The Accident of the Author

Books start with a concept, then a plan. Mine were accidents, of search.

An idle moment in 2006, browsing The Times archive in the British Library, led to the tabloid front pages of a distant relation. Mary Jane Fearneaux was a great-grandfather’s second cousin, sent to prison in 1882, a forgotten fraudress. Busy with career and family, her biography was filed for retirement. By 2018, online access to newly digitised archives revealed her fleeting fame, but also her scandalous cross-dressing context. This was an astonishing story, hidden for over a century.

The author (b 1952) knew little of such matters, admitting to a traditional British education at Cothill and Eton, followed by the less conventional route of University of Sussex (BA Economics & Sociology), marketing the Beatles at EMI Music, then an MBA at London Business School (1983). Their professional career as strategy and innovation consultant, working for corporate clients in technology, media, and telecoms, taught them to check facts, to test assumptions, and to present hypothesis-analysis-conclusion.

The fraudress turned out to be a piece in a much larger moral jigsaw: the rise of feminism, and a scandal of gender. Writing Rebels and Romance, the author had completed Gladwell’s ten thousand hours, now expert on the history of women, in understanding the hidden past. Except, why had an aristocrat’s death been faked, why was the early struggle of women buried, why so deeply? Solving the mystery of Victorian morality became a challenge.

This is where the author’s background, their education and experience, and their new passions kicked in. The internet soon revealed a mass of contemporary evidence, blowing away the mists of silence. It helped that there was a pandemic, little else to do, so they kept looking, kept reading, kept writing, sure in the power of search.

Scandals and Silence was a sequel, the answer to an accident.