Q&A: Audrey Blake, Co-Authors of ‘The Girl in His Shadow’

Written by contributor Elena Horne

The Girl in His Shadow is an inspiring historical novel set in 1845 London. Nora Beady, orphaned and raised by the eccentric Dr. Horace Croft, has a gift for medicine, but must practice in secret or risk scandal for practicing as a woman. But when she makes a discovery that could change lives, she has to decide whether to remain invisible, or reveal who she really is, even if it destroys her legacy.

This novel by Audrey Blake is written by authors Regina Sirois and Jaima Fixsen. With a handful of solo books under their belts, Regina ad Jaima first met as semi-finalists in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA) contest, which Regina won with her debut novel, On Little Wings. The Girl in His Shadow is their first combined project.

We chat with Regina and Jaima about their new book, researching women and medical history, and their unique co-authoring process.

Hi Regina and Jaima! Can you tell us a little bit about how you both got into writing?

Regina: I majored in history in college and then minored in creative writing. Those were my two great loves. When I first sat down to write my first attempt at a story I went with contemporary because I had two little children at home and the weight of research for historical fiction is just incredibly consuming. I wrote contemporary fiction first and then about five years ago I did my first historical fiction.

Jaima: Writing wasn’t something I set out to do, but I’ve always loved reading and imagining. So many times, when I’d read a book and didn’t like the ending, I’d rewrite it in my head. After my third child, I stopped working as an occupational therapist and needed something for myself. It was really hard with three kids to get out of the house, but writing is always there whenever you want it to be available. It was the perfect outlet for me.

And how did the two of you meet and become writing partners?

Regina: We ended up in the semi-finals of ABNA together. Jaima had a friend who reached out to me as a fan and talked to me about my book. She wrote back later and said, “hey, I have a good friend who is in the same contest that you are and you’re both semi-finalists together.” At the time I was just a bag of nerves because it was really scary to be [in ABNA]. I was too nervous to reach out to any other authors. Then Jaima sent an e-mail to me, and she said, “I read your book, and it was lovely. I think you’re going to win and I’m so excited for you.” I was like, “wait a second, I don’t even know this person, she’s in the same contest, and she’s telling me that she thinks that I’m going to win?! Who is that nice?” So I wrote back, and we started talking a little bit and then I read her book that was in the semi-finals, and after I finished it I turned to my husband and I was like, “oh, I know the winner.” That’s how we got to know each other.

That’s amazing that you both thought the other was going to be the winner.

Jaima: But I was right!

Regina: I should have been right!

Jaima: I feel like we were both right, now.

Regina: Yeah. And now we’re writing a book together. For years, Jaima was the only person I would send my manuscripts to. Even though we had totally different projects we’d exchange chapter by chapter and go through it, so this experience of writing together, this started years before we ever joined our efforts.

Tell us about The Girl in His Shadow. How did you come up with the idea for this book?

Regina: I came to Jaima with the idea of Horace Croft. I needed the world to meet this surgeon that was percolating in my head. I had the skeleton of Horace Croft and I was wondering, “what is the story?”

Jaima: We had this idea of a girl being saved by [Horace] and then growing up in his crazy home. If you grew up there in such a crazy place, you’d have to develop an interest in medicine just out of sheer survival.

Tell us more about these characters. Who is Horace Croft?

Regina: We really loved Horace Croft as a character, because he’s this very scientifically minded doctor, but his mantra is to treat every wound quietly. “Don’t cut unless you have to cut.” He always tries simple things first. “Does it hurt? Let’s try ice. Let’s try gargling.” What we really admired about him is that he’s willing to try crazy things like anesthesia, that no one else will try at the time, but he cares about whether his patients live or die. He wants the outcome to be life.

I think of Horace as a little bit on the spectrum. He doesn’t have a lot of those tender human abilities to communicate but he’s ultra-focused and he wants to do the right medicine. When the patient dies, he clucks it off and moves on and he’s more concerned with the dissection that will help him save the next patient than mourning. He wants to master how to save people, but he’s not a warm fuzzy.

And what about Nora?

Jaima: Of necessity she’s quiet. She has Horace’s curiousity, but she has the capacity to understand people’s feelings, which he lacks.

And what was the inspiration for her?

Jaima: It’s hard to remember her before she was. We knew something about the challenges to women at the time and we knew about women who became astronomers by working with their brothers but never published anything under their own name. They suspect but don’t know that some of Felix Mendelssohn’s work was actually the work of his sister published under his name, so the idea of these undercover women was really irresistible to us.

Did you find any evidence of undercover doctors like Nora in history?

Regina: Well there was some that had to live their lives as men and weren’t discovered until after they died.

What?! How did they pull that off?

