Natalie Jenner's "Bloomsbury Girls"

Natalie Jenner is the author of the instant international bestseller The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls. A Goodreads Choice Award runner-up for historical fiction and finalist for best debut novel, The Jane Austen Society was a USA Today and #1 national bestseller, and has been sold for translation in twenty countries.

Here Jenner dreamcasts an adaptation of Bloomsbury Girls:

Ironically, it was an early pandemic rewatch of the 1987 movie 84 Charing Cross Road, based on the wonderful book by Helene Hanff, that lit the creative spark for my new novel Bloomsbury Girls, which is about a trio of women working in a 1950s London bookshop who are engaged in a battle of the sexes with their male department heads and decide to stage a coup. Although the movie focuses on the epistolary relationship between Hanff and the manager of a 1950s bookshop at—you guessed it—84 Charing Cross Road, its wonderful set design for the shop brought to humming life all manner of staff. As I watched, I thought to myself, there’s a whole other book in here, and immediately half a dozen characters came to mind. Here’s how I would cast the main ones:

Lord Baskin, the elegant, sympathetic earl who owns the one-hundred-year-old bookshop at the heart of Bloomsbury Girls, has to be played by Richard Armitage, who narrated the audiobook for my debut novel The Jane Austen Society, the actual writing of which he also inspired. What can I say—I’m a huge fan.

Evie Stone, the former servant girl turned literary sleuth and Cambridge graduate, is also connected to my first book, and for years now I have envisioned a shorter Saoirse Ronan in this role, given the serious, fiercely ambitious Jo March vibes from her performance in Little Women.

For Vivien, the insolent ringleader of the discontented female staff, I can only see Charlotte Spencer, the amazing actress currently playing Lady Esther Babbington in Masterpiece Theatre’s Sanditon. She has all of Vivien’s sass, impatience and ultra-cool demeanour.

Alec McDonough, the lean, blond, handsome head of fiction and competitive foil (and maybe something more) to Vivien, would ideally be played by Tom Hiddleston. As I wrote, I could actually picture Hiddleston sliding along on the rolling bookshop ladder, blond angelic head and all.

And finally, Elizabeth McGovern played Ellen Doubleday once already, in the BBC2 television drama Daphne, and I have always pictured her as the late publishing magnate’s wife and friend to Daphne du Maurier (who, with all her grand historic mystique, could only be played by herself).

Visit Natalie Jenner's website.

Q&A with Natalie Jenner.

My Book, The Movie: The Jane Austen Society.

--Marshal Zeringue