DEBORAH CROMBIE: Sometimes you happen across a book that ticks all your boxes, the sort of book you dive into, don't put down and, when you finished it, wish you could start all over again.
I somehow missed Natalie Jenner's debut novel, THE JANE AUSTEN SOCIETY.
But this spring, when I saw a mention of BLOOMSBURY GIRLS, I preordered the book because:
--London
--London in 1950, such an interesting period
--Bloomsbury, and not just Bloomsbury, but Lamb's Conduit Street!
--Bookshop
--Literary society
--Great cover!
It was a lucky find, and today it's my great pleasure to introduce Natalie Jenner, who has a few more things to say about luck!
Luck: writing’s dirty little secret
I am almost embarrassed by how much luck goes into my writing. I am a dedicated pantser—a fun term for someone who writes by the seat of their pants—and luck plays an outsized part in what shows up on the page. As a group of people without a plan, what all pantsers have in common is an infatuation with the power of our imagination. Luck, writing’s dirty little secret, is what keeps that infatuation from becoming a very bad date.
As a former career coach, I know another little secret: what you randomly encounter in life can completely change it. My new book Bloomsbury Girls is a tale about such luck, mirrored by a writing process that hinges on that same what if doorway in life.
What if, in the fall of 2019, I hadn’t caught a Netflix documentary on Peggy Guggenheim?
I so loved one of its throwaway lines—“Guggenheim and Samuel Beckett spent five days in bed at the Ritz, and only opened the door once—for a tray of sandwiches!”—that I immediately put the idea on simmer in my brain, hoping to one day find a use for its unique mix of hot sex and whimsy.
What if, four months later, a rare bookshop in London had sent me the book I had ordered online (a Jane Austen edition with an introduction by Daphne du Maurier) and not Du Maurier’s memoir instead?
It was the first wave of the pandemic and things everywhere were a mess. The shop kindly let me keep the entire care package, which had been intended to boost someone else’s spirits in isolation. This was how Du Maurier—and not Jane Austen, for once—made her stealth entry into my brain instead.
What if, when my debut novel The Jane Austen Society released in May 2020, the bookstores hadn’t all been closed?
This must be the reason why I decided to set my next book Bloomsbury Girls inside the quintessential 1950s London bookshop, where disaffected staff and famous people of the time could circle each other. I now also had a way to insert cameo roles for that simmering trio in my mind: Du Maurier, Guggenheim and Beckett.
What if Daphne du Maurier had never met Ellen Doubleday or Oriel Malet?
Cursory initial research on Du Maurier quickly led me to Ellen Doubleday, her dear friend and object of affection. In pitching Bloomsbury Girls to my editor, I mentioned both Ellen and her husband Nelson Doubleday as potential characters, only to learn from my editor that by 1950, Nelson was dead. You really don’t want your research called out in an editorial pitch.
But once Nelson’s demise was dealt with, my research began in earnest. One day, while scrolling through a website on female literary friendships, I read about Oriel Malet, a young writer who had landed Du Maurier as a mentor after encountering her in a hotel corridor while waiting for a party being hosted by Ellen Doubleday to start. Suddenly, I had my lucky-break plot for my new book, while my own luck happily continued.
What if there was no The Mummy!
For a separate but parallel plotline, I needed a real-life woman-authored book with both demonstrable value and no repute. I found the perfect book within five minutes of Googling, but was convinced I could not be that lucky. So, I spent weeks scouring lists of old and relatively unknown books until I gave in to my own good fortune. As a writer, this is trickier than it sounds: the Wikipedia rabbit hole promises, and so often proves, that there is always something even better, just a little further down. And down.
What if Peggy Guggenheim had not worked at the Sunwise Turn?
At the bottom of that Wikipedia rabbit hole, I tripped across Guggenheim again, decades before her five days with Beckett in bed. It turned out that as a young heiress and socialite, she had worked at the Sunwise Turn, one of the first bookshops in America to be fully owned and operated by women. This fact would end up directly inspiring the caper-style ending to Bloomsbury Girls. My agent told me that a lucky writer gets these gifts sometimes, and you just have to run with them.
I am the kind of person, and writer, who chooses to see all of this as a form of luck. It fuels my imagination—the other altar at which I worship. In Bloomsbury Girls, there are many random encounters that lead to lucky breaks—the very type of good fortune that I experienced while writing this book. No one wants to think that life can indeed be this random or beyond our control. Everyone likes to think that hard work and perseverance are enough. They are indeed essential to success, but the dirty little secret—both in my book, and in the writing of it—is that luck can play just as big a part.
The good news? We can make our own luck. Just stay open to the possibility, recognize it when it shows up, and run as fast and as far with it as you can.
Bloomsbury Girls is about three women in 1950s London who work at an old-fashioned bookshop and are engaged in a battle of the sexes with the male managers of the shop. With the help of famous literary figures of the time including Daphne du Maurier, the female staff find a way to realize one very ambitious plan: to take over the bookshop from the men who run it.
Natalie Jenner is the author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls. Both books were instant national bestsellers, June Indie Next Picks, Amazon Best Books of the Month and People Magazine Picks of the Week. Born in England and raised in Canada, Natalie has been a corporate lawyer, career coach and, most recently, an independent bookstore owner in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family and two rescue dogs.
DEBS: Of course when I finished Bloomsbury Girls I immediately read The Jane Austen Society, which I loved as well. The books are interconnected but don't have to be read in order.
REDS and readers, what book have you run across by chance that was a perfect fit for you?
