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Annie R McEwen Samples The Corset Girls Unbound
Katherine Grant: Welcome to the historical romance sampler podcast. I'm your host, Katherine Grant, and each week I introduce you to another amazing historical romance author. My guest reads a little sample of their work, and then we move into a free ranging interview. If you like these episodes, don't forget to subscribe to the historical romance sampler, wherever you listen to podcasts and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
Now let's get into this week's episode.
I am excited to have an episode today with a returning guest and supporter of the podcast, Annie R McEwen. A career historian, annie has lived in six countries and under every roof from a canvas tent to a Georgian era Manor house. She writes historical, romantic suspense, paranormal romance, and historical fiction.
Winner of the 2022 Page Turner's writing award, romance category, annie garnered both a first and second place, 2022 Romance through the ages award, the 2023 Maggie Award and the 2023 Daphne de Maurier Award. She was a finalist for the 2024 Page Turner's Writing Award and shortlisted for a writer's mentorship award.
When she's not in her 1920s bungalow in Florida, annie lives writes and explores castles in Wales, and Annie has previously been on the show in season one, episode 51, I believe, the very last one before a holiday break. So if you haven't listened to that, you have the opportunity to hear even more from Annie.
But today I'm excited to have you back. Thanks so much for coming, Annie.
Annie R McEwen: Oh, it's my pleasure to be with you.
Katherine Grant: So today you're reading for us The Corset Girls: Unbound.
Annie R McEwen: Yes, I, I, I'm gonna, may I give you a little backstory, please on, on the series because Unbound is the second in a series of four books all titled The Corset Girls Something.
The first title is The Corset Girls Unlaced. And the, the premise of the Corset Girls series, which is what I've been calling Victorian Noir, it's could be called working class Victorian Romance. It's definitely romantic suspense. So it, it has some dark and some edgy aspects to it. The premise of the series is
pretty simple. It's four women, all of them working in a bespoke corsetry salon in Mayfair, and they meet four men. And each of the women has a troubled background of some sort. The men, well, three of them are former members of London's most notorious street gang. And the fourth is a Royal Navy Deserter who becomes a spy.
So as I say, it's a pretty simple premise, but it's one that promises and delivers a lot of complications. Some of those are, are delivered in book one unlaced, and as part of resolving that complication, one of corset girls Minerva Hawkins meets and is strongly attracted to one of the former gang members was by way of an enforcer for the gang.
He's an expert in the use of throwing knives and other lethal weapons. He's heavily tattooed, and he is attracted to Minerva, Min as she's known, but he has to return to France in order to evade British arrest warrants. It's Etienne's only desire when he goes back to France to just forget his gang past.
He doesn't want anything more to do with crime or violence. He is moved into his inherited a farm farmhouse where he raises grapes and makes wines and cooks and you know, he just is going to have a nice, peaceful life there. So he thinks, but in the scene that I'm going to, to read for you, a complication of her own has sent Min to Etienne. There's only one person that she thinks can help her sort out this complication, and that is him. She finds out where he is living in France and she goes there. Unfortunately, she arrives in the middle of the night and at a very minimal train stop in the middle of Bordeaux and she didn't let him know she was coming, obviously, because she knew he would tell her not to come to stay away.
But, she, she doesn't know where she's going. I mean, she has a vague idea of where the farmhouse is. So she sets off in the middle of the night and somehow she manages to walk there and finds the door open. And so she just walks in and it's, she can't see where she's going because of course there are no lamps burning.
And she stumbles around and ends up stumbling into Etienne's bedroom where he unfortunately is having a, a nightmare. And so he's dead asleep in the middle of this horrendous nightmare, and she trips over the bed and falls onto him. He thinks in his dream that it's an assailant attacking him. And so there's this tremendous scuffle that goes on in and around the bed.
