ŷ������

I don't review my own books, of course—but here are some facts you might not have known about Half a Soul and the Regency era in general!

FUN FACTS ABOUT HALF A SOUL
- A great deal of this novel was written during work lunches at a nearby cafe, about thirty minutes at a time.

- The first scene I came up with for the book was (view spoiler)[the scene where Theodora washes her gown in the fountain (hide spoiler)]. This scene remains almost entirely unchanged in the final draft.

- The Regency Faerie Tales were originally published independently. They were later picked up by Orbit for rerelease, with fresh edits and lovely new covers.

- Theodora's half a soul is indeed a metaphor for neurodivergence. She shares many of my own neurodivergent qualities, along with a few from my friends.

- Some people theorise that children historically suspected to be stolen by faeries were in fact neurodivergent all along, and that faerie involvement was simply a fanciful method of explanation for this phenomenon. I love this idea, and therefore enjoy calling myself faerie-cursed.

- At one point, Lord Hollowvale (view spoiler)[calls Elias a changeling. (hide spoiler)] This is another reference to this bit of folklore. (view spoiler)[When faeries stole babies, they were said to leave a faerie child behind in place of the human baby. This faerie child was known as a changeling. In this particular case, Lord Hollowvale is implying that Elias is one of the human babies who was stolen away to faerie and raised there; he has used the term "changeling" for both sides of the equation. (hide spoiler)]

- The original draft of Half a Soul was even darker in tone. (view spoiler)[Through investigation, Theodora discovered that the workhouse master had been burying children alive once they fell asleep, in an attempt to prevent anyone from learning that they were missing their souls instead of falling sick. (hide spoiler)] Ultimately, despite the fact that I found this plot development to be realistic, I decided it was slightly too much. I believe I still have the redacted scene in my notes somewhere.

- Mr Albert Lowe's personality is based partially on one of my husband's tabletop roleplaying characters. If I'm somewhat in love with him, therefore, readers will need to forgive me.

- For anyone confounded by the last line of the novel, in light of the messages about self-acceptance: (view spoiler)[Traditional faerie tales often end with something called an apotheosis, where the characters ascend to immortality, join God in Heaven, or are otherwise transfigured forever. This is understood to be an intentional metaphor for death, framed in gentler wording. Theodora is indeed just fine as she is, with only half a soul, and she lives her life accordingly. When she joins her halves together at last, this is meant to represent her death—a loss of self at a time and place of her choosing, once she has lived a full and happy life with her family. I can think of no better ending. (hide spoiler)]

AMUSING FACTS ABOUT THE REGENCY ERA
- Regency vocabulary being slightly different, "dress" connotes an entire outfit or style of dress, while "gown" or "frock" connotes an actual article of clothing. In every book, I have always had to do an entire editing pass purely dedicated to fixing this difference, as it's far too easy to mix up while writing.

- Lord Hollowvale's five coats are not nearly as outlandish as reasonable people would probably like to believe. In fact, there was a style during the Regency era where wealthy men would wear two coats at once. One suspects that the only reason human aristocrats stopped at two was pure logistics; thankfully, faeries have no such limitations.

- The faerie obsession with English culture is based on the English aristocracy's obsession with East Asian culture, and its collection of arbitrary East Asian objects. If English aristocrats can marvel over Chinese teacups, it seems only fair that faeries should marvel over English gravy boats.

- A real hazard of Regency era balls was the candlelight. Not only did it make balls incredibly hot and stifling, it also posed a danger to women and their gowns. At least one woman is recorded to have died from burns after catching herself on a candle at a ball. (view spoiler)[This is part of why the guests at Lady Cushing's ball are so charmed and relieved when Elias blows out the candles and lights everything with starlight instead. Much of the tension in the room was quite literally snuffed out. (hide spoiler)]

- During this time, the waltz had recently been introduced to society, but it was still considered slightly scandalous. The Regency waltz uses a different dancing position than the modern waltz, with which I am actually very practised—and for the life of me, I can't imagine how that tangle of arms actually worked.

- Ladies at balls were expected to be polite and not hog the same dance partner indefinitely. This led to the understanding that a woman who danced twice with the same man was possibly infatuated beyond good sense and decorum, and probably about to become engaged to said man (if she wasn't already).

