Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to a Spot of Story with Danielle Grandinetti. Cozy up with your favorite beverage as we chat about sweet romance, thrilling suspense and fascinating history.
Perhaps you'll find your next read in one of these stories.
On this episode of A Spot of Story, I'm chatting with Anna Jensen about the Lady's Companion. Anna Jensen is a British-born author living in South Africa. She writes Christian historical and contemporary fiction along with devotions and inspirational poetry.
Her stories are all about identity and purpose with faith gently woven through it all. Anna's passion about showing how an ordinary life lived with an extraordinary God can change the world.
Anna, welcome.
[00:00:57] Anna Jensen: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Podcast number one.
[00:01:00] Danielle Grandientti: Yes. You're my debut author.
[00:01:03] Anna: Yay.
[00:01:06] Danielle: All right, well, my first question is one because we're all readers here and our this podcast unites us over a love of story. What are you currently reading?
[00:01:18] Anna, I have to confess it's not Christian fiction, but I am reading John Le Carre's last George Smiley book, which he wrote just before he died.
Now you're going to ask me what the title of it is, and I think it's called something like the Last Spy or something like that. But it's really, I'm really enjoying it because it pulls in all of his previous stories and kind of very cleverly done. So if you know the previous stories, it makes a lot of sense. But my poor husband read it and he didn't know the other stories so he was lost throughout the whole book.
So that's, that's not marvelous if you haven't read all the other ones.
But I've also recently finished ARC Copy, an advanced reader copy, of Caroline Johnson's latest release that she'll be bringing out later this summer. It's called Shade, not Shades of Of Autumn. That's the one she did before.
It's called Shadows of Summer and it is so, so good. So when people get a chance to, when she starts promoting and so on, definitely it's one that I would recommend. Set in Scotland in the middle of summer at an outdoor pursuit center.
Really, really good. And it's got a very not necessarily an easy to read storyline, but it has a beautiful story of hope and redemption worked through.
[00:02:46] Danielle: Oh, I love that. I love that her covers are so beautiful. I love the Shades of Autumn one with the umbrella.
[00:02:52] Anna: Isn't it brilliant?
[00:02:53] Danielle: It is. It really is. Well, now turning to your story, The Lady's Companion. First, tell us a little bit about it.
[00:03:05] Anna: Okay, so the latest companion is the first book in the upcoming Our House on Heather Wind. And according to Caroline being Scottish, Wynd is pronounced wind, not wind, which is what I thought it was.
And it's set on a little winding street called Heather Wind, and we have 14 houses on our street.
And it's a follow up to the series that a few authors did last year, which was our house on Sycamore Street.
So we've got some of the same authors like yourself and myself and a few others, and then we've got some new authors who've joined the series this year.
And it's set in the Scottish Highlands, very close to Loch Ness. So there might be a few monsters in some of the stories.
Yes. Sadly, not mine, because my story set in the 1870s and nobody discovered the monster in the 1870s. Yes. So I couldn't talk about the monster, unfortunately.
But my story is essentially ... The story that I wrote last year for our house in Eden Cove was.
Our House on Sycamore street was The Ferryman's Light, which was about a young, young man called Walter Ferryman who has to deal with the consequences of.
Of an action that he took with his. With his beloved girlfriend, whatever you want to call her, lover.
And unfortunately, he has to face the consequences of that. And I kind of left readers hanging slightly at the end of that. I did have a couple of readers say to me they were very disappointed at my ending. So I'm hoping to satisfy some readers with this, with the Lady's Companion, because it. It can be read standalone. You don't have to have read the Sycamore street story, but it does tie up the loose ends from The Ferryman's Light.
And we follow, We follow a girl called Gwendolyn Powis as she heads from Wales, which is where she's living, and she heads off up to Scotland, where she becomes a lady's companion in the small village of Bild Fell. And she lives at number one. Number one Heather Wynd.
[00:05:18] Danielle: Yay.
