New Book Release Spotlight and Author Guest Post: The House in the Hollow by Allie Cresswell

A Characterful House

My new novel The House in the Hollow is a prequel to Tall Chimneys. Both feature a fictional house in Yorkshire, built at the bottom of a combe or hollow, surrounded by trees and in some strange way cut off from time.

I can see the house in my mind’s eye with absolute clarity. It is built of grey stone, the same stone that forms the scree and rocky outcrops of the combe. Time has weathered the stones and they are furred with an atlas of greyish green lichen. The house is flat-fronted, with a porticoed door and deeply mullioned windows. At first the windows seem blank and blind, coldly forbidding to any visitor. But after a while this expression is revealed as a defensive shyness; the house protects its inhabitants from intrusion. Although shielded from the worst ravages of the weather that roars across the broad-stretched moor above, the bowl around the house has its own climate; of frost, of rain, of mist and of a churlish, swirling wind that scours the crater and sculpts the trees. When summer comes it is glorious, but brief.

A century separates the two women who inhabit this house in the two novels, but both find it to be a place of exile as well as a place of refuge. Its situation is so remote—its very existence not known by many—it has the potential to make them mad with loneliness and despair. On the other hand the outside world becomes increasingly frightening and malevolent to them as they are left, alone and almost friendless, within its walls. What is to be trusted, out there? Here, at least, they are safe. Aren’t they?

For both women the house and its environs begin to exert a subtle influence. It becomes, for them, much more than stone and slate and wood. For Evelyn, the heroine of Tall Chimneys, it begins to exude a jealous control, in some peculiar way encouraging all her fears and misapprehensions about the world beyond its boundaries. The survival of the house and her own future become so entwined that it seems, at one point, that the continuance of one will mean the demise of the other. Like a jealous lover, it makes her choose. For Jocelyn, the heroine of The House in the Hollow, the house has a benign, healing effect. Though she is sent there as a punishment and endures, at first, great unhappiness, in time the house’s very isolation from the cruelty and deception of the world acts as a balm.

Perhaps it is because we have all recently spent so much time at home that the ambivalence of it has struck me so forcefully. For those in small apartments, places without access to outside space, over-crowded houses or for those who live alone, home must have seemed at times to be a prison. The lyric from The Eagles’ Hotel California comes to mind; ‘You can check out, but you can never leave.’

For others, where home is comfortable and the house-mates pleasant and where there is outdoor space, lock-down has given new appreciation. For them, there really is ‘no place like home’.

The House in the Hollow, the house that later becomes Tall Chimneys, is both the malevolent place of nightmares and the picturesque house of dreams.

The Talbots are wealthy. But their wealth is from ‘trade’. With neither ancient lineage nor title, they struggle for entrance into elite Regency society. Finally, aided by an impecunious viscount, they gain access to the drawing rooms of England’s most illustrious houses.

Once established in le bon ton, Mrs Talbot intends her daughter Jocelyn to marry well, to eliminate the stain of the family’s ignoble beginnings. But the young men Jocelyn meets are vacuous, seeing Jocelyn as merely a brood mare with a great deal of money. Only Lieutenant Barnaby Willow sees the real Jocelyn, but he must go to Europe to fight the French. The hypocrisy of fashionable society repulses Jocelyn—beneath the courtly manners and studied elegance she finds tittle-tattle, deceit, dissipation and vice.

Jocelyn stumbles upon and then is embroiled in a sordid scandal which will mean utter disgrace for the Talbot family. Humiliated and dishonoured, she is sent to a remote house hidden in a hollow of the Yorkshire moors. There, separated from family, friends and any hope of hearing about the lieutenant’s fate, she must build her own life—and her own social order—anew.

Amazon UK               Amazon US

Both books are available at discount prices this week.

Amazon UK          Amazon US 

Allie Cresswell's social media contact details are as follows: 

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/alliescribbler. 

Twitter @alliescribbler. 

Website is www.allie-cresswell.com

New Release Spotlight & Guest Post: The Widow's Mite by Allie Cresswell

The Widow’s Mite by Allie Cresswell

Article for Ellesea Loves Reading

I like to read - and write - books which help me understand the world I live in and the people who surround me. To me, reading is an opportunity to walk in someone else’s shoes, to expand the canvas of my experience in order that I might connect more effectively. I didn’t know when I began The Widow’s Mite just how profound this expansion might be.

