Interview with Gillian Bagwell, author of The Darling Strumpet, a novel of Nell Gwynn

Moppet: Gillian, welcome to The Misadventures of Moppet! I was intrigued to read in your author’s note that, “Nell has been in my mind and heart for a long time.” What first inspired you to write about Nell?

Gillian: When I was an ambitious 23-year old actress, an actor friend got a lot of attention for a one-man show he was doing.  I thought it was a great idea, and decided to write a show for myself to perform.  I thought some historical character would be a good subject, and my father suggested Nell Gwynn.  I began researching her, and the more I learned, the more I fell in love with her and her story.  She was a little scrappy kid born into poverty and rose to great heights by using what she had: smarts, determination, charm, humor, and a very likeable sex appeal.  She never put on airs or pretended to be other than what she was, and the people loved her for it.

I did work on the script but never finished it to my satisfaction, because it really wasn’t possible to do justice to Nell’s life or the times in which she lived in such a limited format.  I didn’t give up on the idea, and I always had her in the back of my mind and thought that some day I’d get around to telling her story.  I spent many years focused first on my acting career and then running a theatre, and writing got pushed to the back burner.  But when I was living in London in 2005-2006 taking care of my ill mother, with no creative focus, I decided that what Nell needed was a novel of her life, and the time had come to start it!

Moppet: You’re an actress as well as a writer. Did you find you could use the techniques of preparing to play a role to help characterise Nell?

Gillian: One of the ways that my acting experience has been very useful to me is in writing dialogue. When I’m writing, I’m almost unconsciously checking how it would feel to say the lines out loud if I were playing the scene on stage.  If the dialogue seems stilted or anachronistic or “faux period” I know it isn’t right. I’ve got to get it to where I could play the scene.

And yes, I think I use other techniques that I use as an actress.  When you’re working on a role in a play, you’ve got to incorporate into your performance the character’s sensory experience.  What is she hearing? Smelling? How do her clothes feel?  Are her stays uncomfortably tight and she wishes she could take a deep breath?  When she runs a finger over the silk of her dress does it remind her how far she’s come in the world? Does the look in the eyes of the man she’s sitting with remind her of another experience, good or bad?  When you’re doing this work as an actress, much of it is necessarily imaginary, and not something that an audience will know about, but still, it informs your character and performance.  So when I’m writing I’m putting myself in the character’s place and thinking about all these things, only I can let the “audience” – the reader – in on them, and so into the character’s mind and heart.

Moppet: Your blog On The Trail of Nell Gwynn chronicles your research trips to England to find out more about the places where Nell lived and worked. Where was it that you felt closest to her and her time?

Gillian: London is an amazing place.  In central London, the layout of the street is pretty much the same as it has been for centuries; even millennia.  After the Great Fire in 1666, there were grand plans to create a street design that was more organized and formal, but it didn’t happen, because people couldn’t wait long enough for that to happen – they had to get on with their lives.  So they built houses and shops and everything else in exactly the same places they had been, and there they stand now!

So in most of the areas that Nell knew well, where she lived and worked and performed, the footprint is basically unchanged from her time, though of course many of the buildings are gone.  This is particularly true in the locations where many of the theatres were.  Years ago I was walking near Lincoln’s Inn Fields and felt impelled to turn down a certain street, and felt somehow that the place was very significant.  When I looked at my books, I discovered that I’d found my way to the place where the Vere Street Theatre had stood, the place where the King’s Company converted a tennis court into their first home when they began playing in 1660.

Very close to there, at the northeast corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, is Newman’s Row, where Nell’s first house was.  Her own house, I mean, that Charles rented for her when she was going to have their first child.  Newman’s Row is now little more than a passageway to High Holburn, but the layout of the streets is pretty much unchanged.  I stood there and could feel very clearly how it must have been for her to look out over the square, where duels and executions occasionally happened, although it was a very posh area with many noble residents, and that Whetstone Park, a little street running along the top of the square, which was pretty unsavory, must have been noisy and squalid.

And of course the current Theatre Royal in Drury Lane is on the same spot as the original theatre, the one that Nell performed in.  The original theatre was smaller, and burned down and was replaced, and the current building is the third on the site, I think.  But standing there I can feel Nell with me.  And so many other places she knew are practically within spitting distance – the location of the Cat and Fiddle pub, where she lived; the Maypole in the Strand; the places where Charles Hart and John Lacy lived; and it’s only a short walk up to what is now Macklin Street, the former Lewkenor’s Lane, the site of Madam Ross’s brothel.  Nell’s world is still there; you just have to close your eyes and feel it.

Macklin Street/Lewkenor Lane, site of the brothel where Nell worked. Photo reproduced with permission of Gillian Bagwell.

The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Photo reproduced with permission of Gillian Bagwell

Moppet: As she rises in royal favour, Nell’s life becomes increasingly luxurious. I adored the description of her bedroom, with its mirrored wall and solid silver bed:

It was the bed that took Nell’s breath away. She traced a finger along the scrolls of a cockleshell on the headboard. Its elaborate carving evoked the frontispiece above the stage of the first Theatre Royal beneath which she had played so many performances, and the rich red curtains were like the playhouse curtains.

