Charlie and Natalie Jenner (Every Time We Say Goodbye) discuss the war years and 1950s Italian film industry and the Vatican’s authority over it, changing working practices after being accused of discrimination, and including still-living celebrities in your book.

General references:
I talked to Natalie about her previous book, Bloomsbury Girls, in episode 65
Day For Night
Quo Vadis
Umanità
Nine
Summertime
Three Coins In The Fountain
Roman Holiday
A similar quote of Kurt Vonnegut’s is “Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.”
I talked to Liz Fenwick about the map girls in episode 100
Natalie’s Instagram post on Ray Holland
The Prince Of Foxes
Natalie’s episode on chapters 7-9 of Pride And Prejudice for the Rosenbach Library

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Charles Dickens: Our Mutual Friend
Charles Dickens: A Tale Of Two Cities
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Last Days Of Pompeii
Henry James: The Portrait Of A Lady
Jane Austen: Pride And Prejudice
Jane Austen: Emma
Joe Klein: Primary Colors
Natalie Jenner: The Jane Austen Society
Natalie Jenner: Bloomsbury Girls
Natalie Jenner: Every Time We Say Goodbye
Natalie Jenner: Austen At Sea
Sophia Loren: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow My Life
Zadie Smith: The Fraud
Zoe Wheddon: Jane Austen’s Best Friend

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 11th April 2024; published 9th September 2024

Where to find Natalie online: Website || Twitter || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

00:01:52 The different inspirations for the book – old films, Natalie’s character Vivian from her previous book, Bloomsbury Girls, the WW2 refugees that lived at the Cinecittà movie studies and then used as extras (this turns into a longer discussion)
00:10:58 More about Cinecittà itself
00:13:08 The Vatican’s past authority over the Italian film industry
00:17:59 How Natalie researches her books, and her love of Rome
00:29:30 John Lassiter, urgh!
00:34:20 The importance of Tabitha’s story and how a reader’s criticism changed how Natalie wrote
00:38:25 La Scolaretta and the stafetta – the young women messengers and assassins in WW2 Italy
00:44:45 Natalie’s knowing, and the life of, Ray Holland, film-maker Jack Salvatori’s son
00:52:28 Writing as characters celebrities who are still with us, with a focus on Sophia Loren
00:59:16 All about Natalie’s forthcoming next book, Austen At Sea, which Charlie reckons will end up being her favourite of all Natalie’s books
01:08:59 Natalie tells us why she likely won’t write about Jane Austen herself

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 105. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. And if you find yourself enjoying today’s episode, do share it with your friends. I’m Charlie Place and today I am joined by Natalie Jenner to talk about her latest novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye. This book follows, primarily, Vivian, who you may have met in Natalie’s previous novel, Bloomsbury Girls, and we talked about that one in episode 65. So, in this latest book, Vivian Lowry’s latest work for the stage has not been well received by the critics, while it’s been really well received by the audience. However, her friend Peggy Guggenheim suggests she goes to Italy to work on a film script that she’d be perfect for. It’s a great idea in theory however the Italian film industry in this decade of the 1950s is heavily censored by the Vatican, so it’s going to be difficult. But there’s also another consideration for Italy regardless of this – Vivian lost her fiancé in the war and she’d like to know what happened. This book is full of people both fictional and, like Natalie’s prior work, real, and I’m going to have to ask her about her research later because her application of it is absolutely unique and fantastic. Hello Natalie.

Natalie: Oh, hi, Charlie, that was lovely. Thank you so much for shouting out the research because on this book it was pretty extensive and weirdly done and harrowing. So looking forward to talking to you about that and much more today. Thanks again for having me on the podcast.

Charlie: It’s lovely to have you back; I’ve been looking forward to this book’s release and having you back. So I want to ask, firstly, about the very initial inspiration for this book, because I believe you’ve got various levels of inspiration as such?

Natalie: Oh that’s a really nice way of putting it, I’ve never thought of it that way before. There are various levels. I think the absolute earliest moment I remember thinking about this book was watching, exactly three years ago, François Truffaut’s movie Day For Night. And in this movie that is set on a film set in France, there are these young women in jeans and ’70s t-shirts running around called ‘the script girls’. And I had just finished and delivered the manuscript that very week for Bloomsbury Girls, my second book, and I remember watching the movie with my family because it was my birthday request and they have to watch whatever I want [both chuckle], and I said to them, ‘I think I want to write a book kind of about movies, and I’m going to call it Script Girls’, and they groaned. They were like, ‘noooo, you cannot call another book that!’ [Both laugh.] And the irony is that they know that I never picked that title. I had a different title, The Last Days of Bloomsbury Books. So my publishers picked Bloomsbury Girls. So that was the double irony of the moment! So anyways, I actually started to research Truffaut, and film in general. I had studied movie making – Cinema Studies is what we call it in Canada – at university in the 1980s, at a time when it was a very burgeoning, up and coming programme at the college level. And in doing this research into Truffaut, I somehow came upon a mention of Cinecittà in Italy completely randomly, that mentions that the studios had been shut down during the Second World War, after the occupation began by the Germans – especially the Germans – literally took over the studios and were living there, like on the sets. It was very bizarre. But then they were transformed, once Rome was liberated, into refugee camps – an international refugee camp and an Italian refugee camp. And what was most intriguing to me was when I learned that the international camp continued to be in place at Cinecittà all the way until, they think, as late as 1950. And, in fact, they were filming a Hollywood movie, the crowd footage for Quo Vadis, in 1949. And there’s some academic speculation in the journals that I found that refugees might have been used as extras in the crowd. And as a historical fiction writer, I was just so taken aback by the notion of these people who had absolutely nothing compared to anybody else in the world – no home, no family, just the clothes on their backs – that they might actually be in a movie. Not in costume, necessarily, but perhaps. And I thought the dichotomy of that really opened up in my mind this interest in that time of life in Italy, both in the ’40s, but then also after the war. And anyone who knows Italian World War Two history will know it was probably one of the most complex, puzzling, harrowing situations, because the government changed hands many times. And there’s the whole history with Mussolini as well. So I became very fascinated, both on a historical, political, social level, as well as the notion of film-making as a plot. And then finally, I think the other level of inspiration was I remember, very clearly, sitting by my swimming pool, which in Canada means late May [laughs] at the earliest, and thinking about why the character of Vivian in Bloomsbury Girls had been angry all the time. And I remembered that I had mentioned in Bloomsbury Girls the fall of Tobruk in Libya, as where her fiancé was last seen during the Second World War. And right away, that author part of the brain, kicks in and says, ‘we never know what happened to him. He could have ended up in Italy if he’s in North Africa…’ So I did some quick research and discovered that many of the soldiers that were captured at Tobruk, actually were taken on ships to Italy by the Italians and the German armies, by the axis powers, and then kept in camps for a long time until the end of the war. So I called my agent right away. It always begins and ends, Charlie, with the call of the agent ! [Charlie chuckles.] The agent’s either gonna go, ‘I don’t know if I see you writing about that next!’ or they’re gonna jump all over it. It’s always yes or no. Cause it’s a very emotive, I think, enthusiasm that they need to feel. And I said to him, ‘I think I wanna write about Vivian and what happened to her fiancé. And I think I wanna write about the Second World War in Italy, but I mostly wanna write about the world of Rome in the 1950s, the beginning of the dolce vita, and people moving on despite the harrowing losses of the war. And I think I want to figure out why Vivian was angry all the time in Bloomsbury Girls’. And he said, ‘go for it’. And that’s how it happened.

