Interview with Natalie Jenner, author of Bloomsbury Girls
Interview with Natalie Jenner of Bloomsbury Girls
Macmillan Publisher (St Martin’s Press)
📚
What inspired the Bloomsbury Girls? Please provide a brief description of the story.
Bloomsbury Girls was initially inspired by an early pandemic rewatch of the 1987 movie 84 Charing Cross Road—as I watched this charming film set in a London bookshop but focused mainly on an epistolary exchange between two people, I realized there was also a huge back story visually taking place between the staff and their various departments. Right away half a dozen or so new characters came to mind, and I was off. Bloomsbury Girls is about the three main female ones, who work in a 1950s bookshop where a battle of the sexes rages between them and their male department heads, leading to a dramatic takeover of the shop!
Bloomsbury Girls has a large cast of characters. Do you have a couple of favourites and if so, what is unique about them?
I really liked Vivien for her sass, ambition and cool style, and I was charmed by the elegant and courtly Lord Baskin, whose family has owned the bookshop for one hundred years. But as I wrote, I fell hardest for Ash Ramaswamy, the recent Indian émigré who mans the basement science department and is always the most composed and practical of the lot.
What main or important themes do you hope readers see in Bloomsbury Girls?
I was a recruiter and career coach in the legal industry for decades, and after I finished the first draft I could see that a lot of what I was writing about was how to make luck. I am a big believer in the maxims “sociability breeds serendipity” and “she who gives love gathers love” and have seen, from thousands of past clients, how valuable and energizing it is in life to stay curious and kind, to make connections, and to always put yourself out there in ways big or small.
Give us at least one historical fact that wowed you during your research for Bloomsbury Girls and you knew you had to include it in your story.
Ha! This is so easy: that Daphne du Maurier had written a short story that went missing for seventy years and involved a mechanical male doll. You can’t make that stuff up.
Please describe characters Evie, Grace and Vivien, each one in three words.
Evie is diligent, ambitious and proud; Grace is patient, humble and warm; and Vivien is quick-tempered, witty and stylish.
Each chapter begins with a Bloomsbury Bookstore rule. Were these created from your imagination or drawn from a real bookstore in history? What do you think they say about the culture of the time? What purpose do they serve in your novel?
The rules were all created from my imagination and unintentionally so: as I wrote the first draft, different characters would just randomly shout out a rule in the context of a plot point or conversation. I think the rules reflect a very old-fashioned way of approaching the staff-customer relationship, before sales and marketing became so much more in your face. It was my editor who brilliantly suggested adding a rule to the beginning of each chapter, at which point the fun for me as a writer was realizing which rule the characters in the chapter were violating or otherwise subverting. Ultimately my purpose with the rules is to show just how structured, and inviolable, the shop’s working environment was, while also creating moments of wit and relevance to the plot.
Some great literary figures, like Daphne du Maurier, appear in Bloomsbury Girls? Is she an author you admire and why have you chosen her to be included in your story?
Oh absolutely—as a middle-aged but beginning writer, I cannot overstate my admiration for those writers whose stories have lasted and have sold in the millions. It is incredibly difficult to produce the amount of excellent writing Du Maurier did, while staying culturally relevant. And Du Maurier herself ended up in my book because of luck: I was missent a copy of her memoir by a London rare bookstore (I had ordered an older edition of Mansfield Park to which Du Maurier had contributed the introduction), and she sort of seeped into my brain from there, and I found myself paying more attention to her: just in time for starting to write this book.
Bloomsbury Girls is also about the importance of bookstores. As a past bookstore owner, how did this experience help with the weaving of this story’s fabric?
Looking back, I started this book at a time when all the bookshops in Canada were closed during the first wave of the pandemic, and I was unable to see my own debut novel on a bookstore shelf. So I think that as I wrote, I was teleporting myself into my favourite place in the world as well as indulging in a “do-over” of the joys of setting up and opening a bookshop (which is a very addictive experience, and something many readers dream of one day doing for this very reason). Having run my own shop was invaluable to me as I wrote, as it made it easy for me to conceive of plot points such as duelling literary events, unpleasant customers, staff who are secretly aspiring writers, and much more!
Name at least two challenges women faced in the late 1940’s and 1950’s that are not so much an obstacle today? And an additional one that hasn’t changed over time?
Many readers of Bloomsbury Girls have commented that decades ago, they too were expected to make the tea and coffee in the office, no matter their job title and simply due to their gender—something that wouldn’t happen today. But something that hasn’t changed over time, I believe, is the pigeon-holing of fiction as “women’s writing” or “romance.” If anything, this industry practice seems to be only increasing as the use of genre titles becomes more and more pervasive overall.
10. Are The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls books connected in any way?
The most obvious connection is that Evie Stone, the former servant girl in The Jane Austen Society, is one of the three main female characters in Bloomsbury Girls. Without giving too much of the plot away, the auction that takes place offstage in the epilogue of my first book comes into play in Bloomsbury Girls as well, which leads to a couple of other characters from my first book getting to make an appearance. I was so happy when each of them showed up as I was not expecting to ever see them again.
Tell us about the men in this novel. Was it hard or easy to write from their perspectives?
My characters just show up one day on the page, fully formed, and as a result it is made very easy for me to understand them and write in their voice. This is also why my writing is mainly character-driven: I don’t plot or outline in advance, but instead follow my characters and what they decide to do, usually half a step behind them, and part of the joy for me as a writer is when I discover the secrets they have been keeping from both me and the reader.
Please share an overview of your path to publishing and how it has changed your life?
I tried for decades with five different manuscripts to get published to absolutely no avail. When I turned forty, I took a ten-year break from writing and focused on earning income for my family with my own business ventures including the bookshop. When I wrote The Jane Austen Society, I had just turned fifty and was writing solely to entertain myself and my husband during an incredibly difficult time for him health-wise (a situation which continues for us today). My husband was the one who thought I had something with that manuscript and encouraged me to query agents one last time. When my agent read it and first reached out to me, he said it would become a bestseller and it would change my life. And it did, in that now when I write, my happiest activity, I am writing no longer just for myself but also for readers all over the world, which is incredibly inspiring and motivating, and for which I am immensely grateful.
If you could travel to the past and meet one person in history for the sole purpose of writing a novel, who would it be and what question would you like to ask them?
Jane Austen of course! I would ask her if she had any inkling of how much she was going to change our world.
If you could give your younger self any writing advice, what would it be?
The same advice I actually did always give myself: to write whenever I could make time for it, and to only write if it made me happy. Something I still hold true to today.
Are you working on a new project and, if so, can you give us a few hints?
Yes, I am working on a third book which has been sold to my US publisher (tentative publication 2024) and which follows one of the new characters from Bloomsbury Girls to Rome, circa 1955. So right now my head is in Italy all the time, which is a wonderful place to be!
Thanks to Natalie Jenner for being my guest today. Please check out her website and buy her books! Available at all your favourite book sellers.
