‘The Prendergast Watch,’ a novel by creative writing student Emma Woodhouse was more than 10 years in the making ahead of its release in February.
LONDON — The saying goes that you wait ages for a bus and then two come along at once. It turns out the same might be true for book deals.
Emma Woodhouse, who is pursuing a master’s degree in contemporary creative writing from Northeastern University in London, had been quietly tapping away at her keyboard for more than 10 years before her debut novel got snapped up by a publisher. She is now due to release four books in just over a year.
Her first novel, “The Prendergast Watch,” a shadowy historical drama set in Britain during the Victorian era, was released in February by Holand Press.
Woodhouse describes the 286-page novel as an “extravaganza of love, loss, blackmail, asylums, art, suffrage and family secrets,” with a pocket watch at its center that brings bad luck to anyone who has it in their possession.
Holand Press will release another of Woodhouse’s stories — its title still to-be-confirmed — in April about a girl in Victorian London who falls in with a gang. In July, publisher Cranthorpe Milner is also set to release her book “Mercy,” which is partly based on a true story about a woman who in the 1840s was tried three times, having been charged with killing her own mother.
But before those additional fictional works are released, Woodhouse intends to self-publish this month “Mary, Queen of the Forty,” a historical account about the life of Mary Carr, the leader of an all-women London-based Victorian gang. Carr features as one of the central characters in the recently released Hulu television boxing drama, “A Thousand Blows,” and is played by Erin Doherty.
Woodhouse went back to writing during the isolated period of the COVID-19 pandemic, deciding it was “now or never” to pursue her dream of becoming a published author.
The elementary school teacher did not have to commute to work every day during the pandemic, so she used the time she saved to tidy up a manuscript for “The Prendergast Watch” that she had started a decade earlier.
“When COVID arrived and I knew I had this time that I would not normally have, I thought, ‘I’ll dig that out and see if it’s any good,’” Woodhouse recalls. “So I took it out, and I thought, surprisingly, that it was all right. The opening of the book is basically what I wrote probably 10 years previously. It had been a little project I started but then life got in the way.”
In a bid to contain the virus during outbreaks in 2020 and 2021, restrictions in England meant citizens were permitted one walk per day. Woodhouse remembers how she would think about the characters from the book while getting her daily dose of exercise, itching to get back and figure out the next part of their story.
“I’d be walking along with my dog that I had just rescued from Romania,” she adds, “and I’d be thinking, ‘Oh, I wonder what so-and-so is going to do next.’ And so I’d go home, switch the laptop on and I’d write this next bit about such-and-such a character.”
Woodhouse describes herself as an author who, especially with “The Prendergast Watch,” opted to fly by the seat of her pants in that she “very much let the story write itself” after conjuring up the initial idea about having a sought-after pocket watch that brings misfortune to its owner.
Her years spent as a demonstrator and tour guide at Blists Hill Victorian Town in Telford, England, helped ensure that the story was also factually accurate, particularly when it came to describing the conditions the poorest in society were living through during that era.
In September, the Shropshire-based author enrolled with Northeastern to study creative writing online over two years. She says the program was “exactly what I was looking for” from a professional qualification.
The regular feedback, both from lecturers and classmates, has helped her to hone her writing, she says. “It has just been brilliant,” says Woodhouse. “It has made me think a lot more about editing. I think the program makes you think very much in depth about everything that you write.”
With so many titles earmarked for release in the next 12 months, Woodhouse is gearing up for a summer promotional tour. She is keen to show to modern audiences that, although her books are set in the 19th century, they cover social issues still relevant to our own times.
“There are a lot of themes that you can say are still contemporary in this day and age,” she continues.
“In ‘The Prendergast Watch,’ we have issues such as alcoholism, equal rights, family secrets — these are all the sorts of things that we find in society today that people are still struggling with.
“I think that you can relate to so many different themes in history — history is never irrelevant. There are always things that we can learn from, so I try to make those themes relevant in my writing.”