A daring young woman risks everything to pursue a career as a doctor on the front lines in France during World War I, and learns the true meaning of hope, love, and resilience in the darkest of times.
We chat with author Lecia Cornwall about her latest book release The Woman At The Front, along with writing, book recommendations, and more! PLUS we also have an excerpt to share from the novel!
Hi, Lecia! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I live in Alberta Canada, in the foothills of the beautiful Rocky Mountains with my family. We all work at home from home at the moment, and I also have five cats, a chocolate Lab named Andy, and my daughter has a rescued rabbit we all adore, so our house is a crowded, busy place! When I’m not writing, I’m volunteering at a local museum, or out in the garden, or reading.
As the year gradually draws to a close, how has your 2021 been?
Crazy! I was recently speaking to a friend, and we decided that the whole world is suffering from collective burnout. There’s way too much anger and sadness! Right now, in Alberta, COVID cases are rising again, so we’re back to taking care of ourselves, our families, and our neighbours in hopes of ending this pandemic. There are good things that happened this year as well, including the wonderful feeling of seeing THE WOMAN AT THE FRONT go out into the world at last.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
I loved fairy tales as a child, and King Arthur and Robin Hood, which led to a love of history, and a desire to know more about the past. I read constantly (even in bed with the lights out when I was supposed to be sleeping), and I wrote stories and dreamed of writing books as a career. The book that made me realize it was actually possible to grow up and use all that dreaminess to become a writer that was probably Anne of Green Gables. I was a lot like Anne, living in my imagination, and even naming trees and landmarks the way she did. I opened that book and knew I’d found my soul mate!
Your new novel, The Woman at the Front, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
My first thought was how every story begins—’I wonder what happened to her?’ But that’s six words! In five—Woman doctor, War, Courage, Adventure.
What can readers expect?
THE WOMAN AT THE FRONT is about a young woman who graduates from medical school determined to do her part and help with the wounded, though female doctors are not permitted to work on the front lines in France. Her parents want her to give up medicine and get married. When she gets the chance to go overseas to escort an injured pilot home to England, she jumps at the chance. She must face all the horrors and hardships of the war, but she finds purpose, and courage, and even love.
Where did the inspiration for The Woman at the Front come from?
My grandfather and great uncle fought in World War I. At the battle of Vimy Ridge, my grandfather was far behind the lines with the artillery while his brother was on the front lines, where he was killed in the early hours of the fighting. When I was a teenager, my grandfather made me promise to go to France and find his brother’s war grave, which I did in 2009 with my own teenaged children. It was a very moving moment, standing in a tiny Commonwealth cemetery beside Matthew Greenwell’s grave, in sight of the monument on Vimy Ridge and the place where he died. I decided then that I wanted to write a story set in my grandfather’s war. I wanted to tell the story from a female perspective, and at the time I thought that meant writing about a nurse. As I began the research, I discovered that while female nurses, ambulance drivers, and volunteers were allowed at the front, the British War Office forbade female physicians, and I knew I had a better story to tell, about a woman doctor who goes anyway, breaks the rules, makes a difference, and saves lives.
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
I loved writing Eleanor’s character, but she is my opposite in a lot of ways—she’s bold and brave and determined, while I’m a shy introvert, like many writers. After the first draft, I realized Eleanor had to be more ‘kick-ass’, the kind of heroine who could take care of herself and those she loves, make a difference in the world, and inspire readers. Eleanor became very kick ass indeed, and my alter-ego. That’s one of the best things about being a writer, by the way—the chance to step into the skin of a character who is my complete opposite and experience a different life, a different time in history, and enjoy a thrilling adventure through her story.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I read everything I could find about medical services in World War I. I became fascinated by the courage of the stretcher bearers. These men started off as mere porters, sent out to bring the wounded off the battlefield for medical care, but eventually they received first aid training and they became medics. They went out under fire, in enormous danger, to do their job. They carried heavy casualties through deep mud and suffered terrible injuries to their bodies. They said you could always tell a bearer by his hands—scarred by blisters and splinters, cuts, and bruises. Their shoulders and backs were cut and scraped by the straps of the stretcher, leaving permanent scars. I had to include a one of these brave men in my story, and I created Fraser MacLeod, the stretcher bearer who becomes Eleanor’s love interest. But falling in love in war, on a battlefield, is a foolish, possibly fleeting, and dangerous thing to do. But no spoilers—I’ll let you read the rest of Fraser’s story in the book!