[00:05:19] Anna: Yay.
[00:05:21] Danielle: So for readers who haven't read the Sycamore street series, my characters were the descendants of the original ferryman in Anna's story, so it's really fun. And then with the ladies companion, there's a little bit of tie in with my Scotland story as well. So I'm. I'm really excited for readers to catch the little nod to each other's books.
[00:05:50] Anna: That's my favorite thing with the whole series is that kind of different authors have collaborated with one another and have, like, added little nuggets from each other's stories or developed one of the other characters or ... it's actually a, it's a lovely thing to see authors kind of creating together. I love it.
[00:06:09] Danielle: Yes, me too. Me too. Well, so what is a day in Gwendolyn's life? Can you describe what a common day would be like?
[00:06:19] Anna: She would ... She is the companion for Lady Caldwell, who was living in Wales. She's a widow and she decides that she wanted to go back to her kind of roots up in Scotland, and she wants to take Gwendolyn with her, so she goes with her. And Gwendolyn is a daughter of landed gentry in Wales herself, so she's not really used to kind of companioning and, you know, mating and that kind of thing. So she's maybe not really that good at it, but she's essentially there as.
As a companion while Lady Caldwell makes new friends in the village. So she would maybe get up in the morning. I don't think she'd necessarily help with breakfast. They do have a cook and a housekeeper who comes in who does all of those sorts of chores. So Gwendolyn would maybe sit with Lady Campbell while she goes through her post.
She runs errands for her during the day. There is a young man on the scene. He was the groom down in Wales, but Lady Campbell decides that she's going to train him as the butler and bring him with her. So David, our groom, comes along and is now learning to be a butler. So sometimes him and Gwenlin are sent out on little errands together by Lady Campbell, who I think is maybe.
Maybe a little bit of a matchmaker and, you know, kind of hoping that the two of them are going to get on better than just being mates with each other.
So that's kind of Gwendolyn's day. She attends the local church on a Sunday, the Kirk, rather than the church, as it would have been called.
And they are meeting various different neighbors in the street. They are. They hold supper parties. So they have a couple of supper parties at their place and then they go to a few supper parties. So generally her life is quite.
It's quite relaxed. You know, there's not too much.
She's not. Lady Campbell's not very demanding. She's happy for her to just be a companion, not a servant, which. Which I think is lovely. But then in the meantime, Gwendolyn is trying to discover. She feels that there's these sort of undercurrents in lots of conversations and letters that seem to be going backwards and forwards. And so at the same time as her just carrying out her normal life, she's also trying to discover what's this, what's this kind of secret that seems to be bubbling under the surface?
Secret?
[00:08:47] Danielle: It sounds fascinating.
So what was, what was your favorite scene to write in this story and why?
[00:08:56] Anna: It's a bit of a funny one actually, but I think there were, there's probably a couple. There's, you know, there's always one or two, but one, one in particular that, that really struck, struck me when I was writing or I really wanted to include in the book was just a very coincidental event when Gwendolyn and Lady Campbell and David are traveling from, from Wales via London up to Scotland and they're at the railway station in London and a carriage arrives and on the back of it is kind of like a. It's like a sort of a hearse and on the back of it is a coffin which has a little bell on the top, a little sort of bell tower on the top of the coffin. And I read about this years ago in another, in another novel that I read. I think it was the Great Train Robbery. And apparently in Victorian times, because they were absolutely terrified of being buried alive, they would put these little bells on top of coffins with a kind of rope and pulley system so that if the person in the coffin suddenly woke up, they could pull on the little rope and then attract the attention of everybody outside.
[00:10:01] Danielle: Oh my goodness.
[00:10:02] Anna: When I knew that I was going to be writing a story set in Victorian era London and to do with the railway station, I thought, no, I have to somehow incorporate this little, you know, this little event and the coffin. And so I, I managed to do that and it was so fun. And then later incorporating it into Gwendolyn's kind of panic about what it is is she going into and almost like a sense of foreboding that, you know, she just seeing a coughing is quite unnerving as it is. But then to worry, has she heard the bell ringing? Is the person actually alive?