Regina: I truly don’t know because one was a war surgeon. You’re talking about a Mulan situation here! You’d have to be camping with these men and how they could not know, I don’t know.

Jaima: She went by James Barry. Her gender was discovered after her death.

Regina: They are few and far between because these are only the ones that they found later. How many women had gifts and knew these things and were interested we’ll never know. If the men in your family excelled at something it offered this little bit of shelter for the women to sneak in there and have a little portion of that life. I think that was one of the only ways it happened for women.

How did you research Nora’s world and the medicine at the time?

Regina: It started with books and then I discovered a site called JSTOR where they have pictures and digitized medical journals for the exact period we’re writing about in London and across England. We started reading all of the medical cases of the day. Anything that pertained to any of the cases we were trying to write about.

Jaima: If we wanted to write about appendicitis, we would just look for cases of appendicitis to see how it was treated, what happened to the patients, how many recovered, how many didn’t. It was so fascinating because medicine was totally crazy at this time. It was regulated by a dozen different regulatory bodies who were all quarreling and disagreeing about how doctors should be regulated, but they sure didn’t want any women! They would argue about treatments and techniques and call each other out in the press. Real drama queens!

What was medicine like in 1845? What were the common practices?

Regina: Bleeding. Absolutely.

Jaima: They’d make blisters and poultices and gave people mercury for pretty much any disease.

Regina: There was so many poisons they had to choose from to put into your body! It was kind of like a wild west show of medicine. You just never knew if the doctor was going to cure you or kill you.

Jaima: And often it was the latter.

What about your co-authoring style? How do you divvy up the manuscript?

Regina: If someone’s looking to find out who wrote what, there’s no way to direct them. There isn’t a chapter I wrote and there really isn’t a paragraph that I wrote. We literally have gone through sentence by sentence crafting this book together.

Jaima: The first draft is like a relay. We have an idea of where the story is going to go, and we brainstorm the people and outline and then one of us just starts writing. When she gets tired or stuck the other one just takes off where she left off, like the passing of the torch.

Regina: You can only do this if you completely trust the other writer. If I didn’t think that Jaima was an incredibly skilled and gifted writer, I couldn’t hand her my stuff and let her change it. It’s this indescribable amount of trust that she’s not going to harm what I made, she’s going to improve it.

Are there any other periods of history you’d like the write about, or visit if you had a time machine?

Jaima:I quake at the idea of a time machine. I love history. I do not want to go there. I love going there in my mind, but I do not want to be there. No way!

Regina: One of the things I wanted to write about was the first Great Plague, the Black Death of 1359, but I just found that I couldn’t do it. I’m so steeped in so many modern ideas that it was really difficult for me to feel like I was being honest and accurate in portraying their lives, but I am fascinated by their lives. I would very much like to go back to study not just the Great Plague of 1349, but everything that came as almost a direct result of it. It was quickly followed by the Renaissance and some of these modern ideas were just being born. I would like to be a fly on the wall to see some of that happening. I’m drawn to time periods when new ideas are coming to fruition. That just makes my heart come alive.

All right, no time machine, Jaima, just imaginary. Where would you go?

Jaima: I’m interested in women that made space for themselves in history. Any woman whose name survives to us must have been singular, so I’m fascinated by them. I’m also really interested in the suffragettes. These militant women who became terrorists when polite negotiation failed. We reap their legacy.

What about real women from history? Anyone you wish you could meet?

Jaima: That’s tricky, because knowing the names that we do know, there’s so many more that we’re missing. I am very interested in Pythagoras’s wife, who was a mathematician in her own right. We don’t have any of her writings, but she was known to be a mathematician and a scholar.

Regina: I wish I could meet Harriet Tubman. I’m really fascinated by the women who lead the charge against a double bondage; the bondage of being a woman, and the bondage of being a slave in a land of liberty that was built on the idea of freedom and liberty. I’m really fascinated by her courage and her faith.

And back to the woman in The Girl in His Shadow, what do you hope readers take away from Nora’s story?

Regina: Courage. I love that her courage didn’t have to be brash and loud. I love her quiet courage. She was willing to keep pursuing what mattered to her in the face of great adversity, and that’s what I want people to remember from her.

Jaima: The simple assertiveness of wanting something and working for it. I know there’s need for a lot of change in our world today, so looking back at history and finding examples where positive change happened can inspire us to hopefully examine the way we do things now and think, “hmm, maybe there could be a better way.”

And finally, what’s up next for “Audrey Blake”?

Regina: We’re still working hard.

Jaima: We’re revising the sequel right now!

You can check out The Girl in His Shadow wherever books are sold. Find out more about Regina and Jaima at audreyblakebooks.com or on Instagram, @audreyblakebooks.