Charlie: Okay, well, I mean, you said about the refugees first, and, I mean, I didn’t realise it was such a big part of the book for you in that way, but certainly when I read it, I thought, ‘that’s got to be real’ [Natalie: yeah!]. It’s just so… obviously, your book’s about the film industry, but at the same time, I was thinking, ‘gosh, this is just almost so out of the blue, but it has to be real’ [Natalie: yeah]. I mean, did you find anything else about that that you can tell us?

Natalie: Well, what was really fascinating was how movie making resumed on site while the camp was still in place. And one of the things that I discovered in my research that was even more fascinating than that, was that the refugees had been captured on film because of a documentary. So aside from the question of whether they were extras in the big Hollywood movie that was filmed, there was also a movie that was found only, I think, about 20 years ago did it really come to light, called Umanita. And it was by a British Italian, Jack Salvatori. And he had been in France making movies when the Nazis occupied France. He escaped; he ended up in Italy; he ended up in Rome; he was hidden under the Coliseum by the priests; he escaped from Rome; he ended up joining the resistance in the hills of Italy. And after the war, he made movies and went and did showings to villages in Italy that had been so destroyed in terms of their sanitary sewage systems and the safety of their environment. And he would show films on hygiene through the United Nations. But he also made a movie. And he actually can be found at the beginning of the movie – you can see them on screen – and nobody really knew about this movie for a long time, like I said. It was shown, though, at some major film festivals about, I’m going to say, 15 or so years ago. So what was fascinating was the whole middle part of the movie is filmed in the refugee camp. Like, literally, you can see the way they live. And, Charlie, this is a part of history that had been obscured and not really discussed. So how often – I can’t even think, honestly, of an example of where something that was so obscure and lost to history ended up having such a clear documentary, photographic and filmic record of it. And that was mind blowing to me. So the final thing, we might get into this more later, was that I reached out to the professor who had written about this movie on the Internet, Professor Roberto, and she put me in touch with the son of Jack Salvatori. And we started a wonderful correspondence, which I can go into more detail later, but that just cemented for me the fact that I wanted to find a way to write about – even though it’s not a major part of the book – I wanted a way to write about the refugee experience. And then, Charlie, to go back to your point about how realising this must be true – I put a line at the end of my first book, The Jane Austen Society, and it was about the adoption by one of the main characters in that book. Of two Jewish refugees who are at a hostel in England. And I remember saying, ‘well, they could very easily have been refugees in that camp. And this will allow me to reconnect with the mother that adopts them’, the adoptive mother character, because she’s one of my favourites from The Jane Austen Society, my first book. And so in a contrived yet highly inspired and fun way, I found a way to make the refugee storyline an organic part of the book.

Charlie: It comes full circle, but I don’t know – I don’t think that’s contrived. I think that’s rather lovely.

Natalie: I hope so. That’s how I felt it was. When you talk about the strategy behind your writing and you come at your writing so intuitively, as I do, with no plot, really, I just start to write and I hope it all works out in the end! It feels odd to put language around it.

Charlie: Yeah. I do want to ask about Ray Holland later. First I will ask, then, we’ve got the 1950s, the Italian film industry, and I’m probably going to say it wrongly, I’m going to say it wrongly, [pronounces correctly] chi-nee chee-tah? [Natalie: yeah] the studio. I suppose I want to ask more about this, like, what was important in including this in the way that you did and the way it has an effect on so many different stories in the book?

Natalie: In terms of the choice to talk about Cinecittà?

Charlie: Yes.

Natalie: Yes. I really immersed myself in movies about Rome. And so many were being filmed at that studio in the 1950s. Italy was the second largest producer of movies in the world at that time, certainly, I think the second largest consumer of movies, in both cases, next to America. And there is a movie based on a Broadway play called Nine that stars Daniel Day Lewis, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench. And it’s a movie that I watched a few times because it was filmed at Cinecittà, set in the 1950s, although filmed about 14 years ago. And I really was captured by the central-ness of this studio for Rome at that time. In the ’50s it was the, I think, first or second largest employer of Romans, in the 1950s. So I knew that it served a huge importance for Hollywood – filmmakers that were escaping the blacklist in America were often coming to Europe to film, and they were choosing Cinecittà for some of these reasons. But I knew that served a really important role in the Roman mindset of moving forward and creating an art, and choices about how much of the past to focus on and how much to move forward. So it was symbolic on many levels, aside from the nuts and bolts of the history that we had just earlier talked about.

Charlie: Well, I’ve got to get onto something that… I was brought up a Catholic, so I find learning about Catholicism interesting. I’m not a Catholic any more, I suppose I just like exploring it and finding out more that I didn’t know [Natalie: yeah]. So I do want to ask you about this whole church censorship [Natalie: yeah], the Vatican censorship, I suppose. Can you tell us more about that?

Natalie: Yeah. I also was raised Catholic, and my mother is a very devout Catholic, so her love of this book is probably the most gratifying to me, because I knew I was taking on something that is difficult to talk about, and that is the role of the church – in Italian society in particular, but around the world, has always been outsized in a way or oversized in relation to maybe where it should be, historically speaking. And I remember reading and learning that there had been real involvement with the Vatican in talking and writing about movies and what they would hope to see from film. But there was a book I read about censorship in Italy in the ’50s, where they did say, and I have a line about this in my book, that in the local village, they would show a movie, and the priest would pull the children out. It might not get shown if the priest didn’t approve. Like, this is on a very happenstance level. But institutionally, the Vatican did come out with the exhortation that I quote from in the book. And it happened to come out in June of 1955, which was around the time that my book was set. So, Charlie, I had to do a lot of dancing with the dates sometimes and move stuff around in order to have that paper… everything about that paper that I talk about in my book has to be accurate, factually, the date of its release, the title of it, any quotes from it, et cetera. And it was a very extensive, fascinating document from the pope at that time about, ‘what we hope for from film, film’s role, and exhorting film, as an exhortational document, to be more positive and to be more uplifting. And I thought it was really fascinating, and I have a line in the book about that, about how beyond censorship, beyond priests deciding, ‘we don’t want to show this in our local village’, beyond interference. For example, the Vatican had a representative on the censor committee for the country, which meant that if a screenplay didn’t cut muster with the committee – and the Vatican had a representative on that committee – if they didn’t think that it was a screenplay that should be produced, the committee was able to interfere with the release of funds and other things that were available. So there was an active financial activity going on, as well as censorship. But the final element about this that I found really fascinating was the idea that movies could maybe take the place of the church’s historic role in moving man and woman and people, that it was aware its power was starting to be affected by the modern mindset, the post-war mindset. The people taking a stand requires great individuality – it’s very hard to go back from that. And I think that that was a factor in the Church’s thinking about maybe movies can help us spread our message – which is a very positive message – but I know as a writer and I know film-makers are the same, you make what moves you. And it doesn’t have to be just because it’s going to be a thoroughly positive, inspirational message that might not reflect what life can really be like for people, therefore, it’s less relatable. And that’s not the role of art. The role of art is connection and to help you relate in order to be moved in a way that will be lasting and special [Charlie agrees.]. So that’s, for me, one of the problems with censorship, is it interferes with that relational context. I mean, when you think about the Church and you think about the fact, in my research, I think about 100,000 illegitimate children of priests were in Italy at that time, but there was no divorce laws. Divorce in Italy did not become possible for another 10 – 15 years from the plot of my book. So there was just a lot of things going on that also call into question anyone’s ability to say, ‘you’re not going to get to hear about this way of living life’. And that’s why I wanted to explore that.