Peter Price dies suddenly, unexpectedly, in the middle of a Saturday in spring. His plans for lawn-mowing, a visit to the garden centre and the prospect of dinner in a country inn are, of course, abandoned and his widow is left to pick up the pieces of her decimated life.

This situation – poignant, though unfortunately quite mundane – offers interest enough to a writer but I wanted to give it a twist. So Peter’s Will seems to be worded in such a way that although his widow may remain in their splendid, gated mansion she is not provided with the means to maintain it. Minnie, a respectable if somewhat ineffectual woman, is faced with bereavement and poverty. How will she handle it? What resources might she discover – what resilience and cunning – to enable her to survive? Once she has spent their savings she will be destitute. But that begged a question: what does ‘destitute’ mean? What is its definition, if it has one? How little would a person have to have to qualify? What does ‘destitute’ feel like? Look like?

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, more than 1.5 million people in the UK were destitute at some point in 2017, living on less than £70 a week, without essentials such as housing, food, clothing or heating. A fifth of the population of the UK, amounting to 14 million people, are living in poverty. Minnie is not alone. Destitute looks like a lady in the supermarket comparing one tin of soup with another, minutely calculating best value for money. Destitute looks like the friend who meets you for lunch but then says she is not hungry. Destitute is the man in church who wears too many layers of clothing and eats more than his fair share of biscuits after the service. Destitute walks instead of taking the car or the bus, because, ‘I do so enjoy the fresh air and exercise.’ All of a sudden my book was about wider social issues; the problem of homelessness, the exponential rise in the number of – and need for – food banks; the shortfall in social security provision.

Writing The Widow’s Mite brought the enormity of this first-world problem into the light and I admit it shocked me. I hadn’t expected it.

Nor had I expected what Minnie’s response to it might be. Dreadful as her plight is, something good arises from it. She develops a species of tenderness and special empathy, a kind of second sight which can discern the signs when someone is bravely struggling, as she is. I found this quality strangely contagious. I hope you do too.

Minnie Price married late in life. Now she is widowed. And starving.
No one suspects this respectable church-goer can barely keep body and soul together. Why would they, while she resides in the magnificent home she shared with Peter?
Her friends and neighbours are oblivious to her plight and her adult step-children have their own reasons to make things worse rather than better. But she is thrown a lifeline when an associate of her late husband arrives with news of an investment about which her step-children know nothing.
Can she release the funds before she finds herself homeless and destitute?

Fans of 'The Hoarder's Widow' will enjoy this sequel, but it reads equally well as a standalone.

Amazon UK           Amazon US 

Allie Cresswell was born in Stockport, UK and began writing fiction as soon as she could hold a pencil.

She did a BA in English Literature at Birmingham University and an MA at Queen Mary College, London.

She has been a print-buyer, a pub landlady, a book-keeper, run a B & B and a group of boutique holiday cottages. Nowadays Allie writes full time having retired from teaching literature to lifelong learners.

She has two grown-up children, two granddaughters, two grandsons and two cockapoos but just one husband – Tim. They live in Cumbria, NW England.

The Widow’s Mite is her tenth novel.

Website: www.allie-cresswell.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alliescribbler/

New Release Spotlight and Guest Post: Dear Jane by Allie Cresswell

Dear Jane by Allie Cresswell

The final instalment of the Highbury trilogy, Dear Jane recounts events hinted at but never actually described in Jane Austen’s Emma; the formative childhood years of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, their meeting in Weymouth and the agony of their secret engagement.
Orphaned Jane seems likely to be brought up in parochial Highbury until adoption by her papa’s old friend Colonel Campbell opens to her all the excitement and opportunities of London. Frank Weston is also transplanted from Highbury, adopted as heir to the wealthy Churchills and taken to their drear and inhospitable Yorkshire estate. Readers of Emma will be familiar with the conclusion of Jane and Frank’s story, but Dear Jane pulls back the veil which Jane Austen drew over its remainder.

In writing Dear Jane I have scratched an itch which has been bothering me since I first read Emma over forty years ago. Why would a clever and upright girl like Jane Fairfax have engaged herself, in secret to an unreliable fellow like Frank Churchill? That she would have suffered agonies of conscience is unarguable - indeed, she tells Mrs Weston she has had ‘no tranquil hour’ since she agreed to it. The levels of deceit and invention they would both have had to stoop to hardly bear contemplation. But I did contemplate them and, at last, found I could not leave the story unwritten.

