A Ruritania With A View - Writing Fictional Europe in a Post-Edwardian Age

Hope broke her heart. I wanted to give her back her country. 

My latest book, The Ruritanian Pretender, is out!

If you haven't bought a copy, go buy a copy. Because I'm really pleased with this one - which I think is saying something; it's a little gauche to admit it, but I often find while in the moment everything I write feels achingly good, the moment I commit to sharing it with the world I tend to panic that maybe it isn't achingly good enough, that one sentence here or there could have elevated things from the merely orgasmically well-written into levels of 'linger-in-your-mind-and-shiver-your-thighs-the-next-morning' pleasure... 

It’s a terrifying thing to build your characters and send them into the world, hoping they’ll make people’s knees weak the way you told them to.

(I think every author feels that post-publication panic, although I'm not so sure that applies to Thomas Hardy, who I've always suspected of just grabbing the most depressing motif he could find and then phoning it in. Or telegraphing it, like a more depressing death notice.)

Anyway - The Ruritanian Pretender is out, and as I discussed last time, it's set in Ruritania.

In some ways, that's wonderful because - as an author - you have a lot of room to play with Ruritania, and it can look more or less how you want. It's... sort of in Eastern Europe, it has a monarchy, it has mountains and castles and ceremonies that are perfectly calculated to trap the unwary Protagonist and draw him into Intrigues, Love Affairs, and quite possibly Swordfights (although there are no swordfights in The Ruritanian Pretender; much though the character of Rózsa would have looked incredible swashbuckling in a corset, I don't think it would have worked). 

And speaking of things that I think wouldn't have quite worked, I come to writing Ruritania itself.

Writing in that fictional nation is a blessing - I had genuine good clean fun as well as, shall we say, my more usual kind of authorial fun that creeps up on me in some key scenes - but it's a curse, too. 

The biggest problem I ran into when writing Ruritania, is simply one of time. Anthony Hope wrote The Prisoner of Zenda in 1894. I wrote The Ruritanian Pretender starting in the spring of 2025 (one of these days I might try and explain the chaos of notes and impulses and fantasies that form the messy basis of my creative process...). 

I had a massive advantage in that Hope had already imagined Ruritania for me - but he got to imagine it clean. 

In 1894, I suspect it was entirely plausible for small monarchies to exist on the fringes of Eastern Europe, clinging like little limpets around the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was simple enough to say "it is small, it is pretty, it has a monarchy and all the royal family have plot-critically strong DNA, or they will have once Franklin and Watson and Crick get round to knowing what it looks like.

I can't just do that. 

 

There's no Austro-Hungarian empire. There are huge, vast, horrifyingly extensive swathes of France marked by an endless parade of white gravestones bearing witness to the fact that the world Hope wrote in went on to convulse and scar itself repeatedly across the following 130 years (and is still, horrifyingly, doing so today). 

I can write in Ruritania, but if the Ruritania my Rudy Russell flies off to is going to bear any thematic similarity to the Ruritania where Rudolf Rassendyll dueled with the villainous Duke of Strelsau, Black Michael, and faced down swashbuckling swine like Rupert von Hentzau or the other members of Duke Michael's Secret Six, there has to be a reason. There has to be an escape that was offered to Ruritania which allowed it to evade the Great War, the Second World War, the Cold War... 

...and, weirdly, as I struggled to find it, I discovered Hope had given it to me. 

Because the ending of The Prisoner of Zenda is what I like to categorise as a bit of a Downer (Thomas Hardy would have loved it, if only Hope's Princess Flavia could have been more miserable). 

The Rudolf hero doesn't get the girl; he goes home and leaves the real King Rudolf to be married to Flavia. Once a year they send each other a rose, and Hero Rudolf feels all stuffed and noble and Victorian Man about it. Apart from the fact she sends him a covert message on an annual basis, we never get Flavia's side of the story at all, although it's reasonable to infer that the real King Rudolf, not being the man she actually loves, is a bit of a let-down. 

You can do this as a male Victorian novelist, apparently. 

But, that, I realised - god I was so pleased when I worked this out - that was the answer. 

Flavia (1894) never stops loving Rudolf Rassendyll - and because of that, I realised, she had all the power. She was going to be the mechanism that saved Ruritania and kept the trappings of the Ruritanian Throne there, waiting for my Flavia (2025) to step in and meet her Rudolf Russell. 

Hope left Flavia (1894) trapped in a marriage of duty, while her heart was held by the man who returned to England, and who could never see her again. 

It was not possible, it was inconceivable that, from the ending Hope wrote, she would have forgotten that 20 years later.

When the drums beat in 1914, when the young men across the continent flooded the streets to enlist, when they crowded the stations and packed on to trains and rattled off to a front that was mobilising at a speed suddenly too fast for talk or diplomacy or even sense to stop it...

...there was no possible way 1894's Flavia would allow Ruritania to mobilise; not against England, not if she could help it; not if she had the slightest chance of stopping Ruritanian shells falling on the lines Rudolf Rassendyll could have been heading for. 

 In 1894, Flavia is left heartbroken, yes. And I never liked that.

But I used it anyway. 

I used it so that in 1914 she absolutely bars any possibility of Ruritania following her neighbours of the Central Powers into the conflict - she even threatens divorce over it. And it works. She loved one man, and because of that she saved who knows how many Ruritanian lives?

And, as a reward I also let her have something else: in one glorious throwaway line as Rudy's being drilled in Ruritanian history, 1894's Flavia gets to spends a considerable amount of time in London, in the 1920s, doing "constitutional research" to help the modernisation of the Ruritanian monarchy. Nobody says it in the text, but you'd better believe she is doing that research with Rudolf Rassendyll curled up and panting with exhaustion in her bed. They deserve that. 

One rose a year is nice and romantic and tragic, but it's hardly a substitute for carnal exhaustion, is it? 

 

Hope broke her heart in 1894. But I was able to say she was what saved the country. Her son modernises the army in the 30s, as you'll read briefly in the book - although the history I had to invent to guide Ruritania through the greater horrors of the mid-20th Century is going to need another blog post, and probably a strong, sugary tea before I can stand to think about it too much; it's another scene that makes me cry! - and it's Flavia (1894) that helps shape my Flavia (2025)'s view of both the world, and the duty of the Ruritanian throne.

Hope left her heartbroken. But it turns out, she became a heroine. 

You can do that if you're a 21st century erotic author, apparently. 

I hadn't really thought about that before, but now I find I'm looking for other women I can reclaim from a femdom perspective. 

Becky Sharpe, for example. Charlotte Lucas. Not Beatrice from Much Ado, though, she's there already: next time you see a performance, you listen out for her "O God, that I were a man!" line and tell me it's not the cry of someone fed up with adjusting the buckles on a strap-on harness...