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In Book Takes, authors share three things that readers will gain from their books, as well as an insight into what they learnt during the researching and writing. This week, Wendy Parkins writes about her book The Defiance of Frances Dickinson.
The Defiance of Frances Dickinson is based on the true story of a young English heiress who discovers that her wealth and privilege cannot protect her from the consequences of an impulsive marriage. It also sheds light on the lives of other women around Frances, and the fine line they all tread between defiance and disgrace.
Despite being a former professor of Victorian literature, Parkins says she was often surprised by what came to light during her research for this novel, some of which she outlines below: “I hope that readers might find this story of a 19th-century scandal, and its consequences, as intriguing as I do.”
The complicated story of divorce
Before new legislation in 1857, divorce in England was a difficult, expensive and complicated process. Neither the petitioning couple nor their witnesses appeared in the courtroom – all evidence was submitted in written statements, and these documents are still held in Lambeth Palace Library in London. I was therefore able to read the archive relating to Frances Dickinson’s case, which not only provided detailed accounts of daily life in her troubled marriage but presented me with a very diverse range of characters, each with their own story to tell. Especially valuable was the powerful evidence provided by a number of servants - at times, extracts from some of their depositions appear verbatim in the novel.
Filling in the gaps
How do you re-tell a true story about marital abuse, sexual violence and trauma, when none of those terms were understood the way they are now at the time the original events took place? This is one of the questions that I hope readers of The Defiance of Frances Dickinson might reflect on.
I don’t simply mean, for example, that rape in marriage was not legally recognised as an offence so a wife could not use this as a basis for divorce, although this was the case. I mean something like how might a woman at that time have made sense of her own experience of abuse and trauma, if she didn’t know what to call it, and if it wasn’t acknowledged as a reality, either by legal precedent or medical knowledge?
I wanted to show how extraordinary it was that a woman like Frances might come to protest against the damage inflicted on her, then also show the challenges she faced in trying to translate her experience into terms her friends and family could understand and that the law could remedy.
Nineteenth-century Scotland and England were very different places
I was often surprised to find that my assumptions about the 19th century were true for England but not necessarily Scotland. Weddings and christenings, for instance, did not have to take place in a church in Scotland but could be conducted at home. Literacy rates among the lower classes were considerably higher in Scotland than in England during this time (meaning more servants could read and write, providing valuable evidence). Divorce law, too, differed considerably between the two countries. So it was important to convey how Frances felt she was living in a foreign country when she moved to Scotland after her wedding in 1838, never having been outside England before she met her husband.
What I learned: Sometimes research is about seeing, not just reading
I was fortunate to have ample research to consult in re-telling the story of Frances – legal documents, letters, diaries, wills, newspaper reports, as well as Frances’s own published writings. I was even more fortunate in being able to visit most of the locations in which the story takes place in England, Scotland and Italy. There’s something about standing outside a house where real people lived that gives you a different perspective, no matter how much you have read about those people in that house.
The two houses in Scotland where Frances lived for most of her marriage, for instance, turned out to be surprisingly close to main thoroughfares within reach of other houses and settlements (villages or towns) but, being confined to bed by ill-health or denied permission to go out alone, Frances frequently complained of her isolation and invisibility there. By contrast, driving to a grand villa deep in the Tuscan countryside brought to life for me the dramatic change in fortune that Frances experiences towards the end of the novel, like a breath of fresh air (quite literally).
The Defiance of Frances Dickinson, by Wendy Parkins (Affirm, $38), is out now.
