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Hearts and minds
Published 23 October 2023
Cambridge academic Rosy Thornton set aside her law books to pen a romantic comedy on asylum seekers. Why?
Anyone stumbling across a list of my books on Amazon might wonder if there has been some mistake.
My new book, More Than Love Letters, is a romantic comedy, complete with hearts and butterflies on a baby-blue cover. But my backlist features the rather less emotionally charged Property Disrepair and Dilapidations: A Guide to the Law. Not so many butterflies there.
From housing law to chick lit would be a leap for any author – so how did it come about? As part of my day job as a law lecturer at Cambridge University I write articles for academic legal journals on housing and homelessness law.
In 2005, I was sitting down to write another, this time on women asylum seekers escaping domestic violence in their home countries, and how their problems are ignored in asylum law. But then I thought, who will actually read this? A couple of dozen legal academics and maybe an enlightened law student or two?
So instead, I started a novel centring on a women’s hostel and highlighting asylum and gender violence, as well as other issues facing homeless and marginalised women, including psychiatric illness and childhood abuse. Peg it to a tale about a woman campaigner (beautiful and ebony-curled, naturally) who falls for a sexy MP, and bingo.
Light fiction has a wider readership than legal journals or, indeed, ROOF magazine. Having been involved with Shelter for 25 years, I have done my share of conventional awareness-raising. As a member of a local Shelter group I lobbied and leafleted (unsuccessfully) against the abolition of rent control in the Housing Act 1988. I wrote a research report for SHAC in the late 1980s on youth homelessness and changes in benefit rules. For ten years I was active in the voluntary sector, helping run a hostel for single homeless women, and taking part in the campaigning that entailed.
All of this work – the sort that many ROOF readers are involved in day to day – is invaluable and has to carry on. Just as, undeniably, legal textbooks on property repairs are vital to tenants and their advisers.
But it’s useful sometimes to take a step back and think of imaginative ways of getting the message to new people.
There is a great tradition of fiction being used as a vehicle for raising awareness. The place of Jeremy Sandford’s play Cathy Come Home is, of course, unique in the history of housing law, triggering an intense public debate about homelessness which gave impetus to the launch of Shelter and led, just over a decade later, to the enactment of the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act.
I am sure, too, that many ROOF readers will know Alexander Masters’ brilliant Stuart: A Life Backwards, which tells the story of a young homeless man in Cambridge. Both are examples of stories which, by engaging the emotions and relating the general policy to an individual’s circumstances, convey important messages to a wider audience.
My own book is not aimed at people who have even a passing interest in homelessness. My Cambridge colleagues may well look down their noses at a don who spends her evenings writing romantic fiction.
But wrapping up subjects like this in a chick lit format might well bring the issues to a new audience – one that might never otherwise give a book on homelessness a passing glance.
Rosy Thornton is an author, lecturer and fellow in Law at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.
