Welcome to Economical with Fiction
Welcome. This is my very first substack post and I thought I would explain why I am here and what I’ll be posting.
I’m a writer of fiction, that’s the day job (if I can give such a grand title to a very fluctuating occupation). Yet often I find myself writing other things. My novels are historical (1920s and 30s) and involve a lot of research; I also read a lot of fiction from the period. Sometimes my research fuels ideas that aren’t fictional, and other times I just want to explore what is going on in the world. Sometimes I want to put off starting a new chapter of the current novel …
So my aim for my substack is to have a space where I can share these musings with others who might also be interested in forgotten novelists of the 1920s, what Neville Shute has to say about capitalism, why the Great Depression is a catalyst for some classic children’s books, why I am obsessed with the timeline of E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady or constructing a map of Helen Hooven Santmyer’s Waynesboro, how to write novels about real people, how to write novels with exchange rate debates, what the Bloomsbury Group would have made of twitter, and so on …
I’m especially interested in that space where economics and fiction intersect. Who knew that The Wizard of Oz was an allegory for currency reform? And the Yellow Brick Road is the gold standard? Having written two novels myself in which squabbles over currency reform has a major part to play, I’m intrigued by other writers who inhabit this niche, whether that’s a contemporary novel like Trust by Hermann Diaz or forgotten middle brow novels like D.S Stevenson’s Miss Bundle’s Book, who will be the subject of my next post, or the classic tales of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’m especially interested in the impact of the Great Depression, whether on the books themselves, or on the lives of people writing them. One of the most massively seismic events of the twentieth century, it’s perhaps not a surprise that it had an impact on the word on the written page as much as in the political or social realm. For some writers it turned out, oddly enough, to be an opportunity. In any case, the material conditions in which people write matter.
I plan to post at least once a week. I will be making all material freely available to subscribers for the present. If anyone does choose to be a paid subscriber then I will gratefully put the proceeds towards funding research for my third novel.