And when he eventually stands up and gets clear of the the sheets, he realizes that he is been, you know, attacking this woman that he actually knows. He is horrified and she is horrified that this scuffle has somehow produced a formidable state of arousal in him, which she has never seen before. And since he sleeps in the nude, is quite a shock, which he then realizes is mirrored in her eyes and he flees from the room and this is what happens next.
Katherine Grant: All right.
Annie R McEwen: Well, well. There was no dictionary in which the entry for awkward defined what Minerva had just seen. Life was a banquet of novelty. The moonlight was enough that she could see to scramble out of the bedding and began putting herself to right. Her petticoats dropped into place easily enough, but her skirt was twisted entirely around, closure to the front and unhooked, the placket gaping.
The buttons of her bodice had also taken leave of their senses. Six were unfastened, displaying the lace edge of her chamise and the ribbon tie at the top of her corset busk. The tie was undone, pink silk tails spiraling coquettish down the front of her boice. All very embarrassing, as though her clothing had been ready all along for the man with a... she would try not to think about that, but when something was imprinted on one's retinas, it tended to remain that way for a while, like the image of the flash after the photographers fired the pan.
Thankfully, her eyeglasses had not been broken in the scuffle. She removed them, strained one earpiece that had gone slightly south, and replaced them. The disorder of her hair was less easily remedied. Hang her hairpins. She was not about to go rooting through the bed to find them. She'd had a hat too, a small dove gray toque that her workmate and friend Evie had made.
It was also apparently tucked in for the night. "Sweet Dreams, Hat", she said archly to the room. The bed covers were partly on, mostly off the bed, an invariable consequence, she imagined, of boudoir wrestling matches. She straightened the linens and made the bed into some sort of order. Her hat did not make an appearance.
If it was half as shocked as she was, it might never show its face again. She'd had a hair ribbon. Also missing. Perhaps it had run away with a hat like the dish and the spoon in the nursery rhyme. She performed an exercise in futility, rustling her hair into a single long plait without a ribbon to tie it off.
Her hair invariably worked itself out of a braid in minutes. Her traveling handbag was on the floor. She retrieved it and stood with it in her hands, unsure of what to do next. She would concentrate on feeling vexed. It seemed the safest place for her feelings to go. There was a toppled wooden chair next to the bed.
She set it upright and sat in it, handbag in her lap, folding her hands over the bag. She strove for composure. Her face, she felt, was a success. Her heart less so. It continued to race like a rabbit who drunk a pail of strong tea.
He returned clothed. She remained in the chair. He stood hands behind him and expression truculent.
An impenitnt Schoolboy called before the headmaster. They would now be forced to engage in convoluted and embarrassing speeches, but she couldn't see any way around it. They couldn't just pretend nothing had happened and start off with, "lovely weather, don't you agree?" Or perhaps they could. She couldn't make things any worse by establishing the civility
she completely snubbed when she breached his bedroom and fell over him as he slept. "Hello, Etienne."
"Minerva."
Now that he wasn't bellowing like a bull elephant, Min remembered how much she enjoyed the way he said her name, the way it reached deep, stroked deeper, the low rumble of it, the French of it. Minerva. It made her want to shut her eyes and bask the way a cat does in the sun. There would be no basking, convoluted and embarrassing speeches commencing.
3 2, 1. Etienne inquired as to her health. Was she damaged? Had he hurt her in any way? She was well, she told him, if a bit rattled. He was shattered by having fought with her. She insisted it was her fault. He had been having the cauchemar, he said, and and she sympathized sharing her recurring dream in which she went round and round London in a hackney cab that never let her off.
He brought up again the inadvisability of entering a man's bedroom. She lied and said, yes, of course she knew not to enter a man's bedroom at night or at any other time. In actuality she'd never been warned. No one seemed to believe she was a woman to whom such a thing might happen. She mentioned that the door of the house was open.
