The Secret Book Society
The Secret Book Society
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Madeline Martin on The Secret Book Society
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A boot thrown from a carriageThe book began with a fact that stopped her cold: Victorian men believed reading gave women opinions that conflicted with their own, and they acted on that belief by controlling what women were allowed to read.
Women very much were discouraged from reading. They felt that it was a selfish endeavor that took them away from their roles as wives and mothers. They felt that it led to promiscuity. They felt that women didn’t have the emotional fortitude to go on the journey that a novel would take them on. And, oh my gosh, it gave women opinions that differed from the men in their lives, how dare they. [paraphrased from audio]
That suppression became the premise. But a forbidden reading circle needs someone bold enough to run it, which is how Lady Duxbury, the novel’s opaque and much-whispered-about hostess, arrived in Martin’s imagination.
The plot’s structural hook came from a real incident Martin turned up in research: a husband having an affair with his wife’s niece arranged to have the wife committed to a lunatic asylum, and as the carriage carried her away she threw her boot out the window with money for a street boy to deliver it to her friends. Martin built the novel’s entire prologue around that boot, with an invitation inside reading “You are cordially invited to The Secret Book Society.” She calls it the anti-Cinderella story. That real event also forced a question about who could plausibly have the independence and social standing to convene such a circle.
I thought, well, this would need a very fearless leader, and that’s where I came up with the idea of Lady Duxbury. [paraphrased from audio]
All four of Martin’s previous historical novels were set during World War II. The move to 1895 London was a deliberate break she had been working toward.
The Victorian era is something that’s always really appealed to me, and I wanted something that would kind of let me have the opportunity to explore that curiosity in history a little bit. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Written in a month, researched for much longerMartin normally spends ten months in research before writing a word, then drafts over roughly two months. With this book she reversed that sequence entirely, leaning on years of writing Regency historical romance for working knowledge of adjacent Victorian social conventions, and letting the concept carry her forward at a pace unlike anything she had written before.
I was so enamored with this concept that I actually wrote this book in just about a month... it just poured out of me... a huge part of that excitement came from empowering these women. And not only empowering them, but letting them empower one another. I’m just such a huge fan of women supporting other women. [paraphrased from audio]
After that month of drafting she went back and did extensive research, including a trip to London to tour Victorian townhomes, where the density of objects on every surface and the deliberate arrangement of mirrors to push candlelight into dark rooms gave her the physical texture the draft was missing.
One research thread she worried readers would dismiss as invented was hat pin fighting, a real Victorian practice. Women’s hats required pins up to a foot long, and women organized to teach each other how to use those pins defensively. Cities eventually passed ordinances limiting hat pin length because men were frightened.
Women started to get together and help one another learn how best to utilize these hat pins to protect themselves from people who meant to do them harm. [paraphrased from audio]
Floriography, the Victorian language of flowers, became a second research thread she wove through the novel systematically. Every plant in the book carries a period-accurate meaning she looked up, and she designed a deliberate reward for readers who want to go further.
In this book, every flower and plant that has been mentioned, if readers were so inclined, they could go on a little bit of a literary scavenger hunt and look up why every flower and plant, what their meaning is to see why it was mentioned. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s four-perspective structure, three women plus Lady Duxbury’s hidden diary, was new territory for Martin. She had never managed four points of view before, and the hardest problem was ensuring each character carried enough of the story. But the range brought its own pleasure, one she frames as a fundamentally different cognitive experience than single-POV writing.
It was kind of fun getting to kind of dip into other people’s heads... because when you do write, you can only really explain the voice of the head that you’re in. [paraphrased from audio]
Lavinia, the youngest Society member, was loosely modeled on Florence Nightingale, who as a young woman believed she suffered from hysteria, the era’s catch-all diagnosis for inconvenient female emotion. Writing Lavinia’s inner life was conceptually exciting; writing the poetry Martin gave her as Lavinia’s secret passion was a different problem entirely.
I will say that I did enjoy Lady Duxbury’s mysterious character and writing her diary entries was so much fun. Lavinia was a little more of a challenge because poetry doesn’t come very easily to me and I had to dig pretty deep in my creative well for her character, but it was a lot of fun to do.
The personal thread
A month lived inside someone else’s skinMartin has spoken about the difference between writing a book that costs her a year of slow, methodical effort and writing one where the story arrives whole. The sensation she describes is less about craft and more about the peculiar intimacy of a story that won’t slow down.
If you read a book and it’s so good you can’t put it down, you read it over the course of a weekend, and you can viscerally recall every part of that story…. For me, when I get to write that book in one month, it’s like I’m living in their skin, and I’m living in their heads.
Her previous books, all set during World War II, required her to spend months inside some of the most documented suffering of the twentieth century. She has thought carefully about what she wants readers to feel when they close one of her novels, and it shapes which parts of a hard history she reaches for.
What readers often tell me is that while my books can be emotional, they also leave them feeling hopeful. I believe this is due to my interest in sharing resilience and community rather than hardships. I love how there is always light, even in the darkest times.
On what the book is wrestling with
The reading list as argumentThe books the Secret Book Society chooses to read were not decorative choices. Martin selected Victorian women’s literature specifically because she believes the era marked a turning point in how female characters were written, and she wanted her fictional readers to feel that shift as they encountered it. The contrast she draws between what came before and what Austen and the Brontës made possible is the argument buried inside the reading list.
The Victorian era really was very huge for female authors... you’re having female authors writing female characters who are so much more real and so much deeper than they’ve ever been before. Before, I would hazard to say... so many of the female characters are really so two-dimensional. You have either the angel or you have the fallen woman, and there’s really very little in between. [paraphrased from audio]
Lady Duxbury, rumored to have killed her three husbands, is deliberately kept opaque through most of the novel. Her diary, revealed in fragments, is the mechanism Martin uses to resolve that opacity. The design was intentional from the start: Duxbury understands each woman’s situation on a level the women themselves don’t yet recognize, and the slow unveiling of her own past explains why.
I painted her [Lady Duxbury] like that intentionally. I wanted her to really understand what these women were going through and understand them on this deep level that they don’t understand until her secret diary is discovered. And her past is revealed in little juicy tidbits, which I think is a great way to have things revealed. [paraphrased from audio]
Martin has written four books in which books themselves are the subject: a wartime bookshop, librarians preserving culture under occupation, and now women reading in secret. She places the Victorian novel directly in that sequence and names the thing all of them are really about.
Whether it’s a bookshop amid London’s Blitz like The Last Bookshop in London, librarians helping preserve culture during war like The Keeper of Hidden Books, or women banding together to read when they are told they shouldn’t like The Secret Book Society, I’m fascinated by the ways stories connect us and help us endure.
What she wants us to sit with
Cobblestones before the suffragettesThe emotional argument at the center of the novel is not about Victorian oppression in the abstract. It is about what women do when they choose to show each other their cracks rather than their polished surfaces, and what becomes possible when they build each other up rather than exploit the vulnerability.
I really wanted to illustrate that with these particular women, that they seem like they’re so perfect on the outside, but everybody has their cracks, everybody has their struggles. And letting one another be vulnerable with one another and helping to build one another up, that was such an important aspect of the story that I really wanted to portray. [paraphrased from audio]
Martin is also precise about where the novel sits historically. The suffragette movement is not yet on the horizon in 1895, but the women of the Secret Book Society are laying the conditions that make it possible. She wants readers to feel that placement: not the revolution itself, but what came quietly before it.
This book is sort of laying the cobblestones that lead to that path of the suffragette movement. [paraphrased from audio]