Historical fiction and short story author Katie Lumsden talks to us about her latest novel 'The Trouble with Mrs Montgomery Hurst' and how her love of 19th Century literature began.
Katie Lumsden is a writer of historical fiction, both novels and short stories. Katie's debut novel, The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, was published in spring 2023, by Penguin Michael Joseph in the UK and by Dutton in the US.
Her second novel, The Trouble with Mrs Montgomery Hurst, was published by Penguin Michael Joseph in the UK in July 2024. You can find Katie's books on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
It all started with Jane Eyre. There was a wonderful TV adaptation of it in 2006, when I was 13 years old, and I started watching it with my parents. I was so totally captivated by the first episode that my mum gave me her copy of the book to read. I read it all well before the end of the series, and I was completely blown away. As a child, I used to skim-read a lot, skipping over description to get to the dialogue – but with Jane Eyre, I just wanted to take in every word. In that sense, it changed how I read as well as what I read. After reading Jane Eyre, I picked up Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell and Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, guided by my mum’s recommendations and by the screen adaptations we had on DVD. I’d often watch the adaptation before reading the novel, which I think really helped me, as a young teenager, to find 19th century literature less daunting.
After that, there was no going back. I discovered Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope and so many more amazing writers. I’d read every Dickens novel by the time I was 18. One of the great things about reading a lot from one particular period in time is that the more you read, the more you know about that time, and the more interesting you find it. My love of 19th century literature really sparked my love of 19th century history.
These days, I read a lot of new releases, too, but my love of 19th century literature still remains very strong.
It was a fairly long one! The Secrets of Hartwood Hall may be my first published novel, but it was in fact the 13th novel I completed! I’ve been writing since I was a young teenager, and I first tried submitting to literary agents when I was 15, which on reflection seems very ambitious of me. Several years and books later, I signed with a literary agent when I was in my early 20s, but I struggled to get to the next stage and had multiple books out on submission without success. It took another five years and a lot of different book ideas before I finally wrote The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, which was picked up by Penguin Michael Joseph.
One thing that’s important for aspiring authors to remember is that, so often, it’s a case of wrong book, not wrong author. You just have to keep writing.
It’s certainly a disorientating experience doing things from the other side! I’ve been an editor for nearly a decade, and I worked in-house at several big publishers before going freelance a few years ago. On the one hand, this means I knew a lot about the publication process going in and had realistic expectations about the challenges of being a published author, but on the other hand, every publication and every publisher works a bit differently, so there are always going to be surprises. I’ve found it slightly odd settling into a different role, and when I talk to my publishing team, I sort of forget I’m the author and just feel like I’m talking to any other publishing colleagues. But in a way, I think that’s a good way to think about it; being an author is a job, even if it’s also a passion, and your team are your colleagues, working with you to strengthen your work and get it into as many hands as possible.
When I started writing regularly as a teenager, I used to wake up early every weekday to get in an hour’s writing before school – and I’ve basically kept that routine ever since. Throughout school, university and every job I’ve had, I’ve always woken up early to write first thing in the morning. Now that I’m freelance, my time is a bit more flexible, but I still wake up and write first thing, usually for a couple of hours. It’s a lovely way to start the day, and it ensures I always make time to write.
I tend to write at home, at my desk, often with a cup of tea at my side. I always write on a computer, rather than on paper, because I can type faster than I can write longhand, and because it makes editing easier. I sometimes take my laptop to a café or a pub to write, but the majority of my writing gets done at home.
The novel as a whole owes a big debt to the works of Charlotte Brontë and Anne Brontë, but Margaret herself doesn’t really have an inspiration I can pinpoint. I suppose I wanted to take the figure of the governess from Victorian literature and do something different with her. Margaret isn’t in her late teens like Jane Eyre or Agnes Grey; she’s twenty-nine years old, an experienced governess who left her last post to get married and is now returning to work after the death of her husband. She’s come to a house full of secrets, but she’s got secrets of her own, too.
The Trouble with Mrs Montgomery Hurst is, like The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, set in the Victorian period, but they’re very different books. Where Hartwood Hall is a gothic novel, Montgomery Hurst is more of a comedy of manners, and where Hartwood Hall follows one character in first person, Montgomery Hurst has a lot of different characters and interweaving plots. Montgomery Hurst follows the residents of a small community after a local gentleman marries somebody no one expected him to marry. In many ways, it’s a book about gossip and scandal, but it’s also very much a book about love and how people navigated romantic relationships at a time when society was run by etiquette and rules.
The writing process was very different for the two books. The Secrets of Hartwood Hall was, in a way, quite straightforward: I had the idea, planned the novel, wrote a first draft, then did several rounds of edits (first on my own, then with my agent, then with my editors), and it came out about three and a half years after I’d started work on it. The Trouble with Mrs Montgomery Hurst, however, is actually a much older project – I started working on it long before I wrote The Secrets of Hartwood Hall. It began life as a short story, an experiment to see whether I could write about a Victorian couple solely through the gossip of their neighbours. Then I found myself falling in love with the characters, so it became a novella and ultimately a fairly chunky novel. I’ve been working on it on and off for about eight years, and I’ve rewritten it countless times. It’s come a long way from its beginnings, but I’m so excited that it’s finally out in the world.
I’ve just finished a second draft of a new book, set in the Victorian period again but otherwise quite different. A second draft is still very early days for me, though. I tend to write a quick first draft and then rewrite that many, many times, so I spend a lot more time editing my work than I do on the initial writing.
My to read pile is, as ever, very big! Right now, I’m part way through The Late Mrs Willoughby by Claudia Gray, an excellent murder mystery riffing off Jane Austen’s characters, and I’m about to start reading a non-fiction history, Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune by Rory Muir, which I’m really looking forward to.
Probably at my desk, writing, or sitting on the sofa with a good book!
As well as being an author, I have a YouTube channel, Books and Things, where I talk about and review books, focusing on historical fiction and classics. I’ve been making videos for nine years, and I love it. The bookish community on YouTube – Booktube, as we call it – is a lovely space, and I have great fun participating in and hosting online reading challenges and book clubs.