He countered by saying in the remote French countryside doors were often left unlocked, the danger of house breaking being somewhat less than the chances of volcanic eruption. There was an absence of lights in the house, which she pointed out. He gave the point several swift kicks. It was the middle of the night he lived alone, and he could find his way around his own house in the dark.
Why leave a lamp burning? Even though she knew she was pressing her luck, she claimed she was unaware she'd even entered a bedroom. Houses, she pointed out, did not usually have bedrooms on the ground floor. She'd assumed she'd gone into a sitting room. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, he said he understood why she might make such a mistake.
He then informed her a bit patronizingly, she thought, that French farmhouses did not as a rule have parlors. She sidled oh, so courteously up to the heart -or some body part of the matter. "While I am sorry for intruding, the truth is that I would not have expected to find you..." she hunted for the word and hoped she'd get it right.
Her French was unreliable. "Deshabille." Needlessly, since he was French, she translated: "undressed. I was under the impression that gentlemen wore..." another word she had to hunt for. She didn't think she'd ever said it aloud in any language. "Night shirts."
He didn't quite smile, but a corner of his mouth lifted fractionally.
"You would know this how, Minerva?" He had her there. She rushed on to assure him that she would never have entered his house at all, except it was so very late and she was tired. She had the idea she could walk from the train, stop in the village, but wasn't entirely sure how far it was. And, and the train pulled in so late and there wasn't really anyone to ask except one very old person.
And the old person was asleep on a bench and she didn't like to wake him. Did Etienne know that the stop wasn't really a station and just sort of a shed. Well, he probably knew that. But with the walking in the night and being alone and not entirely sure where she was, she was unnerved. So when she discovered that she was repeating herself, but she thought it was a strong point in her favor, the front door was unlocked.
"I let myself in."
"I beg your pardon, Goldilocks And the three bears. Not important." He apologized again for the buffeting, very nicely, she thought, for a man who tried to press her to death. Walking ahead, he brought her to the kitchen. She thought she passed it on her way to the bedroom, so it was by way of a return trip and put her in a chair at a broad wood table.
Then he went around lighting lamps until the room took on a golden glow. She exercised rare prudence and kept her mouth shut, watching. Five lamps. Four minutes. After two years apart. That's all it took to drop her right back in the same stunned emotional state as the last time she'd seen him. His height, the broad span of his shoulders,
the leonine grace of his movements. In a Mayfair shop or a French farmhouse, he made her newt stupid with desire. She knew he would ask the question sooner or later. Once he'd stirred the embers of the fire in the kitchen hearth to life, he did. "What are you doing here?"
"Here in France?"
"In France, in the Entre-deux-Mers, in my house."
Yes, indeed. That's where she was. And what a long journey to get here. When he wasn't so irritated with her, he'd appreciate that she had everything to lose by turning and running away. Everything to gain by saying what she had come to say. "I am here to ask for a service. Please be assured, I would never presume to ask without offering compensation.
I have funds if they are not enough, I'm prepared to offer you..." She'd rehearsed the speech a hundred times, but that didn't stop ferocious heat from rising from her chest to her face. Unnecessary display of maidenly shyness considering what had happened in the bedroom. She put her hand to her mouth and discreetly cleared her throat.
"I, I am prepared, if the money is not enough, to offer you my body." It gave her no little pride to see that she was in what was surely a very small number of people who had shocked "Etienne the Dog Sans Saceur." Lawbreaker, blades man, former member of London's most notorious gang. His jaw didn't quite drop, but his brooding dark eyebrows drew together and the whiskey colored eyes beneath them seemed to wobble for a split second.
He spoke with the caution of someone stepping over broken glass. "E bien? and this service you ask of me. What is it?"
"Silly me. Of course, you'll need to know that. I'd like you to kill a man. Please."
Katherine Grant: Oh boy. What a scene. That was fantastic. Thank you so much for reading it. I, of course have many questions, but first we're gonna take a quick break for our sponsors.
