Q&A with Julia Kelly

 

 

 

Julia Kelly is the author of the new novel The Dressmakers of London. Her other books include The Light Over London. She has also worked as a producer, a journalist, and a marketing professional, and she lives in London.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Dressmakers of London, and how did you create your characters Izzie and Sylvia?

 

A: I have written a lot about female friendships, but when I started thinking about the book that would become The Dressmakers of London, I realized that I had never really explored a sister relationship.

 

My sister and I are very close, but I know not everyone has that sort of relationship with their siblings. I decided to write about a pair of estranged sisters, Sylvia Pearsall and Izzie Shelton, and not only what drove them apart but what it would take to bring them back together.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between them?

 

A: Sylvia is the eldest of the two sisters. She remembers what life was like before their father died and their mother Molly Shelton had to begin working as a dressmaker in order to provide for the family.

 

There is tension between Sylvia and Molly, which isn’t helped by the fact that Sylvia’s natural talents lie in running a business rather than making clothes. When she meets her husband, a well-born doctor named Hugo, at the age of 18, she realizes that she has the opportunity to escape from under her mother’s scrutiny and also climb a few social rungs as well.

 

Growing up, Izzie always looked up to her older sister, but she believes Sylvia turned her back on the family and the dress shop when Sylvia married Hugo and threw herself into his world of private clubs, dinners, balls, and charity work. A talented seamstress with ambitions to design for her mother’s dress shop clients, Izzie wants to one day run the dress shop with her mother.

 

However, when Molly Shelton dies and leaves the dress shop to both Sylvia and Izzie, Izzie has to contend with her grief at her mother’s death, her sense of betrayal over her mother’s will, and her longstanding anger with Sylvia.

 

In giving the sisters huge emotional hurdles to clear, I wanted to explore what it would take for them to forge a new relationship after their mother’s dress shop.

 

They do most of their healing through letters that they write back and forth to one another while Izzie is serving in the WAAF (the women’s auxiliary of the Royal Air Force) and Sylvia is back in London manning the shop, which I think gives them a unique chance to be vulnerable on the page in a way they might not have been in person.

Q: The writer Gill Paul said of the book, “The descriptions of fabrics, dressmaking techniques, and the ingenuity of fashion designers operating under wartime austerity measures are fascinating.” What do you think of that assessment, and what surprised you in the course of your research for the novel?

 

A: First off, let me say that was incredibly kind of Gill!

 

I have always been interested in fashion history, and I really wanted to explore what life would have been like for the average British person during the time of clothing rationing during the war.

 

The ration was very restrictive from how much clothing an individual could buy to what those garments could look like, all in the name of saving valuable cloth and labor resources. Looking back at the fashion of the time really speaks to the ingenuity of both British women and dressmakers who produced some of those garments.

 

Q: What do you think the characters' experiences say about the importance of social class in World War II-era Britain?

 

A: Times of great conflict like World War II tend to be the periods of time where social structures like class and gender roles become a lot less rigid.

 

With the first wave of women’s conscription that I describe in The Dressmakers of London, you had women for all across the class and socio-economic ladders being brought together to serve in auxiliary forces, factories, and on agricultural land.

 

People who might not have otherwise met suddenly found themselves in close proximity to those with completely different backgrounds and upbringings.

 

This is what happens with Izzie when she is conscripted into the WAAF. She meets and befriends the daughter of a peer while in training camp. On the outside, she and Lady Alexandra couldn’t be more different, but they each have qualities the other recognizes and values like loyalty.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m hesitant to say too much because I only just handed in my first draft, but I am very excited to say that it is a new historical novel in a location and time period that is entirely new for me!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I thought I’d take the chance to recommend a few books I’ve recently enjoyed.

 

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall is a wonderful, heartbreaking historical novel set in the English countryside that I have been telling everyone in my life to read.

 

Another historical novel I loved was Hazel Gaynor’s upcoming Before Dorothy.

 

I also took a chance on a YA fantasy novel, The Notorious Virtues by Alwyn Hamilton, which is set in a 1920s-esque world of magic and is such a hoot!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Julia Kelly.