You’ve written the book – what next?

The Spy Who Loved Manuscript

My first biography, The Woman Who Saved the Children, about Eglantyne Jebb, the controversial founder of Save the Children, was a labour of love, and ‘labour’ and ‘delivery’ became the keys words when it came to finishing the book. I had started my research when I went on maternity leave from Save the Children, where I was working as a fundraiser, thinking I might be able to trot the book out before the baby arrived.

Six years, two jobs and two children later, I finally had most of a draft manuscript, an agent and a book deal. What I didn’t have was the last few chapters. By now heavily pregnant with what turned out to be daughter number three, my agent put a bet on which would be delivered first, the book or the baby. Baby won. The final chapter was written with her mainly on my lap (moving her even slightly seemed too risky), and typing away with one hand while she was latched on the other side. To say I was becoming slightly unbalanced was putting it mildly at this point, in more ways than one.

The irony is that Eglantyne, the wonderful founder of Save the Children, was not even fond of individual kids, ‘the little wretches’ as she once referred to them and never had children of her own. It seemed slightly wrong to be dedicating so much of my time to her story, just when I should be most absorbed in my own children. Although I had loved researching and writing Eglantyne’s story, and felt the full weight of responsibility for my precious book, it was with no slight relief that the manuscript finally went off and I believed I would be free.

The Woman Who Saved the Children

Oh no. For a book to flourish, it not only has to be well researched and well written, it needs to be well promoted.

Now began a series of book tours. Some were wonderful; I met some fabulous people actually interested in what I had written, and sat next to ‘other authors’ in the odd green room. Other events were less so, such as when I spoke to two people and a dog in a small London library – and they were only there to shelter from the rain. A highlight was being interviewed on Woman’s Hour. A low moment was when the email I had received from ‘Richard and Judy’ turned out to be from a local WI group, run by Judy and her husband Dick. Wish I’d realised that before I replied.

I wrote articles for everything from the Daily Mail to Save the Children’s newsletter and the British Thyroid Association magazine. I spent hours traipsing round bookshops offering, slightly embarrassed, to sign any copies they had, and I blogged. My first blogs went up on the Save the Children blog board, and the response was great. Later I was invited on blog tours. In a way I felt as though I had not deserted the book after all when it left home; the teenage book needed plenty of support too. But after a year or so it was definitely time for us both to let go.

The Spy Who Loved

Book number two, The Spy Who Loved, the secrets and lives of Christine Granville, Britain’s first female special agent of WWII, was written much faster, with no new-borns or other jobs to distract me. Writing the life of a secret agent contained new challenges however. Christine had been taught not to leave a paper trail, and proved good at covering up her tracks. Fortunately, though, she also liked to tell a good story, as did the many men she dazzled in her sights as she made love to the cream of the British and Polish secret service while fighting the Nazi advance across Europe.

In the end, as is traditional with a second child, the delivery was easier, and I was not so shocked to find the finished book staring up at me in all its helpless innocence. This time I have gone into the book promotion phase with my eyes open and I am enjoying (almost) every moment. I have poured my heart into this book, and I am proud of the result. I am not going to let Christine’s story go into the world without all the support I can give it. It is worth the work, both professionally and personally. I am speaking at several literary festivals, as well as at museums and societies ranging from the Imperial War Museum to the Special Forces Club. Women’s Hour has invited me back, and last week I was on Radio Four’s Today programme and ITV news. I have given interviews and slogged round bookshops and spoken to an awful lot of members of the WI and Rotary clubs around the country.

The author,  giving a presentation

Once I was given a loaf of home-made bread by one fan of the book, another time when I was showing some slides of Christine and her fellow agents in the field when a voice piped up from the back of the room saying, ‘blimey, that’s my dad’. I have even been introduced to the woman who censored the files I ordered at the National Archives under the Freedom of Information Act, although she refused to tell me what was in the missing pages. It has been great fun, and I am just joining The History Girls to blog among friends about the things that we love: history, writing and people. But I know that ultimately I will have to let Christine go, just as I did Eglantyne, and watch to see if she survives in the crowded book-place on her own merits, or at least – since her own merits are not in doubt – if my books do these wonderful women justice.

What happens next? Well I have three children who I love very dearly – I think that is a full complement. But I have only written two books… I am now looking at other remarkable, unsung women, with whom I would like to share my life for the next few years.

