wedding day itself, Mrs. Foster actually was outside, just by the gates of Buckingham Palace, having been given a special ticket to stand in a roped-off area with many of her friends from Hartnell. It was with her permission that I instead put her inside the palace on November 20, 1947, and let her look out along the Mall, with Miriam at her side, as the carriages with the royal party left for Westminster Abbey that morning. I feel she deserved no less.

As with my other novels, in The Gown I have attempted to describe the past—not the far-distant past, but a vanished and largely unfamiliar world all the same—with authenticity and accuracy. I accept that I have made mistakes, and that those errors are my fault and responsibility alone. Yet I hope, in the end, that you will read this story in the spirit in which it was written, which is one of respect, reverence, and above all profound gratitude for those whose sacrificed and lost so much during those terrible years of war.