Feisty, independent heiress Winifred de la Coeur has never wanted to live according to someone else’s rules—but even she didn’t plan on falling in love with a bank robber.Winifred is a wealthy, nontraditional beauty who bridles against the strict rules and conventions of Victorian London society. When she gets caught up in the chaos of a bungled bank robbery, she is thrust unwillingly into an encounter with Court Furor, a reluctant getaway driver and prizefighter. In the bitter cold of a bleak London winter, sparks fly.
Winifred and Court are two misfits in their own circumscribed worlds—the fashionable beau monde with its rigorously upheld rules, and the gritty demimonde, where survival often means life-or-death choices.
Despite their conflicting backgrounds, they fall desperately in love while acknowledging the impossibility of remaining together. Returning to their own worlds, they try to make peace with their lives until a moment of unrestrained honesty and defiance threatens to topple the deceptions that they have carefully constructed to protect each other.
A story of the overlapping entanglements of Victorian London’s social classes, the strength of family bonds and true friendship, and the power of love to heal a broken spirit.
What inspired you to start writing?
It’s partly due to my father, who read to me as far back as I can remember. He also took me to see the musical Scrooge (1970) at the Ambassador Theatre on Fayetteville Street in Raleigh, so I can’t recall when I didn’t know who Charles Dickens was. I may have been even younger when Daddy started sharing his literary heroes with me. He also loved Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, and he had a wonderful comic book collection. Although I hadn’t learned to write, I couldn’t hear a story without making up one in response.
Being held, read to, and hearing my father’s voice share what obviously gave him joy probably wired my brain for life. My bed became Huck’s raft; our tool shelter was Mr. Tumnus’ cave in Narnia. I reworked Daddy’s stories or made up my own until I fell asleep. In our yard and the woods behind it, I acted out scenes by myself or with friends. Dialogue was essential, as were accents. It was always “long ago and far away.” Imitation is a wonderful way to learn.
What’s amazing about how devotedly my father read to me is that I’ve no idea anyone did that for him when he was a child. He failed first grade because he couldn’t read.
That summer, his teacher came to his house for two weeks and tutored him. Whatever she did, worked. My father became a passionate, lifelong reader. Everyone I ever met who knew him in his youth mentioned Daddy’s books. The lawyer’s bookshelf that held his stash of dimestore boys’ novels sits in my house, as does the chest his father fashioned from tobacco crates to hold his comics.
In Treasure, family stories and reading play a crucial role in Court’s relationship to his mother, his aspirations, and efforts toward self-education. Reading is vital to the lives of several other characters as well, like his sister, Beryl Stuart.
What was the hardest part about writing this book?
Rewriting it—and rewriting it. Male and female readers, all of vastly different ages and reading tastes, tackled the early drafts. Their feedback and questions were invaluable. Their insights didn’t change the plot, but encouraged me to make characters’ motivations explicit, especially the desperation underlying Winifred and Court’s first encounter. Theirs is not a social gap but a societal chasm. The role of George Broughton-Caruthers, Winifred’s reckless Norfolk neighbor, also grew, as did those of Court’s half-sister, the prostitute Beryl Stuart, and her beloved friend Rosie.
A later draft opened with Winifred’s uncle pondering two of the book’s major themes. Can a person change their character? Are we in control or driven by inexorable external and internal forces? My publisher suggested starting with more action; for instance, Winifred’s trip to the Royal Empire Bank to collect her mother’s fabulous Indian necklace—which is exactly where the story began in its original draft. The bank debacle had come to me automatically, from who knows what part of my brain, and it was where we ended up in revisions.
The other difficult part was standing firm for Treasure’s plot. Editors advised me to consider dividing the novel into two books even before they’d read it. Winifred and Court’s love story is central, but I grew up on Dickens. The web of relationships between the people in Winifred and Court’s lives is as important to the outcome of their story, and the book’s message, as their passion for each other.
Does one of the main characters hold a special place in your heart? If so, why?
Today I’ll focus on Treasure’s heroine, Winifred (though I enjoy the villains too). She tries to take control of her life but is driven by the forces her uncle writes about when he jots in his daybook, “ARE WE THAT HELPLESS?”