Clare Mulley is the award-winning author of two biographies and a contributor to The Arvon Book of Life Writing. She is a seasoned public speaker and occasionally writes for publications including History Today, The Spectator, The Express and The Church Times, perfect titles for a historically minded, left-wing atheist.

Find out more on her website

The Spy Who Loved: the secrets and lives of Christine Granville, Britain’s first female special agent of World War II

‘Highly atmospheric… scholarly and tautly written’, The Economist

‘Compulsively readable… thrilling’, The Sunday Telegraph

‘Engrossing… as thrilling as any fiction’, The Mail on Sunday

‘A nerve-shredding read’, The Lady

‘Sterling biography… a fitting tribute’, Country Life

‘Scintillating and moving… one of the most exciting books… this year’, The Spectator

‘Riveting… Hollywood should sit up and take note!’, The Good Book Guide

The Spy Who Loved

First published in the "History on an Hour" blogsite,  2013

One can’t help but gasp with admiration at the life and exploits of Christine Granville, one of Britain’s bravest wartime heroines. On reading Clare Mulley’s entertaining new biography, The Spy Who Loved, we are introduced to a woman who lived life on the edge and who found ordinary, routine existence a bore. Mulley writes with almost a venerable regard for her subject and rightly so, for one would expect the life of Christine Granville to exist only within the pages of fiction. Indeed, she may well have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s character, Vesper Lynd, from his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale.

Born Krystyna Skarbek in Poland, 1908, to a rakish father, a count who taught her how to ride a horse like a man, and a wealthy, Jewish mother, Christine Granville, the name she later adopted, enjoyed an aristocratic, carefree childhood, whose tomboy antics earned the respect of her loving father. Granville disdained authority and convention from an early age, pushing boundaries wherever she went. As a convent schoolgirl, to cite one of several examples, she was expelled for setting fire to the priest’s cassock. (He was wearing it at the time).

Absolutely fearless

With the outbreak of war in September 1939, Granville and her second husband travelled to London where she offered her services to British intelligence. She was sent to Hungary and from there, skied into German-occupied Poland. And it is from here that Granville’s life of adventure, incredible courage and resilience begins. ‘She is,’ wrote one secret service report, ‘absolutely fearless … ready to risk her life at any moment for what she believed in’. What Granville believed in was to play an active role in undermining Nazi control of her beloved homeland.

Once, having been arrested by the Gestapo in Poland, she bit her tongue so hard as to make it bleed. The Germans, fearing she was suffering from the dreaded tuberculosis, released her. Mulley gives us plenty of examples like this, examples of what she calls Granville’s ‘sangfroid’.

Granville had ‘an almost pathological tendency to take risks’ and the British sought to find her work that was ‘sufficiently risky and bloodthirsty to appeal to her’. Her work gave her a purpose in life and, although hard to credit, its danger sometimes left her shaking with laughter, such was her addiction to adrenaline and risk.

Granville joined Britain’s SOE service, established in July 1940 on the orders of prime minister, Winston Churchill, and was to become the SOE’s longest-serving female agent.

Mulley takes us on an exhilarating journey as we follow Granville from Poland to Cairo and then, from July 1944, into Nazi-occupied France where she joined the resistance. It was here, in southeast France, that Granville embarked on perhaps her most daring undertaking. Three resistance colleagues had been arrested by the Germans and faced certain execution. Granville walked straight into the lion’s den of the Gestapo HQ and demanded to see the commander-in-charge. We read Mulley’s description of the episode with our hearts in our mouths; such is the extent of the risk and Granville’s bravado. It really is one of those occasions where, if you were reading this as a work of fiction, you would dismiss it as far-fetched.

The horrors of peace

Following the war, Granville, missing her adrenaline-fuelled life, found adjusting to ‘the horrors of peace’ difficult. Having been rendered stateless by Stalin’s post-war occupation of Poland, she had difficulty settling or finding employment. The British decorated her with enough medals and awards to make, as Mulley observes, a general envious, but they seemed particularly unable or unwilling to find her a job: ‘she is altogether not a very easy person to employ,’ wrote one dismissive report. That she had no office experience counted against her – as if a woman of Granville’s character could have been contained within the four walls of an office.

Christine Granville was murdered, aged 44, on 15 June 1952. This is not a spoiler, we know this from the off. But the way Mulley describes the impending tragedy is poignantly done. She describes Granville meeting Dennis Muldowney, a man with whom Granville experienced a brief if unfulfilling relationship, and we are filled with a sense of doom. Cast aside by Granville, Muldowney became obsessed by her. Without resorting to fiery prose, we, the reader, feel outraged as Mulley recounts the final days and hours of Granville’s life, leading to her violent and tragic end.

