Jessie [Paperback]

'After an action-packed start, this story develops into a well told, captivating story' (Dorset Evening Echo on JESSIE )

‘After an action-packed start, this story develops into a well told, captivating story'

Jessie Burton is lively and intelligent - she wants more than the respectable life in service her mother has planned for her. Times are changing, railways are being built across the land bringing new freedom and possibilities. Jessie tastes that freedom when she meets an ambitious young navvy, newly arrived in Yorkshire. The attraction between them is overwhelming. And Jared Wilde is determined to make Jessie his wife. The primitive, colourful shanty towns that spring up around the railway works are nothing like the safe world Jessie once knew. But in spite of the hardness of life there, she finds happiness with Jared. Until another navvy becomes determined to destroy their future together...

Background information on this book by author
JESSIE is the first single title book I wrote as Anna Jacobs ie it's not part of a series. I was doing some general research when I got interested in the history of the railways - not the machinery, but the men who built them, mostly by digging them out by hand. The navvies lived in shanty towns and moved on as each section of the track got built. This made me wonder what life was like for the women who lived in those shanty towns - hence my heroine Jessie.

The book has an interesting history. It was the second book I tried to write. When I resuscitated it, I realised why it had been rejected, but I still thought the story idea and characters were great, so I completely rewrote it, adding new sub-plots and characters, and lots more historical colour. My writing skills had certainly improved after writing the five-part Gibson Family Saga (beginning with SALEM STREET).

I never thought I'd get interested in railways - but they opened up the world to ordinary people, bringing news and goods (including better food) into the towns and villages, and taking people out of them. That's why so many ordinary people were able to go to the Great Exhibition.

My heroine is one of those ordinary people whose lives got transformed by railways. Jessie is the daughter of a parson's housekeeper, and is destined by her mother for a safe life in service. But she's too lively for that, and when she meets Jared Wilde, he opens up the world to her.

It's not always comfortable for JESSIE, because there's danger as well as money to be made in the shanty towns. Other people's stories mingle with Jessie's, Simon, the railway engineer, and his sister Elinor. It's my longest book and there's so much happening, I won't try to tell you any more about the story.

I will, however, share with you what readers have written to tell me. To my surprise, they keep asking if I'm going to write a sequel, telling Elinor's story. I hadn't even thought of that, but the idea is now bubbling on the back burner of my brain - and maybe one day I will.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing and re-writing it. In fact, I used it as an example of improving a plot in my how-to book about writing PLOTTING AND EDITING, which you can read about on my web site at ....I've also put the first chapter of JESSIE there for you to try. Enjoy!

Anna Jacobs grew up in Lancashire and emigrated to Australia in 1973, but loves to return to England regularly to visit her family and soak up the history. She has two grown-up daughters and now lives with her husband in a spacious waterfront home. Often as she writes, dolphins frolic outside the window of her study. Inside, the house is crammed with thousands of books.