In this episode of She Wrote Too, we welcome a special guest, novelist and booktuber, Katie Lumsden to discuss Amy Dillwyn’s The Rebecca Rioter.

Katie wrote The Secrets of Hartwood Hall a gothic novel set in Victorian England. Her new novel, The Trouble with Mrs Montgomery Hall, is available for pre-order now and will be out in July.

We discuss the novel, The background to the Rebecca Riots and a little of Amy Dillwyn’s life. Katie mentions an article Professor Kirsti Bohata. ‘A Queer-Looking Lot of Women’: cross-dressing, transgender ventriloquism and same-sex desire in The Rebecca Rioter. The Victorian Review, 44(1), 113-130:

A very interesting and informative site on Dillwyn and this book can be found on the Literary Atlas of Wales.

The Rebecca Rioter, published in 1880, is a novel based on the notorious Rebecca Riots in south and west Wales in the early nineteenth century. It is told from the perspective of Evan, a working class participant in the riots in which the people protested against the imposition of toll bridges; it was a protest against wider social inequalities and the poor treatment of the working people. The outcome of the riots has a profound effect on Evan and the woman he admires.

As usual, in the podcast, we do discuss the plot as a whole and so there are ‘spoilers’ about the Rebecca Rioter. There are no ‘spoilers’ regarding Katie’s books.

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