Granville loved men and men loved her. She was married twice, neither time particularly successful, and had numerous lovers. Men were hypnotized by her vibrancy and her love of life, but no man ever possessed her; no man would have been capable of it. As Clare Mulley states, writing for History In An Hour last year, ‘Nobody possessed Christine, not her father nor either of her husbands, not any of her lovers and certainly not her killer.’

Special Agent Christine Granville: "The spy who loved …"

On this day in 1939, just a few months after the Nazi invasion of Poland that had marked the start of WWII, a determined Polish Countess and former beauty queen marched in to British secret service headquarters and demanded to be sent on an active mission. ‘She is a flaming Polish patriot, an expert skier and great adventuress…’ the startled British officer reported, ‘I really believe we have a PRIZE’.

Countess Krystyna Skarbek is now better known in Britain by her adopted name of Christine Granville of which, she later wrote, she was ‘rather proud’. When she volunteered for service she was already on her second husband and third name, Krystyna Gizycka, and she was known on paper simply as ‘Madame G’. By the end of the war she had gone through many more identities, from her first alias, Mme Marchand, under which she was sent into Hungary in December 1939, to the ‘admitted libelous’ code-name the British gave her in Cairo, ‘Willing’, which spoke loudly both about Christine’s mode of gaining information, and the male British sense of humour of the time.

Christine was the first woman to work for the British as a special agent during the war. Despite having a life expectancy of just a few months while on operations, she was also Britain’s longest serving female agent, active in three different theatres of the war. For her outstanding courage and huge contribution to the Allied war effort, she was honoured with the OBE, the George Medal and the French Croix de Guerre as well as an array of service ribbons that would have made any General proud. And yet, as a woman, Christine was ineligible for British military honours, and had to accept their civil equivalent – something that enraged her and many of her female colleagues, one of whom wrote in disgust that there was ‘nothing remotely civil’ about what they had done.

Although Christine trained and served alongside men throughout the conflict, her gender always informed her experience of the war. She was in southern Africa when Poland was invaded, and by the time her ship reached Europe her home-country was occupied. Unable to sign up to fight alongside her compatriots, Christine determined to get Britain to support her plan to ski across the hazardous Carpathian mountains taking money and propaganda to the Polish resistance, and information – on microfilm hidden inside her gloves – back out. At this point the secret services were only recruiting through the Old Boys network, but Christine had contacts within this group and quickly used them to good effect. No other women would be taken on for another two years. Christine’s combination of independent-mindedness, determination and charm had given her the contacts she needed in Britain, Hungary and Poland, but it was her gender that ensured she would be less conspicuous travelling around an occupied country than any able-bodied man, and secured her the job. Christine was exceptional.

The Spy Who Loved

Christine crossed into occupied Poland four times over the next year, bringing back information that at times had the potential to change the course of the war, and helping to ‘exfiltrate’ thousands of Polish and other Allied officers to continue the fight overseas. When occasion demanded she was quick to exploit her femininity to good effect, once charming a Wehrmacht officer into carrying her package of ‘black-market tea’, in fact incriminatory documents, through a security check. She also happily made love to the cream of the Polish and British secret services in every country she crossed, many of whom later described the ‘mesmeric power’ she held over men.

But Christine also fully employed her contacts, language skills, creative brilliance and sheer blunt courage both to undertake her missions, and to save not only her own life, but also the lives of several fellow officers and agents. Once under interrogation in Hungary she feigned tuberculosis by biting her tongue so hard that it looked as though she was coughing up blood, until she and a compatriot were thrown out. On another occasion, in occupied France, she walked into Gestapo headquarters and demanded the release of three colleague just hours before they were due to be shot. Using a combination of bribery, and bravado about the ‘imminent’ approach of Allied forces, she saved the lives of the men and went on with them to help coordinate the resistance in advance of the Allied liberation of the south of France.

