Anne here, and today I'm interviewing Bronwyn Parry.
Bronwyn is best known for her romantic suspense novels, published in Australia by Hachette. She's received a swag of awards; she won RWAmerica's Golden Heart, and in 2008 that became her first published novel As Darkness Falls. She's a two time RITA finalist, for Dark Country and Dead Heat, which were also listed in the Daphne du Maurier award for romantic suspense. And three of her novels (Dark Country, Dead Heat, and Storm Clouds) have won an Australian Romance Readers’ award for best Australian romantic suspense novel.
She lives with her husband in rural NSW, and regularly posts photos of costumes, kangaroos and dogs on her FaceBook page. Now, Bron has moved into the Regency-era with The Clothier's Daughter, a move that's not a huge surprise to those of us who know about her passion for history and for historical costume — not just how it looks, but how it was made and how it was worn. She volunteers in a small local museum and has conducted several workshops on historical textiles at national RWA conferences in Australia. Bron has also taught herself to pen letters using a quill and will dress up in costume to do so.
Anne: Welcome to the Word Wenches, Bronwyn. Tell us a little about your passion for costume and what you do at your local museum.
Bronwyn: Thanks, Anne. It’s a thrilling honor to be invited to visit the Wenches. I’ve been a fan of you all for a long time.
I’ve always loved historic costume and in my late teens and early twenties I did costume design and making for amateur theatre, while I fantasized about a career in theatre/film costuming in the UK. But alas, I realized that I really don’t have the design flair to create stunning original designs, and that my interest is more in historic cut and construction. There were few resources around in those days, and I strayed into spinning and weaving for some years, where the historic textiles fascinated me. My Honors thesis is on late 18th century British worsted (wool) textiles, and I travelled to the UK to study the scraps of original textiles pasted into clothier’s sample books, and later recreated some samples with my handspun, handwoven yarn.
Fast forward to 2014, and I heard about the Jane Austen Festival in Australia, which was the perfect excuse to get back into costume making and sew myself a wardrobe of Regency gowns. There is so much information available now and it inspired me and hooked me right back in to the costuming passion. I’ve been to JAFA every year since, and have ventured into other eras of fashion as well.
About two years ago, the opportunity arose to begin documenting the sadly neglected clothing collection at the local Folk Museum, and that’s been a wonderful experience, discovering, documenting, and studying treasures. We don’t have much from the Regency era, but we do have a huge Paisley shawl and some beautiful chemisettes from about the 1830s, and also a gorgeous morning jacket with an inked laundry mark of 1837. You can imagine me squealing when that was discovered in a box of men’s shirts! We’ve put on several displays, including one showing the dramatic changes in fashion during WW1, and our most recent, showcasing three gowns from the 1880s. I’ve presented talks for both of those.
Anne: What brought about the change in your writing focus from contemporary romantic thrillers to Regency romance.
Bronwyn: My contemporary books are set in two small fictional towns, and after three quite gritty books in each with multiple murders and dark times, I found myself reluctant to inflict more pain on the towns’ residents. Yes, I do know they’re entirely fictional, however, it seemed time to give them, and me, a break and some time for them to enjoy their happy endings!
Historical romance has long been one of my favorite genres and my inner historian has been dreaming up character and plot ideas for a while, so it seemed a natural direction to take. And I love writing it.
Anne: This is from one of the Amazon reviews of The Clothier's Daughter. "Lovely, thoughtful romance with wonderful characters. Great evocation of the period in a way we don’t often see in Regencies - and a tight, suspenseful plot. Excellent HEA, too!" As has been pointed out, your Regency-era novel, is not the usual kind of Regency novel. Bron, would you tell us about The Clothier's Daughter, please?
Bronwyn: Well, I confess there are no dukes or rakes. The Clothier’s Daughter is set in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in 1816. It’s a time of major change, with the Napoleonic wars over, the Industrial Revolution well underway, factories spreading, and social structures in a process of being radically reshaped.
It’s against this backdrop that Adam Caldwell, brother to the Earl of Rengarth, returns home after eight years of war and comes face-to-face with the woman he once loved and lost. Emma Braithwaite is struggling to keep her family’s worsted manufacturing business afloat after the death of her father and her brother’s disappearance. She narrowly escapes a fire at her warehouse with Adam’s assistance, but as the threats escalate, they discover that someone wants control of Emma's family company and is prepared to murder anyone in the way of getting it - including Emma.
It’s a second-chance romance with a wounded war hero but I guess Emma is unconventional – for her time and for the genre - in that she’s engaged in business, and active in campaigning on social concerns. I did aim to give a good sense of the particular point of history, without (I hope) getting bogged down in historical detail. Although it does rain rather a lot. 1816 was the Year Without a Summer, after all.
Anne: I think many wenchly readers will enjoy this departure. What kind of research did you do for this book? What did you find most interesting?
Bronwyn: My inner historian is a alive and well and I love research! As I mentioned, my honors thesis was on British worsted textiles, and I was fascinated by the variety and beauty of these practical fabrics and the skills of the hand-spinners and weavers who made them. But sadly, few people these days know what a calamanco, or camblet, or lasting even looks like. (Anne interjects to say that she thinks a calamanco is a rowdy dance, a camblet is a very small camb, and lasting never goes away. Smack! Ouch! <g> ) PS that pic on the right is of calamanco and came from this site. Now back to Bron.
