Julia Lee

Julia Lee

About Author

Julia Lee has been making up stories for as long as she can remember. She wrote her first book aged 5, mainly so that she could do all the illustrations with a brand-new 4-colour pen, and her mum stitched the pages together on her sewing machine. As a child she was ill quite a bit, which meant she spent lots of time lying in bed and reading (bliss!).

Julia grew up in London, but moved to the seaside to study English at university, and has stayed there ever since. Her career has been a series of accidents, discovering lots of jobs she didn't want to do, because secretly she always wanted to be a writer.

Julia is married, has two sons, and lives in Sussex.

Author link

julialeeauthor.wordpress.com

Interview

THE MYSTERIOUS MISADVENTURES OF CLEMENCY WRIGGLESWORTH

PUBLISHED BY OUP

SEPTEMBER 2013


The Mysterious Misadventures of Clemency Wrigglesworth, by debut novelist Julia Lee, is a full-throttled adventure story with double-dealings, mysteries, fabulous characters and forbidding settings. It has echoes of classics such as The Secret Garden and The Little Princess although its feisty heroine is a thoroughly modern creation and role model.

Clemency, recently orphaned, talks her way onto a ship bound for England from India, where she has been living. She has dreams of finding her loving family and claiming her inheritance; instead, she is torn from the impoverished but kindly Marvel family who had been looking after her and finds herself working in a perilous position as a scullery maid in her ancestral home.

Author Julia Lee spoke to ReadingZone about her first children's novel.


While this is her first published children's novel, Julia Lee has always written and has had a number of short stories for adults published. She says, "During my career, I have fallen into various jobs, including working for children's voluntary organisations and pre-schoolers with special needs, but I was always writing. I have written since my childhood."

What started her writing her first children's novel, Clemency Wrigglesworth, was the name 'Gully Potchard' which sprang into her mind. Generally, it is the characters that drive her stories says Lee. "When I am writing, I often get the name of my characters first and I let that person start to tell me about themselves. After Gully, I got the name Clemency Wrigglesworth and the sense that she didn't like people whispering about her and I wondered why, so I started to write her story.

Since it was a book she was writing "for fun", Lee wrote it very quickly in just a couple of months, but then she put it away. "I didnt even dare to show it to my children , I just left it on the computer for a while and in one of those fallow moments I got it out and it made me laugh so I sent it to my agent, who sent it to publishers."

As the characters led her through the story, she did not follow a plan, simply moving from one cliffhanger (and there are plenty of those in the story) to the next. However, she adds, "While I never used to plan any of my books, since writing Clemency Wrigglesworth, I now plan every book assiduously, including writing a synopsis for each chapter etc. I thought that planning a book would make me bored of it but now I know I need to do that."

Lee turned for inspiration for her first children's story to the kinds of books she liked reading as a child. She says, "I enjoyed everything from rubbish to classics but the ones that stick out and stay with you are the classics like A Little Princess, which I adored. I re-read it last month. I tried to re-read The Secret Garden, which I also loved, but found the dialect of Dickens Was difficult whereas A Little Princess was fun to re-read and I like the values of the book. I was surprised how well it has stood the test of time."

She remembered loving stories where there was a mystery around someone's identity, so decided to write her own mystery story. As she wrote, she realised it would be set in the past. "In my book you have an unaccompanied orphan getting onto a ship, so the novel had to be set at a time when that might happen, when children would be sent off to sea on their own or with a chaperone and so it's set around the late Victorian times, although to me it also feels sort of time-less. I did do a few checks to make sure it was all accurate, although I have done much more research for the second book."

She adds, "I love visiting old castles and trying to imagine what it must have been to live in them. I think if it was the Victorian times I would have loved to have had a kitchen garden run by a fleet of gardeners and garden boys, so I would have been involved with the gardening side of things but I would still want my creature comforts and Penicillin!"

She wanted the lead character to be a very feisty young person who faces some quite scary situations but draws on her inner resources to make sure she is rescued. "I didn't want someone who would end up as a trembling heap who can't do anything to save herself."

The other characters in her story tended to "write themselves" as Dickensian-type characters, says Lee, and one or two of them were quite nasty and eccentric. "Ms Clawe (the housekeeper) is a favourite of mine with her tight-lipped manner and cruelty; you can have such fun with the baddies. I didn't have to reign her in and stop her behaving badly! The uncle was also fun, he's selfish and fearful."

Another character who emerged during the writing process was Poll, the kitchen maid. "She was meant to be a tiny character, an irritant, but she became noisier and bigger and wanted more of a role so I liked her having a voice," Lee explains. "I'm interested in class in novels and I didn't just want to write about a poor little rich girl. I liked the idea of someone else having a role, like Becky in A Little Princess, so Poll is my 'Becky'. She really comes out of her shell and does things that she's terrified about, like a midnight raid on the kitchen."

Lee enjoyed revisiting one of her favourite pasttimes, creating houses, when she wrote the story. "The house in the story is not based on a real country house, it's one I made up, but that is something I love doing. I could start every story I write with a fabulous description of a house. As a child I loved drawing floor plans of houses and maps of their gardens. I adore inventing houses of any sort."

This story is more than a jolly good romp, given the level of jeopardy involved for Clemency. "Her family are mad and bad and they want to get rid of her and I had to think quite hard about why they wanted her out of the way," says Lee, "But I have never enjoyed reading books that are just grim, so while it's dark in places, there's also a lot of fun and action."

The next book she is writing is about one of the characters in this story but it is a prequel, set nine months in advance, about Gully Patchard and how he discovers his psychic powers.

Lee writes from her study overlooking the garden, although she has had to move her desk to face the inner wall rather than the window "otherwise I end up looking at birds and plants all day, it's such a distraction". She uses a 'mood board' where she pins lots of pictures and references for the book she's writing a the time. "I don't have a routine, I'm not a disciplined writer, but when I am writing the last third of a book I do put in the hours and write into the night and at the weekends. Mornings are not my best writing time though, I write better in the afternoons and evenings."

As for suggestions for budding writers, Lee says, "I'm in the school of make-it-up. Quite often people are advised to write what they know about but I think it's much better to make it up, have fun, go off somewhere and write about someone's life that isn't yours. So make it up, and read, read, read all sorts of things. And enjoy it!"

As a child, she enjoyed reading books like Just William stories, E Nesbitt, Neil Gaiman.

Author's Titles