Charlie: Yeah, I think maybe that was the theme, I suppose, that I took away from your book the most, because I was also just really impressed with the way that you wrote it. I think you got the balance absolutely wonderfully with showing, as you said, you know, the more positive side of the things that they wanted to show, but also the not-great stuff. I mean, certainly your work on telling us about Anita and John’s relationship and the divorce, that can’t happen there and stuff. [Natalie: yeah.] All right, then I would like to ask you about how you research, because that is, for me… I’ve got to read The Jane Austen Society still, but I have read Bloomsbury Girls now, I’ve read your Every Time We Say Goodbye, and there is just a particular atmosphere, ambience, I don’t know, a particular sort of research, and I find it fascinating. You obviously do a lot of research, you’re obviously very passionate, and I know that you must absorb just so much. And I would love to know how you research your books.

Natalie: Well, Charlie, you might find it interesting to know that I don’t like doing research.

Charlie: Wow!

Natalie: Yes! Because I love writing, and I didn’t study History at university, I studied English Literature and Film. I love consuming art. I love beauty. And I went to law school after my degree in English literature, and I think studying Law gives you a self-discipline and an intellectual rigour that makes you appreciate the need, the imperative, to look at things from every possible angle. Therefore, you cannot write a book about people at a different time than yours without doing that work. So I come at it very seriously, but I also do it very haphazard. So with The Jane Austen Society, I did all the research without knowing I was writing a book; I was just reading a lot about Jane Austen at a difficult time in life. And when I sat down to write eight months later, I never looked at a single one of the books I had read, which made copy editing [laughs] a year and a half later, a very interesting experience. They’re like, ‘where did you get this fact?’ And I’m like [puts on a silly voice], ‘I don’t know’ [Charlie laughs]. So I had to reread all the research and put sticky notes everywhere. With Bloomsbury Girls I did just enough research and still got enough wrong that in the pitch to the editor, he had to point out – when I mentioned that Nelson and his wife, Ellen Doubleday, would be characters in the book set in 1950 – he’s the grandson of Ellen Doubleday and Nelson Doubleday happens to be the former chair of our company, and I know for a fact Nelson was dead at that time [both laugh]. My agent had to say to him, ‘this is just the way she works [laughs]. Just don’t worry. She’s gonna…’ So with this book, with my third book, Every Time We Say Goodbye, I started out immersing myself in all my favourite movies from the ’50s that were filmed in Italy, so that I would get a very strong, immediate ambiance of what Venice looked like during summertime with Katharine Hepburn, what Rome looked like when they were filming Three Coins In The Fountain there in 1954, 1955. Roman Holiday was a couple years earlier, and it’s in black and white but I actually was able to find colour footage, colour stills. So first immersed myself in the world of movies. I also retook a very, very long multiple-hour course, on audiobook, of Italian film in the 20th century, because I knew I needed to really understand the industry and how important it was to the country. And as I’m doing this, I’m reading books about the politics to an extent, but I’m very focused on exactly what you just said, Charlie, the ambiance, what people were wearing, how they spoke, how they gestured, what they cared about, what they were talking about. And I’m absorbing that, and then I will not usually, except for the first book – The Jane Austen Society – I will not usually start writing at all until I have a sense of time period, the setting, and then I can picture my characters, then they can come to life, they come to me. And then I usually need to know the stakes. What’s the one thing that my characters will collectively grow towards as much as possible? Sometimes I get it wrong. Sometimes what I think they’re all trying to get is not what happens, but I have to at least feel I have a target. And then that’s when I start to write. And then at that point, I just keep doing research on an as-needs basis. And some other historical fiction writers will attest to this. The trouble with historical fiction… I remember Zadie Smith was saying this about her new book about Charles Dickens and the trial, The Fraud, that she was used to just writing. And then with this book, she had like this stack of notebooks, etcetera. And that’s what happens. So as you’re writing you’re researching at the same time. And I had mornings where I sat up with all full intention, ready to start writing the chapter. And I would write two paragraphs and go, ‘oh, I need to know more about this before I can write any more’. And then I would start doing research. And that research would sometimes take up the next week. It would sometimes take up maybe just the next hour. And to go back to your point about how I give the information to the reader in this way that is little different, pertaining to my style. I always have a commitment – and I think this is the rigour, again, of law school – of never giving the reader anything, absolutely more, than they need to know. And whether that comes across to the reader or not, every fact that I put in the book is very intentional. It might be harking to something that hasn’t yet happened, so the reader doesn’t realise at the time. But if I talk about Lucino Visconti being imprisoned during the war and about to be executed and then being saved and he’s a film director, that is because that plot element will actually happen later in my book. That is why I’m talking about Visconti instead of somebody else in film, in the ’40s, in Italy. So everything I’m putting in there, I try to make sure is reflective or connected in some way to what I’m writing about. So that at the end, the experience for the reader does feel fully connected and engaging. And I try not to have too much information, I want to have no information that’s unnecessary, because I don’t want to drag down the experience of reading. I do try very hard – whether I achieve it or not is another question – but I do try very hard to have the reader feel like they want to keep reading and keep turning the page. And so I think with history, you have to be very careful, because that’s not how I feel when I read a book of history. I want to learn, but it’s not that same compulsion. And literature’s goal is to, I think, engage the reader’s own imagination. And there’s a great line from, I think it’s Kurt Vonnegut, and not everyone agrees with this, but I do. He said, ‘if you do your job right in writing, by the end, the reader should be able to write the ending themselves. That doesn’t mean they can see it coming. It means the opposite. It means you’ve given them just enough information that they could try and pull it off, but not in such a way that they can go, “oh, yeah, I saw that coming”. It’s a different kind of knowing how to write the ending,’ and I adhere to that very religiously! [Laughs.]

Charlie: Yeah, I can see that, thinking of Every Time We Say Goodbye and the ending there. Yes. So you are definitely, then, a plotter rather than a pantser?

