On January 22nd, Dr. Ying S. Lee, an author of young adult fiction and PhD in Victorian literature and culture, spoke to Prof. Danielle Kinsey’s first year seminar about the writing of A Spy in the House, the first novel in her four-part series called The Agency. “I read this book so many times when I was in Grade 6 and 7,” said one student, “and it’s honestly why I signed up for a first year seminar on Victorian London — for history classes at all!” The novel takes place in central London in the 1850s and details the adventures of Mary, an orphan of mysterious background who finds herself in the service of an all-female spy agency. Mary is tasked with discovering the business secrets of a very well-off family engaged in importing and exporting goods from London’s busy docks. She has to negotiate prejudices about gender, race, and class while finding ways to move about a city stultified by traffic and the “Great Stink,” a condition caused by pollution in the river Thames in the summer of 1858. While the story is about Mary’s coming of age and realization about her parentage, as the plot twists and turns, readers come to understand London as a diverse metropolis teeming with people enabled by, constrained by, and, in most cases, pushing against assumptions about their “place” in society.
In a lengthy Q-and-A session, students asked Dr. Lee about her writing process and the choices she made to balance historical accuracy and plot. She described the extensive research she did for the series and noted that while she read broadly in terms of what academics had to say about the historical context, it was only in turning to the primary sources created at the time – newspapers, novels, paintings, photographs, diaries, and letters – that she was able to get a real sense of how mid-Victorian London would have felt. The immersive quality of the novel definitely struck a chord with the class. Dr. Lee’s visit was part of a section on thinking about historical consciousness and popular culture in Prof. Kinsey’s class, with other days devoted to discussing TV shows, video games, and movies. While Dr. Lee has finished with The Agency series, she is now at work on a novel set in 1940s Southeast Asia. You can read more about it on her website.