Start Strong

Vicky (U.k.)

[reflection]

For 'Stories in your Writing Life', I took the route of 'Playing with Genre' (that has also overlapped with the third activity, 'Start Strong'. My research examines the practice of taking in lodgers in Victorian England through a reading of coroners' inquests. Below is the new opening from my chapter exploring what happens when the boundary between landlady and lodger is crossed. The widow who took in lodgers is often depicted as a man-eater, but I've uncovered a much more complicated picture. I had been struggling with the opening to this chapter, but taking this approach has helped develop the beginning. I used Marie Belloc Lowndes 'The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog', a crime novel, as a template but attempted to write more as a romance. The aim of what I've written below is the reader is to unsettle the reader, making them wonder whether the arrival of the lodger is a good or bad omen until my final sentence.

[Writing experiment]

Busied with washing, Betty was startled when a ‘sharp, quick, bold, confident rap’ came at the door. Hastily drying her hands, the widow made her way to the door. On the front step stood before her was a ‘powerfully and proportionally built’ man clearly in the ‘prime of manhood’, with ‘a heavy moustache and whiskers at each side of his face’. “I’ve come ‘bout the lodgings,” the bachelor declared. As the man stooped to enter her home, Betty immediately sensed a change in fortune. Had this been the opening scene of a Victorian music hall play or novel, what would have followed would have been ‘an embarrassing romantic pursuit of a resistant lodger’. However, Betty’s story – a story of reality – told in the pages of the Victorian press, took a very different trajectory.