Gillian Bagwell: The Darling Strumpet

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Title: The Darling Strumpet
Author: Gillian Bagwell
Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group
Trade Paperback: 370 pages
ISBN: 978 0425 23859 2
ASIN: B004FGMQRK

Number One Novels: Congratulations on the publication of your first book! Tell me a little about it—what's your pitch?

Gillian Bagwell: Fortunately, I don’t have a pitch! The only time I did anything like a pitch was at the Historical Novel Society Conference in 2007, when I met with an editor. Unfortunately, she (and the rest of the editors) wouldn’t even read anything from authors with no agents, so that meeting was all for nothing. I should have met with an agent.

However, The Darling Strumpet is a novel based on the life of Nell Gwynn, who rose from the streets to become one of London’s most beloved actresses and the lifelong mistress of King Charles II.

NON: How did you get the idea for your novel?

GB: When I was a wild-eyed and ambitious young actress of 23, just finishing a yearlong professional acting training program at The Drama Studio London at Berkeley, one of the teachers, a young British actor who had recently come over from England to teach, got an astonishing amount of notice for his performance in a one-man show. In fact, that work catapulted him into a career that has kept him busy ever since.

I thought he had a good strategy, and decided I’d write a show for myself to perform. But what to write about? My father suggested Nell Gwynn. I didn’t know much about her, but as I began researching her life, I fell in love with Nell and her story. She was born into poverty in London in 1650, began working as an orange seller at the brand-new Theatre Royal on Drury Lane 1663, got noticed, and soon became the lover and protégé of Charles Hart, the leading actor of the King’s Company.

One of the first things that Charles II did upon his restoration to the throne was permit women to act, instead of the boys who had played men’s roles in the old days. Nell was one of the very first English actresses, and her gamine sex appeal and saucy personality made her an instant hit with London audiences. After the long closure of the theatres under Cromwell, a new generation of playwrights was at work, and Nell and Hart quickly became the William Powell and Myrna Loy of the 1660s, playing opposite each other as sparring and witty lovers in a series of star vehicles written just for them. Nell’s career took place during some of the most intriguing and important years in the history of the English theatre.

The newly-opened theatres were popular with the nobility – and the king – and Nell soon caught the eye of Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, later the Earl of Dorset, and became his mistress. It wasn’t long, however, before she rose even higher – to the bed of the king himself.

Charles II had many mistresses, but Nell was unique for several reasons. She wasn’t a noble lady, but a child of the gutter, who had risen from poverty on the strength of her wit, charm, determination, and likeable sex appeal. She never put on airs or pretended to be other than she was, and this won her the love of the people.

Another reason Nell was better liked was that she was English, unlike another of Charles’s long-term mistresses, the baby-faced Louise de Keroualle, who promoted French interests, cost the royal purse quite a lot of money, and was spoiled and weepy into the bargain. Nell called her the Weeping Willow and Squintabella.

Nell didn’t care about politics. She cared about Charles for himself, and was faithful to him until his death, and that too set her apart from Charles’s other women, notably Barbara Palmer, later the Duchess of Cleveland, and Hortense Mancini, the Duchess of Mazarin.

So I set out to put Nell’s life on stage. I did write the script, but never completed it to my satisfaction. And no wonder – I found it was impossible to cover the richness of Nell’s story – which encompassed not only the dazzling worlds of the theatre and court, but also the devastating plague of 1665 that killed a third of the population of London, and the Great Fire of 1666 that destroyed most of the old City – in such a brief format.

So I put my script aside and embarked on an acting career that encompassed a lot of stage work and some film and TV. Eventually I began directing, and then founded The Pasadena Shakespeare Company, producing 37 shows over nine seasons. There was no time for writing during those years, but Nell stayed in my mind and heart and sometimes at the back of my mind I could hear her whispering “Someday….”

In January 2005, I learned that my mother, living alone in London, was terminally ill, and went over to take care of her. As it turned out, I was in London for almost a year and a half. It was a difficult time, with my own life on hold, halfway around the world from friends and family, and facing my mother’s death. There were also many positive aspects of my life in London. I spent more time with my mother than I had in many years, I made many good friends, and I became very familiar with a city that had enchanted me in so many books and movies all my life. Also, for the first time in my adult life, I had no career demanding my attention and no creative focus.

So I decided that I would finally take up Nell again, and present her life in a way that would do it justice, as a novel.

NON: No two authors seem to take the same route to publication, but almost every author has an interesting story about their journey. How did you get published? Did you use an agent? How did you find out that your book had sold?

GB: My mother died on Mother’s Day 2006, and I returned home to California in June. By that point I had written quite a lot of the first draft of my novel, and I was determined to complete it and sell it. I signed up for writing class at Vroman’s, a local bookstore, taught by author Kerry Madden, which gave me not only the benefit of Kerry’s teaching and weekly critique of material I submitted to her, but also the opportunity to get feedback from my classmates. They were encouraging, and I continued to work on the book.