Yet at the end of the war, in May 1945, Christine was dismissed with just £100. A British memo stated simply, ‘she is no longer wanted’. As an aristocrat and former British agent, Christine knew she could not return to post-war Communist Poland. But as a Pole, and a woman, it was soon clear that she was not hugely welcome in Britain either. The qualities that had made her so valuable as an agent during the war were no longer appreciated in women during the peace. Without secretarial skills she was difficult to place, memos moaned, and she was soon being referred to as ‘this girl’, while her applications for continued work were dismissed as ‘a headache’. The country that had employed Christine to risk her life in three different theatres of war, now only begrudgingly gave her citizenship and completely failed to provide work worthy of her service and abilities.

In 1952, after seven years of menial jobs in London and as a stewardess on various passenger ships, Christine was stabbed to death by a rejected lover. It was a pathetic end for such an extraordinary woman. Although very few special agents have been murdered for love, at least outside of novels, Christine should not be remembered as a tragically romantic figure. Today women in the Resistance are all too often seen in such terms. Perhaps the best known female special agent is Sebastian Faulks’ heroine, Charlotte Grey, and she is not only fictional but achieves very little. Even the most famous true stories, of Violette Szabo and Odette Samson, celebrate outstanding courage and sacrifice rather than significant achievement. If my new biography of Christine contributes anything, I hope it will highlight the role, use and abuse of Poland during the war, and rebalance the view on the effectiveness of British female agents.

Christine Granville – The Spy Who Loved

Despite having a life expectancy of only a few months during her operational missions, Christine volunteered to serve in three different theatres of war. From Hungary she skied across the Tatra mountains in blizzards of minus thirty, taking money and propaganda into occupied Poland, and arranging to smuggle men and information – the latter hidden inside her gloves – back out. In Egypt, where a British SOE memo notes that her ‘admittedly libelous’ code name was ‘Willing’, she filled a useful role in information gathering. However she earned her highest decorations for her extraordinary work helping prepare the way for the Allied liberation of France, having been the only woman dropped in by parachute from Algeria, in July 1944.

The Spy Who Loved

 And yet Christine’s story is little known today. The reasons for this are to a large extent personal. In the days after Christine’s brutal murder in post-war London, in 1952, sensational headlines blazed across the British papers, ‘Kindness led to Murder’, ‘Drama of Quiet Countess who was British Secret Agent’ and ‘Heroine Dared Me Three Times to Kill Her’ among them. Distraught that ultimately he could not save her life, Christine’s on/off lover and long-term soul mate, Andrzej Kowerski, made it his mission to at least now protect her reputation. Roping in a group of men, mostly former agents, who adored Christine, he created the ‘Panel to Protect the Memory of Christine Granville’. Several articles and two proposed books, one by Christine’s former lover Count Wladimir Ledóchowski, the other by her colleague, the Ill Met by Moonlight author Bill Stanley Moss, were quashed. And yet as Count Ledóchowski’s son has said, ‘the death of heroes is not usually followed by panels to protect their memories and stop books about them’.

Part of what made Christine so successful is that she did not operate, or live, like a woman of her time. My new biography of her is called The Spy Who Loved because Christine loved life in its fullest sense. She loved adrenalin and adventure, she loved men – she had two husbands and numerous lovers, and above all she loved freedom – both for her country and for herself. Ironically this twin passion, for action and liberty, that helped her to be so successful during the war, made her far less acceptable in the peace. After her death the men who had jumped into Christine’s life, ‘like parachuters into unknown territory’ hoped to protect Christine’s reputation and with it, in several cases, their own, in a highly judgmental age.

Christine Granville

Before his execution Christine’s murderer claimed that ‘to kill is the final possession’. He was wrong. Nobody possessed Christine, not her father nor either of her husbands, not any of her lovers and certainly not her killer. The resistance burning within her was too strong. Christine Granville is long overdue recognition, her story deserves to be told and her reputation set free.

Clare Mulley’s The Spy Who Loved, the secrets and lives of Christine Granville, Britain’s first special agent of WWII, is published by Macmillan. 

See here for History In An Hour’s review.

Christine Granville – The Spy Who Loved

First published on the blogsite History In An Hour

Last year I was on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Women’s Hour’, writes Clare Mulley, talking about the remarkable Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, not only the first woman to serve as a special agent for Britain in WWII, but also the longest serving and one of the most effective.

Despite having a life expectancy of only a few months during her operational missions, Christine volunteered to serve in three different theatres of war. From Hungary she skied across the Tatra mountains in blizzards of minus thirty, taking money and propaganda into occupied Poland, and arranging to smuggle men and information – the latter hidden inside her gloves – back out. In Egypt, where a British SOE memo notes that her ‘admittedly libelous’ code name was ‘Willing’, she filled a useful role in information gathering. However she earned her highest decorations for her extraordinary work helping prepare the way for the Allied liberation of France, having been the only woman dropped in by parachute from Algeria, in July 1944.