[00:10:37] Danielle: Oh, yeah.
[00:10:39] Anna: That was just a really fun, you know, it doesn't really add, it doesn't add a huge amount to the actual story, but it just kind of shows where Gwenlan's heart and where her feelings are at kind of preoccupied with the possibility of this body not actually being dead.
[00:10:58] Danielle: Oh, wow. Wow. Oh, I love that. Can't wait for that. Read that scene.
So speaking of that, what was some unique research you needed to do for this story?
[00:11:09] Anna: Well, that one I'd had, I'd had already come across. So I did do a little bit extra research just to make sure. That that wasn't just something from a novel that didn't happen, but it actually did happen.
But then what I stumbled across in doing the research, that the area of our fictional village, Bildfell, is in the area of the Caledonian Canal and Fort Augustus. And I discovered that in 1873, Queen Victoria had visited Fort Augustus and had gone on her royal steamship along the Caledonian Canal.
And so that was something that I particularly wanted to research. And I found a couple of newspaper articles that kind of described the event. And it was amazing. I mean, the newspaper article I found was so.
It was so beautifully descriptive in the way that newspapers used to be in Victorian times. And so it was describing the weather and described how they came out onto the, onto the deck and waved at passersby and then how they went back inside to have a sumptuous banquet. And it was just such a rich description of the real time event that I thought, I have to include Queen Victoria's visit to the area. And so kind of Lady Campbell's reason for wanting to go back to her, to her roots was also because she'd heard that the Queen was coming on this visit and so she actually wanted to make sure she was there in time to be able to see Queen Victoria. And so, yeah, that, that was, that was really interesting.
[00:12:42] Danielle: Oh, that's cool. I love when, like, real events just.
[00:12:45] Anna: Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:46] Danielle: Well, in a story. What is one bit of research you wish you could have included, but it didn't fit.
[00:12:56] Anna: I did do a little bit of research on the building of the actual Caledonian Canal and it was really quite interesting. You know, it's like the canals were so innovative. You know, I don't know how many listeners kind of know the history of the canals in Britain, but it was very much a revolutionary form of transport. You know, it wasn't just about kind of pretty rivers, which is sort of what we think of them when we see them now.
It was very much a way of transporting goods around the place, especially heavy goods like coal and things like that. And so reading the story, reading the background to the Caledonian Canal was very, very interesting. It's one, it's. I think it's got the most locks in. Oh, wow. In like a three or four mile distance or something like that than any of the other canals in Britain.
And I really wanted to try and talk about that, but I didn't really have an engineer in my story who could kind of wax lyrical about canals and things like that. Yes.
Oh, I'm gonna have to forego that. But maybe one day I'll write a story. Story about canals and something like that.
[00:14:04] Danielle: That would be really cool.
[00:14:06] Anna: Yeah.
[00:14:08] Danielle: It's kind of backtracks a little bit. But what is the. What was your inspiration behind writing this story?
[00:14:13] Anna: The inspiration, obviously, was the link with the Ferryman's Light. Right. And I really wanted to explore.
So. So the basis of the Ferryman's Light was what happens, what would happen in---And it kind of. it's relevant to today---what happens when an upstanding young girl and an upstanding young man have a moment together that actually changes their lives and it impacts other lives later.
And so it was sort of the story of their redemption and how did they resolve the issue for themselves?
But. But of course, their decisions and their consequences actually get felt by other people. And so often we're in that position where, you know, we can kind of feel really hard done by about something and someone else has made a decision and someone else has suffered a consequence. But I'm in that circle of consequence.
And so it's almost like, okay, what would happen to this young girl, this young lady, who is actually in the circle of someone else's consequence?
[00:15:25] Danielle: Yeah.
