Spotlight & Giveaway: No Life for a Lady by Hannah Dolby

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Hannah Dolby to HJ!

Hi Hannah and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, No Life for a Lady!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

No Life for a Lady is the lively, funny story of Violet Hamilton, a Victorian lady who is determined to live life on her own terms – rejecting suitors, embroidering the truth and above all, searching for her missing mother, who disappeared from Hastings pier ten years before. But when she hires a seaside detective, nothing goes quite as she planned…
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

There were definitely days when Mr Blackthorn looked larger than others. There were days when he loomed and days when he didn’t. Today was a large day. He seemed to take up a lot of space with the breadth of his shoulders and his height, and I wondered how often he hit his head on low doorways.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• The Working Title of the book was The Lady Detective, which tells you a little more about where this story goes!
• I spend a lot of weekends in Hastings and St Leonards, the seaside town where the book is set – there are many Victorian buildings that survive and echoes of the past, and even a guest house called St Benedicts, where the whole house is Victorian-themed!
• A few incidents in the book are inspired by real life – for example there was a true incident called the Hastings Rarities, where an ornithologist imported lots of dead birds from abroad and pretended to have spotted them in Hastings – seriously affecting British bird records!
• The book started out as very serious and grim, until I spotted the Comedy Women in Print awards and realised my book – and my heroine – could be funny! And I came joint-second in the awards, which led to publication.
• I love Victorian ephemera and spend a lot of time haunting second-hand book shops and junk shops for magazines, postcards, photographs and books – and there are lots of junk shops in Hastings!
• Music in the Victorian times would have been a mix of music hall songs (Come into the Garden Maud, Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’ After the Ball, Where Did you Get That Hat, and they could get a bit bawdy too.
• Victorian food was sometimes very odd! I am currently reading a book called Dainty Dishes, written by Lady Harriet St Clair in 1896, which gives recipes for dishes such as Larks en Ragout (‘Take a dozen larks and put them in a stewpan with a bit of butter…’) and Stewed Tripe. I love books like this.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

Our heroine is attracted to our hero for quite some time without acknowledging it to herself, but the first time she really realises it is when he shaves off his long black beard to reveal that underneath, he’s really quite attractive.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

I blushed and laughed when I was writing the scene where Violet’s mother attempts, badly, to tell her about the facts of life:

‘I must tell you,’ she said, ‘what it looks like.’

‘What what looks like?’

‘A man’s parts,’ she said. ‘So that you can steel yourself. I have thought about it, and the best way I can think would be for you to go and look at a turkey.’

Readers should read this book….

Because no matter what kind of day you are having, it will cheer you up and make you laugh. The story has some sad moments, but for the most part it is a joyful and uplifting read. People have described it as a tonic in book form and the kind of book you carry with you in your heart. Only today someone said it is a ‘big hearted, cackling inducing, bracing delight’!

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

I am currently working on a sequel, which will be published next year! It’s great to be thinking up more funny Victorian adventures for my heroine.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: One physical copy of No Life for a Lady by Hannah Dolby to anyone in the US.

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Excerpt from No Life for a Lady:

We lived in a detached red-brick house in St Matthew’s Gardens, one of the many new houses that had sprung up in the town over the last half-century. The bricks were bright red-orange, untrammelled by the blackness of city smog, and it had a dark green front door with stained-glass panels on each side. We had moved here when I was ten, and I had loved it, in the early years. My mother had liked to cover any available surface with ornaments, vases, coloured lamps, family photographs, candlesticks; she had draped our furniture and our mantlepiece with bright fabrics that brought cheer to the rooms. A year or so after she disappeared, my father had arranged for many of these reminders to be packed away in the attic. He had replaced some of them with keepsakes from relatives I had never known: footstools and faded antimacassars woven by longdead great-aunts; his grandmother’s Staffordshire pottery dogs; photographs of his grandfather, who by all accounts had been a terror. But some of the shelves and surfaces stayed bare, and the atmosphere of cluttered cosiness was gone.
At breakfast the next day I faced a wall of newspaper, as I had for approximately the past ten years. Today it felt more than usually annoying.
I was a lady. I would be ladylike and rise above it. I straightened in my chair, taking a deep breath. I was an elderly spinster, patient with my lot and with the foibles of others. I was a woman, nurturing, caring. Accepting. My only goal was to foster a happy, contented home.
I hit the edge of the teaspoon I was toying with too hard with the edge of my thumb, and it flew across the table and collided with the back of my father’s newspaper with a sharp thwack.
He jumped and lowered the paper.
‘Stop it, Violet,’ he said.
‘I thought perhaps we could have a conversation,’ I said. ‘It has become a habit, your reading, but perhaps it might be pleasant to talk today?’
He raised the paper again. ‘I need to know what is happening in the world. Am I not to be allowed a moment of peace? You will get your chance when I am done.’
The Hastings Observer would give him a narrow view. ‘You did not read when Mother was here,’ I said. She had not let him, but it did not seem wise to raise that. He must have found it joyous and freeing to take up reading the paper after my mother had disappeared. But now we were chained deep within the dullness of his habit, and I hated habits. If I had a choice, people would be forced to do new and different things every single day.
He lowered the paper briefly and looked at me with a weary patience, as if I was a sack of rocks he was dragging around.
‘I have told you, I do not want that woman mentioned in this house,’ he said. He folded up the paper so that he could hold it one-handed, and then forked his breakfast into his mouth. My mother would have said it was very rude and American.
Breakfast was eggs and kippers. I also disliked kippers, at every time of day, but especially at breakfast. It was a miserable end for a herring. I thought they should all live out a long and happy life at sea, unsmoked.
Eventually he finished eating, folded up his paper and dropped it beside his plate.
‘What will you do today?’ he asked, rising. ‘My kippers were a little dry, by the way. Best raise it with…’ He made a slight vague circular gesture with his hand. ‘I have a busy day, and I may be back late. But in time for dinner.’ And he was gone, out of the door, off to his manly, worldly business at the bank.
‘Today, I will mostly be…’ I said to the air. ‘Today, I will mostly be…’ I stopped and rested the heels of my hands against my eyes for a second. I was not crying. I just needed to rest my eyes.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Read the most uplifting historical debut of 2023! Perfect for fans of Dear Mrs Bird, The Maid and Lessons in Chemistry.

Violet Hamilton is a woman who knows her own mind. Which, in 1896, can make things a little complicated…

At 28, Violet’s father is beginning to worry she will never find a husband. But every suitor he presents, Violet finds a new and inventive means of rebuffing.

Because Violet does not want to marry. She wants to work, and make her own way in the world. But more than anything, she wants to find her mother Lily, who disappeared from Hastings Pier 10 years earlier.

Finding the missing is no job for a lady, but when Violet hires a seaside detective to help, she sets off a chain of events that will put more than just her reputation at risk.

Can Violet solve the mystery of Lily Hamilton’s vanishing before it’s too late?
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Meet the Author:

Hannah Dolby’s first job was in the circus and she has aimed to keep life as interesting since. She trained as a journalist in Hastings and has worked in PR for many years, promoting museums, galleries, palaces, gardens and even Dolly the sheep. She completed the Curtis Brown selective three-month novel writing course, and she won runner-up in the Comedy Women in Print Awards for this novel with the prize of a place on an MA in Comedy Writing at the University of Falmouth. She currently lives in London.
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