A Humble Companion
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Published by: Quercus
Release Date: June 6, 2012
Pages: 320
ISBN13: 978-0857387813
Synopsis
As companion to Princess Sophia, one of George III’s enormous brood of children, Nellie is privy to the innermost secrets of the House of Hanover. From the first rumblings of revolution inFranceto the first rumblings of the steam railway, Nellie is the clear-eyed, sharp-penned chronicler of a changing world and the cloistered, unchanging lives of Sofy and her sisters.
Praise
"Graham is fantastic at creating believable characters while at the same time conjuring up historical period and a gripping plot."
—IRISH INDEPENDENT"Laurie Graham’s latest offering, A Humble Companion, finds her at her sharpest and wittiest best."
—THE DAILY MAIL"Once again Laurie Graham wins us over by small, witty, sharp-eyed observations."
— THE LADY, Book of the WeekBackstory
A Humble Companion has been in my Some Day, Maybe file for a very long time. In fact it all began so long ago I can no longer remember where I first heard the whispered story of Princess Sofy, but I do know it hooked my interest immediately.
The problem was that the 18th century wasn’t my genre. I wrote modern, bitter-sweet social comedy. My critics said so. And it used to be that once you’d climbed into your box of choice publishers didn’t like you clambering out and trying to break into other people’s boxes. Then things changed.
I think it was when Young Adult emerged as a genre. Suddenly all kinds of novelists were getting into YA, the barriers were down and writers were leaping this way and that, like the Gymnastic Corps at the Edinburgh Tattoo. So when I told my publishers I’d like to write Sofy’s story they barely blinked.I said, ‘I’ll do it under a different name, if you like.’
‘That’s okay,’ they said, looking at my sales figures. ‘These can’t get much worse. Just go ahead.’
I already knew Nellie Buzzard would be my narrator. Princess Sofy’s brother, the Prince of Wales truly did have a steward called Ludwig Weltje - there’s actually a street named for him in Hammersmith – and Mr Weltje did have daughters, one of whom married a confectioner. The Humble Companion role for Nellie arose from another of those strange but likely snippets whose provenance I’ve now forgotten. But it sort of makes sense. In George III’s vast family most of the boys were born before most of the girls and it’s possible the King observed how the Princes were turning out and thought there was room for improvement. George was a monarch who liked to get off his horse and talk to ordinary men so I find it quite believable that he thought the company of a sensible commoner would be good for his daughters.
Writing A Humble Companion has been such a pleasure. It required far more research than anything else I’d ever written and a morning spent at Kew Gardens is infinitely more fun than a morning seated in front of a blank page. Also, the period called for a more elegant use of language and I enjoyed that challenge too.
‘But Laurie,’ objected one friend, ‘historical fiction? How’s that going to work? You’ve always written comedy.’
So I would just like to reassure my loyal but perhaps apprehensive readers that humour is not a 20th century invention and that they will find my fingerprints all over this book.