A woman falls for the man she is tasked with investigating in Lovise’s second Secret Society of Governess Spies novel, Never Gamble Your Heart (Forever, Feb.).
Your series centers on an all-female spy agency focused on uncovering and correcting society’s wrongs, especially those committed by the aristocracy. What was the inspiration?
I was thinking about who writes history, and how usually it is the people who are in power. I was also thinking about all the women’s stories that have gone unwritten in history and I wondered, “What if there was a secret group of women who were doing all these amazing things in London in the early Victorian times, and we just never heard about it?” I didn’t want to make them duchesses, so I landed on governesses, who are in all the houses and listening to all the stories and know what’s happening.
The hero of this book, Jasper Jones, is a self-made man. Why create a male lead who is outside of the aristocracy?
I had done that with my first book in the series as well, because I needed to have characters who could get close to that world but also be far enough away to have some perspective on it. With this book, I wanted a similar story where I have two people who aren’t exactly part of the elite but who rub shoulders with the folks who are, so they know where to look for secrets. Also, I still needed them to have power. At that time, money was power. And really, it still is.
Tell me about the heroine’s backstory.
Frankie grew up thinking that no one could ever love her because she was too smart. Her mother raised her to think that you can’t be smarter or better than men because it hurts their egos, and no one is going to want you. When Frankie meets Jasper, she’s internalized that message and doesn’t believe that anyone would ever be interested in her that way. As for her job choice, she was genteelly born but impoverished, so she did not have a lot of options: it was marriage or being a governess. She chose being a governess because she didn’t think marriage was an option. But even if she had thought marriage was an option, I think Frankie would have chosen governess because it gave her a little bit more freedom.
How do you approach writing a heroine who bucks the norms of her time?
I think it is important to show that women being smart and powerful and having their own agency isn’t this newfangled modern thing. Women have been intelligent just as long as men have been. It just wasn’t celebrated or even allowed to be shown in a lot of instances. I have no interest in writing books where the women are stereotypes. I want to show them as they actually are, and that is intelligent and brave. Everyone has vulnerabilities, but I don’t think that is specific to sex. Men have vulnerabilities, too. It is okay to show women with vulnerabilities, but I want to show the other sides of them that sometimes get glossed over.
