Touch of Basil: A Novel of Gender Politics and Domestic Abuse in 19th Century England

Touch of Basil is a novel exploring the tangled web of social mores and legislation of Victorian England in which a victim of sexual assault is forced into marrying her rapist, a man who in fact, raped her so she would be forced to marry him. The project was conceived using a novel outlining process known as 21 Days to a Novel which helped me plot the book and create its characters. Once the outline was complete, the first half of Touch of Basil was written during National Novel Writing Month, wherein one tries to write 50,000 words of a novel between November first and thirtieth. The latter half of this novel was drafted during spring semester. As time went on, the project became less about creating a perfect, complete novel—though it is still an important project as such—and became more about the actual task of writing a story so large and sprawling in contrast to university creative writing classes which focus on short fiction. This novel is presented not only for the story it is and the issues it discusses, but also the painstaking process through which it came into being