In the beginning of the novel, Winifred struggles to suppress her sexual urges, desire for children, and dream of a mutually satisfying partnership of emotional equals with the man she marries. She has foreclosed on these possibilities because of her disappointment in the men she’s met during her debut. She strives to find where she fits in society without letting its expectations of women of her class crush her individuality. On the one hand, she wants to use her wealth and enjoy its possibilities. On the other, it makes her suspicious of men’s motives for expressing interest in her. In some ways, she’s extremely traditional. In others, she’s daring to the point of foolhardiness. In her relationships with Court and George, she’s not always honest with them or herself. She’s full of contradictions. She makes choices she isn’t proud of, or doesn’t always understand.
I didn’t want to create a “strong woman” who fit modern standards, but one who finds out who she is by testing the unyielding social strictures of her time. She acknowledges these boundaries, even as she realizes that to find fulfilment, she must reject some of them. The consequences for women who had sex before marriage, or chose the wrong man, were terrible. “Prostitute” was a very elastic term, and divorce was almost unheard of.
If your book was to be made into a movie, who are the celebrities that would star in it?
I hesitate to answer because I hope readers have their own cast, but here goes!
Winifred: a combination of Billie Piper (for her incredible smile), and Kate Winslet as she appeared in Titanic.
George: Terence Stamp in Far from the Madding Crowd (1967); and see Terence Donovan’s photographs of him from the same era!
Beryl Stuart: Helena Bonham-Carter.
Rosie: silent film star Lilian Gish.
The most difficult part to cast is Court’s. An early reader insisted that he must have been inspired by Robert Carlyle in The Full Monty. I hate to disappoint her, though she nailed it with Carlyle’s warmth, cheek (no pun intended), and humour. Only recently did I find two antique photographs that even remotely approximate Court. One is of 19th century actor James Stark. The other is of an unidentified man. You can find them on my website. My mother once asked if Winifred and Court were real. “They are to me,” I answered. Given some of the odd coincidences that have happened as I wrote and researched this story, I look at this unidentified man’s picture and wonder—what if it is him? If someone finds out, I wish they’d tell me who this fellow is.
What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
It’s Winifred and Court’s love story, but there are many types of love in Treasure. Almost all the characters have someone or something that, rightly or wrongly, they cherish or desire. Treasure is about what happens when people risk all to pursue their heart’s dream. It’s also about human connections and the possibilities that open up when people trust each other. Stretching out a hand, or taking one—especially when it belongs to someone very different from yourself, requires courage. When readers come to Treasure’s end, I hope they feel that taking such risks is worth it. Love can change lives for the better.
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M. C. Bunn
M. C. Bunn grew up in a house full of books, history, and music. “Daddy was a master storyteller. The past was another world, but one that seemed familiar because of him. He read aloud at the table, classics or whatever historical subject interested him. His idea of bedtime stories were passages from Dickens, Twain, and Stevenson. Mama told me I could write whatever I wanted. She put a dictionary in my hands and let me use her typewriter, or watch I, Claudius and Shoulder to Shoulder when they first aired on Masterpiece Theatre. She was the realist. He was the romantic. They were a great team.”Where Your Treasure Is, a novel set in late-Victorian London and Norfolk, came together after the sudden death of the author’s father. “I’d been teaching high school English for over a decade and had spent the summer cleaning my parents’ house and their offices. It was August, time for classes to begin. The characters emerged out of nowhere, sort of like they knew I needed them. They took over.”
She had worked on a novella as part of her master’s degree in English years before but set it aside, along with many other stories. “I was also writing songs for the band I’m in and had done a libretto for a sacred piece. All of that was completely different from Where Your Treasure Is. Before her health declined, my mother heard Treasure’s first draft and encouraged me to return to prose. The novel is a nod to all the wonderful books my father read to us, the old movies we stayed up to watch, a thank you to my parents, especially Mama for reminding me that nothing is wasted. Dreams don’t have to die. Neither does love.”
When M. C. Bunn is not writing, she’s researching or reading. Her idea of a well-appointed room includes multiple bookshelves, a full pot of coffee, and a place to lie down with a big, old book. To further feed her soul, she and her husband take long walks with their dog, Emeril in North Carolina’s woods, or she makes music with friends.
“I try to remember to look up at the sky and take some time each day to be thankful.”
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