CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR OTHER WOMEN

“As a freezing January gave way to a damp February, they spent their evenings sitting close and warm in cheerful pubs, stretching out the evening with whisky for him and sherry for her, letting the fiery sweetness sink down, letting it spread and burn. At a certain point in the evening, Tom would catch her eye and his hand would tighten over hers.”

From true crime to fiction

Other Women was inspired by the true story of Emily Beilby Kaye, who was murdered by her married lover, Herbert Patrick Mahon, on or about April 15th, 1924.
The case was huge in England at the time: it was a journalist’s dream, involving a brutal murder, a clandestine love affair, an illegitimate pregnancy – and, at the heart of it, a handsome and charismatic family man who was leading a secret double life.
When I first read about the case around twenty years ago, I wondered why most accounts focused more on the killer than on his victims. And I wondered about the terror his victims must have felt when they realised what lay behind his charming appearance.
While I was writing Other Women, I saw a documentary about the American serial killer Ted Bundy – another attractive, charismatic man who led an appalling double life, and who fascinated the media and the popular imagination. Bundy killed beautiful women in their late teens and early twenties. At his trial, the courtroom was filled with young women who looked just like the photographs of those he had killed – women who could have been his victims. This fascination interested and unnerved me – what made these women come to his trial day after day, week after week? Watching this documentary reminded me of the account of the case I’d read years before – and when I went back to it, I saw the same kind of fascination with evil. In 1924, women from all areas of society queued for seats in the courtroom to watch the killer give evidence. They stood for hours outside the cottage where the murder had happened, and they paid the policemen on duty to let them pick flowers from the cottage garden as souvenirs.
This kind of fascination was one of the initial inspirations for Other Women. I wanted to explore why we are so drawn to evil, especially when it appears behind a handsome mask. Why do we want to be near it, and why do we want to examine it so closely, when we know it has the potential to harm us?
I don’t have any easy answers to this, but perhaps one answer lies in the fairy tale belief that beauty equals goodness. This maxim is usually applied to women, but Mahon and Bundy – conventionally attractive men – seemed to have no trouble attracting admirers who believed their stories even when the extent of their crimes were revealed.
Perhaps it also lies in a stubborn determination to hope that men like these are just misunderstood. A belief that if they’d just met the right woman, she might have saved them from a life of murder and mayhem. Or a belief that if they met the right woman after their arrest, she might still save them from damnation, by encouraging to express remorse and ask for forgiveness.
Whatever the truth of it, it seems that the burden of responsibility – a responsibility to believe in this man’s goodness, despite all the evidence to the contrary, or a responsibility to somehow save him for himself – still lies with the women in his life.

…she recalled the woman she had been in London: the dresses, the hats and shoes, the trips to the theatre; the silks, the stockings, the nightgowns; the teal- blue scarf of soft peltlike velvet, that she had worn all through 1922, that looked like a summer evening.

Historical context

The 1920s was a time of great social, political and economic change. The world was mourning the loss of almost 20 million military personnel and civilians during World War I, followed by the devastating effects of Spanish Flu which killed 50 million people globally.
In the UK, 8.4 million women (largely wealthy middle-class white women) had obtained the right to vote for the first time in 1918. Many women were coming to terms with the loss of husbands, sons, brothers, fiances. Women who had been raised to assume they would be wives and mothers now found that they had to enter the labour market to support themselves.
January 1924 saw the election of the first Labour government in the UK – but the country was already seeing the effects of falling coal production and wage reductions which would lead to the General Strike of 1926.
Despite these seismic historical events, the image that is often most commonly-associated with the 1920s is that of the Bright Young Things. The 1920s has become synonymous with short fringed dresses, bobbed hair, cocktails and Charleston dancing. In reality, these tropes bore as much resemblance to the lives of most people as the cast of TOWIE have with the lives of the majority of us today.
In Other Women, I wanted to write about what it was like to live through this period without the insulation of wealth, youth, beauty or fame. I wanted to write about what was it like to be heading towards middle age in a period of high unemployment, with no financial protection or job security. What it was like to be a woman who had grown up expecting to marry and bear children, only to find that the war had taken a generation of eligible men. And what it was like to be unmarried and pregnant with all the stigma and shame that involved, but without the protection of a welfare state or a National Health Service.
“…The darting silver girls were for noticing, for flirting with and tipping hats to, while the older women were wives and mothers and widows. They had made sacrifices. They had earned the deference of Madam.
And besides them, there was a third type of woman: less visible and less noticed, and neither one thing nor another. These women were Misses without youth, middle- aged without wedding rings. They held fast to the banks of the river, avoiding the current, clustering together in the cool green shade.
Bea was one of these other women.”