On continuing my readerly pursuit of Women’s Historical Fiction:
There is a bit of a back-story I need to share ahead of the conversation I had with Ms Lanigan. For quite a few years of the recent past, I constantly would seek out stories rooted in two branches of Historical Fiction: Feminist Historical Fiction (which sought to illuminate stories about the Women’s Movement and the Suffragettes in particular) *and!* Women’s Historical Fiction which was casting a wider net of choice in respect to what a novel could encompass. Either about Women’s History itself or about the journey of women across time, continent and lifestyle.
What I loved the most about seeking out these kinds of stories was the knowledge I was gleaming out of History through fictional accounts of stories which were rooted ‘in real life’ (ie. IRL). These were stories about women who had once lived and who had lived lives that many of us could not quite fathom how they were able to survive them – much less survive them well and achieve the accomplishments they did. Other stories were more harrowing and turbulent – somewhere more uplifting and soul-catching whilst some rooted us so directly into a particular time and era, it felt as if we were re-walking in that person’s shoes as if their life had merely been lived yesterday.
Most of the stories I read of this nature in the past were independently published – and I can bet you already know why that might be the case. It is hard to find publishers (not always but it can be true) who will want to tackle the topics and subjects’ writers of this branch of #HistFic love to pursue. Whilst at the same time, I love to celebrate ALL authors and their voices who are re-establishing a living narrative about Women’s History – from all women and all eras in which tey can reaffirm a connection to highlight back into the present.
When I read the premise behind this particular story of White Feathers, it felt like the next chapter of my discoveries in this branch of the genre I love to read. I hadn’t heard of the concept behind ‘white feathers’ previously – as apparently, I just missed that part of living history when it comes to war era revelations. I also can’t imagine how hard it was for the women of the time to use the white feathers as they were being directed to do and not have a hold over effect on themselves, too.
Another component of the story is a May to December romantic connection – meaning, there is a romantic thread of the story which has two characters who are of different ages and generations falling in love with each other. I haven’t read too many stories about this kind of romance, but I have seen this play out in tv serials and/or films or read about them in Biographies especially within the Entertainment Industry where sometimes people who find each other to be their soul mate can find that person either years younger than them or years older than them. Depending on the person, of course. I felt this might be an interesting part of the plot as well. Especially to see how it was handled and how it all played out in the end.
And, when it comes to why read about a wartime romance? The truth of it is there is so much life to be understood during times of war. War can take on different meanings in different eras of History – it can be the more direct route of actual wars, and it could be the different kind of wars we find ourselves in as a global society where the very structure of our lives are becoming redefined. I used to read a lot of wartime romances and war dramas – then, I had to step away as after a while it all felt a bit too much for me. My heart was too full. White Feathers perked a renewed interest in me to re-open that door. There was something unique about the story Lanigan was telling and I wanted to experience it.
I think even with everything on fire (as that classic song refers too by Billy Joel) we still need to take stock and time out to ruminate on life, love and the ways in which we’re all connected. Art, literature, music and all the creative passageways we can celebrate life as it is lived both present and in the past is one way of lifting up our humanity and remaining interconnected to each other.
Thereby when it came time to selecting my questions for Ms Lanigan, I wanted to stay rooted into the premise of the story and potentially discuss elements of the story and/or the characters as well as highlight her own writerly approach to this kind of storytelling. I leave you with our words and our conversation to contemplate picking up a copy of White Feathers.
White Feathers
by Susan Lanigan
Source: Author via The Coffee Pot Book Club
In 1913, Irish emigrée Eva Downey receives a bequest from an elderly suffragette to attend a finishing school. There she finds friendship and, eventually, love. But when war looms and he refuses to enlist, Eva is under family and social pressure to give the man she loves a white feather of cowardice. The decision she eventually makes will have lasting consequences for her and everyone around her.
Journey with Eva as she battles through a hostile social order and endeavours to resist it at every turn.
Places to find the book:
ASIN: B0DVDRPQLX
Published by Self Published
on 21st March, 2025
Format: Trade Paperback
Available Formats: Paperback, Ebook
Converse via: #TheCoffeePotBookClub, #HistFic, #HistoricalFiction, and #WhiteFeathers
About Susan Lanigan
Susan Lanigan’s first novel White Feathers, a tale of passion, betrayal and war, was selected as one of the final ten in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2013, and published in 2014 by Brandon Books. The book won critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the UK Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2015. This edition is a reissue with a new cover and foreword.
Her second novel, Lucia’s War, also concerning WWI as well as race, music and motherhood, was published in June 2020 and has been named as the Coffee Pot Book Club Honourable Mention in the Modern Historical Book of the Year Award.
Susan lives by the sea near Cork, Ireland, with her family.