“This bed is your stage,” Rochester had said. And finally she had a stage worthy of her role as king’s lover. The wall facing the bed was mirrored from floor to ceiling. And that is our audience, she thought. Only ourselves.

Is the description based on surviving accounts, or on what was most fashionable at the time?

Gillian: The description of Nell’s bed is accurate.  She really did have a bed crafted from two thousand two hundred and sixty five ounces of sterling silver, elaborately decorated with the king’s head, the rope dancer Jacob Hall, etc., and other pieces of matching furniture.  There’s no record of it surviving, and sadly she probably sold it when she was broke and it has long since been melted down.   The wall of mirrors is also based on contemporary accounts.

Moppet: How straightforward or otherwise was it to find an agent and a publisher for The Darling Strumpet?

Gillian: I was incredibly fortunate not to struggle as so many writers do.  In the fall of 2007, when I had a good chunk of the book done but not yet a complete draft, I attended a writing conference and paid extra to get critique of my first 20 pages from two different agents.  The first one loved it and asked me to send her the first 100 pages.  She loved that, too, and passed it on to a colleague of hers, Kevan Lyon, who handled a lot of historical fiction.  Kevan loved it too, and offered to work with me and give me feedback as I wrote the rest of the book.  I sent her sections of the book and incorporated her notes and suggestions.  I went through four or five drafts of the whole thing before I thought the manuscript was ready to send her, in July 2009. She emailed me when she was halfway through reading it to say she wanted to officially represent me.  Within a month she had sent pitches to publishers.  Several of them read it, two made offers, and by early October she had sold The Darling Strumpet to Berkley – as well as my next book, yet unwritten, on the basis of a very brief synopsis.

Moppet: Your next book, The September Queen, is about Jane Lane, who entered history when she helped Charles II to escape after the Battle of Worcester. Charles mentions the incident to Nell in The Darling Strumpet – did the idea of writing about Jane come to you through researching Charles’s early life?

Gillian: Yes.  When I wrote that scene in The Darling Strumpet I had read a certain amount about the disastrous Battle of Worcester in 1651, from which Charles barely escaped with his life, and his six-week odyssey trying to get to safety in France.  It was an enormously important and formative period for him, and he told the story to anyone who would listen for the rest of his life.

He told the story to Samuel Pepys on board ship in May 1660 when he was coming back to England to take his throne, and Pepys mentions that in his diary.  We’re very fortunate that many years later, in 1680, Pepys sat Charles down for two three hour sessions and took down the story in great detail, in his famous shorthand, and went to quite a lot of effort to edit it, collect other contemporary accounts, and bind them all together in one place.

But there just wasn’t a way to get into much depth about these events in The Darling Strumpet without slowing the story down.  I had Charles say, “That’s a story for another time,” not realizing that the story would become my second book.  Later in my research for The Darling Strumpet I read All the King’s Women by Derek Wilson.  He spends about three pages on Jane Lane, and lays out the evidence for his belief that she and Charles were lovers, which I found pretty compelling.

When my agent asked what I was going to write next, and I was casting around for ideas, I remembered Jane.  Kevan loved the idea too, and we were both astonished and delighted to discover that apparently no one had ever written a novel about the really unbelievable story of her journey with Charles.

Moppet: Other than seventeenth-century England, what other times and places intrigue you?

Gillian: I’ve always been a huge anglophile, and English/British history in general interests me, especially 16th to 19th century.  Victorian era London intrigues me and I think eventually I’ll write something set during that period.  London in general is fascinating.  It has such a rich history. I don’t think I could ever get tired of finding stories that happened there.  I have one story I’d like to write that takes place in 16th century London, but it has a male protagonist and my agent tells me to keep to female leads for now.

My ancestry is very diverse, and I’ve thought of writing stories based on some of my ancestors, maybe different stories coming down through the generations.  My mother’s paternal grandparents emigrated from Sicily to Chicago in the early 1890s, and it’s amazing to find them in the 1900 census, my grandmother illiterate and not able to speak English.  On the other hand, my father’s paternal grandmother, who came from generations of family in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, graduated from Brown University in 1900.  What a contrast!  My 7 times great grandparents, Leonard Shown and Virginia Barbara Slimp, made the arduous journey from Virginia to the mountains of Tennessee, settling at what became known as Shoun’s Crossroads, which is still there.  They had 18 children and were very prominent in what was first Carter County and became Johnson County, but I believe my great-great grandmother was illegitimate. She met her father for the first time when he came back from the Civil War, and took her to basically be brought up in a boarding house in North Carolina. A hard life in a very interesting time.

I’ve always been fascinated by the sea and naval history.  I’m a big fan of Patrick O’Brian’s books, and before long I expect I’ll write something that takes place partly at sea.

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Gillian Bagwell’s website

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Thanks so much to Gillian for a fascinating interview! Do you have a question about The Darling Strumpet or Nell Gwynn? Amy (Passages to the Past) is hosting a live chat with Gillian on Monday, 10 January at 6.30-7.30 pm EST.

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Tags: gillian bagwell, the darling strumpet, the september queen