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
The strangest advice I ever got came from my mother. Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees was published around the time admitted to friends and family that I’d decided to try writing fiction. Based on a talk show interview she heard about the book, my mother insisted I must only write books about bees, because that was what people most wanted to read about.
The best advice I got came from other writers in the Calgary Chapter of the Romance Writers of America, the writing group I joined when I moved from Ottawa to Calgary. Before joining CaRWA, I wrote in isolation (okay, in complete secrecy). When I finally got brave enough to query an agent, I got a rejection back. It was what they call a ‘good’ rejection, meaning the agent offered advice and feedback, and some positive comments. I saw only the ‘no’ in her letter, and it wasn’t until I learned the difference that I was able to pluck up my courage again and send my work out to contests, agents, and editors. I learned persistence, to always have something in the mail—a query to an agent or editor or a contest entry—because as long as there was something out in the world that might still get a ‘yes’, rejections, good or not, were far easier to bear.
What’s next for you?
I just finished a book set in Berlin in 1936, during the Nazi Olympics. A young Englishwoman is on holiday in Germany, the guest of a high-ranking Nazi family, when a British journalist asks her to use her talent for photography and her access to places he cannot go to help expose the war preparations going on behind the peaceful façade of the Olympic games. It’s a dangerous game, and if they’re caught, they’ll simply disappear, never to be seen again. Can they stay one step ahead of danger and reveal the truth of Hitler’s plans?
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
I am one of those people who reads at least two books (usually more) at a time—and then there’s my favourite feature on Kindle, book samples—So.Many.Book.Samples!! I’m currently reading a book called Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy, and I recently finished Stephanie Marie Thornton’s A Most Clever Girl. They’re all wonderful! Around this time of year, I tend to choose something a little spooky to read, and I’m looking forward to reading Stephen King’s Billy Summers.
You can find out more about me, my books, and where you can connect with me on my website at www.leciacornwall.com.
Excerpt from Chapter Forty-One
Scene set up: Louis Chastaine is the wounded pilot Eleanor goes to France to see, tasked with escorting him home to England. With the help of aristocratic friends, Louis escapes the Casualty Clearing Station against medical advice, and goes to Paris with Lady Frances Parfitt. He’s won medals from the French for his bravery in an exploit that left him wounded, but he finds he can’t simply forget he war, or Eleanor Atherton.
Louis looked around Fanny’s grand Hotel Ritz suite—his was right next door, luxurious and huge, fit for a viscount, made for indolence and the pursuit of pleasure and pretending there wasn’t really a war going on less than seventy miles from the hotel’s gilded front doors. Every day here was a party. Champagne flowed like water, and there was steak and eggs for breakfast, and gateaux of the kind he hadn’t seen in nearly three years. It wasn’t even noon, and he was drunk. Again or still? Did it matter?
“Which is the illusion, the war or all this glamour?” he asked Fanny.
She looked up from considering a list of invitees for tonight’s do. “Don’t be silly darling. This is what’s real, of course. The war won’t last forever.”
God, he’d die of boredom is this was how he had to spend eternity! He’d read the newspapers, current ones, saw the reports of skirmishes and battles, and scanned the casualty lists when Fanny wasn’t looking. She didn’t like to be gloomy. He wondered if Eleanor had made it home to England safely. Poor El—she’d never get Mama’s patronage now. She’d likely be lancing boils on the backsides of the tubercular poor until the end of time if the countess had her way. He should write at once, tell her that his escape from the Casualty Clearing Station wasn’t Eleanor’s fault, but he was a poor correspondent.