I’d like to start by talking about the cover art by your artist friend which graces the new cover for “White Feathers” as you are self-publishing the re-release. How did the artist tap into the story with such elegance and artistic grace? I felt moved just by staring at the cover art for a spell before sending in my request to join the blog tour. It truly could be a painting and it would tell its own story.
Lanigan responds: I asked Astrid to answer this question as she is better placed to know than I am! Here is what she said: “The characters are complex and multi-dimensional and are faced with impossible circumstances. I was completely engrossed. There was beautiful imagery throughout the novel. I wanted to include the white feather and keep the main characters centre stage. How many women have lost their lovers and husbands: even when they come back alive they come back broken. I wanted to show the brokenness, but also the tenderness and strength. I also wanted to convey how a life can change, like a feather being caught in a breeze. I hope I managed to do this wonderful novel justice.”
White Feathers has become a series of stories – what did you call the collection of stories which include: White Feathers, Lucia’s War, Unfortunate Stars and Blood Ties? Do you feel this will remain a trilogy with a novella attached to it or will it become an ongoing saga rooted in and around stories during WWI? Also, do you have plans to release Lucia’s War as an audiobook too?
Lanigan responds: I call the series White Feathers as that is the starting point of the universe where I created these stories. And in many ways the act of bestowing a white feather is a catalyst for so much else. I feel towards this motley band of characters the way I imagine Ford Madox Ford felt about Tietjens, Sylvia, Valentine Wannop and the even the demented clergyman in Parade’s End.
As for where it ends, I imagine Blood Ties will be the last one, though Sybil might have a story to tell. I would love more than anything to create an audiobook for Lucia’s War. But it would be very expensive to do and given I don’t have a publisher behind me, I’m unsure about investing in it at present. But I hope one day to be able to. It would take a very special narrator/actress to deliver the text, and from my brief experience of self-publishing audiobooks (the one for White Feathers is published by Bolinda Press) part of the fun is finding the perfect voice for a character as singular as Lucia is.
How did you first delve into this area of Irish History and how did you want to interject the narrative with social justice, Feminism and mental health topics as well as relatable content which would traverse the story and stay relevant to today’s society too?
Lanigan responds: I think the protagonist is Irish because I’m Irish, to be honest. For my first novel, I wanted to stay with the familiar. Then because of the rigid class system in early 20th century England, it became a Thing for Eva, the main character – she and her sisters were encouraged to ditch any trace of an accent in order to fit in. Then when I was writing about her experiences in the finishing school, I realised she would be subject to teasing on account of her ethnicity and would have to navigate too.
Feminism obviously came under the microscope because the white feather phenomenon was one of its less edifying moments and my research indicates that the anger about it reverberates through generations. It is awkward to juxtapose the plucky resistance to “cat and mouse” force feeding with this nasty, petty ideology and the appalling behaviour that resulted from it.
The hero of your story has PTSD – how did you approach writing his character and showcasing how this affects his life? Whilst attempting to deconstruct the stigmas which surround mental health?
Lanigan responds: There’s a line where Eva’s friend Sybil says of Christopher, “he was always at least flirting with a nervous breakdown.” Even before the start of the war, it’s clear he is very nervy, has never really got over losing his brother in the Boer War, and isn’t really a suitable person to be on a battle front. To use a non-specialist term, he’s generally a bit weird. He is very restless, and I realised later that a lot of his movements are stims for self-regulation.
When I was researching PTSD, I actually found a lot of modern examples, as well as the literature about shell shock. One that stuck out was a story of a man who was so traumatised from serving in Afghanistan that when he went to his local supermarket the fire alarm went off and he screamed and threw himself to the ground. I turned the fire alarm into a drayhorse and the supermarket into a street and transposed that back to the wartime period.
The most important aspect of the depiction of PTSD is that it is not a temporary malaise. I read somewhere that the brain is permanently altered from the trauma of endless hypervigilance. Too many novels use it as a device to put a temporary question mark over whether the hero and heroine will make it together, until it all magically goes away and everyone lives happily ever after. That is not how it works in real life, and I felt an obligation to convey that in the book.
The Women’s Rights Movement has had its fair share of injustices throughout History – not just against the women who were fighting for our rights but also when suffragettes would turn to violence rather than peaceful demonstrations or protests. How did you choose which of the suffragettes to place inside your story and why?
Lanigan responds: I mentioned the Pankhursts because in the end the conflict between Sylvia on one hand with a more peaceful, socialist, inclusive worldview vs Emmeline and Christabel who were far more fanatic and blinkered, mirrors the conflict between the sisters in White Feathers that drives the story forward. Family is often society in miniature – especially when you consider that Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II and King George V were all cousins!
At the heart of White Feathers is a romance – love is the key to life and the most important thing we can all have whilst we’re alive. Why was love the centremost focus of the novel and what developed first – the background of the war or the romance between your characters?
