9. A new housemate

A typical Urania case, how to do exposition and my first bout of cringeworthy dialogue

A typical Victorian shared bedroom. Read on for a strange twist!

I knew there would come a point in sharing my first draft that I would wince, and this is that time.

In this scene, a new girl called Hannah Parsons arrives at the cottage. Josephine welcomes her, or fails to. Hannah is a pretty inconsequential character. This scene perhaps suggests she will have a larger part to play in the story, but really Hannah is a mascot of Urania Cottage – a typical inmate, brought in as a sort of exemplary case. She is made up of all the various cases I read about, and rather than just being an ornament, I use her as an example of what happens when girls at the cottage transgress. Basically, she gets kicked out, and it serves as a lesson to the girls (and the reader) that the governors take discipline seriously. Hannah is made an example of. Mrs Holdsworth doesn’t agree with their decision but is overruled. The whole situation serves to cause more of a chasm between Mrs Holdsworth in the real world and the governors in fantasy land. That the governors would expect to pick girls up from prison and them be instantly reformed and unlikely to err again is so naive. Mrs Holdsworth sees this, but they don’t or won’t.