Natalie: No! I’m a pantser rather than a plotter. [Charlie: No? Okay!] Yeah. When I start the book, I did not know I was going to have a dual timeline. I did not know I was going to write about the schoolgirl assassin – that actually popped up one day. I didn’t know about the movie that they were going to discover. I knew that Tabitha was going to show up in Italy trying to find someone that she loved, that character. I knew why Vivian was angry. I did not know what had happened to her fiancé yet. I did not know how anything connected. So I actually was writing the book just knowing that Vivian was angry, and I knew that that was going to come out at some point in the story. I did not know who she was going to fall in love with. I did not know any of the major secrets, except one – I knew that the man that she first has a relationship with was not a reliable love interest. So.

Charlie: Okay, well, you could have fooled me [Natalie laughs], I thought you were going to say ‘yes, I plot religiously’. Yeah, that’s really interesting, and first, I think I need to ask. You said about reading and watching films? [Natalie: Yeah.] Obviously, we’ve been in the pandemic for a while. Were you able to go places, travel and do research as well?

Natalie: No, I was very lucky that I travelled a lot in life when I was able to. I have not been able to travel as much during the pandemic. This book was written in 2021 until May of 2022, almost two years ago, actually, in terms of the first draft. Then I worked on it for another year. But I had been to Rome several times, and I had been there in a really lovely way when I was in love with my husband, [on] our first vacation together, then with our daughter when she was, I think, seven, to Rome again, and then again with our daughter when she was, I think, turning 16, 15. And that time we renewed our vows, my husband and I, in Chianti. So Rome and Tuscany in particular have a really special resonance for me and my family. So I also am somebody – in the Canadian school system I’m considered one of the last generation to study Latin, in the public school system. I went through all six years of Latin and got our equivalent of an A Level at the very last grade you can get before you go off to college. And studying Latin gives you such a love of Rome and the Roman Empire’s history and a fascination for both the Roman emperors, but also the lives of essentially the slaves and the peasants and the people at that time, this highly, highly classist empire in which even accountants and lawyers were in servitude. It’s a very interesting time historically that also has a connection to Great Britannia. And as someone that was born in England, I also have always been very interested in the Roman history there as well. So whenever I would go to England – which is many times, because my family, my paternal side of the family, is completely still there, from there – I was always fascinated with seeing any kind of Roman ruins, whether they were just some sister stones in the middle of the Dorset countryside or [laughs]. So all these things kind of added together. And then there were some books that I read when I was growing up, in particular, a great book called The Last Days Of Pompeii. And it’s a fascinating, really fun book. Really meant more, I think, for middle grade at this point, in terms of the evolution of literature, but I remember we read that in grade 7 at this girls school I was at, and I just ate it up. So all of those different factors have given me an innate love and ability to picture Italy even when I’m not able to travel there. And I do consider Rome my favourite city in the world. So it was so wonderful to have the chance to write about it and spend time there again through literature.

Charlie: Yeah, I can see that through your writing of it. Yeah, there’s this great, great love of Rome, definitely [Natalie: yeah]. And yeah, your descriptions and stuff like that, it’s really lovely. So, yeah, you’ve mentioned John Lassiter and the unreliability. You put him and Vivian together as a couple and I went and, ‘urgh! I don’t like this. [Natalie: Yeah, yeah!] I’m really hoping this doesn’t carry on.’ And then it carries on [Natalie laughs] and I’m like, ‘please, please can we…!’ And then, you know, you do what you do, you change it. Can you just talk about the romance, specifically with, yeah, Vivian and John Lassiter and your writing of it, etcetera?

Natalie: Vivian is a very forward-thinking individual for that time in history, surrounded by women who have always made choices involving marriage and children at some point. She is 35, she also has made some decisions in her past that have created, I believe – I hope this comes across – a certain degree of self loathing, a certain degree of, in certain respects, highly disrespectful of her own abilities, and very… not unconfident, because she’s overall confident, but dismissive of certain experiences as being something that she would be good at or that she even wants to pursue: there’s a dismissiveness in Vivian towards many things that cross her path in life. And because of that, I thought that she was somebody who would prioritise sexual attraction, would prioritise the thrill of the moment, the excitement that sexual attraction will present, and an attractive, a notably attractive man, who has his own unique brand of charisma that I too do not respond to, which is why it was so much fun to write this character, but that is a brand of charisma that, unfortunately, you can see winning sometimes, especially in American politics, with their former president. Just a certain kind of brashness, a certain kind of self confidence that in and of itself is convincing to a lot of people. And I didn’t think that Vivian, who doesn’t suffer fools, would fall for somebody who was stupid, per se, but I did think that she wouldn’t care too much if other elements were in place, and that she’s just living life on the surface and experiencing that kind of a relationship, deep down inside knowing herself that this isn’t the right type of relationship. Now, there is something I haven’t mentioned yet. There was a shadow inspiration for this book, and it was one of my favourite novels, Henry James’s, The Portrait Of A Lady. So as I was writing it, I remember that book becoming at certain points a bit of a touchstone. And I remembered how in the midpoint of that book, Isabel Archer makes this horrendous decision to marry an incredibly sociopathic, narcissistic, awful character – about as awful as they can come, relatively speaking – Gilbert Osmond. And she herself has these wonderful qualities, but a degree of self-sabotage that is coming from a very different place than Vivian, so they’re not the same character at all, and I wasn’t trying to recapture that character – but it was somebody who, on the surface, should not be making that decision. And watching them do it is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. But that’s real. People do that. People marry people they shouldn’t. People fall in love based too much on sexual attraction. People who have self-loathing deep down, repressed inside, sometimes don’t think they deserve much more. And some people really, at certain stages in life, want to have a bit of a break and have fun. And I just thought Vivian was at the right age, at 35 – in those days that was actually past spinsterhood, Charlie, it’s sad to say, but, you know, once you’re in your thirties, that was it. So that was really my reasoning for why this could be a viable – not an admirable choice – but a viable choice for somebody at that particular time in their life, in that particular place. And that choice was critical. As I said, I did know this was an unreliable love interest. And that unreliability, as I wrote, would later lead to the other major, one of the other major, plot revelations. So I knew she had to fall in love with someone that was unreliable and that we wouldn’t be invested in.

Charlie: Yeah, no, I mean, I’m very happy with how that worked out, the plot line there. [Natalie laughs and says ‘so was I’]Very satisfying. Yeah! So you’ve mentioned earlier, I believe, Tabitha’s story. Could you expand on this a bit more, the importance of including this?

