ANGIE NORTHEY
SELF-PUBLISHED AUTHOR
LADY ANNA
A bit of Victorian frivolity. A peek behind the net curtains of Belgravia. A glimpse underneath the petticoats and corsets of the late 19th Century upper-classes, and into the private lives of the wealthy and powerful.
Anna starts life in St John’s Wood with her emotionally cold and mentally unstable mother until, at the age of sixteen, she is married off by her father to the elderly Lord Albury in exchange for forgiveness of a debt.
Her husband’s quest for an heir leads her into a new world of sensual pleasure, where her sexuality and libido are unlocked for the first time.
Her journey takes her from opulent Eaton Square to life amongst the idle rich in Nice, rural seclusion in Wiltshire, and then back again in Belgravia.
My Story
I've just published my fifth novel 'Lady Anna', and it's available on the links above.
I planned to write 'The Beast Catcher' after 'Out of the Darkness', but as the title suggests, it featured some very dark scenes which were quite difficult to write, and which were based on my own abusive childhood and then my later abusive marriage.
I decided to take a break from dragging traumatic events out of the subconscious part of my brain and onto paper, so I wrote the slightly more light-hearted 'Lady Anna'.
I've spent the past 34 years of my other life as a telecoms engineer, but all of my life devising plots and ideas for many novels. My first stab at writing was at the age of 11, when I was inspired by the 1981 TV adaptation of 'Brideshead Revisited'. It was about a similar romp around a stately home, but unsurprisingly, not up to Evelyn Waugh. I remember falling madly in love with Anthony Andrews, and ironically I worked in his house in Belgravia twenty years later, installing a telephone line. Sadly, he wasn't there at the time.
I was born, and have lived and worked in London all my life. My education was woeful, typical of most working-class kids of '70's, and I could barely read when I left secondary school. I managed to drag myself through the sixth form and two years at Brixton College, before working for BT as an engineer where I was (and still am) the only woman working with two hundred blokes!
I know it sounds like an old cliché, but my education started when I left school, and I truly have been attending the University of Life ever since.
I am now divorced with two beautiful sons, and after the birth of my youngest son in 2009, I took a slightly more sedate role within BT, when I managed to convince myself to start writing down some of the ideas for novels that I have had clanging around in my brain for the past forty-odd years. I thought it was better to drag them out before the menopause and then dementia kick in.
My novels are almost all set in the past, as I'm what I describe as a history nut, and are all set in my beloved London, so they unite my two passions. They are all seen from a working-class female point of view and feature the very lowest and down trodden of society, like servants and prostitutes or victims of cruelty or abuse. Accurately portraying London history.
I hope to give these, so far, voiceless under-class a real voice in a realistic, authentic and un-sanitised depiction of history.
I hope you enjoy some of the yarns that I have devised, for they are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, very adult, and above all entertaining.
