The Story Behind the Book: The Dressmakers of London

Every book is different. They have personalities. Some are easy, and some are troublesome but all the more satisfying for it.

Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing the unique stories behind each of my books. If you have read my books, I hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes look, and if you haven’t, I hope this encourages you to take a chance on one of them.

This article has been pre-scheduled as I am currently on maternity leave.

I wrote previously about the story behind Betrayal at Blackthorn Park (Evelyne Redfern #2). In that, I mentioned that I started 2023 with a pretty wicked set of deadlines:

• I owed my historical fiction publisher a book on June 1 (The Dressmakers of London)

• I owed my mystery publisher a book (Betrayal at Blackthorn Park) on July 1

On top of those deadlines, I had two books coming out in 2023, and I was getting married so my now-husband and I had a great deal of wedding planning to do. I created a writing schedule for myself that would allow me to write each book with some contingency for edits and any illness or other life events that might come up. For it to work, I had to be near perfect.

Spoiler: my best-laid plans failed and failed in a big way. Let me explain.

I started writing The Dressmakers of London in early January having spent some time creating my characters and plotting out the book. I was writing a story about two estranged sisters who unexpectedly inherit their mother’s dress shop in the middle of World War 2. When the youngest sister and seamstress Izzie is conscripted into the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force to serve, her older sister Sylvia must come in to run the shop and save the business while contending with the very real challenges of clothing rationing.

All was going well for the first two months until I hit the 40,000 word mark.1 Suddenly the words dried up, and grinding out even a thousand words per day was like pulling teeth. I set the book aside for the week to promote the release of The Lost English Girl, assuming that a little break would help. Unfortunately, when I came back to the book I was still stuck.

Normally, when I write, I try my best to start at the beginning of a draft and carry on without looking back at the work I’ve already done. This helps me keep me away from the temptation of getting stuck in a loop of editing and doing nothing else.

In the case of The Dressmakers of London, I knew that if I was this stuck it must be that there was something fundamental wrong with the characters. I went back to the beginning and dug into Sylvia and Izzie’s motivations. I began to layer in more detail about their lives when we meet them and more backstory to show how they got there. I thought long and hard about what it might be like to be estranged and then thrown together again and—in the case of Izzie—forced to ask your estranged sister for help. I began to surround both characters with more people, giving them b-stories and relationships outside of the family and dress shop. Slowly, the story began to come together.

I was fortunate enough that, while I was working on this crazy double deadline year, my editor offered to move the deadline for The Dressmakers of London from June 1st to August 1st. Those extra two months allowed me to have the time and space I needed to get Betrayal at Blackthorn Park (which was due in July) done and then to focus solely on The Dressmakers of London.

When a book has been difficult to write, there is often a wonderful moment when everything locks into place and it just becomes easier. It’s a little like getting to the point in a jigsaw puzzle where you slot in enough pieces that you can see the picture coming together and you begin to fly through to the end.

That is exactly what happened with The Dressmakers of London. As I told me now-husband, at some point in the summer, I began to really like the book in a way I hadn’t when I was stuck at those 40,000 words. As an author, there is nothing better than that.

Learn More About the Book