Lanigan responds: I have said this in other posts but White Feathers was not originally intended as straight romance. I had this idea that Eva would be hanging around some house like the old vicarage in Grantchester with a Rupert Brooke like figure and various acolytes talking about literature. The white feather was originally something bestowed as a result of rivalry and jealousy. Christopher was supposed to be a minor character. I hadn’t even given him a first name. But those two just bounced off each other from the first time they spoke. The romance between the two took over, very powerfully, and that raised the stakes.
What was the hardest part about writing White Feathers? Was there a character or set of characters you found harder to write over others? Or was it something else entirely – and likewise, what was your favourite passage from the story?
Lanigan responds: The hardest part was setting up the conflict that led Eva to make a crucial decision. In a way I was trying to close off any alternatives and make the action inevitable. I guess that’s been an issue since Aristotle, trying to convey this inevitable path without a point where you can jump off.
My favourite scenes to write were: 1. the scene where Eva and Christopher dance on the lawn, 2. a long scene which I will refer to here as the Isle of Fight for reasons that will become clear when reading the book. Every time I went to edit that scene I felt goosebumps. 3. And the final one I can think of right now is the pigeon van scene with Sybil and Roma. That particular one I was asked to censor in translation and refused.
Of all the minor characters within the story – who’s your favourite and why?
Lanigan responds: I dislike Joseph Cronin, but at the moment when he announces, “I’m not going out in that” when his platoon are ready to go over the top during biblical rainfall at Loos, I have to cheer for him. My favourite line in White Feathers is Imelda’s remark about Grace’s handkerchief embroidered with wartime slogans – “Snot easy, fighting on the Western Front.”
Lucia is not really a minor character, she originally took up so much space that my editor had to suggest removing her story. I wrote a separate novel with her at the centre. I love her musicality and humour and resilience.
How did you approach writing the student and teacher relationship between Eva and Christopher – not just due to the generation gap and age differences but from the perspectives of the society in which they lived?
Lanigan responds: It’s interesting not so much because of the mores of 1913-14, but of those one hundred years later, the shift over the last decade in what reader consensus has considered acceptable. I notice that readers have become far more attuned to power differentials and perceived grooming in fiction. The Zeitgeist is less tolerant of moral greyness even than it would have been in 2014. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, it’s probably for the best. I had not planned this romance, it was spontaneous and organic and inspired by memories of my own schooldays, though I did not have any such relationship!
I do not believe there is any such exploitation here. Eva in particular is a young woman who knows her own mind and never wavers. I wanted to deal with real, complicated people, who fall in love in sometimes inconvenient ways.
As for the mores of the time, Eva’s stepsister Grace absolutely loathes Christopher but her objection to him is not because of any perceived power over Eva, because in terms of class, Eva is a parvenue and Christopher is downwardly mobile (in a later book it is clear he has mixed heritage) so they are socially an equal match. But Grace expected Eva to leverage this opportunity to find someone titled and rich, rather than “going off with one of the staff”. Social class trumps any other distinctions.
In respect to setting within White Feathers – what can you share about where you set the story and where readers can feel transported to whilst they’re reading the story?
Lanigan responds: During the writing of the novel, I did a Battlefields Backroads tour and found it quite draining, particularly when touring Passchendaele. I brought that knowledge into some of the battle scenes, particularly for the Somme, though that battle does not directly feature.
The Links in Eastbourne was a real finishing school attended by Edwina Ashley, later Lady Mountbatten. I found it by accident while visiting Eastbourne, thanks to a local historian, Grenville Godfrey, who was able to find the location of the building. I had noticed it while walking past, along to Beachy Head, but never would I have thought it was the actual building!
I am indebted to Nina Panagopoulou and Athena Andreadis, both creators in their own right, for helping me with the description of the loukoumades Sybil stuffs herself with towards the end of the book. I tasted them in Cyprus once, they are little pastry balls sweetened with rosewater and they are divine.
What inspires you to continue to seek out stories to write into Feminist Historical Fiction narratives and why is it important to show women of different backgrounds and lifestyles in each of your stories? Can you share a bit about what will be inclusive of Blood Ties?
Lanigan responds: Blood Ties is actually shaping up to be less diverse than the other three, oddly enough! Much of it is taken up with the Irish War of Independence and Civil War and Grace’s ongoing attempts to reckon with her past actions. I like to represent all backgrounds in my fiction because there were different backgrounds in actual reality and researching them is a joy. For Lucia’s War I had a wonderful authenticity read with Lyeanne Beckford-Jones who really got what I wanted to do and made sure I kept Lucia bound to her background and culture in a way that was essential and not superficial.
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Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2025.
Dear Jorie, thank you so much for your detailed and thoughtful questions which it was a pleasure to answer. I have sent a message to your website, just checking that you received it. Many thanks, Susan
Thank you so much for hosting Susan Lanigan today, with such a fascinating and insightful post about her deeply moving novel, White Feathers.
Take care,
Cathie xo
The Coffee Pot Book Club