Kindness Led to Murder

And yet Christine’s story is little known today. The reasons for this are to a large extent personal. In the days after Christine’s brutal murder in post-war London, in 1952, sensational headlines blazed across the British papers, ‘Kindness led to Murder’, ‘Drama of Quiet Countess who was British Secret Agent’ and ‘Heroine Dared Me Three Times to Kill Her’ among them. Distraught that ultimately he could not save her life, Christine’s on/off lover and long-term soul mate, Andrzej Kowerski, made it his mission to at least now protect her reputation. Roping in a group of men, mostly former agents, who adored Christine, he created the ‘Panel to Protect the Memory of Christine Granville’. Several articles and two proposed books, one by Christine’s former lover Count Wladimir Ledóchowski, the other by her colleague, the Ill Met by Moonlight author Bill Stanley Moss, were quashed. And yet as Count Ledóchowski’s son has said, ‘the death of heroes is not usually followed by panels to protect their memories and stop books about them’.

Part of what made Christine so successful is that she did not operate, or live, like a woman of her time. My new biography of her is called The Spy Who Loved because Christine loved life in its fullest sense. She loved adrenalin and adventure, she loved men – she had two husbands and numerous lovers, and above all she loved freedom – both for her country and for herself. Ironically this twin passion, for action and liberty, that helped her to be so successful during the war, made her far less acceptable in the peace. After her death the men who had jumped into Christine’s life, ‘like parachuters into unknown territory’ hoped to protect Christine’s reputation and with it, in several cases, their own, in a highly judgmental age.

Before his execution Christine’s murderer claimed that ‘to kill is the final possession’. He was wrong. Nobody possessed Christine, not her father nor either of her husbands, not any of her lovers and certainly not her killer. The resistance burning within her was too strong. Christine Granville is long overdue recognition, her story deserves to be told and her reputation set free.

Women’s History Month: Eglantyne Jebb

Last night the paperback of my biography of Eglantyne Jebb was launched at the wonderful Women’s Library in London, as part of their on-going Wise Words Book Fest. The book’s publication was deliberately timed to coincide with Mothering Sunday because Eglantyne changed the way the whole world both regards and treats its children when she not only launched Save the Children at the end of the First World War in 1919, but went on to write the pioneering statement of children’s rights that has since evolved into the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most universally accepted human rights instrument in history.

Nevertheless I had to laugh at this Mothers’ Day schedule, because one of the many things that I love about Eglantyne was that she never had children of her own and was definitely not ‘the mothering kind’. In fact she once referred to children as ‘the little wretches’, and even the year she founded Save the Children, she wrote to her close friend Margaret Keynes, the younger sister of the economist, with typical dry humour; ‘I suppose it is a judgement on me for not caring about children that I am made to talk, all day long, about the universal love of humanity towards them’.

Perhaps this is partly why Eglantyne’s wonderful name is so little known today. Eglantyne spent her life defying conventions. As a young woman she considered leaving, and then bombing, her Oxford college. She consistently defied fashionable society in both dress and behaviour. She left the Church for her own very personal brand of spiritual Christianity. And she very publicly broke the law. And Eglantyne seems to have continued this independent trend ever since, eluding all the obvious academic and biographical categories by being neither a ‘great man’ of the type so much favoured by David Starkey and his predecessors, nor a maternal woman, and yet still a woman who devoted her life to children rather than some more obviously feminist cause such as suffrage.

While writing the book it took me some time to get my head around this apparent paradox at the centre of Eglantyne’s being; a children’s champion who was not fond of children. But Eglantyne was simply a great humanitarian. She recognised that children suffer in specific ways from starvation and may not be able to make up the lost ground both physiologically and psychologically as well as adults; that children are the world’s future citizens in whose hands lie both the opportunity and responsibility for creating a peaceful and more equitable society; and also that children make a good PR and fundraising hook – and then she just got on with it – brilliantly. Passionate but not sentimental, she moved from spiritualism in Shropshire to espionage in the war-torn Balkans, from illicit romance in Cambridge to public arrest in Trafalgar Square, on the way winning over the Pope and the miners, the aristocracy of Europe and the Bolshevik government, the crown prosecutor at her London trial and the fledgling League of Nations in Geneva.