Katherine Grant: I am back with Annie R McEwen, who just read a fantastic and sizzling sample from the Corset Girls Unbound, which is now available for readers to go grab from their favorite bookstore. There was so much personality in that scene and in the way that you wrote the narration. We learned so much about Minerva just from how she is thinking about how to handle this situation.
One question I have that's a little general is this is a historical suspense romance. Yes. And I'm curious what you think about why do suspense and romance work so well together?
Annie R McEwen: Well, they, they both profit from crises. The very definition of suspense is, is that it rides a wave of crisis.
If the stakes aren't really, really high, then it's not very suspenseful. It might still be considered suspense, but it wouldn't be what I would call high tension. And I think the same is absolutely true of romance. If you can ratchet up those stakes to the point where it, it, it's not necessarily a do or die, though, you can have threats to life as, as my as the corset girls all do.
But even if it's not a threat to actual physical life, it's a threat to the heart. There's always that feeling that, oh, you know, this could be a killing blow. I mean, this could really destroy me. So they're obviously well suited for each other.
Katherine Grant: That's a really good insight. And you mentioned that this series is, some of the words you used were noir, dark, edgy, and we also know that there's a big trend right now of dark romance.
So how did you approach writing a dark, historical, and how did you approach creating a world where the characters are living? They might, they might be called morally gray, or they're living with maybe a different morality system than the reader's everyday life.
Annie R McEwen: I have to say, first of all, that there while I came up with the expression Victorian noir, I came up with it after I began reading what my publisher was saying about the book.
My publisher and editor were using words like edgy and in the back of the book blurb and the Amazon blurb my publisher wrote that it's romance with a fight. And, you know, I thought, well, that's cool. But I am a historian, as many people know, I'm a career, was a career historian before I devoted myself full-time to authorship.
And my area of specialization is British material culture from the Regency period through right up to World War I and life for ordinary people. I mean, I love reading about Dukes and Earls and, and crises in the ballroom. You know, I mean, sure I eat that stuff up, but I don't write much of that stuff.
What I write is the lives of the working class and yeah, they were full of darkness at the same time that they were also full of a kind of vigor.
Life was hard for these people. They coped with it with tremendous courage and tremendous bravery and tremendous humor. And I fold a lot of humor into these books. But yeah, that's where I think they do deserve the title Dark. It's that darkness, that awareness, not that people are necessarily wallowing in it, but there's that awareness that they're just one step away from disaster all the time.
Katherine Grant: Yeah. Mm. That's very interesting.
And I noticed in the, in the first episode that you did with us, you read a sample of
The Chelsea Milner, I noticed that there was the, the character, the protagonist there, she was from France. And now we've got, you know, an English character in France with a lovely French hero. Are you drawn to writing England, France relationships? I am. And if so, do you know why?
Annie R McEwen: I love France. I love France. I love the French language. I was lucky in that I took quite a lot of French language training when I was growing up and I had several teachers who were also Francophiles though no was actually French.
I was engaged to a Frenchman for five years. I've been to France a number of times. The relationship between France and England is probably more complex and has more longevity than the relationship of Britain with any other European nation because Britain as in part, because Britain as we know it, would not have existed without the Norman invasion.
So, at least from 10 66 we can say that Britain and France were inextricably joined. And, and that fascinates me. I love to see how that plays out. And I, I love to see how it plays out how it, how it played out in that novella. The Chelsea Milliner. Because the female protagonist was one who fled with her parents from France during the terror.
And they lost everything in France and had a dream of rebuilding in in England. But they died before, you know, they could make that happen. And their daughter carried on their dream without ever really knowing why. She just, you know, she borrowed their dream and it became her dream. And then when she lost it, she had nothing to take its place.
And so that book opens on a scene of utter devastation. And she rebuilds from that.
Katherine Grant: Yeah. Alright, well I think it's a good time to play our game, and since you've already played Love or leave it today, we're gonna do, would you rather? Oh, okay. All right. Would you Rather A Cinderella story or a Fall from Fortune?
