Katharine McGee, the bestselling author of the American Royals series, turns back the clock to 19th-century Europe in her new YA historical romance novel A Queen’s Game, the first book in a planned duology inspired by true events. Three teenage noblewomen—Alix of Hesse, exiled French princess Hélène d’Orléans, and Her Serene Highness May of Teck—find themselves caught in a web of political alliances as the queen of England plays matchmaker for her sprawling family. It’s Queen Victoria’s world and the protagonists of this 1889–set, royalty-studded period piece are just living in it. In a conversation with PW, McGee talked about her lifelong love of history and the British monarchy, and the challenges of balancing fact and fiction.
You spoke with PW in 2016 about the publication of your debut YA thriller The Thousandth Floor. Why did you move toward writing contemporary romances centering royalty?
While I do really love an elaborate speculative setting, I think the most important thing in all my books has always been the relationships between the characters. At their core, my stories are actually more similar than they would seem at first glance, because they’re all about young people and how they relate to one another, and the conflicts that come with families and found families and friends, and with growing up and romance. Whether it’s in a futuristic science fiction novel about a multi-story skyscraper or an alternate version of the present day where America has a royal family or Victorian England, the central challenges are always similar.
Speaking of Victorian England, what prompted you to write a historical fiction series?
This is a home game for me—I’m in really familiar territory. This is the kind of book that I read for fun, so the writing itself came so easily. Historical fiction has always been my first love. I grew up on Philippa Gregory and Margaret George. I’ve wanted to write a historical fiction novel for forever, I just had to get my agent and my publisher on board. I knew that my editor [Caroline Abbey] and I were going to have a good time on this project, because the moment that I told her about the characters, she said, “Oh, George and Nicholas? Those are the cousins who looked like twins. They have this famous picture with the beards.”
People are sometimes scared of historical fiction. It can be polarizing—some readers find it intimidating. This new series is historical fiction at its most approachable in the sense that the characters think and feel a little bit more like modern young women than Victorian women truly did, but you still have all the trappings of the era that make for such a good story: the forbidden love, the conflicts of families that can’t be together, and of course, grand ballrooms and carriages and tiaras.
How much research did you do before you felt confident tackling this story?
I first stumbled across these relationships while reading a biography about Queen Victoria. Then I got to the section about her 42 grandchildren, several of whose marriages she personally arranged across various European thrones. There were all these stories about young people who were constantly being engaged, and then engagements were broken off, and then they got reengaged to different people; many of them become very prominent historical figures. It was so juicy. It was shocking to me that no one had made it into a mini-series on BBC.
I did both quite a lot and far less research than I wish I could. I once spoke on a book panel with Jodi Picoult where she said she spends a year researching every book. That sounds like a dream.
In some sense, I’ve been reading about these people my whole life because I have such a deep-rooted fascination with history and with monarchy, particularly the British monarchy. I’ve read at least one biography about each historical figure I feature. There’s obviously a lot of material on Bertie, the Prince of Wales, because he became king, and even though he doesn’t really play a huge role in my story, the books that I’ve read about him and the information I’ve learned from them have given a lot of texture and depth to the narrative. The research that I’ve done is not necessarily about the specific events that I’m writing about in the book, but about getting the overall sense of how it felt to live in that time period. I find that everything I read finds a way to pop up into the story and make it feel more real.
I’m also constantly reading fiction novels set in this time. I love Evie Dunmore and Edith Wharton. I find that they put me in the right headspace. I constantly fall into the trap of wanting to make my characters think in a modern way, and so I have to strike a balance of making them feel approachable to readers without making them feel like 21st-century women.
Was it challenging to build a fictional narrative using a preexisting historical framework?
These have been the easiest books to write partially because they’re based on real events that happened among real historical figures. That said, I’m very used to being in the driver’s seat. But now I’ve got limited options. It’s a new experience for me. I had to do so much juggling of my own imagination and real facts.
While I read these peoples’ diaries and their letters and their multiple biographies, and while I try my best to be true to who I think they were, I am also creating things. Even though they’re based on real people, they are first and foremost characters who just so happened to come to me with content. The people I’m creating have minds of their own and are trying to take the story in their own direction. I do have to fight sometimes to make them do what they did historically.
One of the things I struggled with was how closely should I adhere to the true timeline. How much am I willing to let go of the history? The biggest example of this is at the end of A Queen’s Game where all the characters get together at a wedding. In real life, not all these people were in attendance, but I decided for the sake of the narrative that it would be more fun to have them all in the same place at the same time.
There are, of course, some things that I’ve completely fabricated, where there’s a very large historical gap in the record. In those instances, I’ll step in with an outlandish explanation that I think creates a really fun story.
A Queen’s Game ends with a cliffhanger. What can you tell us about the duology conclusion?
I would love if readers exercised the self-control to not go reading about the history, which I think is a very tall order. For most book series, you can’t cheat. But if you go on Wikipedia, you’ll know what’s coming. My sister read A Queen’s Game and has shown incredible willpower by not doing any research. She keeps peppering me for book two; she wants to know who marries whom. I’m very proud of her for not cheating, but she is wrong about who she thinks is going to end up together and it makes me laugh. She could just go look it up any moment, but I think the fun of it is going on that journey with the characters. If I was writing this without the historical guide, I’m not sure I would’ve taken book two where I did. But I’m beholden to the history.
What else are you working on?
Aside from taking care of my two children, which is its own full-time job, I’m working on something that hasn’t been announced yet: my first adult project.
A Queen’s Game (The Princess Game #1) by Katharine McGee. Random House, $20.99 Nov. 12 ISBN 978-0-593-71070-8