I took Kerry’s class a second time in the spring of 2007, and shortly after that attended the biannual Historical Novel Society conference, which was held that year in Albany, New York. The conference was valuable not only for the panel discussions and presentations, but because I met other aspiring and published authors, and began to feel like a writer myself.

That fall I attended another conference, and had the opportunity to get critique from an agent on the first 20 pages of my book. She liked it a lot, and asked to see the first 100 pages. She liked that, too, and passed it on to a colleague, who said she was very interested and was willing to work with me and guide me as I completed the novel.

The book went through four or five drafts, but finally, in July 2009, I thought it was ready, and sent it off to the agent who had given me so much support – Kevan Lyon of Marsal Lyon Literary Agency. When she was halfway through it, she emailed to say she wanted to officially represent me. Within a couple of weeks, in late August, she had submitted it to a list of eight publishers, I believe. Four of them asked to read it, and two made offers. By the first week of October, Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin, had bought the book – as well as my second book, as yet unwritten, on the basis of a one-page synopsis.

I know that I’ve had a much easier time than many writers in finding an agent and a publisher. But lest you think that it happened overnight, let me assure you that that’s really not true. I had been thinking about Nell for more than 20 years when I began writing the novel, always picking up the odd bit of knowledge about her life and the times in which she lived. And the years I spent working in theatre gave me the perspective that enabled me to bring vividly to life the theatrical conditions and performances of Nell’s time. Then too, the loves and heartbreaks I endured, as well as that amazing time living in London, which was both terribly difficult and also an opportunity for personal growth, contributed to my ability to tell Nell’s story. I could not have written this book when I was 23; it had to wait. And I think that my joy is fuller, my satisfaction deeper, at this accomplishment that took so long, than anything I could have imagined so long ago when I first learned about dear Nell Gwynn.

NON: I think that names say a lot about a person, especially a fictional person. How did you decide on your protagonist’s full name? Did you have any other names that were in the running?

GB: An easy question! Nell Gwynn was very much a real person, so I didn’t have to name her. Almost all of the major characters in the book and many of the minor ones are also real people who were a part of the real Nell’s world.

NON: Do you have another book in the works?

GB: While researching Nell Gwynn I learned of the unbelievable true story of Jane Lane, who risked her life to help the young Charles II escape after the disastrous Battle of Worcester in 1651 by disguising him as her servant. Jane's perilous and romantic odyssey with Charles is the subject of my second book, The September Queen, which will be published in the U.S. by Berkley Publishing Group in November 2011 and in the U.K. by Avon UK in November 2012.

I’m currently working on the proposal for my next project, which was inspired by people and events I learned about while researching The September Queen. It looks as though I’ll be stuck in seventeenth century England for a while, but that’s okay, I like it there!

NON: What's your writing routine? Do you write in the mornings, nights, daily, or when the mood strikes you?

GB: One of my favorite quotes about getting things written is something to the effect of “I write when I feel inspired. And I make sure I’m inspired every morning at 9 o’clock.” Just do it, in other words. In Walter Mosely’s book This Year You Write Your Novel, he has some good practical advice. One line that sticks with me is “Let the paint peel from the walls!” The book has to be the first priority.

I don’t have a particular schedule except to write as much as I can. Usually a couple thousand words at day at least. I think my record was about 20 pages in a day. I was very motivated by Kevan’s interest in The Darling Strumpet, and the feeling that finishing the book and selling it wasn’t just pie in the sky but a realistic goal. I gave myself a much too short deadline for finishing the second book, so I really had to drive myself to get it done. It was originally due June 1, but fortunately my editor was behind schedule and kept pushing the deadline back. I turned in the book at the end of August, about ten months after I started it. It really wasn’t fun writing under so much pressure. It didn’t allow leisure to let things percolate in my mind. I’d like a year for my next project.

NON: What’s your favorite way to procrastinate?

GB: Obsessive checking of emails, Facebook, Amazon sales rankings, and the news on the CNN and Guardian websites.

Research is also something that while essential in writing historical fiction can be a hazard when I actually need to start writing.

NON: What’s your favorite non-essential item on your desk?

GB: There is usually at least one cat supervising my work.

NON: What are you currently reading?

GB: I just got a Kindle yesterday. The first book I bought for it was Peter Ackroyd’s Thames: The Biography, and I read the first couple of chapters immediately. I really like his London: The Biography. Last night I downloaded the complete works of Mark Twain ($1.79), the complete works of Shakespeare ($1.99) and Le Morte d’Arthur (89 cents!). I can tell the Kindle is going to be a great tool for research. You can highlight passages and easily find them later, make notes, etc. And download public domain works from Google Books and Project Gutenberg to the Kindle, instead of having to either read them on a computer screen or print them out.

In the real world, however, I just finished Leslie Carroll’s non-fiction Notorious Royal Marriages, which was fascinating and encompassed a staggering amount of research, and I’m reading J.D. Davies’ Gentleman Captain, a seafaring tale set shortly after the Restoration of Charles II, definitely my period. Davies will be one of the participants in the panel on naval history I’ll be moderating at the Historical Novel Society conference in June, which will be in San Diego this year.