Annie R McEwen: Oh, fall from Fortune.
Oh, fall from Fortune. Absolutely. I wanna see, you know, how the, the, the chamber maid who used to be a bare, you know, a baroness. I mean, how is she gonna climb outta that hole? I love that. I kind of like it if it takes place before the book, so that then we watch the ascendancy because it's not so much fun when you've already gotten to like a character and then her whole world falls apart, you know?
Katherine Grant: Yeah. All right, would you rather Secret baby, as in the heroine keeps the child a secret from the father, or amnesia?
Annie R McEwen: I gotta admit, I'm allergic to secret babies, and I'm not all that fond of amnesia either, but it fits into a category of themes I have in my mind called war wounds.
And I think of the amnesia as a result of a combat injury. I'm, I'm for it. I wanna see where that goes. I like that. I think it can be a powerful tool for the unwrapping of a character when that character themself may not know who they are. Or, or maybe I've just seen Hitchcock's suspicion too many times.
Love some of my favorite flicks. Yeah.
Katherine Grant: All right. Would you rather a rake who needs reform or a cinnamon roll who needs to learn to stand up for him himself?
Annie R McEwen: I'm all for rakes. But you know, nobody likes a rake who's still a rake and that I don't think there's any such thing as a lovable rake.
It is just my feminist underlying philosophy. But I don't find anything attractive about men who abuse women for sport, which is a cruel but probably honest definition of a rape. But if a, if a rake is reformed, and I can think of some wonderful ones in romance literature. I think Eloisa James has made a small specialty out of writing about rakes who are ashamed of their, their rake-dome in the past.
And then when it revisits them, they are crippled by a very attractive shame. For what they've done. Yeah, I like that.
Katherine Grant: Okay. Would you rather present tense narration or a story told through flashbacks?
Annie R McEwen: I honestly don't believe I've ever written in the present tense and, and I can only think of one book that I wrote in, in first person.
I just don't, I just. And I find it unsettling to read. Now, that's just me. I'm, a lot of people are fine with it. They love it. And you do see it, I think, and you don't see it much in historical fiction of any sort, but you do see it in contemporary romance I think more commonly. And maybe that's why certain people are, are accustomed to it and they like it.
So I, I don't do that.
Katherine Grant: All right. And finally, would you rather angsty third act breakup or a bonus epilogue?
Annie R McEwen: To me, gotta have the epilogue. Although I can't think of any time that I've ever called it epilogue at the start of. Mm-hmm. But I, there's something about. The end of any story, including fairytales, where they say, and they all lived happily ever after.
I can remember as a child, I never thought of that until just now. I can remember as a child thinking, yeah, but what happened? I mean, they live happily ever after. Well, what does that mean? Do they live in New York? Do they live in Massachusetts? Do they have a cat? Do they have a pony? It's like, I need, I need to know where they are a year or two years, five years down the road.
And so maybe I just have to write that wrap up at the end for me personally. But but I do think a lot of readers like it too. They wanna know about the pony too.
Katherine Grant: Awesome. Well thank you for playing would you rather, and thank you for coming back on the historical romance sampler. Where can listeners find the corset girls?
Annie R McEwen: Corset girls is on every sales platform now. it is already available in ebook and paperback, and it will be available in audiobook as well. The whole series has an audiobook contract. So for those that like audio books, they're out there and the narrators are lovely.
Katherine Grant: Well, fantastic, and I'll put a link to your website in the show notes. So listeners, if you want to learn more about the audio books and make sure you're on the newsletter to find out, head out, head over to that link in the show notes.
All right, thank you. Thank you for coming on and sharing your stories with us.
Annie R McEwen: Great to see you again. Keep on doing what you're doing.
That's it for this week! Don't forget to subscribe to the Historical Romance Sampler wherever you listen, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Until next week, happy reading!