Natalie: So, to be absolutely honest – I’ll be very frank, because I think this is the writer’s experience. Recently, I saw a TikTok reel, I believe, by a very well known young adult writer, who said that all writing for her is an act of revenge. And often the motivation to write is, people have told you, ‘you can’t do that, nobody wants to read that, please write something different‘. And again, the creative mind wants what it wants. And so I remember a reader wrote me a fairly difficult email accusing me of racism and antisemitism and other things. And it was a difficult email to read because they were charging me with a character in The Jane Austen Society who was not Jewish at all. They were never ascribed as Jewish, never did I think of them as Jewish. But this person said to me, ‘this is very clearly a Jewish character. You have them working in the garment industry and then moving into film’. But I had done research in writing the book, and I felt very sorry for this reader, that this miscommunication between writer and reader had occurred. And I remember thinking, ‘I don’t like that this book is landing this way’. So I really wanted to explore who helped and how did they survive and what did people have to do to help them get through the trauma of losing their entire families in the Holocaust. And I have many friends who are Jewish and have lost family in the Holocaust, and I made sure that they read this book. And I said, I really want to do justice to this aspect of the story because, frankly, Charlie, I never want anyone to read one of my books again and come away thinking that I meant something in any way negative, when all I intend is a positive sharing of history and the inspiring work of people, especially during that time. So that is the honest answer that I can give as to why I decided to write the story of Tabitha and her brother being rescued, being in a camp, being rescued by the Red Cross, being brought to England. And these are the kinds of people that populate my stories and I wanted to elevate them, and again, convey this bit of history to the reader.

Charlie: No, I mean, you’ve taken some criticism, albeit that, you know, it was unwarranted, and you’ve made something really positive of it, certainly, yeah.

Natalie: I think that’s all you can do with that [Charlie: yeah] kind of experience. And no judgement – I believe that if somebody has read the book and is coming at it that way, it might be something I could have done differently or been more clear about. It might be choices I made and might not have. We never know. And I think that’s part of the writer-reader relationship. It’s a very mysterious one. And you are asking people to picture everything in their head. It’s so intimate compared to every other art form in which you provide the music, you provide the movie, you provide the visuals, you provide at least the sounds, you provide voice. But the act of writing a novel, it is an act of trust. You have to achieve trust with your reader – they have to trust your voice, they have to trust that you know what you’re doing, and you have to trust that you’re giving the right information for the reader as well. And it makes it a very intimate, important relationship that I learn, I think, with each book, I hope, to honour.

Charlie: Yeah, I mean, I think you’ve done that well. Obviously, I’m not that person, but, yes, no, I think you’ve done that very well. So I wanted to ask – I’m gonna have to see if I can put these together, I think, because it’s probably the best way to do it – you have the story of La Scolaretta, which I believe in itself, you fictionalised, at least somewhat. And this is partly why I’m asking you. Because you’ve also got, in your acknowledgments, you’ve got the real people that inspired you. Among others, you’ve got mother Dolores Hart, Private Cyril Morris, and Carla Capponi, which I think one of them I was able to find out more about, yeah [Natalie: yes]. And I wanted to ask more about La Scolaretta and the real people, these people that inspired you, I suppose, rather than talking about Ava Gardner and Sophia Loren, yeah.

Natalie: Yeah, no, I’d love to talk about them. I, in doing research about the occupation of Rome, which begins in the fall of 1943. And the allied forces land at the south of Italy. Germany shuts down the top part of the country, removes Mussolini to the very north, to the Salò Republic, where he’s a bit of a puppet ruler. And Germany now has control of the top part of Italy and Rome. And it is going to take the Allies until the following April or May of 1944 to liberate Rome. That is not a large expanse of land – that is how difficult this liberation is going to be from the time they land. So I remember, in doing research about the politics behind what was going on in Italy at that time, I came across the name of Carla Capponi. She would later become, I believe – don’t quote me on this – a female leader of the Communist Party of Italy. But at the time she was a very young woman, during the war, and she was part of the GAP. A group of resistance fighters, a lot of whom were professors in Rome. And she would go out in the dark, in Rome, looking like any other young woman on the streets. And she would assassinate Nazis, Nazi leaders. In one instance, she came home to her mother’s apartment, and it had been raining, and she had assassinated a Nazi leader point blank as she passed him on the street against his chest and then grabbed his attaché, which the resistance knew had some important documents in it that would help them in their fight against the Nazis. And I remember thinking about her age – her age even more than her gender. But also doing this at a time in Italy when women didn’t have the vote, when women were charged twice as much to attend university as men. Mussolini’s government was really encouraging life at home for women – marriage and children only. And I remember thinking about how the war was breaking down all of that. And that women were taking on these incredibly daring roles. And I started to read about the stafetti. And the stafetti were these young women bicyclists, messengers, and they would carry coded messages in false bottoms of their bags, false bottoms of their shoes, sewn into their skirts. And then I saw a harrowing photograph of one of them hanged – sorry; I get a little emotional – in her dress, hanging from, like, a lamppost in Rome. And it was awful. And I remember thinking how brave they were. And one of the things I learned about the Italian women at that time, who fought in the resistance, was it’s now considered to be the largest female participation in a resistance movement in the history of the world [tears up a little], which I thought was so incredible. So I really became very attached to La Scolaretta, very attached to the sacrifices that she is making. She hasn’t been in the military. She’s left school, she’s working as an editor at a movie studio, which is something that women were able to do. They were able to be very – what’s the word? – they’re not, like, treated like editors are today in movies, it was considered to be almost like construction work. They would be using their hands and their seamstress skills. And they would be editing film. And they would be doing it anonymously, often at the studios in the ’40s and into the ’50s. And I just remember thinking, that was really interesting. So I thought she could be somebody who’s working at Cinecittà. Which would mean, therefore, that her connections to other characters ten years later would make sense.

Charlie: Yes.

Natalie: So I remember thinking that could be something that she did for a living. She wasn’t an actress. And I remember wanting to really pay homage to the bravery of these women, young women, very young women, in particular at that time. Because, Charlie, the last thing to say about La Scolaretta and her compatriots, is that there was really not a lot of acknowledgement after the war for what they had done [Charlie: yeah]. They were given the vote, which was wonderful. They were able to participate in the new democracy of Italy – Italy will no longer be a monarchy. There is a tremendous opening up for them educationally. They will enter medical schools and law schools. At a rate that you would not necessarily see in a lot of other countries for a longer period of time. These women are tough, like they are so to be admired. And ironically, Professor Roberto, who I mentioned earlier connected me with Jack Salvatori’s son, she actually forwarded me a notification of… sort of like a charity run in honour of the stafetti. And all these people were going to be on their bicycles in Italy. I think it’s either being held or has been held recently. And it was a poster of the young woman with her bike. And it was all in honour of the Stafetta. And she said, ‘see, they haven’t forgotten’. Right? I’m paraphrasing what she said, but the point was they are still celebrated, as they should be. And I wanted my story, La Scolaretta, to help in my own very small way, shed more light on their achievements and the risks that they made.

Charlie: Absolutely, yeah. It’s not surprising, is it, that people don’t know much about it. I mean, I talked to Liz Fenwick, we were talking about the map girls in the war [Natalie: ahh, yeah] and how they were completely forgotten. So, yeah, it’s sadly not surprising. But that’s lovely to hear that they are celebrating them [Natalie: yeah!]. Yeah, you have said about Jack Salvatori, and we need to come back to that. I would like you to tell me more about Ray Holland – I believe you put it somewhere on your Instagram, but yes, please tell us.

