Ying Lee talks to us about researching her new book The Agency: A Spy in the House
I’m supposed to be an expert on the Victorian period. But while researching my PhD thesis, I realized I didn’t know much about daily life in the 1850s. How did it feel to wear so much clothing? How often did you shampoo your hair, and what with? How long did it take to drive from Chelsea to St. John’s Wood in a hansom cab? And how many people will fit into a hansom, anyway?
Writing A Spy in the House was my way of trying to answer some of these questions. Take the Great Stink of 1858, for example. We know the facts: toilets flushed right into the Thames, and Londoners pumped the water straight back out for cooking and bathing. People thought the smell made you sick – not germs. And future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli fled the House of Commons one day with a handkerchief over his nose, so evil was the stench.
Still, these tidbits are like an aerial view of the city. What was it like on the ground, in individual houses, for people who lived and worked and walked around the city every day? What if you lived beside the river? This squelchy, sticky reality is the Victorian period you don’t read about in nineteenth-century novels or diaries, and it fascinates me. However, I didn’t want to write an entire novel about sewage; for one thing, it’s hard to identify with it as a character. And I also wondered what happened to smart, unconventional women in the period. If you weren’t a good little girl, and you didn’t have a lot of money, what on earth happened to you?
Women’s choices were grim, even for the clever. You could be a governess (underpaid, powerless – look at Jane Eyre, and remember that’s a happily-ever-after story!). You could live with your rich relatives as a semi-servant (Jane Austen has a lot to say about that). You could try for a job as a clerk (and earn half what the man next to you did, for doing the same work – some things haven’t changed that much). And to do any of these jobs, you had to be respectable, educated, and extremely long-suffering. Just thinking about it makes me want to scream.
So this is where I’ve gone my own way. If a top-secret women’s detective agency existed in Victorian England, it left no evidence – just as well, since that would cast serious doubt on its competence. The Agency is a totally unrealistic, completely fictitious antidote to the fate that would otherwise swallow a girl like Mary Quinn.
Writing A Spy in the House was a real pleasure. Like Mary, I escaped into (imaginary) detective-work. And I explored the grit of Victorian London. I hope the novel draws you, too, into both these worlds of escape and discovery.