On Inspiration: Interview with Annie R McEwen

My guest this month is Annie R McEwen, a career historian who has lived in six countries and under every roof from a canvas tent to a Georgian Era manor house. She is published by Harbor Lane Books (US), Bloodhound Books (UK), The Wild Rose Press, and Rowan Prose Publishing. When she’s not in her 1920s bungalow in Florida, Annie lives, writes, and explores castles in Wales. A winner of the 2022 Page Turners Writing Award (Romance Category), Annie garnered both a First and Second Place 2022 RTTA (Romance Through the Ages Award), the 2023 MAGGIE Award, and the 2023 Daphne du Maurier Award. She was a Finalist for the 2024 Page Turners Writing Award and Shortlisted for a Writer’s Mentorship Award. Annie’s short fiction appears in numerous anthologies.

You can connect with Annie via her website, Facebook, Instagram, Goodreads and Bluesky

Annie’s latest release is the The Corset Girls, Unlaced. You can find all Annie’s books on Amazon.

What or who inspired you to first write? Which authors have influenced you?

As a teen I was mad for writers of the Romantic Age (early to late, British, French, and American): Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edgar Allan Poe, Emile Zola. In more modern fiction, and as a genre fiction author, I have learned much from Diana Norman, Anne Perry, Dorothy Sayers, Daphne du Maurier, and the very clever Joanna Bourne.

What is the inspiration for your current book? Is there a particular theme you wished to explore?

The Corset Girls, Unlaced, is what I call Victorian noir romance. To say I’m inspired by history is self-evident—I’m a career historian—but as a reader of historical romance, especially that of the Regency to Edwardian Eras, I saw a preponderance of themes attached to the upper class at play: wealth, society gossip, the ballroom, bared shoulders and well-cut tailcoats. I like to write the working classes, especially in Industrial Age Britain. Their passion is just as soaring, their quest for happiness just as profound. In The Corset Girls four-book series, the focus is on four working women (staymakers) and the four men (all from problematic and even criminal backgrounds) who love them. All eight are swept along in an age of technological marvels and social unrest. None of the eight appear in Burke’s Peerage, but a couple might be found in Newgate Prison!

What period of history particularly inspires or interests you? Why?

My deep love for and kinship with the Victorian and Edwardian Ages comes from three sources: one familial, one literary, one academic/professional. Familial: One of the most influential people in my childhood was my godmother, born in 1884. A near-invalid, she lived in a cottage surrounded by reminders of her genteel past, and told story after story of what it was like to be a child before automobiles and telephones. Literary: The books I most loved as a child were written in the 1800s. The first I wept over was Black Beauty. I learned what fantasy and adventure were from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson. Charles Dickens taught me about writing character, and how each individual is a metonym for the greater society of the time. Academic and Professional: At university, I was drawn to the vast changes in Western society from the 1840s to World War One; the material culture of that interval is my area of specialisation.

When I became a museum professional (more than 27 years in that work), I had the good fortune to be staff in two sites whose mission was the interpretation of that period (1886 and 1891, respectively), as well as the Executive Director of a historic (circa 1891) house museum. The decades presented at those sites offered the worst behaviours, the most grinding poverty, the most blatant inequality, and the deepest despair. At the same time, they offered a seemingly boundless world of science, ideas, the arts, and education. I find endless inspiration in that contrast.

What resources do you use to research your book?  How long did it take to finish the novel?

While the final manuscript of The Corset Girls, Unlaced coalesced over a year, I had already spent two years developing the series concept. To write the books, I rely on many years of prior research into Britain in the 1890s, refreshed—as always—by new scholarly work published every week. I’m a fan of the Internet only insofar as it’s the handiest and largest encyclopedia in the known world. It is flawed, however, and is more problematic since the intrusion of AI into search engines. I still use books, the digital or paper kind, and engage my academic habit of digging through scholarly journals (most of them digitised today.) A few online blogs or compendia of historical knowledge provide help: the Jane Austen Centre’s blog articles, for example, or Candace Hern’s excellent website. And The Historical Novel Society, of course.

What do you do if stuck for a word or a phrase?

Walk away, have a cuppa, try again.

Is there anything unusual or even quirky that you would like to share about your writing?

I usually retire early and wake at three in the morning. I then write steadily until around ten or eleven a.m.

Do you use a program like Scrivener to create your novel? Do you ever write in long hand?

The first, no, never. The second, sometimes. I do some of my best writing in notebooks I keep in my car and scribble upon in coffeeshops. What I write that way undergoes a lot of revision in its journey to a typed manuscript, however.

Is there a particular photo or piece of art that strikes a chord with you? Why?

Like most people who first see famous art in a book, I fell in love as a teenager with Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. As an adult, when I saw the actual painting in the Uffizi in Florence, I was struck by how small it is. It demonstrated that enduring art is not necessarily big. In my work, I don’t strive for big. I strive for compactly interesting, highly textured, and, if possible, beautiful. I also love Ophelia by John Everett Millais. (1851 Google Art Project).

What advice would you give an aspiring author?

People will tell you, ‘Don’t stop.’ I say, ‘Don’t stop improving.’

Tell us about your next book.

Boundless, the last of a trilogy of ghost romance novels (all with hefty historical content), launches later this year. Book Two of The Corset Girls (titled Unbound) sees the light in Summer 2025. Moonlight and Margaritas, launching in March 2025, is a romance anthology that includes my short story set in London just prior to WWII: a tale of spies, love, and cocktails.

After a desperate act leaves Jillian Morehouse a fugitive, she flees to Whitechapel. The escapee finds work in a Mayfair corset workshop, but the walls are closing in.

Jillian catches the eye of the handsome Michael Kelly, a reformed criminal with a dangerous history he’s anxious to keep hidden. The pair are drawn together by a powerful attraction—but their love is tested when she’s kidnapped and abandoned in the catacombs beneath London.

With enemies circling and secrets threatening to destroy them both, Jillian and Michael must confront their darkest fears . . . or lose everything to the shadows of their pasts.

Thanks Annie – all the best with The Corset Girls, Unlaced. I love the idea of Victorian noir!

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