Miss McVey Takes Charge by Sheena Wilkinson
Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau was published by HarperCollins in 2023 and immediately readers clamoured for a sequel. They loved the 1930s marriage bureau setting, the endearing cast and the mix of social realism and social comedy. When the publisher, citing ‘disappointing sales’, declined Miss McVey Takes Charge, the follow-up, I decided to self-publish.
I won’t pretend I was initially enthusiastic. I was a multi-award-winning novelist, an Arts Council Major Award winner: wasn’t it embarrassing to be reduced to self-publishing? But the support of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, plus the invitation from Writers Review Publishing to join their author-led publishing collaborative, gave me the endorsement I yearned for. I realised that, far from being reduced to self-publishing, I was in excellent company, as so many established authors find new ways to bring their books to readers. I wrote about the self-publishing experience here.
Miss McVey
Miss McVey Takes Charge is set in 1936, in the fictional Yorkshire town of Easterbridge. April is in charge of the True Minds Marriage Bureau, trying to find happy futures for the lovelorn, while the menace of fascism marches through the country. After two years of matchmaking, she thinks she’s seen it all. But when an old friend arrives from Ireland, with a broken heart that’s well beyond April’s experience, and a young nun asks her to find a match for her lonely brother, the consequences are shattering. As political turmoil reaches their own community, will April have the courage to take charge and do the right thing?
The tension between the political and the personal is at the novel’s heart. Over both books, but especially Miss McVey Takes Charge, hangs the spectre of fascism and approaching war. Some characters are deeply involved in fighting fascism. Others are caught up in their own concerns, simply wishing they lived in less ‘interesting’ times, but you can’t choose the era you live in, only how you live in it.
The most challenging scene for me, mainly because it really happened, was the Battle of Holbeck Moor (a precursor to the more famous Battle of Cable Street) when thousands of people in Leeds marched to show Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts that fascism was not welcome. Writing this today, with the rise of the populist far right spewing the same hate-fuelled propaganda as their forbears ninety years was chilling. As one of my characters remarks, ‘Things have got worse … People are unsettled … It’s not just the unemployment and … the cost of living. There’s a kind of nastiness in the air. At home and abroad.’
It was a different kind of nastiness in the air – literally – that encouraged me to write these books, which, despite their political aspect, are essentially uplifting. I started Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau during lockdown in 2020. Like so many people – and writers are, of necessity, over-imaginative and doom-suspecting – I was overwhelmed by anxiety on a scale I’d never known before. Having already written about the 1918 flu pandemic (Star by Star, Little Island, 2017) I knew far too much about global pandemics. For the first time, I struggled both to write and to read, while needing the escape of a fictional world more than ever.
Feminist Feelgood
My usual comforts reads weren’t working their magic — until I discovered Dorothy Whipple. Whipple’s domestic dramas, popular in the thirties and forties, had recently been reissued by Persephone books. My introduction was High Wages, (1930) the rags-to-riches story of a determined young shopgirl. I loved its unusually modern prioritising of the professional over the personal. Now I knew what I wanted to write: escapism, yes, but firmly grounded in social realism. Warmth, wit and women at work.
As well as Whipple and other mid-century writers – Noel Streatfeild, Monica Dickens, Barbara Pym, Dorothy L. Sayers – the greatest influence on these novels is probably the long-running BBC drama, Call the Midwife. I love its strong, female-led stories, accurate social realism and warm sense of community. Anyone who thinks Call the Midwife is merely cosy nostalgia hasn’t watched it. Feminist feelgood is the term I’d use to describe it, and my own novels.
Of course, in a book set around a marriage bureau, there’s plenty romance, in and out of the office. April lives with Felicity – to outside eyes, one of many pairs of spinster companions sharing the housekeeping and keeping each other company in a world still feeling the effects of the Great War. The truth is more complex, but while it’s easy for bohemian ‘advanced’ Felicity, whose friends are artists and activists, to be out and proud, it’s harder for April who, after all, is running a marriage bureau in a small conservative town.
And of course it’s 1936 so nobody actually says anything so anachronistic as Out and Proud. I find walking the line between celebrating inclusivity, kindness and community (central to all my books) while also being true to historical contexts, one of the most challenging – and interesting – things about writing historical fiction. But Miss McVey is my seventh historical novel, counting five for younger readers, so it’s a line I’ve learned to walk confidently.
Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau was widely praised for its social comedy, with the Irish Independent calling it ‘riotously funny’, though quiet desperation is never far away. Miss McVey Takes Charge has more overt sadness and jeopardy but there are enough infuriatingly fussy marriage bureau clients to keep things from getting too glum.
Plus horses and greyhounds. The Yorkshire moors. Bias-cut frocks. And quite a lot of afternoon tea.
What more could you ask for?
(c) Sheena Wilkinson
About Miss McVey Takes Charge:
Yorkshire,1936. April McVey is in charge of True Minds Marriage Bureau, trying to find happy futures for the lovelorn of Easterbridge, while the menace of fascism marches through the country.
After two years of matchmaking, she thinks she has seen it all. But when an old friend arrives from Ireland, with a broken heart that’s well beyond April’s experience, and then a young nun asks her to find a match for her lonely brother, the consequences are shattering.
And as political turmoil reaches their own community, will April have the courage to take charge and do the right thing?
Miss McVey Takes Charge is published by Writers Review Publishing.
Order your copy online here.
And read more from Sheena Wilkinson on Writing.ie here.
