In 1914 Emeline Pankhurst, the militant leader of the suffragettes, wrote, “[Men] have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.” Fourteen years later women were finally given universal franchise.
There is a thread of Pankhurst running through Rye-based novelist Jane Steen, and through her, it is in the veins of the heroines of her books. Not militant perhaps, but rebellious, determined to make their mark as independent, the equals of men in every respect.
Lady Helena Scott-de Quincy, the eponymous heroine of the Scott-de Quincy trilogy (of which two are published and one is in the works), embodies the emergent late Victorian spirit of push-back against the patriarchy. In book 1, Lady Helena Investigates (now you get the title of this article), she says, “A life lived with purpose. Mama used to say I was her last hope for drumming the notion of a purpose in life into her girls.”
You may think that quote less than indicative of the suffragist spirit but read the book(s) and you will understand the context, and, if you know Jane, the subtle but powerful message of the struggle for equality women faced – and, sadly, still do. Later in this book, Lady Helena forces her way past an overprotective chap to see something quite unpalatable. “Oh no. …. I’m going to witness this death and make sure nobody can make any more wild assertions against you. They won’t question my word.”
“But it’s unsightly. It’s unfit for a lady’s eyes.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
Is Lady Helena Jane Steen? To an extent, yes.
Social disparity and self-determination are patterns in Jane’s life too. She is, in her own words, “a child of the 60s and 70”. Born to a mother who was “proudly working class” but married what used to be called “up”. Middle class, with an almost Edwardian view of the roles of husband and wife (one goes to work, the other stays at home), Jane’s mother was clearly conscious of the changing attitude of women and told Jane “don’t marry until you’re thirty.”
Jane’s love for Victorian literature came after reading Dickens – and in particular the constrained, boxed-in lives of women. A theme repeated in Hardy and elsewhere. But her switch from reading to writing for a living did not start in earnest until much later, with the publication of the first in the series of House of Closed Doors in 2016.
But her life till then was anything but conventional.
She didn’t go to university, in spite of clearly being bright enough to do so. Instead she got a place at the Institute for bi-lingual secretaries (who knew there was one?), then worked in London, and at 20 moved temporarily to Brussels where she deployed her language skills. Temporarily turned out to be 16 years because she met her husband Bob after four years and stayed on.
At 36, Bob got a job (sorry) in Chicago, so off they went, and Jane had to learn a third language – American. Raising children meant that she had to juggle work as a fund-raising director and in the property business with home and childcare. But this didn’t stop her from testing her own limits and being at home a lot unleashed creativity in the form of writing a novel in 2009 which remains locked in a drawer somewhere. But the process itself told her she could write, and as importantly, wanted to write. She joined a writer’s group, got the idea for her first series (The House of Closed Doors), pitched it to agents at a convention, got the usual rejections or offers that made no financial sense, and naturally (for her) decided that it would be far more rewarding if she self-published.
So she did.
The family moved to Rye via a circuitous route some ten years ago, and Jane settled in to her new career as an entrepreneur-cum-author, with volume two of The House of Closed Doors coming out in 2016. She was now successfully writing, publishing, and selling her seven (to date) novels, reaching a worldwide audience, with a very large readership back in the USA.
Self-publishing is not for the faint hearted. You don’t simply write a book, hire a designer, spend a fortune on printing, then cart them round bookshops or get an account on Amazon. It’s a fully-fledged business with all the complexities and risks that that entails. And writing about Victorian society and the early emergence of independent-minded women in a rigid and often bigoted system reflects in many ways the determination and breadth of skills needed to run a publishing business.
There is a moral to this tale. Society still faces inequity, unconscious (and sometimes conscious) bias, even in Rye and the surrounding villages. If Lady Helena investigated she would surely have something to say about it.
Image Credits: Christopher Broadbent .