1. The novel opens with Hannah facing personal and financial ruin—what drew you to write about a woman navigating such peril in 1749 London?
The precarious nature of life for women in 18th century Britain is a recurring theme to my books – as is the agency and space that women carved out for themselves in a world where most of the rules were dictated by men. In this novel I wanted to write about the ‘middling sort’, England’s entrepreneurial middle class. They grew substantially in number throughout the 18th century, but are often left out of the costume dramas, which tend to focus on the very high and the very low. The many women who ran their own businesses in Georgian England are especially marked by their absence and many of those women were widows. For the purposes of my plot, I needed Hannah to be a woman of means, but one who had everything to lose, and it made total sense to make her a shopkeeper. Widowed business-owners had to battle legal and financial rules that penalised them, as well as public censure and ridicule. Such challenges were not for the faint-hearted, but luckily Hannah is anything but!
2. You blend real historical figures like Henry Fielding into your fiction—how did you approach mixing fact with imagination?
I needed a law enforcement figure who would investigate the murder of Hannah’s husband, Jonas Cole, so I set about researching London’s system of justice during the mid-18th century, the time ice cream came to Georgian London. Henry Fielding was so central to law and order during that period, his name kept cropping up. I knew a fair bit about Fielding’s fascinating life and had read some of his novels and plays. At first I thought I might put him in the novel as a background figure, but then it occurred to me that I could put him centre stage. I had a lot of fun with Hannah and William’s interactions with Fielding, but I did try to stay true to his character throughout and I’m not sure I could have invented anyone more interesting and contradictory. Even though we never see the world through Fielding’s eyes, to me he is the third main character in this book and the lynchpin on which the novel turns.
3. Do you have any favourite historical novels or authors who inspire your writing?
Aside from the classics, historical novels I have loved and been inspired by include:
An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears
The Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel
The Music of the Spheres by Elizabeth Redfern
The Quincunx by Charles Palliser
The Athenian Murders by José Carlos Somoza
CJ Sansom’s Shardlake series
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré (which I think counts as historical now!)
The American Boy by Andrew Taylor
A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss
Lemprières Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk
4. If The Art of a Lie were to be adapted for screen, who would you cast as Hannah and Devereux?
Jenna Coleman would play Hannah Cole and James Norton would play William Devereux.
5. Finally, can you tease any themes or directions you would be excited to explore in your next book?
I can’t say too much as it is still very much in the planning stages, but I’m intrigued to try something a bit different, with a theme of justice, both in the past and in the present.