Natalie: Yeah, this is also an emotional story for me because he just passed away in February, so you’ll have to bear with me on this one!

Charlie: Sure.

Natalie: I wrote to him after I read the story of his father. He is the only child ever of Jack Salvatori, the director who made the movie Uminità that I talk about at the beginning of the podcast. And when Professor Roberto was able to give me his email address, I was so grateful. And I emailed him and I said, ‘I want to write about your father. I want to include the extract from his journal that he – his son, Ray Holland – had posted online’. And he said, ‘that would be great. I’ve been trying to spread the story of my father, but at 86, time is running out’. So I sent him the extract and any references I made in the book to his father, to make sure he was comfortable with that, to have his permission, but also to let him know that whether this book sells a lot of copies or not, it is a lasting record that will hopefully exist somewhere one day and someone will read it and learn about his dad in that way. And we started to email each other fairly regularly. [Laughs] and then one day, and I’ll never forget this [laughs], I go into the mailbox and there’s this little brown wrapped package like I used to get from my grandmother with all these stamps on it and handwriting that reminded me of my grandmother, who lived to be 95 in England, in Hastings. And I opened it up and it was the journal that I found quoted online that I was asking his permission [for]. It was this red bound book, the actual journal, and the only thing of his father’s that he has. And he has mailed it to me.

Charlie: Wow!

Natalie: And I was like, I couldn’t believe it. I was shaking. He also mailed me a DVD of the movie Umanità and photographs of his mother and his father and more of their story. It was really lovely. And I will tell you, going to FedEx [laughs and say the rest of the sentence in a higher, laughing pitch] to send that book back to him was… I was, like, so worried that it was going to go missing in the mail, but it all worked out and I was so glad when it landed back safely in Hampshire, where he lived. And so, basically, we continued to correspond. And I was able to send him an early ARC. He was diagnosed with cancer, I’m going to say, almost a year ago. So last fall, I was able to send him the North American early advance reading copy. And he was really pleased and asked if I could send copies to his daughter and his niece in Ireland, and I’ve since now become a regular correspondent with his niece in Ireland, which is really lovely. And I was, unfortunately not able to get any of the audiobook to him – I knew his eyesight was becoming challenging – because the recording finished up the week of his passing in London. It’s narrated by the British actress Juliet Aubrey, who won the Bafta for her performance in Middlemarch. And she does a truly, truly stunning job on the audiobook narration. But at Ray’s funeral in early March, it was a memorial service, I should say – actually, looking back, I think it was late February – they read from the journal, the exact section that’s in my book. And I was able, later that day, to get a snippet of the audiobook recording from my publisher, MacMillan audio, in New York, back over to the niece who was staying with the family so that they could hear Juliet Aubery read aloud this extract from his father’s journal. So the last thing to say was that Ray Holland was this very wonderful family man, very average British bloke, whose father enlisted when he was sixteen in World War One. He had fallen in love with a 16-year-old girl, and they weren’t able to be together. In the ’20s, Jack Salvatori would race camels across the sahara. He would become involved in movie-making. He would end up living in Italy, in England, in France, in these various capacities. And he ended up back in England in the late ’30s, I think, around 1937, and reconnected with his lost teenage love, who was married, and she became pregnant. And Ray Holland did not know – he was very open about this chapter – he didn’t know until he was much older that this British Italian film-maker was his biological father. And so he found out – again, he’s very open about this on the Internet, I’m paraphrasing, but I believe he was dating a girl whose father owned a pub and I believe somebody in the pub, I think it was the pianist, mentioned the story of the parentage – and I believe he was able to meet him in the hospital before he passed away. I believe that by 1950/51, Ray is about twelve, his father has been worn down by the starvation and the trauma of the war that he underwent. His body never fully recovered. You can catch him in very small moments in the movie Prince Of Foxes by Orson Welles. He was a very striking British Italian man, and he lived this very fascinating life. And I do believe they had an ability to connect in person near the end, before he died. And it’s, again, an example of somebody who has a story in their past that they have been sharing to the extent that they can and I felt so privileged to get to know him and to be part of helping him share that message in my own small way. It was just a connection that I’ll never forget. And then the last thing, Charlie, to say is that I was starting, a year ago, almost exactly, my fourth book, which is called Austen At Sea. And I imagined Jane Austen’s last surviving sibling, a 91-year-old former sea admiral Sir Francis Austen, a real life individual, widowed twice, living in Hampshire, who, in real life, in 1848, struck up a correspondence with the daughters of the president of Harvard who were obsessed with Jane Austen and actually went over and visited him – this is a well known story among Janeites, it’s a great story – and became pen pals with him, were able to visit with him, at least one of the sisters was. I always thought, ‘wow, that would make a great plot!’ And it always sat in my brain for four or five years, just percolating. So I decided I wanted to write it. And it wasn’t until Ray’s passing earlier this winter that I realised that I had become, myself, a North American woman corresponding with a very old, at this point 89-year-old British man living by the sea in Hampshire. And I thought that was quite perfect.

Charlie: It’s a lovely story.

Natalie: Yeah.

Charlie: And thank you for sharing it. Yeah. And may his – Ray’s – story and Jack’s story be remembered, definitely. And, I’m going to ask you about Austen At Sea in a moment; I’m very, very excited about it [Natalie chuckles]. I wanted to ask you – we’ve talked about real people. And I believe last time we spoke, we were talking about Daphne Du Maurier, because I love that in Bloomsbury Girls and, to my knowledge, you got her right. It’s everything I thought she would be [Natalie chuckles]. And I think you said something like, ‘oh, she’s going to be in the next book and she is a little bit’. As far as Vivian is in England, we have Daphne du Maurier.

Natalie: Yes, exactly.

Charlie: But all these people had passed away. You’ve got Sophia Loren, albeit a very small part in the book. I wanted to ask you, how was that- including someone who is still with us?

