Christmas Carol prequel explores life of Marley
Prequel to A Christmas Carol offers lens into the Marley character
Miss Marley Vanessa Lafaye with Rebecca Mascull HarperCollins
The week before she died, everything seemed to be coming up roses for novelist Vanessa Lafaye.
She and her husband, James, had just returned to their home in the Wiltshire town of Marlborough after their “holiday of a lifetime” in Australia and New Zealand. She had signed off on an exciting book deal with publisher HarperCollins, which saw yuletide gold in her latest project, Miss Marley, an enchanting prequel to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
But as she returned to work on that book, spurred on by the promise of publication at the end of this year, Lafaye was also wearing another hat — as founder and director of the Marlborough Community Choir. She was busy rehearsing her singers for their upcoming appearance at the Town Mayor’s Civic Dinner. And she made it to the dinner to conduct the choir — from a wheelchair. She then went back to work on Miss Marley.
A few days later, on Feb. 28, she was dead — resilient to the last after a lengthy battle with cancer.
“She continued on the book as long as she could,” says her editor, Kate Mills. “She was working until her last 48 hours. She would be sending me messages, and for a while I couldn’t go back to reading them. It was just too painful. She was a remarkable woman. And she had such joy about her and determination.”
Lafaye had also continued to say yes to life by blogging about her struggles with her illness in a widely read online series of mini essays under the title of Living While Dying.
Mills, now publishing director of HarperCollins’s new HQ division, was with another house, Orion, when she and the U.S.-born Lafaye first met several years ago. “That was when I published her first book, Summertime, dealing with a Florida hurricane in the 1930s,” Mills says. “I was really struck by her — she was a very good writer of historical fiction. It was a very emotional book and I absolutely fell in love with it.”
Lafaye went on to write another successful novel, At First Light. In the meantime Mills had moved to HarperCollins. That’s where a dramatic new chapter would open in their relationship.
“She sent a new novel to me. We had stayed in touch, so I knew she was ill at that point because she had gone through several rounds of chemotherapy. It struck me that this new novel wasn’t quite right.”
Mills decided that Lafaye, despite her illness, was tough enough to want the truth.
“It’s always difficult to say this to an author because you’re aware of how much they put into their writing. But I rang her and said: ‘Look, I don’t think this is you at your best.’”
To which Lafaye cheerfully replied: “That’s all right. I have another idea I’m working on.” She then revealed that she wanted to explore the early life of Jacob Marley — “doomed to drag his chains across the earth for all eternity” yet striving through his ghostly appearances to save his old partner, Ebenezer Scrooge, from a similar fate.
Lafaye had a lifelong fascination with A Christmas Carol — indeed, she once spent a Christmas watching 11 different film versions back to back. “But I’ve always wondered why there hasn’t been a story about Jacob Marley,” she was now telling Mills over the phone. “Scrooge gets off at the end of A Christmas Carol, so what did Jacob do that was so much worse?”
Mills remembers feeling a “shiver” when Lafaye asked this question. She sensed the possibility of something truly unusual happening in her publishing life.
“It’s a really good idea,” she told Lafaye. “I think you should write it.”
“I’ve already started,” Lafaye replied. “I’m 20,000 words in.”
So less than a year ago, Mills settled down with those early chapters and was captivated by what she read. Lafaye had made her own convincing entry into this Dickensian world by introducing readers to two wretched orphans, Clara and Jacob Marley, reduced to scavenging for scraps of food in rat-ridden alleyways. But Jacob’s determination to protect his little sister — promising her repeatedly that “tomorrow will be better” — sets him on a dark and terrible path that leads to his infamous partnership with Ebenezer Scrooge and then to his ultimate doom.
In a note to readers, Lafaye admitted that the idea of inhabiting the character of Jacob himself seemed too much like trespassing, so she invented Clara to provide the lens though which she could tell her story.
“I knew her illness was terminal and that Vanessa probably wouldn’t be here for publication,” Mills says now. “But the material contained everything I loved about her writing — brilliant, historical accuracy, fantastic research but told very lightly with fantastic characters who just walked off the page. I phoned her the next day and said — you must finish this.
“She carried on working, and we made a deal. We went out with a really big announcement and immediately started getting TV and film interest in the idea. She was delighted and kept working away. I don’t think any of us knew how quickly things would take a turn for the worst.”
Lafaye died days later, with Miss Marley unfinished. So she never made it to that meeting in early March with the book team that was so passionate about her story. But husband James was there.
“He was adamant that we should carry on with our plans to publish and find a way to make the book work,” Mills says. “So we did.”
At James’s suggestion, fellow writer Rebecca Mascull, a close family friend, took on the job of bringing the story to its conclusion.
“Rebecca’s transition is absolutely seamless,” Mills reports. “And I think her ending is inspired. I cried when I first read it. It felt so right. I hope we’ve got it right for Vanessa — I really missed having her here with us this summer because she was so incredibly funny and brave and honest.
“This has been a very precious project for everybody involved with it,” Mills says. “Miss Marley was such a brilliant idea and I think it could become one of those books that people perennially will return to each Christmas.”