A little more than a month ago, I reviewed Quenby Olson’s Regency-era fantasy, Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons on this site. In the review I totally gushed about the book—and I gave it a full 10 stars. Naturally, I had to investigate the source of such brilliance with an interview.
What about the Regency era appeals to you?
I grew up reading and watching every Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell adaptation known to mankind, and being from a tiny, rural town in Central Pennsylvania, it just seemed like this lovely dream world with pretty dresses and balls and tea, so much tea. Who can resist tea?
What is your favorite Jane Austen novel, and why is it Jane Eyre? (ha ha—that’s a joke, but feel free to share your thoughts on any early 19th C female author synergies that might influence your work.)
I mean, I do really like Jane Eyre! I love the governess trope, I love the grumpy, wounded Mr. Rochester (who I will argue about endlessly in his favor as K. S. Villoso already knows…) but I’ll probably say that my favorite Jane Austen is Persuasion. Because second chance romance? Older (for Jane Austen standards) main characters? Anne Elliot learning to shrug off the influences and constraints of her family to strike out on her own? YES, PLEASE.
Do all your books have something fantastical in them? What drives you to write historical romance versus historical fantasy?
Not all of my books have something fantastical in them (unless you mean their overall quality… ahaha… oh) ANYWAY, I began writing historical romance first, but had always wanted to write historical fantasy, yet worried there wouldn’t be much of an audience for it. But after writing more than a half dozen books, I started to realize I didn’t much care whether or not there was an audience for the stories I wanted to write, so I simply… started writing them.
So, if you write them, they will come. Has that turned out to be true for you?
Well, [Miss Percy] seems to be selling pretty well? I’m actually surprised by its reception, honestly. But I do see other books like this cropping up now, fantasy with a lighter edge to it, a hopeful edge. And after the last two years, I can see why there would be an audience for it, definitely.
Have you ever regretted publishing anything you’ve written?
Nope. It’s all a learning process. I’ll make mistakes, and I’ll continue to make them, but I have to learn from them. That’s the key. Do better. Write better. And don’t dwell too much on the past. (That’s for every night at 3am when I can’t sleep.)
In your Sundered Veil series, Dorothea is a spiritualist. What inspired you to write a story involving spiritualism?
I’ve always been fascinated with that period during the Victorian era, when there was the mingling of industrialization and great leaps in science all tangled up with a fascination with death and the macabre, as though in moving so swiftly forward people started clinging to that something… more, something to do with their souls while machines and progress stirred to life around them.
Ooh, this makes me want to read the Dorothea books even more. I’ve got to get on that. But now let’s turn to Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide. On social media a while back, we briefly talked about the resemblance between Miss Percy and Persuasion, but how you weren’t even thinking about that book when you wrote it. Where did it come from?
I wish I knew! It wasn’t a story I was agonizing over or making notes on for months and months prior to beginning. I had a small spark of an idea, and then the first lines came to me as clear as day out of nowhere, and then… that was it. I had it all written down in about three months during the beginning of the pandemic. (I wish I had a better story to tell about its origins, but really, that’s it.)
Mature protagonists are relatively uncommon in fantasies, particularly when they’re women. Did this gap have anything to do with the creation of Miss Percy?
I love stories like The Hobbit, where you have Bilbo Baggins, settled and comfortable in his life and without any pining for adventures (or if there was pining, pining that was suitably smothered away and out of sight) but then being thrust into this huge, epic journey they’d never fully signed up for. And being a not-terribly-young person myself anymore, I wanted to see someone more like myself on the page. Someone who creaks and cracks a bit when they wake up, who sometimes falls into the rut of thinking that only the young, energetic kids can accomplish things, that our time is somehow behind us. When for a lot of us, these fourth and fifth decades (and beyond) can be the beginning of everything!
I couldn’t help thinking about dear old Bilbo as I read Mildred’s story. Maybe it was the love of cake and tea. Miss Percy though is in a much less privileged position than Bilbo—as not only a woman but as someone who is essentially a servant, or even a sort of slave, since she has been forced into her role of unpaid nanny. Another thing that struck me was the fact that Miss Percy is immensely clever and capable, yet her lack of worldliness and experience leads to some trouble. I appreciate how you crafted a female character who, when we meet her, adheres to the strictures of her time, and the limitations that imposes on her. Can you comment on that?
