Interview about A Rare Find

I first encountered Joanna Lowell’s historical romances with Artfully Yours, a delightful Victorian comedy that pits a reluctant art forger against a devastatingly handsome but alienated aristocratic art critic known for his ability to spot a fake. I then read two other books in the series in preparation for interviewing Lowell in reference to last summer’s A Shore Thing, which introduces a trans male who appeared (in trousers) as a female artist in those earlier novels. A Rare Find (Berkley, 2025) picks up the theme of gender diversity and expands on it while moving the action to Britain’s Regency period. Read on to find out more from this written interview.

This novel moves back in time from your Victorian series—to 1818, to be precise. The first person we meet is one of your leads, Elfreda Marsden. What should we know about her?

Elfreda is the sort of shy that seems cold to people who don’t know her well. She has never enjoyed social functions, and so the fact that her family is increasingly isolated from the neighborhood (due to her father’s irascibility and miserliness) comes as a relief. However, she isn’t cold in the least! She’s filled with passion, just not the sort that she can express in a drawing room, or that has ever attracted a suitor. She loves studying the past, and her dream is to travel the countryside, digging for antiquities, and to gain admittance into a learned society of antiquaries. She’s too busy helping her father with historical research, and taking care of the household, to notice that she’s lonely. Across the novel, she learns to lower her defenses and take more emotional risks, and it changes her perspective on history, and most importantly, on her own future.

I absolutely love your opening, with Elfreda talking to two bushes who turn out to be her twin sisters, Hilda and Matilda. They are so charming (although perhaps a handful for those charged with watching over them). Tell us about them.

Thank you so much! Hilda and Matilda are six-year-olds, and so definitely a handful. They’re playful and rambunctious, and they’re always running wild. They bring Elfreda a great deal of joy, but they also cause chaos. Mrs. Marsden died years ago, and Mr. Marsden won’t employ a nurse (and definitely won’t “parent” in any modern sense of the verb), so it falls to Elfreda to wrangle them into eating their porridge and going to bed at a reasonable hour. Elfreda is the eldest of four girls (there’s a middle sister named Agnes), and she struggles to find time for herself given all of her domestic responsibilities. Even though the twins sometimes ruin her plans, they help keep her imagination alive with their games of make-believe, and that’s an invaluable gift.

An important influence in Elfreda’s life is her paternal grandmother, deceased by the time the book opens. Could you say a bit about what the two have in common?

Elfreda lost her grandmother at a young age but continues to feel her presence. Her grandmother paid attention to her, played with her, and shared her enthusiasm for archeology. Elfreda’s grandfather was a renowned antiquary whose obsession with collecting artifacts and publishing increasingly eccentric books on the druids ultimately depleted his fortune and damaged his reputation. He didn’t credit his wife (Elfreda’s grandmother) for her contributions to his work, and no one remembers her as a scholar in her own right—except for Elfreda. Elfreda has read through her grandmother’s notebooks and understands that her grandmother was the real intellectual powerhouse in the marriage. She has a harder time understanding that she’s in a similar situation.  She assists her father on his digs and writes the lion’s share of his articles. Because this all aligns with her interests, and because she’s eager to win and retain his affection, she doesn’t realize, at first, that he’s taking advantage of her. She thinks if she proves she’s worthy of his respect, he’ll champion her to his colleagues. (Spoiler: this is a trap.) As she tries to vindicate her grandmother’s scholarship, she gains more confidence in herself as well, and she strengthens her connection with her grandmother in a way that embodies what they’re studying: the intergenerational transmission of women’s knowledge.

Elfreda’s father, in contrast, is not terribly supportive of either his daughter or the memory of his mother. This is perhaps not surprising given the time period, but what does it say about him?

Harold Marsden does whatever suits him in the moment, and what suits him is usually what gratifies his ego. He and Elfreda have a close relationship, but it’s predicated on her acting as a mirror, reflecting him back at himself. As soon as she tries to advance her own ideas, to assert her selfhood, he feels threatened and tries to shut her down, or to reabsorb her into the old dynamic. I don’t believe in dichotomies like hero and villain. I’m interested in human complexity, and I try to write complex characters that aren’t all good or all bad. I think Elfreda’s father is working through his own daddy issues and repressing a lot of guilt and grief about his wife. But with that said, I also think he’s on the narcissism spectrum and doesn’t do right by his children. 

Your other main character is Georgie Redmayne. At the beginning of the novel, Georgie and Elfreda (whom Georgie calls Elf) are far from being friends. Why is that, and what do we learn early on about Georgie’s personality and goals?