[00:15:26] Anna: How does she deal with that? And how do you deal with, you know, when people have maybe not told you the truth growing up? And maybe when people have kind of.
Maybe they've been secret, secretive, or maybe they've purposefully hidden it, or maybe it's been malicious where people have withheld information. And what do we do with that? You know, do we.
Can we walk the road of forgiveness and reconciliation, or do we actually stand bitter and twisted? Because.
Because actually, you know, it's just not fair that you kept it from me. And this is fundamental to who I am. And you've not called me.
And so that was kind of the sort of themes that I wanted to explore. And just how God actually knows us intimately, no matter what lies we've been told.
[00:16:11] Danielle: Yeah.
[00:16:12] Anna: And no matter who tries to frame our identity, it actually doesn't matter because God's the one who. Who chooses who we are.
[00:16:19] Danielle: Yeah.
[00:16:19] Anna: And so it's kind of pursuing that of how do we find who we really are when other people are maybe telling us one thing, you know, telling us something different.
[00:16:28] Danielle: Right, right. Oh, I love that. I love that so much.
Which leads perfectly into my next question. What encouragement do you hope readers will take away from your story?
[00:16:39] Anna: I really. In all my stories, I was kind of talking through things with somebody a few days ago and was just saying, what is the. The essence of what my stories. What, what kind of is the core essence of the stories that I write. And I think it's the thing of significance and that every person is significant and that we, you know, we can be people who are just, you know, running the kids to school. We're hanging, I was hanging out the washing earlier, you know, and you're cooking dinner and it's all so mundane and it's so just no, you know, like this is what I have to do just to get through the day. Or other people maybe have got really high powered jobs and all they're trying to do is just keep their head above water or, you know, maybe there are impacts in communities but. But not in the way that maybe they would like to or.
And so for me it's all about when readers read my stories and, and also, you know, talking of The Lady's companion, I hope that that essence of you are important and you are significant and you kind of, like we said in the introduction, it's like I can live my ordinary life with an extraordinary God and then I can change the world.
[00:17:52] Danielle: Yeah.
[00:17:52] Anna: And I think, do we, do we really look and do we, do we really believe that we're the people who can change the world? You know, my first novel was written about a village in the UK that was affected by the plague of the mid-80s, the mid-1670s.
And they were kind of the first or one of the first communities to go into lockdown.
And, and then when we had our own pandemic a few years ago, their stories were being told in newspapers around the world and it really struck 300 years ago. They were just doing what was in front of them to do. They were just getting on with what they thought was the right thing to do. And 300 years later, people are talking about them by name.
[00:18:38] Danielle: Yeah.
[00:18:39] Anna: And wow, what if people start talking about us 300 years later? Not because we've done anything that seems significant to us or seems life changing to us, but actually, actually it turns out that it is. So that's kind of what I really hope that people, the readers kind of extract for themselves as well as hopefully enjoying the story itself.
[00:19:01] Danielle: Yes, indeed, yes. Indee.
Oh, this has been such fun.
Thank you so much for joining me today, Anna, and talking about The Lady's Companion.
If readers want to find you online, where can they do that? And I'll put links in the description.
[00:19:18] Anna: Obviously there's all the social media places that kind of, we hang out, Facebook and Instagram and so on.
I do have a TikTok account, but I was, as I was just saying to you, I'm not mad keen on doing videos anyway.
But probably the easiest place is my website, which is annajensen.co.uk and then that's got all my information and you can find my social media links and newsletter and all that sort of thing.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Wonderful, Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Anna.
Readers, thank you for joining us today.
[00:19:49] Anna: Thank you.
[00:19:55] Thank you for listening to A Spot of Story with Danielle Grandinetti. We hope you enjoy today's conversation. Let us know by leaving a comment below and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.
Discover more information about today's book by visiting A Spot of Story online at daniellegrandinetti.com/podcast
Happy Reading.