“Is there more champagne, darling?” he said, holding up his empty glass. There was nothing bloody else to do. Fanny retrieved the bottle from the bucket and filled the delicate flute to the brim.
She crossed to the Victrola and put on one of the cylinders. The jumpy, jolly, tinny sound of American rag filled the room. No sad, patriotic songs for Fanny, no “Danny Boy”, or “Keep the Home Fires Burning”, or “Tipperary.” You wouldn’t even know there was a war on here in Fanny’s cocoon if not for the uniforms her bright, elegant, titled companions wore to her parties. All officers, of course. If they’d seen battle, or blood, or the ugly side of things—and most of them hadn’t—they never let on. They were as gay as a sunny summer day in England. Well, he’d seen it, firsthand, on the front lines, the sharp end.
“All right, darling? You’ve turned pensive again,” Fanny said, and he forced a grin and raised his glass. He could still play the game, and the game was a damn sight more palatable that reality. There was no chance of dying here, unless it was la petite mort. Even inside his head, the joke fell flat. When had he become so stodgy, so dreadfully dull?
Fanny put another cylinder on the Victrola, and Billy Murry’s fine tenor voice crooned “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now.” He should have kissed Eleanor when he had the chance, should have taught her how, made sure she’d never forget him. She’d probably marry some worthy chap like David Blair or Lancelot Findlay, an untouched virgin, prim and proper and far too smart for her husband. If she married at all, of course.
“More champagne, Louis?”
“No thank you, I’m flying,” he murmured, even as he let Fanny refill the glass. The clouds and the planes and the thoughts of Eleanor disappeared, and he was all quip and no substance once again.
“Shall I order oysters for luncheon?” she asked.
And what were the poor lads at the front eating now? Maconochie’s tinned meat, and bloody Tickler’s plum-and-apple jam on stale biscuits that tasted more of gunpowder and mud than anything else, with rats the size of badgers for dining companions.
“Whatever you like,” he said. He shoved the crutch under his arm and hobbled off to his own room. He limped over to look in the mirror, saw the lines around his mouth and under his eyes, the new light of sober care in his gaze. He wasn’t the carefree, adventuresome lad who’d joined up. He was all grown up, or halfway to old, rather. Like all the other young men in this war, he stood with one foot in the grave while the bell tolled.
This dissatisfaction, this restlessness, was all Eleanor’s fault. She’d made this life—his life—seem small next to her own. Perhaps seeing Eleanor after so many years apart and then being close to her for all those weeks, it was natural to think about her now, to notice that she’d grown up slender and strong, clever, elegant, and keen.
Fanny was soft everywhere, well curved, lushly feminine, and purely decorative. Aside from riding to the hunt or dancing, she was a languid creature. She ruled her world with a charming word and a coy smile. Her wit was invisible until she needed it, like a dangerously sharp blade in a hidden sheath, suddenly drawn and pressed to your throat.
Eleanor had a kind of restless energy, something to prove to the world. Even when she sat still, he could tell her mind was moving at a hundred miles an hour. Did she ever allow herself to be languid? He couldn’t picture it. He suspected that if ever she was properly set alight, the intensity would burn a man to cinders. He’d caught a glimpse of that when the brash sergeant had stalked into the ward and demanded she help with the wounded. It was as if a trumpet had sounded. Eleanor mounted her chariot like Boudicca and rushed away to meet the challenge, purposeful and sure, her eyes bright.
She mucked in, got dirty and bloody, and saved lives.
It rather shamed him to see Eleanor Atherton as such a marvelous heroine. She frightened him. No, it wasn’t fright—it was awe. She had courage. His medals were earned for a lucky accident, but her mettle was innate, as true as any blade, and never, ever hidden. He wasn’t a hero. Not for tumbling out of the bloody sky, being lucky enough not to kill himself or anyone else.