There’s a bit of a star-crossed lovers trope at play. Georgie and Elfreda are neighbors, and their families have a long-running feud. According to the Marsdens, the Redmaynes are grasping, ignorant upstarts, and according the Redmaynes, the Marsdens are insufferable, self-important eccentrics.  So they’re born into an unfriendly context, vis-à-vis each other. But beyond that, they’re opposites, socially. Georgie is outgoing, impulsive, and often surrounded by friends. Elfreda freezes up if she has to speak in front of a group. From a young age, every encounter provided the two of them with a new opportunity for misinterpretation, and things spiraled from there. When the novel opens, Georgie has just been sent back to the village and is not happy about it. The village lacks entertainment, most importantly, a theater. Georgie’s immediate goal is to get back to London, to continue a life filled with novelty and fun. This goal is frankly insulting to Elfreda, who bridles at Georgie’s claims that the country is dull as ditchwater. And so, the hostilities renew.

What keeps Elf and Georgie interacting with each other despite their initial hostility is an archeological dig. What attracted you to this particular element of the plot?

Well, for one, I thought it’d be fun to send characters on a treasure hunt. The archeological plot involves a medieval riddle, and Elfreda and Georgie need to solve it to find the Viking gold. Their attempts lead them on several escapades around the village. But also, I liked the idea of writing a historical romance that deals with the production of historical knowledge, that has characters asking questions about how our understanding of the past gets shaped, and why, by whom and for whose benefit. Nineteenth century British antiquaries played a pivotal role in contesting and defining English national identity based on connections they drew, for example, to the Anglo-Saxons, or the Romans. Thanks, in part, to Georgie, Elfreda becomes more attuned to the political dimensions of antiquarian endeavors. She becomes more sensitive to the stories that aren’t in the historical record and more open to imagining what might have been, and therefore, what could someday be.

In many ways, this novel could be considered an exploration of sexual identity. Georgie and Elf, of course, but also Anne and Rosalie, Elf’s sister Agnes and her close friend Beatrice, Lord Phillip—there are even hints of past couples who were not what they appeared to be. Did you want to say anything about this theme, especially in the context of the Regency, which was not particularly sympathetic to diversity?

I find much solace and delight in queer historical romance. It’s so affirming to read (and write) about LGBTQ+ people living full lives, experiencing desire and joy, feeling safe and seen, seen by each other, if not by the wider world. Anne is looking for this kind of affirmation and connection when she speculates about queer ancestors. Their presence back then creates hope for her, in 1818. As Elfreda goes through her queer awakening, she sees the world differently, past, present, and future. She sees more possibility, more ways for people to be. I want to contribute to that sense of possibility, for all readers, but particularly for LGBTQ+ readers eager for stories that put queer people at the center of narratives that end happily. During the Regency, sodomy was a capital offense, but of course, men still fell in love and lust with other men and did all sorts of things together. London had a vibrant scene of underground “mollies’ clubs,” where people we might today understand as gay and trans fashioned their own leisure activities and rituals. Women had less freedom of movement in the public sphere, and sexual acts between them weren’t illegal, so women involved sexually with other women show up less frequently in the archives (often drawn from newspapers and police records). Despite their relative invisibility, some women who today might call themselves lesbian or bisexual did leave traces behind. For example, Anne Lister, often described as “the first modern lesbian” lived during this period and wrote about her relationships with women in coded diaries. Historical romance author Courtney Milan said in an interview that she writes books that are historically extraordinary. I have taken that very generative idea to heart. For example, people didn’t use they/them pronouns during the Regency, but as Elf explains, they has been used for centuries in writing as a gender neutral third-person pronoun, so Georgie (who uses they/them pronouns in the novel) and their friends could have hit upon the practice. It’s not impossible, although it is extraordinary. Romance as a genre focuses on journeys of self-discovery and emotional justice. It’s eternally optimistic. It proves again and again that people are worthy of love. To me, it’s the perfect genre for all kinds of explorations of identity, and power. Historical settings can shine a light on the contemporary moment, which is also not sympathetic to diversity, in terms of the US’s national political discourse and policies. Romance can give us hope and help us dream, so we can fight with love for the world we deserve.

Are you working on something new?

I’ve been working on a collaborative project with a friend, a contemporary retelling of Mansfield Park. Fanny Price is Austen’s least popular heroine, and we hope to give her a time to shine. In our version, she’s not a poor relation but an embattled English professor trying to save her department from itself, and also from the business school. We’re having fun recasting Fanny, Edmund, Mary, and Henry as academic types, playing around with Austen’s plot, and dialing up the romance.

Joanna Lowell lives among the fig trees in North Carolina, where she teaches in the English department at Wake Forest University. She has published four interconnected historical novels set in late Victorian England—including A Shore Thing, listed as one of 2024’s best romance novels by The New York Times.  A Rare Find is her most recent book. She writes in other genres as Joanna Ruocco. Find out more about her and her work at https://www.joannalowell.com.

Photograph of Joanna Lowell © Mir Yarfitz. Reproduced with permission.