Bronwyn: I argued in my thesis that these fabrics were so fine that they couldn’t be replicated by the new machinery of the Industrial Revolution, and that’s why they disappeared completely by the 1840s or so. So there was my inspiration for Emma, the heroine in The Clothier’s Daughter, trying to keep a proud but dying family business alive in a time of great change.
However, I do hasten to assure readers that the book is not full of textile detail - I know not everyone is a textile geek
In other research, I spent many, many hours reading newspapers from 1816, researching women in business, Luddites, coach routes and times, and shipping from Quebec among other topics I also pored over maps of Yorkshire and Canada. Oh, and the professor who supervised my honors thesis is incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about British social history in this era, and I was fortunate to attend two of his fascinating lectures, both of which gave me some nuggets of research gold.
Attending the Jane Austen Festival in Canberra for several years was not only fun, but a wonderfully immersive experience. Dressing for and attending day events and evening balls, watching the dancers, seeing masculine men dancing with grace and attending to their partners with courtesy, and feeling the exhaustion of three nights in a row of balls, all gave me insights into Regency life. Plus there was syllabub.
Anne: Do your characters spring fully formed from your imagination or do they slowly emerge in the writing? Who’s your favorite character in the book?
Bronwyn: I do usually get a very strong sense of a character quite quickly. I can’t really describe it in words, it’s just a sense of who they are inside, their temperament, values, strengths, fears. Sometimes the details of why they are that kind of person only emerge in the writing, and I love discovering those layers.
I enjoyed writing Adam and Emma; they’d both matured a lot from the (relative!) innocence of their youthful relationship and I knew that, despite the harshness of his war experiences, Adam’s core of gentleness had held fast, even if he didn’t know it himself. And although Emma is in some ways quiet and conventional, she also takes practical actions on the things that matter to her, so she’s no shrinking violet.
I’m not sure I could name a favourite character – I like them all. Well, except for the villains! There are quite a few secondary characters in The Clothier’s Daughter, particularly since Adam is one of a family of ten, and there are assorted returned soldiers and other characters returning home. Most of them announced themselves on the page quite vividly, and several will eventually have their own stories. One in particular strolled on to the stage, pretending to be someone he wasn’t, and I had to rein him in a little so that he wouldn’t take over. But he was rather a lot of fun to write.
Anne: Oh, I know about those characters who want to take over! Could you please give us a small taste of The Clothier's Daughter.
Bronwyn: A taste in more ways than one. To set the scene for this moment, it’s the Countess of Rengarth’s ball, on the day Adam has returned home to Rengarth Castle for the first time in years. After a dramatic afternoon, Emma accepts Adam’s offer to escort her to supper as a gesture of his family’s support…
Adam was attentive to her, passing her the tastiest dishes, but he mostly listened to the discussion rather than contributing to it. It wasn’t that he disagreed with them—when asked for his opinion, he agreed whole-heartedly with their concerns—but he seemed distracted by his own thoughts.
She could no longer read him. If, indeed, she ever had been able to. Perhaps that had just been a young girl’s foolish dream, thinking that she understood him. He was perfectly polite and gentlemanly, but his formal courtesy emphasized the distance between them that those years had created.
Perhaps there was, in London or Europe or somewhere, a woman who held his heart. But when he presented her with a crystal glass containing a syllabub, the rich, creamy dessert she could never resist, for an instant his smile lit his eyes with the memories of a long ago ball, a shared syllabub, and a first kiss.
She felt her cheeks flush again, as if she was still seventeen.
Anne: Lovely. What are you working on now?
Bronwyn: In writing, I’m working on the next book in the Hartdale Brides loosely-linked series, in which two of the secondary characters from The Clothier’s Daughter find themselves in the small colony of New South Wales in 1817, attempting to disrupt a traitorous scheme. It’s an unusual setting for a Regency, I know, so there’s additional research to be done and I need to make sure I include in the story some of those elements that readers of Regencies love and expect, even though I’ll be pushing some boundaries of the genre.
While staring at the screen trying to write, I’m currently also hand-stitching an outfit for a working woman in about 1817 – the kind of petticoat and over-dress a down-on-her-luck gentlewoman might wear in the colonies. Unfortunately, with the coronavirus, there are no balls in my immediate future and no need for ball gowns, so a working outfit is a nice way to connect with my current heroine. But I will give her pretty dresses later in the book!
Anne: Thanks again for visiting us on Word Wenches, Bron.
Bronwyn: Thank you so much for having me! And if I may leave a small thank you to my gracious hostesses, I’ve included below my recipe for syllabub.
Syllabub recipe
½ cup fine sugar
½ cup sherry or other sweet wine
Lemon zest from ½ lemon
Juice from ½ lemon
300ml (10oz/1.5 cups) pure cream (whipping cream)
Fresh strawberries or other fresh fruit
Mix the sugar, sherry, lemon zest and juice together and stir until the sugar is dissolved. It’s best, but not absolutely necessary, to leave it for a few hours or overnight.
Add in the cream, and beat with a handmixer or in a stand mixer until the mix is whipped enough to softly hold some shape, but not firm.
Slice the strawberries or fruit, and in nice glasses layer some of the cream mix, some berries, some cream mix, and top with sliced berries.
Makes 6 serves.
Anne: Ooh, lovely, thank you. I'm sure it's delicious.
Bronwyn will be giving away a copy of The Clothier's Daughter (e-book or paperback) to someone who leaves a comment, asks Bron a question about this interview, or answers this question: What’s your favourite historical era for fashion? Do you like the high-waisted Regency styles, or do you prefer another era?