Nashville’s Queen of Historical Mysteries
Local novelist Tasha Alexander is back—this time with two new books about British royalty
by Faye Jones
Helen Mirren is not the only woman having a regal year. Franklin writer Tasha Alexander started out 2007 with Queen Victoria and will end it with Queen Elizabeth I. Just as her second Lady Emily Ashton novel, set in Victorian England, hits bookstores, Alexander’s finishing her companion novel to the upcoming movie about Queen Elizabeth starring Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen and Geoffrey Rush. When The Golden Age opens in theaters this fall, Alexander’s The Golden Age: A Novel of Queen Elizabeth I will be in bookstores.
Writing a novel based on a screenplay has its challenges, starting with timing: even as she begins her book tour for A Poisoned Season, Alexander’s been doing rewrites to meet her deadline for The Golden Age. And background research got ratcheted up this time, too, she said in a recent interview: “I know the Victorian period pretty well, but here I had to look everything up.” Perhaps the greatest challenge has been the writing itself. “I don’t outline, so I’ve never worked where I knew what would happen next.” While Alexander says that this experience probably won’t convert her to outlines, she admits there have been compensations: since the plot is given, she’s been able to spend more time working on language and style.
If A Poisoned Season is any indication, The Golden Age will certainly be true to its period. Alexander nails not only the physical details about Victorian England; she also gets the emotions right. Avoiding the historical novelist’s common temptation to make female characters behave like 21st century women, Alexander keeps her characters true to both their time and their upbringing.
In Alexander’s first novel in the series, And Only to Deceive, Emily Ashton makes a socially correct marriage to a man she doesn’t love and is widowed soon after the wedding. Ironically, she discovers only after his death that he was a man she respects and probably could have loved. At the beginning of A Poisoned Season, Emily has returned to London to participate in the social season, which she expects to be tedious. As in the first book, she continues her late husband’s quest to recover Greek antiquities from private homes and place them in the British Museum.
The season proves to be anything but tedious, however. First, Charles Berry appears, claiming to be the rightful heir to the throne of France and catching the eyes of mothers with daughters of marriageable age. Then, there’s a string of thefts, all items that once belonged to Marie Antoinette. When one of these robberies leads to murder, Emily begins to investigate, putting herself and her position at risk.
A Poisoned Season, like Alexander’s first book, is a novel that combines mystery and romance, so murder is not the only problem Emily faces. Her mother is pressuring her to marry again. Although she certainly loves Colin Hargreaves, her late husband’s best friend, Emily is not sure that she wants to marry. She enjoys the freedom to stretch herself intellectually and socially. But Emily is not an iconoclast. She struggles realistically with both the life she knew and the one that now tempts her. She is especially concerned about her relationship with her childhood friend, Ivy: “We had been inseparable since we were girls, learning to embroider side by side, picking out our first ball gowns together, swapping sensational novels. We had even been presented at court on the same day. But ever since her marriage and my realization that I wanted to pursue an intellectual life, our lives had veered in different directions.”
Eventually, Emily’s choices cause her to be ostracized by society, and none other than Queen Victoria herself must step in. If Emily is annoyed by the fact that the Queen, too, encourages her to marry, she’s nonetheless grateful for the intervention: “My reputation was not entirely restored; mothers of impressionable young ladies still viewed me as dangerous, and the grand dames of society were not about to suddenly decide that they liked me, but no one would dare exclude me from a guest list so long as I had the backing of the ruler of all Britannia.”
Alexander notes that her protagonist is growing. “In the first novel, she had an intellectual awakening. In this one, she is learning how to incorporate that awakening into her life. In the future, she will have to confront larger social issues.” Emily has already shown sympathy for the lower classes: when a servant becomes pregnant and runs away, almost certainly to a life of penury and shame, Emily finds her and secures another position for her. Still, she hasn’t yet faced an entire culture amiss, and it will be interesting to see how Emily reacts when she realizes that some social conditions can’t be solved by one person with a big heart and money—or when she realizes what sort of labor goes into the beautiful ball dresses that she describes in such detail.
Still, it would not do for Emily to lose her sense of adventure and fun. This is a character who can dodge killer carriages with the same agility with which she handles secret admirers. And she begins to see that with the right man, even a Victorian lady can enjoy romance as well as the Greek classics. Not to mention solving the occasional mystery that comes her way.
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