Regency adventures with Amita Murray

Submitted: 18th August 2024

Regency adventures with Amita Murray

There’s some very good scene setting in Amita Murray’s series – Regency London and Devon have never looked so good. So, put on your fancy bonnet or your top hat and get thee in the horse and carriage for we are OFF…..

Locations in Amita Murray Regency books

In Book One of my Marleigh Sisters series (Unladylike Lessons in Love, HarperCollins and Avon, 2023), we meet Lila Marleigh, owner of a gambling salon, notorious for the tightrope she walks between respectability and notoriety. She is the daughter of an East India Company earl and his Indian mistress, displaced to London when she was little and essentially asked to forget about her Indian side.

Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens

Locations in Amita Murray Regency books

The Marleigh Sisters are fictional, but in the 1800s, there were many mixed-race children who were shipped from the Indian sub-continent or the Caribbean to England and instructed to live as English, with Anglo names, and seemingly Anglo histories. Given the edgy nature of the Marleigh Sisters series and the complex nature of the histories I explore, I take us to locations in England that we don’t always get to see in Regency fiction.

Seven Dials

Locations in Amita Murray Regency books

In Lila’s book, we go to a rat pit in Seven Dials in Covent Garden, the pleasure gardens in Vauxhall, and the dodgier streets of Whitehall. Though we don’t visit Delhi, Lila has a childhood connection with the place.

Westminster

Locations in Amita Murray Regency books

In the second book of the series (Unladylike Rules of Attraction, May 2024), Anya is a sitar player in Queen Charlotte’s court, so we visit St James’s Palace for the Queen’s birthday drawing room (which did in fact take place in 1810!) Anya and Damian meet in Folkestone (where we meet Damian’s wonderful goats in their goat pen), but then most of the action takes place in London.

Besides the palace, we venture near slums like the Devil’s Acre, not far off Westminster,where Anya tries to convince a man to help her and Damian out of a pickle. And we go to Hampstead to confront a highwayman! Not to mention that Damian was born in Jamaica before he moved to England at the age of thirteen to go to boarding school.

Dawlish

Locations in Amita Murray Regency books

In Book 3 (An Unladylike Secret, 2025) we will see Mira and Finn meet in Devon. I don’t name the place, but I expect it to be somewhere around Dawlish. We get to breathe in the red cliffs of the Jurassic Coast and learn about the smuggling that was rife in that area. We also have brief forays to a brothel in St James’s Street in London. And Finn was born in Saint Kitts in the Caribbean.

Amita Murray

Locations in Amita Murray Regency books

My favourite thing to explore in fiction is the impact of childhood experiences on our lifelong search for love. How do difficult childhood experiences, loneliness, loss, trauma impact how and who we love? Does love remain a figment of our imagination? Does it only exist in our most secret longings or can we come to terms with our dark side and find a love that is real and actually works for us? And can we see it for the love it is or will we always be fighting our demons? Oh, and yes, the books do get steamy at times, at a Bridgerton sort of level of heat.

I hope you’ll join me on this fascinating journey!