It was a really interesting thing, putting this story together about a time that seemed to have so many rules about how things were done, and to toss a bit of fantasy into the mix, leaving these characters to watch their carefully ordered world completely fall to pieces with the hatching of a dragon egg. So while Miss Percy has the knowledge given to her from a decent education, from reading (a lot), from raising children (not her own), it doesn’t fully set her up as someone who can jaunt across the country with a dragon in her keeping. And I suppose… goodness, isn’t that most people? We leave school, we enter adulthood with some tiny portion of knowledge and wisdom wedged into our heads, and then life just drops a proverbial dragon egg in our lap and we’re suddenly out to sea!
I loved how Miss Percy rises to the occasion, but not without some life lessons along the way. One of my favorite scenes in the book is her and Fitz’s encounter with a…let’s call him a highwayman. Absolutely hilarious. Is the humor in Miss Percy typical of your work, or are your other books more serious?
Most of my other books are more serious. My first book, rarely mentioned, is a contemporary romance/coming-of-age book loosely based on Pride and Prejudice. It’s called Knotted and I had a lot of fun with that one, injecting as much humor as I could into its pages. And then I published The Half Killed after that (which I had written round and about the same time as Knotted) and since that one received greater critical praise, that was the route I thought I needed to take. Gloomy and fantastical. But… well, I was raised on humor. I gravitate towards more lighthearted things overall, so I think Miss Percy is the first step in realizing that humor is a HUGE part of my character and I’ve been keeping it under wraps (in my writing, at least) for too long.
I loved the portrait of Belinda. She’s a smarter, more conniving, and all around more badass version of Lydia Bennet—and it just occurred to me that the name Belinda is a bit of an anagram of Lydia Bennet, if we throw out some letters. Were you thinking of Lydia when you created Belinda?
Aha, I have to say she was extraordinarily fun to write! And yes, I did think of Lydia while shaping her at first. And then she started to become a much more dangerous version of Lydia, having more intelligence combined with that selfishness.
I saw on Twitter that you have author-cast Zendaya as Belinda and Timothée Chalamet as her hapless suitor Mr. Hawthorne. Most authors would love to see their work on screen, but we don’t want anybody to mess it up. If there ever were an adaptation of Miss Percy, what would be the most important element you would want the director to keep, and what would you be most fearful that they would drop or change it? (These could be the same thing, but not necessarily.)
I would most want them to remember that at its heart, this story is about Miss Percy growing and learning to live her life, the life she wants. And that such growth and change aren’t only for young adult stories, that at forty, fifty, sixty years old and beyond, we’re still capable of taking charge of our own narrative.
Of course, I fell in love with Fitz, who reminded me of a couple of male cats I’ve lived with, particularly when they were kittens. In your mind, is Fitz a cat or a dog?
Cat! Cat! Cat! 100% cat. I based a lot of Fitz’s behavior on my own childhood cat, except this version has wings and can breathe fire.
Did your household cat ever bite anyone in the [spoiler]?
Aha, no! But! She used to lie in wait for us behind doors and furniture, then leap out as we walked past, batting at our calves and climbing halfway up our thighs in some kind of bizarre attack rehearsal. So that was as close to… that area as she ever came.
What’s next for Miss Percy and Fitz? Where will their adventuring take us?
Wales, next. I had such immense pleasure researching Wales and creating this amalgam of fairy tale Wales crossed with historical Wales, and I really hope I pulled it off. It’s a gorgeous place, and Miss Percy (and company) absolutely falls in love with it.
Will Belinda appear in other Miss Percy books?
Hoo boy, does she ever…
Miss Percy’s Pocket Guide to the Care and Feeding of British Dragons is available now. I cannot recommend it highly enough and can hardly wait for the next volume! You can read more about it Quenby’s other works on her website and follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Title image background by Christina Deravedisian.
Julia Kitvaria Sarene
Jennie Ivins
Geoff Matthews