Long ago and far away, I was a graduate student, and I wrote a dissertation on baby farming in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Baby farming is not especially good fodder for cocktail party conversation or romance-writing blogging, in that it’s both gruesome and difficult to explain in a nutshell. Let’s just say that baby farming was what happened at the intersection of bastardy, advertising, poverty, and crowded urban living. The worst of the baby farmers took out newspaper ads offering to adopt infants for a few pounds. Mothers who didn’t want to be mothers met them at railway stations, paid the “premium,” and handed over their babies. Everyone pretended to believe the babies had found loving new homes. No one kept track of what happened to the babies next.
Sorry, but very bad things happened to the babies.
Most cases of baby farming were not nearly so clear-cut, however. “Baby farmer” also described any woman who adopted honestly, with every intention of building a happy family with the child. It described women who cared for illegitimate children for weekly or monthly payments–some of whom had to continue caring for these children when the mothers skipped town and the payments stopped arriving. In fact, “baby farming” encompassed everything that later came to be understood as foster care and adoption: the very worst behaviors and the very best.
What does this have to do with writing or romance–or anything, really? I’m getting there.
Well. So. I wrote a few hundred pages on bastardy, baby murder, the development of infant formulas, and the origins of adoption and foster care regulation. Not a terrible read, as dissertations go. (The bar is low.) What I loved most about the subject was trying to understand what made baby farmers tick. Why did they do what they did? The press called them “evil,” painting all of these women with the same brush, but the more I dug, the harder time I had believing it. I wanted to get to the bottom of the baby farmer’s character. I wanted to see inside her head. I wanted to defend her if she deserved defending, and if she didn’t, I wanted to know exactly where and how she’d gone bad. But it was a dissertation, and the whole thing had to be based on newspaper articles and police documents, parliamentary investigations and social workers’ reports. I did my best. I was never entirely satisfied. I moved on to other things.
And then a few years ago, I heard from author Caitlin Davies that she’d been writing a historical novel with a baby-farming plot. She’d had a hard time putting her finger on how she wanted to portray the baby farmers at the novel’s center (two actual, historical figures I had written about). She’d read my dissertation, and it helped her develop her characters. She was going to rewrite the book accordingly. She wanted to say thanks.
The book is coming out next month with Random House. It’s called The Ghost of Lily Painter, and Davies is sending me a copy.
My first reaction when I heard this was something along the lines of, “Wow, the Internet is cool.” I can easily remember a time when Davies wouldn’t have been able to locate me so effortlessly, to reach out and tell me thank you. How neat to know I’d helped, and my research had made a difference.
My second reaction was more like, Huh. So back when I wrote that, I was doing the same thing I’m doing now, only with different material.
By which I mean this: I love thinking about what makes people tick. My favorite part of writing romance is developing characters and then putting them in situations and working out what they’ll do. Why did she say that? What made her the way she is? How is this going to change him? What choices are available to this man in this situation, and why does he make the one he does? Until I heard from Davies, I’d never thought about the fact that what I love about writing romance is exactly what I loved about writing history. It’s about people. This is why I write, and this is why I read. I’m fascinated by people. People under pressure. People falling in love. People struggling with problems they don’t have the resources to handle. People who make bad decisions and people who make the best of terrible situations.
When I was in graduate school, a professor told me historians all write the same book over and over again. They think they’re writing different books and investigating new problems, but then they get to the end of their career and realize, No, actually, those studies were all about the same thing. My husband is a historian, so I’ve seen this in action: he’s always figuring out accidentally that the papers he was writing fifteen years ago are about the same stuff as the papers he’s writing now.
And I’ve also heard that novelists write the same book over and over again. We change things around, and the books all look very different to us as we’re writing them. But sooner or later, we’ll look back and say, Huh. That book and that book and that book are all about this. And that other one, that’s the same issue flipped on its head. All of my novels are about the same handful of situations/problems/themes.
I can see this sometimes, in snippets, in the manuscripts I’m producing. And now I’m looking forward to watching where this process takes me–and to finding out decades down the line that all of my books, all of my projects, are an extension of the same impulses and the same concerns about human behavior. I like imagining that every erotic romance novel I write bears my stamp just as surely as my dissertation did, despite the vast difference in subject matter and potential audience. I love the thought that even as I write for other people–even as I write in the hope of hitting the “contemporary erotic category romance” slot just right–I’m still producing something that is utterly and completely me.
But I will confess to hoping more people read what I’m writing now than have ever read, or will ever read, my dissertation.
