On The House

When Helen retired, she decided to have a twenty-year exit strategy which would see her through to old age. She would complete all the tasks she'd never finished and try to achieve things which she had put on hold while raising a large family and working full time. One of these projects was to try her hand at a novel. In the past her writing experience had been academic, as a professional in the education world. She began writing On the House in December 2012. This book came about following extensive research into her family history where she made a sad discovery. One of her ancestors volunteered for Wandsworth workhouse, where he hanged himself in 1863. What could have prompted such a desperate act? This led her to fascinating research about living conditions, regulation and control in nineteenth-century workhouses. In Victorian England, provision of welfare for the poor was a fractious political issue which divided opinion, as it still does today. But, while those issues are integral to the story, the events that unfold in this Suffolk workhouse in the early months of 1838 are considerably more graphic, as her synopsis describes. Helen enjoys all aspects of historical writing: developing the strands of ideas, researching and discovering the different perspectives of her characters. The Lawes and Hudson trilogy is now complete and she has grown to like her two protagonists. She hopes you will too.