Help with backstory for cross-dressing woman writer in 1780s London?
It's that time of year again...novel-writing time! This year's novel -- presently titled Chasing Ghosts, though we all know these things are subject to change -- is managing to combine lots of things I find totally fascinating (18th century London, woman writers, the French Revolution, cross-dressing, modern academia, etc.) and I am actually very excited about it, but because of the novel's structure I sort of need to flesh out at least some of what's going to happen.
The novel alternates between a present and a past timeline, as a modern PhD candidate and an armchair historian-cum-medium (as in “talks to ghosts” medium-yes, it’s that kind of story) work together to discover new information about a (totally made-up) late-eighteenth-century writer and radical intellectual figure, Dorian Bell. He lived in London from ~1780-1790, starting as a publisher’s apprentice but eventually writing essays, poems, and a novel or two, while circulating at the edges of the group that contained Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Thomas Paine, etc. And as it turns out, “he” was also not actually a man, but a woman by the name of Dorothea who ran away from home in north Yorkshire and ended up spending the next ten years of her life cross-dressing in London. But this fact remains unknown to 21st century scholars…until Ellie’s dissertation advisor tells her she has no choice but to consult a medium (Ben) before submitting her finished dissertation and completing her PhD requirements. Together, Ellie and Ben slowly unearth clues to Dorian/Dorothea’s past, culminating with the discovery that she was in fact a woman.
The problem is, since Ellie and Ben will be finding out about Dorian/Dorothea’s life out of order, I need to know the entire progression of her story before I start writing if I’m going to appropriately pace the clues! I have a basic outline of what happens to her, but I haven’t made a lot of decisions yet as to background motivation or reasoning.
Things I know:
-Dorothea grows up in Yorkshire, but runs away for unknown reasons when she is 15 or 16
-Somehow she makes her way from Yorkshire to London (not necessarily all at once)
-In London, she becomes apprentice to a small printer/publisher (having already begun dressing as a boy)
-Through this publisher, she meets awesome figures from the London radical intellectual movement
-More things happen! Hopefully exciting things!
-ultimately, Dorothea fakes “Dorian’s” death in France in 1791-2, then returns to England and lives there as Dorothea
Things I really don’t know:
-Why does Dorothea leave? What conditions at home are so bad that she can’t stand to be there anymore? And how, exactly, does Dorothea get from Yorkshire to London? Running away is one thing, running that far is another. Especially as a young girl, because English roads are not the place to be a young girl!
-Related to this, how does she stumble upon the cross-dressing? I'm tempted to portray her as finding it a useful disguise while running away from home, one that she later decides to adopt full-time, but I don’t know how “overdone” this would feel…and I want there to be a fraught moment in which she has to decide, early on, between revealing herself as a girl and continuing on with someone’s assumption that she’s a boy.
-Once she’s committed to the cross-dressing, does she ever tell anyone? I feel like she needs to know someone who knows what she’s up to, but I don’t know who that figure could be and every possibility seems so typical (ex. A woman who’s part of a theatrical troupe and serves as Dorothea’s tailor, or a woman with whom she has a fake courtship so that she can keep up the guise of being a man, or maybe even a very foppish tailor a la Sassy Gay Friend?).
-While there will be a man within this intellectual circle that Dorothea sort of falls for, I can’t decide whether I want her to reveal her secret and become involved in a relationship with him or not. If she does tell him, they’ll start up an affair that will have its own set of complications, but will end with Dorothea becoming pregnant and going to France to fake her own death since her pregnancy would give her away. If she doesn’t tell him, she’ll fake her death for other reasons, but after she’s done so she may later try to befriend him as Dorothea (probably only to find that he has already married another woman, though she may still have a short but torrid affair with him).
It's a long post so I won't make it any longer, except to mention that this is cross-posted on the NaNo forums in case you wanted to reply there instead, and to say thanks in advance for ANYTHING you have to suggest!
The novel alternates between a present and a past timeline, as a modern PhD candidate and an armchair historian-cum-medium (as in “talks to ghosts” medium-yes, it’s that kind of story) work together to discover new information about a (totally made-up) late-eighteenth-century writer and radical intellectual figure, Dorian Bell. He lived in London from ~1780-1790, starting as a publisher’s apprentice but eventually writing essays, poems, and a novel or two, while circulating at the edges of the group that contained Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Thomas Paine, etc. And as it turns out, “he” was also not actually a man, but a woman by the name of Dorothea who ran away from home in north Yorkshire and ended up spending the next ten years of her life cross-dressing in London. But this fact remains unknown to 21st century scholars…until Ellie’s dissertation advisor tells her she has no choice but to consult a medium (Ben) before submitting her finished dissertation and completing her PhD requirements. Together, Ellie and Ben slowly unearth clues to Dorian/Dorothea’s past, culminating with the discovery that she was in fact a woman.
The problem is, since Ellie and Ben will be finding out about Dorian/Dorothea’s life out of order, I need to know the entire progression of her story before I start writing if I’m going to appropriately pace the clues! I have a basic outline of what happens to her, but I haven’t made a lot of decisions yet as to background motivation or reasoning.
Things I know:
-Dorothea grows up in Yorkshire, but runs away for unknown reasons when she is 15 or 16
-Somehow she makes her way from Yorkshire to London (not necessarily all at once)
-In London, she becomes apprentice to a small printer/publisher (having already begun dressing as a boy)
-Through this publisher, she meets awesome figures from the London radical intellectual movement
-More things happen! Hopefully exciting things!
-ultimately, Dorothea fakes “Dorian’s” death in France in 1791-2, then returns to England and lives there as Dorothea
Things I really don’t know:
-Why does Dorothea leave? What conditions at home are so bad that she can’t stand to be there anymore? And how, exactly, does Dorothea get from Yorkshire to London? Running away is one thing, running that far is another. Especially as a young girl, because English roads are not the place to be a young girl!
-Related to this, how does she stumble upon the cross-dressing? I'm tempted to portray her as finding it a useful disguise while running away from home, one that she later decides to adopt full-time, but I don’t know how “overdone” this would feel…and I want there to be a fraught moment in which she has to decide, early on, between revealing herself as a girl and continuing on with someone’s assumption that she’s a boy.
-Once she’s committed to the cross-dressing, does she ever tell anyone? I feel like she needs to know someone who knows what she’s up to, but I don’t know who that figure could be and every possibility seems so typical (ex. A woman who’s part of a theatrical troupe and serves as Dorothea’s tailor, or a woman with whom she has a fake courtship so that she can keep up the guise of being a man, or maybe even a very foppish tailor a la Sassy Gay Friend?).
-While there will be a man within this intellectual circle that Dorothea sort of falls for, I can’t decide whether I want her to reveal her secret and become involved in a relationship with him or not. If she does tell him, they’ll start up an affair that will have its own set of complications, but will end with Dorothea becoming pregnant and going to France to fake her own death since her pregnancy would give her away. If she doesn’t tell him, she’ll fake her death for other reasons, but after she’s done so she may later try to befriend him as Dorothea (probably only to find that he has already married another woman, though she may still have a short but torrid affair with him).
It's a long post so I won't make it any longer, except to mention that this is cross-posted on the NaNo forums in case you wanted to reply there instead, and to say thanks in advance for ANYTHING you have to suggest!