Eglantyne has been incredibly neglected for someone whose achievements are so influential, and I have a sneaky feeling that if a man had penned the forerunner of the most widely accepted UN Convention in history we would all know his name very well. But at least she is getting some attention now, and perhaps it is not so ironic that the book is being promoted around Mothers’ Day. Mothers do not have a monopoly on concern about children’s welfare but most have a strong interest, and while Eglantyne chose not to have children herself – preferring to help the next generation from a strategic distance – she recognised and applauded the diversity of women’s social contributions, simply believing, she said, that ’to succeed in life, you must give life’ – in whichever way you choose.

'Being published'

Seven years after I first became interested in Eglantyne Jebb, my biography of the founder of the international development agency Save the Children, and author of what has since evolved into the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child - the most universally accepted human rights instrument in history - was published last month. It’s a gem of a story, ‘The Woman Who Saved the Children’ was not fond of children herself, ‘the little wretches’ she once called them, and raced through a dramatic life of illicit romances, private spiritualism and public arrest before an early death. I managed to finish the draft in time for Save the Children’s 90th anniversary year, and hoped it would be an obvious best-seller.

Finishing a book seems to be a series of false dawns though, and writing the words ‘…and she died’ is of course just the start of it. Andrew, my agent, had secured my publisher, Oneworld Publications, after I had won the Daily Mail Biographers Club prize at end 2007, when I was half-way through writing. Now there was the editorial process, time spent sorting out index and bibliography, getting permissions for pictures and the excitement as a draft cover design came in.

Then I met the publicist. Oneworld is an independent publisher based in Oxford. I had heard stories of people being driven around in limos at this point in the process but was not surprised that Oneworld had a more modest budget – no limos, no party, lots of enthusiasm, a good press release and some great contacts, but not a whole lot of time… which was my excuse for getting as involved as possible.

I exchanged emails with a couple of independent publicists, who would I am sure do a brilliant job if you have the required budget to hand. In the end I went down a couple of different routes… Save the Children lent their PR support, sharing their media contacts with Oneworld, inviting celeb supporters to provide cover quotes, and asking me to be guest-blogger on their website. The Biographers Club were brilliant; making me the ‘featured author’ on their site and using their contacts to help get me a launch. Two of their three prize judges also came up trumps, inviting me to give talks and filing book reviews. And through them I also met Richard Foreman who describes himself as a ‘freelance consultant and publicist’ and is someone who knows a lot of other people… As well as organising regular drinks to get writers, reviewers and booksellers together in a basement bar in London’s Leadenhall Market, he sets up talks at bookshops, libraries and events around the country, and took me on a book-signing tour of London Waterstones and Blackwells the week before publication, handing out jaffa cakes and penguin biscuits with impunity wherever we went. (For elsewhere he got me to sign a good 200 bookplates and gave me warm contacts to mail them to at shops around the country.)

The rest of my publicity came from talking and writing to everyone I know, including some friends in PR who kindly took me under their wing resulting in a nice radio interview and a few more talks, as well as to any vaguely relevant publication and any literary festival at all – of which there are many. Collective results are good. Reviews have been published in the Daily Mail and Sunday Times as well as in publications from WI Life to Best of British magazine. Building on every angle in Eglantyne’s life I have also written articles myself for journals including Save the Children’s supporter magazine, the newsletters of The British Thyroid Foundation, Lady Margaret Hall Alumni News, and The Church Times. I also milked my own story, securing talks and press coverage where I grew up, went to college, and live now. So far I have around 30 talks from the Edinburgh Lit Fest to Ealing Library, and from my old school (don’t knock it, they ordered 100 copies) to a Royal reception for Save the Children. There were plenty of rejections too of course – although offering to speak with friends/others published in a similar area has also helped – I am doing a number of ‘Women in History’ talks, and also sharing platforms with Mark Bostridge and Alexander Masters at different events. Online I have my own website (courtesy of my brother-in-law) and Wikipedia page, as well as mentions on the site of every society I am a member of and every venue where I have spoken. I have even set up an Eglantyne Jebb Facebook fan group. However my favourite piece of publicity was being interviewed by Jenni Murray on Women’s Hour last week, courtesy mainly simply of Eglantyne having such a great story.

Is it working? Sales are good so far, and my Amazon ranking peaks with every big bit of PR – a sort of irregular pulse that tells me the book is still alive and kicking long after my subject breathed her last.