- Visitation between households of means had fairly strict social rules which would be dizzying to anyone who had not grown up surrounded by them. (view spoiler)[This is why Elias is so confounded by the proper hours at which he is supposed to visit Theodora, and the fact that he should have sent flowers first, in order to signal his likely interest in calling at a later date. (hide spoiler)] Men were not supposed to write letters to women in whom they were interested, but were allowed to send flowers, perhaps with a name card.

- Traditional English magical beliefs from around this period included such things as the four humours, dowsing, alchemy (both literal and metaphorical), necromancy/nigromancy (which I absolutely omitted from this book, due to its often gruesome ingredients), ritualised prayers and commands to both angels and demons, and several miscellaneous concepts like tobacco being used to reveal black magic and evil spirits. I decided to humour historical magicians and make it all real, and proceeded from there.

FAR LESS FUN FACTS ABOUT REGENCY ERA MEDICINE
- English medicine during the Regency era was... questionable. Physicians believed that sicknesses came from "miasma" and that bad smells could lead to illness. Sometimes, at least, this resulted in the right actions for the wrong reasons. (view spoiler)[This is why Albert asks Theodora and Miss Jennings to wear scarves over their noses and mouths while inside the workhouse. (hide spoiler)] Several well-respected physicians almost certainly killed people with their treatments, rather than helping them; nevertheless, many people paid physicians a small fortune for the privilege of being bled until they were too weak to fight off their illness. Despite this, as always, some medical professionals still stumbled upon common sense observations about which treatments led to more reliable results and quietly practiced better medicine.

- Army surgeons, like Albert, could not generally be promoted to the highest medical ranks in the army unless they had degrees from Oxford or Cambridge (neither of which actually had a medical program at the time) as well as a membership with the College of Physicians in London. This led to intense acrimony between surgeons and physicians, partially justified by stories of inept aristocratic physicians whose theoretical knowledge made them worse than useless in hospitals. Nevertheless, some surgeons with the means (like Albert) acquired physician credentials after returning to England, in order to remedy the lack of respect they had been shown during the war.

- English hospitals and medicine during the early Napoleonic Wars are understood to have been horrific, with very high mortality rates. Ironically, previous wars had long since led to a better understanding of how to run hospitals sensibly—but almost all of these lessons had since been forgotten and required relearning. There is evidence that some surgeons and physicians on the English side understood the necessity of good hospital and patient hygiene, but were woefully under-equipped and under-resourced to offer it until far later in the war, when Wellington and his advisors dedicated more effort to reforming hospital logistics.

INTENSELY AWFUL FACTS ABOUT REGENCY ERA WORKHOUSES
- The first recorded instance in Britain of the term "workhouse" dates back to 1631. In 1601, something very similar was known as a "house of correction", per the Elizabethan Poor Law. Both of these institutions were always envisioned as a place where those "unwilling to work" would be forced to do so. From the very beginning, workhouses have had a tradition of hard labour and inhumane punishments.

- The Cleveland Street Workhouse was a real workhouse, originally built in 1775 and known by several different names throughout history (among them the Covent Garden Workhouse and the Strand Union Workhouse). Charles Dickens spent five years living next to this exact workhouse, partially during his adolescence in the Regency era, and it is suspected that he based Oliver Twist on several of the things which he witnessed during that time. (view spoiler)[The apocryphal story of a pregnant woman thrown out onto the street to give birth is one of which Charles Dickens would likely have been aware. (hide spoiler)]

- During the Regency era, the workhouses were already desperately crowded, between ongoing enclosure, grain tariffs, industrialisation, and the recent war—and several of the worst workhouse conditions normally attributed to the Victorian era were actually already present in the Regency era. As mentioned in the epilogue, (view spoiler)[the 1834 Poor Law would soon worsen the situation in the workhouses even further. (hide spoiler)] Master Ricks observes that (view spoiler)[gently-bred ladies should not be meddling in his workhouse (hide spoiler)], however, and this is somewhat prophetic, as (view spoiler)[middle-class women eventually spearheaded workhouse reforms, often forcing their way into workhouses in order to catalogue the conditions there. (hide spoiler)]