Natalie: Well, ironically, Gina Lollobrigida, who’s also in the book, even to a smaller extent than Sophia Loren, was also still alive during the writing of this book. So the first thing I want to do with anyone who’s still alive is I want to be a positive emissary of their story. So their presence in the book will be only positive – they will never be involved with anything negative, because that is what I owe them as a human being in writing about them, if they are still alive. I also will not say anything about their life experience that did not actually happen. I will not attribute any facts to them. So if they were in a movie and learned to swim by being thrown in the water, which is what happened to Sophia Loren, she writes about it in her memoir, that gets in the book. So what I did with Sophia Loren, in particular, and I really idolised Sophia Loren my entire life – her, Audrey Hepburn; there’s a few female movie stars who lived life on their own terms. And also, I mean, everyone’s choices in life are equally valid, but these were two women who embraced mothering two sons – Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren – embraced motherhood to such an extent that was just for me, as a young woman growing up, they were working and they were having this experience of motherhood, and I just remember thinking, ‘I love the way they were doing it’. And I just really admired them as mothers. So with Sophia Loren, I idolised her; I wanted to capture everything about her that was vital and feminine and ambitious and similar in that way to characters like Vivian herself, my fictional character. So the first thing I did with Sophia Loren, besides do a lot of ancillary reading, was I listened to her memoir on audiobook. Although it’s not narrated fully by her, the narrator has captured the cadence and the intonement, the accent of how she speaks, and I really soaked that up. And every day I would take walks – I actually do this with Louisa May Alcott for Austen At Sea – every day would take over an hour of walking, listening, getting the rhythm of my walking in step with their voice, to the point where the voice becomes very musical and natural in my brain. It’s kind of almost like connecting it to ambulatory motion, sort of rewires my creative mind. And then I find it very easy to inhabit their voice as a writer, I can just imagine her groaning when she’s like [puts on an Italian accent], ‘yes, si si, Ingelese. I have to learn English to go to Hollywood’. I can imagine her when she gets very upset, but shifty about the fascists. I just can see her as a young woman, speaking and acting this way, in a way that I think reflects the positive vitality of her character. And so that’s why I pick, always, real life figures, men and women who, whatever choices they’ve made in life, are ultimately inspiring for us as very vital people who have lived exciting and full lives and made the most of their time that they were given, whether they’re still alive when I write about them or not, those are the kinds of characters I want to write about. That’s how Samuel Beckett gets in there [Charlie chuckles]. That’s how Peggy Guggenheim gets in there. That’s how Ava Gardner gets in there. I hope that answers the question.

Charlie: Yeah, yeah, it does. One thing that I have to ask, though, I mean, including someone like Sophia Loren, you know, someone who is alive – do you have to check with anyone, with what you’ve written?

Natalie: No. There’s a lot of fictionalising of real life experiences where as long as it’s clearly a work of fiction and is described as such, it is a situation where you are not under any restrictions as a writer. And, I mean, you can see that with books like Primary Colors, which is about an election that is clearly based on characters like the Clintons, to stories where people are fictionalising the lives of people who are still with us. So it is an exercise in forgiveness and hope and honouring, that seems to work for fiction writers as long as you are not doing the writing in a way that would be, ever, defamatory, harmful to the person’s reputation. Which is why my characters that are still alive, I would never make them active participants in the plot. They would never be involved with the actual what’s going on. They are just there to sometimes help with the ambiance, sometimes they’re there for humour, because all human interaction has a potential, I think, for wit, which I love when I write, trying to show people connecting and making each other laugh. But also, they are there because sometimes their own life choices that are on the record have a resonance with the plot and something that Sophia Loren had to struggle with was it was made impossible for her to marry Carlo Ponti, her husband of many decades, eventually, in the ’50s, due to the laws from the Church that were invented in the state. There was no divorce. Carlo Ponti could not get a divorce from his Italian lawyer wife. They could not even go get divorced in Mexico and then come back and marry in Italy – they’re still considered not divorced in the ’50s. They cannot go to Mexico, get divorced and get married in Mexico and come back to Italy – he will be considered a bigamist. And so they kept their relationship highly secret; there were no photos of them. So I always make sure that their involvement with the plot is done in a way, like I said, that is really just having resonance with events that have nothing to do with them.

Charlie: That makes sense and that’s interesting to know that… yeah, you kind of, as a reader, and obviously authors as well, you see the little bit, the front of the book that says about people being fictional and things like that, but, yeah, actually including someone is always interesting to hear about. So, Austen At Sea: I think I’ve found my favourite book of yours before it’s been released [both laugh]. Tell us about this book as much as you can at this point.