In doing so I had to immerse myself in the world Jane Austen created for Emma Woodhouse and the inhabitants of Highbury. All writers of historical fiction immerse themselves in their chosen period and become familiar with its prominent personalities. I had to do the same, but my chosen world was Highbury and my subjects were the characters Jane Austen had created. To be absolutely sure of getting it right I went back thirty years, reconstructing them, their world and mine stone by stone into one cohesive whole. Mrs Bates of Highbury and The Other Miss Bates were the result, my training ground for Dear Jane.

Highbury’s geography is not minutely detailed in ‘Emma’. We know there is a village street with an inn called the Crown and shops, including a post office and the famous Ford’s Haberdashery. The Bates’s apartment is above one of these stores - accessed by a notoriously tricky stair - with sight of the Crown from its windows. There is a church with an adjacent vicarage. Hartfield - the Woodhouses’ mansion - lies about a mile from Donwell and half a mile from Randalls. The first thing I did was to map out my idea of the layout of the village so that I could picture the practicalities of the comings and goings of the Highbury folk.

I read and re-read Emma, getting to know the characters, their relationships to one another, their modes of speech, their funny little mannerisms. I put a different spin on some of them - this is my book, after all. Most of all I placed myself in the shoes of Jane and Frank, asking how, in their early experiences of bereavement, in their transplantation into the homes of strangers, in their upbringing as perpetual guests, they had become the people we meet in Emma.

In addition to working with what Miss Austen had provided I had to expand into areas she had not described. Indeed, that was my whole purpose in writing Dear Jane, to write the story which she had hinted at but left unwritten. For some of this task I had a clean canvas. We are told only the barest details of Jane and Frank’s childhoods, but enough for me to be able to use as a foundation for the story which emerges in Dear Jane. What a delight it was to picture Jane’s life in London with the Campbells, to expose her to culture and society that poor Highbury-bound Miss Woodhouse could only dream of! How awful could I make Frank’s life with Mrs Churchill - so dreadful that he would risk everything to enter into a secret engagement? Characters that Jane Austen had created but not developed were mine to play with; Mr and Mrs Churchill, Colonel and Mrs Campbell, the Dixons.

Jane Austen tells us nothing of Jane and Frank’s meeting in Weymouth, their romance is unexplored. But not by me. Oh what joy to introduce them on the sunny promenade and watch their mutual attraction - and mutual need - unfurl!

Having formed the characters I ventured forward into the precincts of Emma. Plot and character together had to meld into a flip-side novel but one which was faithful in every respect to the one Jane Austen had already provided. In Emma, Jane Austen creates opportunities for Jane and Frank to meet one another which she quite deliberately does not exploit; these dictated my scenes. For example, we know that, after meeting Emma for the first time at Hartfield, Frank goes off to pay a duty call to Jane Fairfax because, he says, ‘there was that degree of acquaintance in Weymouth’ which required it. It seems innocent enough until you find out what’s been going on behind the scenes. Of course, for my story, it was an encounter I couldn’t wait to write into existence. Again, after Mrs Cole’s dinner party, Frank contrives to be alone with Jane while Miss Bates and Mrs Weston fetch Miss Woodhouse. Old Mrs Bates, rather deaf and, conveniently, without her spectacles, serves as no very effective chaperone. What did they discuss? Would they have been flagrant enough, with the old lady snoozing in her chair, to exchange a kiss? And later, as Mrs Elton’s harrying and Frank’s continued procrastination begin to take their toll on Jane’s health, how would these pressures have erupted in the row the couple undoubtedly had on the Donwell Road on the day of the strawberry picking?

These scenes have been calling to me since I first read Emma. Whether I have done them justice, whether I have effectively explained the conundrum of Jane and Frank’s engagement, I leave it to the reader to decide

Amazon UK      Amazon US 

Allie Cresswell was born in Stockport, UK and began writing fiction as soon as she could hold a pencil.

She did a BA in English Literature at Birmingham University and an MA at Queen Mary College, London.

She has been a print-buyer, a pub landlady, a book-keeper, run a B & B and a group of boutique holiday cottages. Nowadays Allie writes full time having retired from teaching literature to lifelong learners.

She has two grown-up children, two granddaughters, two grandsons and two cockapoos but just one husband – Tim. They live in Cumbria, NW England.

Dear Jane is her ninth novel.

www.allie-cresswell.com

https://www.facebook.com/alliescribbler/

@alliescribbler