Today's guest blogger is Marthe Jocelyn, author of over two dozen books for kids and teens, including MABLE RILEY and WOULD YOU. Below, she shares details about a century-old family mystery that inspired her latest novel, FOLLY.
Realizing that you are pregnant is certainly one of the worst things that a teenage girl has to face. Even if you ultimately keep and, of course, love your baby, first there is panic and then the dreadful time of thinking over the options, deciding which choice is right for you and your family circumstances.
And what if you were a pregnant teenager over one hundred years ago? What would your options have been?
My father was eighty when we learned that his father was not an orphan, as we’d always believed. My grandfather had been born to an unmarried mother, which in 1880 was a shameful beginning. My great-grandmother, (slightly older than my character, Mary Finn) had personally handed her son over to the Foundling Hospital in London, England, and never saw him again. Knowing that my grandfather had been ‘abandoned’ was only part of the story; the reception committee at the institution had also renamed him. ‘Arthur Jocelyn’ was not the inherited name we had imagined, but was chosen from the city directory. There was an Arthur Street and a Jocelyn Road nearby.
I was curious to keep hunting for the family story. A century had passed since Arthur’s arrival, so the Hospital’s confidential records were now open to me. I learned the name of my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Ann --- something her own son had never known. I found her family in a village in Lincolnshire, where her mother had died and been replaced by a stepmother, and where she had several younger siblings, including a sister named Sarepta. Elizabeth’s first job was in the kitchen at Castle Belvoir in Rutland when she was fourteen. She went from there to work as a domestic for Mrs. Reed and her daughter in London.
The characters in my book are entirely fictional, though I’ve used some of the names that appear in the accounts of my great-grandmother. Their troubles are a part of my own history but also sadly commonplace, then and now.
Elizabeth had been on her own since she was hardly more than a child. I believe she must have longed for someone to love her. No wonder she gave her heart to the young man who paid attention to her as no one else had.
I discovered the name of the man who seduced Elizabeth, and her version of his initial kindness --- and subsequent disappearance. I learned that she had struggled for nine months to keep her baby before giving him up. What a terrible decision that must have been to make.
The Hospital’s condition for accepting a baby was that the mother would have a chance to overcome her error and to redeem herself, so Elizabeth was extensively interviewed before being permitted to leave her son.
She was married three years later, to a younger man who owned a tobacco shop. They had two daughters together. I wonder whether she ever told her husband about her past? She never wrote or visited the Foundling Hospital and never knew what became of Arthur --- whom she had named John Graham, after his irresponsible father.
Throughout my research, I carried a sentimental yearning that love and romance had been part of my grandfather’s conception. Whether or not this is true, I have written FOLLY in homage to my ancestors.
-- Marthe Jocelyn