Natalie: Yeah, so, like I said, I always wanted to write about these two young women who are living in Boston in 1865 and the war has ended. Because, as you might notice, I like to write after seismic, cataclysmic world events – I don’t wanna write the actual unfolding trauma, because I don’t know how much we learned from trauma, Charlie. I think what we learn from it is how people cope with trauma [Charlie agrees]. I think that’s the important lessons of the past. And I try very much to situate my stories right near the end or right after, or long after, the more horrific times in history, so that we see how people make choices about how to forge ahead. For me, this became even more of an impetus to write after my husband was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 2016, which led to the writing of The Jane Austen Society, which takes place as the war has ended and the year after the war. And I wanted to write, therefore, at a time coming out of war. So, although in real life, I knew these two young women had written to Sir Francis Austen in 1848, I decided I would pick the Civil War. Now, that’s a really interesting time in American history. And I did a lot of research into it. I was also a huge student of American history when I was younger; I was very fascinated with my neighbour to the south, and I had a real interest in the civil rights movement in particular. So I knew a lot about American history coming out of civil war. And I wanted to explore women at a time who are going to be fighting for a right to vote that they will not receive for nearly 60 more years [laughs], and how angry are they going to get about that? And I also wanted to write about people coming out of the trauma of war, finding new ways to find enthusiasm. In fact, one of the quotes from my epigrams at the beginning is from Emily Pankhurst’s husband, Doctor Richard Pankhurst, and he says, ‘life is nothing without enthusiasms’, and I love that line. So I wanted to write a book about people finding enthusiasm again for different pursuits, whether it’s putting on a charity performance of a Charles Dickens novel or writing to get Jane Austen’s signature from her brother, or discussing her books. So I remember the fall, not last fall, but the fall before the fall of 2022 – I sat down one day and I typed up a page, not even two paragraphs. Two sisters writing to Sir Francis Austen. And then the next paragraph, suddenly two brothers show up. Why do these brothers show up? Because I am in the process of doing events for the Rosenbach library in Philadelphia, which was started by two brothers who were rare book dealers. They owned a first edition Mary Shelley, they owned a lot of fascinating books. And when the older brother died, he bequested the contents that they had to a museum being started. And the Rosenbach Museum is alive and well and thriving and I’d been asked to speak to them as part of their Austen Monday series, where we did a chapter [of] Pride And Prejudice a week for, like, eight months! It was fantastic! And I was learning about these brothers, but I wasn’t thinking I was going to write about them. And then in the second paragraph, I’m like, ‘Nicholas and Hazlitt Nelson live on Chestnut street in Philadelphia’ and like, right away, I’ve got two rare book dealer brothers, and they also are writing to Admiral Sir Francis Austen. And right away, I’m like, ‘oh, well, there’s four characters, so I’ll have these competing siblings who are both in correspondence; they don’t know the other set is. They all want something from Sir Francis’. And then I thought about something I had read, a wonderful book by Zöe Wheddon, about Jane Austen’s best friend, Martha Lloyd. So I knew a lot about Martha Lloyd, and I knew about how she was the other woman in the house when Jane Austen was writing those books in Chawton; she was freeing up Jane Austen’s time to write. Jane Austen had actually wanted [her] to marry her brother Frank. It didn’t happen. He married somebody else. And years later, when Martha Lloyd is honestly, I think, 63-years-old, and I think Sir Francis is in his… maybe fifties, they fall in love and get married. So I knew a lot about Martha Lloyd. So I knew that I wanted to sort of probe this idea of matchmaking, both the matchmaking that had failed within the Austen family the first time around with Frank and Martha, but also the matchmaking of Emma and the matchmaking that an author does in deciding which of my characters are going to end up together – because I don’t plot when I write, I never know which of my characters is going to end up falling in love with the other. And that’s part of the fun for me. So with this book, Austen At Sea, I wanted there to be more characters. There will be eight, and they will all end up together on a steamship going over. Some of them are going to meet Sir Francis, not everybody. One of them is a newshound for the Reynolds Weekly News. Another one is Louisa May Alcott, because joy of joys, coincidence of coincidences, as I was doing my research on her, I discovered that she had taken her first trip to Europe on the SS China, leaving from Boston the summer of 1865 to accompany an older woman. And I was like, well, there’s my subplot. So now Louisa May Alcott gets to be on the ship. And the other element of this book that also really is behind its genesis, to share with you the last element: I sat down almost exactly a year ago May, and on a Sunday afternoon, I just started to type. And right away, I’ve made the two girls’ father, who is the president of Harvard in real life, had learned about Jane Austen from the Chief Justice of the supreme court of the United States and one of the associate justices. They had introduced the president of Harvard to the works of Jane Austen in the 1830s and ’40s. And right away, I make these two daughters, as I start writing, the daughters of a judge instead on the supreme judicial court for the state of Massachusetts, and the very first line comes out of my hands, and it is ‘Six judges in a room talking about a case’. And the spoiler is that it’s not about a case. It’s about which of her books is the best. And that’s the punchline [Charlie chuckles] at the end of the first chapter, for people who don’t hear this, it will be a kind of fun little moment of surprise. But it’s not essential to the plot that people not know. They will parse and analyse through a legal lens, but through a lens that nonetheless has to connect to the story – I’m writing five of Jane Austen’s books over the course of my book. So they become this very hilarious kind of coven of old men with pipes and whiskers and their snifters of scotch and brandy, arguing about why does that happen in Jane Austen’s book, and why is Mrs Bennet the way she is? Just like everything, arguing about everything. It was such a joy to write. And it was such a wonderful way to come at her books, using my legal training and, for me, a very fresh and different way than retreading the ground in The Jane Austen Society – because you haven’t read it, Charlie, then you don’t know that there is a lot of discussion. It doesn’t prohibit people from enjoying the book or reading if they don’t know Jane Austen’s works, I know that by now from reader response. However, you kind of have your greatest hits as a writer, and you talk about what you think is the most important thing about Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice the first time you write about it. So what was really joyous for me with this book was to find a whole other way of coming at her books, which was to look at her books in almost a legal way, because I do think that lawyers, in particular, historically on record, [are loving] Jane Austen’s books as much or more than anyone. There is something about her books that really, really resonates with the lawyer’s mind training, the way they convey information. Jane Austen’s writing is so beautiful, yet highly logical. There’s not anything in there that shouldn’t be in there. There’s an efficiency to it that the lawyer’s brain responds to. And I really feel very grateful that I had this law degree that I haven’t used in 30 years [chuckles], almost now, not quite, but it’s a long time. So the book is a fun, enlightening, I hope, romp of sorts, but also has a seriousness to it; like all my books, I try to get a lot in there. And it has a lot of twists and turns. And I have an homage to Charles Dickens as well, where Louisa May Alcott ropes all the women on board the ship into doing an all-female performance of vignettes from A Tale Of Two Cities to raise money for the victims of the Staplehurst Rail Disaster, which happened to take place that very same summer. Which was another reason I wrote about Dickens, is that he has just survived this horrendous rail crash, lost the rest of his manuscript, I believe, to Our Mutual Friend, [which] was in a case on the train, although I think Ellen Ternan might find it – I can’t quite remember what happens there. But in terms of my plot, he is a big inspiration for my characters as well as Jane Austen. I got to write about him a lot as well. So this was just the most joyous writing experience for me as a result.

Charlie: Yeah. And of course, there is things with Dickens and Portsmouth, isn’t there? [Natalie: yes, yes] which I think your characters are going to [Natalie: yeah]. I want to ask you one last question, actually. If we generalise things, you’ve written about Austen, obviously, in your first book, because it’s The Jane Austen Society. You’ve written about Austen a bit, if we say, in Bloomsbury Girls, because you’ve got characters from the first book, etcetera, and obviously you’ve got Austen At Sea. Yeah. And also, you talk about real people, real writers. You talk about Daphne Du Maurier. We had, was it, George Orwell’s wife in Bloomsbury Girls as well.

Natalie: Yes.

Charlie: Are you going to write a book, do you think, ever, about Austen herself?

Natalie: I don’t know, Charlie, that I would want to try to write directly about Jane Austen in terms of inhabiting her mindset to the extent that a novel would demand. Because in my reader-writer relationship with her, as a reader who loves her work so much, I do want there to continue to be a certain degree of mystery about her, for me. Part of the magic when I read is not thinking too much about the parts of her life that were difficult. And I think that what I learned with Louisa May Alcott, to be honest, is that a lot of these women writers had very challenging lives, financially and health wise, and especially in the regency/Victorian era and difficult life situations, too, I mean, you think about George Eliot living with a married man or Mary Wollstonecraft doing the same, and children being born out of wedlock at a time when there was so much prejudice against that, it was awful. Women dying in childbirth, women being fearful of dying in childbirth, which I think Jane Austen definitely would have been based on the horrendous losses that her brothers wives were experiencing in childbirth. Children, and then themselves dying after delivering ten or eleven children, you know, in these times in history. So there was something painful about the lives of Louisa May Alcott and the Brontë sisters, frankly, and Jane Austen, that I don’t feel it is right for me, almost, to try to inhabit what they went through. I think what they went through was so challenging and so unique and so different from our life today that I like having this margin of separation where they continue to fully be their only voice. They are only what we have of them. I want them to continue to dominate how we think about them in that way, for me, as a writer; so that’s something that I’ve never wanted to do, and if I do it, it would be in a very small, lighter context.

Charlie: No, that’s absolutely fair enough. Yeah. Yeah, I thought you might say ‘no’, but I mean, you do definitely include Austen so much in other ways [Natalie: yeah] that is more than enough, I suppose, in this context. Well, Natalie, it has been lovely having you back, and I know that I said – I was looking at the transcript of our last episode that I was working on the other day – and I know that I said I’d need you back for 3 hours, and I see now why I said that [both laugh]. Thank you so much for coming today. It has been wonderful to have you back and I am absolutely looking forward to Austen At Sea.

Natalie: Thanks so much, Charlie. I so appreciate the chance to talk about Every Time We Say Goodbye and Austen At Sea both. And I’m just really grateful for your support. Especially coming from England, a country that I love writing about so much. And I’m just very grateful for the listeners and the readers there and for your time. Thank you.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time, and for more information as to upcoming authors check out wormholepodcast.com. The Worm Hole Podcast episode 105 was recorded on the 11th of April and published on the 9th of September 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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