Alice McVeigh

Awards

• Finalist for UK Selfies 2023 at the London Book Fair
• Gold medal/First Place in over 50 awards
• Four Editor's "starred picks" at PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
• First place in Chanticleer's international book awards 2023 for BOOK SERIES
• HARRIET was a runner-up for FOREWORD INDIES 2022 "Book of the Year" in general fiction
• SUSAN was a BookLife Quarterfinalist 2021
• DARCY was in the top ten books of 2023 (fiction and non-fiction) Shelf Unbound Magazine
• HARRIET won the Historical Fiction Company's Gold Medal in historical romance 2023

Organisations

• Society of Authors
• Alliance of Independent Authors
• Historical Writers Association
• historical Novelists Association
• Independent Book Publishers Association

Details

Alice McVeigh has been published by Orion/Hachette in contemporary fiction, by UK’s Unbound in speculative fiction (writing as Spaulding Taylor) and by Warleigh Hall Press in historical fiction. Her books have been in the last seven for the UK Selfies Book Award (2024), been a runner-up for Foreword Indies’ “Book of the Year” and joint runner-up in Writers Digest International Book Awards. Three of her novels have been Publishers Weekly’s starred “Editors Picks” – one was a BookLife quarterfinalist. McVeigh’s multi-award-winning Austenesque series won First Place for Book Series (historical) in Chanticleer’s International Book Awards 2023. DARCY was honoured at the last London Book Fair, as one of six runners-up to the winner of the UK Selfies award. Publishers Weekly itself described her series as 'McVeigh's celebrated series'. In one PW review, 'McVeigh's prose and plotting are pitch perfect - she echoes the master herself.'

A long-term Londoner, McVeigh was born in Seoul, South Korea, and grew up in Thailand, Singapore, and Myanmar, where her father was a US diplomat. After spending her teenage years in McLean, Virginia, and achieving a degree with distinction in cello performance at the internationally renowned Jacobs School of Music, she came to London to study cello with William Pleeth. McVeigh spent over fifteen years performing worldwide with orchestras including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, and Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique.

She was first published in the late 1990s, when her two contemporary novels (While the Music Lasts and Ghost Music) were published by Orion Publishing to excellent reviews, including: “The orchestra becomes a universe in microcosm; all human life is here . . . McVeigh succeeds in harmonising a supremely comic tone with much darker notes”(The Sunday Times). And: “McVeigh is a professional cellist and is thus able to describe with wry authority the extraordinary life of a London orchestra. This is a very enjoyable novel, and not quite as light as it pretends to be” (The Sunday Telegraph). Inspired by her life as a touring cello professional, both novels have been recently released in completely new editions on Smashwords.

Alice has long been married to Simon McVeigh, Professor Emeritus at the University of London; their daughter Rachel has a Presidential Scholarship at Harvard in Chinese Lit. (Ph.D). When not playing cello or writing, Alice is generally smiting tennis balls at the Bromley Tennis Centre. (Often far too hard. As Rachel observed when aged four, “My mum hits the ball farther than anybody!”)

The McVeighs also share a second home in Crete and two notably disobedient long-haired mini-dachshunds. 

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Alice has a YouTube channel and occasionally blogs on Medium, as well as in her newsletters. A natural performer, she loves to read scenes from her own Austenesque books. 

She also compiled sections of one of her works and acted it  - in Crete - on her YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiL-ldz8qx8 

(There you can also hear her perform, in 2022, the Elgar cello concerto, with orchestra.)

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Alice has appeared on numerous podcasts, and is always happy to speak about:

1) her (very!) late diagnosis of ADHD, and how it affects writers. (ADHD: the gift that keeps on giving')

2) her long years of infertility and eventual IVF success

3) writing in different genres (contemporary, scifi, historical)

3) Jane Austen and her time, or 'Chasing Mr Right'.

4) Historical fiction in general, or in various particulars ('Music in the Regency period' etc.) She's happy to play a few musical selections, too.

5) how her ghostwriting decade helped her write like Jane Austen (when her only daughter was finally born, Alice switched from orchestral touring to ghostwriting)

6) the music and rhythm in strong prose. ('How to make your prose WORK')

7) her differing experience of traditional, hybrid and indie publishing ('Nothing is perfect in publishing - or in life, either!')

8) 'the backstage life of a symphony orchestra' 

9) 'Marketing your book'

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LITTLE-KNOWN FACTS ABOUT ALICE:

1) She has lived in seven countries and visited 44 (mostly carrying a cello...)

2) A book that she was the sole developmental and line editor for won the Red Hen novella award

3) She completed her first novel aged 13 (sadly, it was lousy)

4) Her grandfather was General Maxwell D. Taylor, who led the 101st Airborne into Normandy on D-Day. 

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OVERVIEW of award-winning series and EXCERPTS from her new release, Pride and Perjury

Alice McVeigh first conceived the idea for the Warleigh Hall Jane Austen series when she began to wonder how the characters from different Austen’s novels might interact, were they to meet.

The first in the series introduces Austen’s beautifully heartless Lady Susan when she was only sixteen, and takes place both in London (where she is adopted as protegee by Lady Catherine de Bourgh) and in Hunsford, Kent. It takes place a year before Austen’s Emma, and five years after Mr Darcy marries Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. A BookLife quarterfinalist and serial awardwinner, Susan is also a prizewinning audiobook, read by Heather Tracy.

McVeigh’s second book (Harriet, a Jane Austen Variation, 2022) takes place the year after Susan and supposes a Harriet – as probably, was not uncommon – clever enough to only pretend to be foolish. The plot is Emma’s, but told from the joint points of view of Jane Fairfax and Harriet Smith. A runner-up in General Fiction for Forword Indies’ “Book of the Year 2022”.

Her third book represent Darcy’s point of view in Pride and Prejudice. Honoured at the 2024 London Book Fair as being one of the six runner-ups to the UK Selfie’s Book Award, Darcy is McVeigh’s bestselling book since she was published by Orion/Hachette.

The fourth, brand new release in the series is a volume of twelve short stories, nine of these inspired by Pride and Prejudice.

The 12 short stories in Pride and Perjury:

The Housekeeper’s Tale” explores the entangled love lives of the Longbourn servants – not to mention their real opinions of the Bennet family.

In “Lady Catherine Regrets”, we are privy to that lady’s innermost fears with regard to that “dreadful” Bennet girl -including the scene in which she recklessly attempts to dissuade Mr Darcy from marrying her.

Kitty is tempted to fall for the Longbourn curate in “Valentine’s Day at the Bennets’” The youngest two Bennet sisters annoy their father in ”The Bennet Girls’ Easter Bonnet” and “All Hallow’s Eve” – while “A Heliotrope Ribbon” exposes every facet of Wickham and Lydia’s accidental elopement in Brighton.

“Captivating Mr Darcy” represents Miss Caroline Bingley’s artfully artless attempt at pulling this trick off although – of  course– she never does!

“Tact and Tactics” lays bare Anne de Bourgh’s pursuit of the sardonic Lord Cuthbert – along with Mr Collins’s hilarious tipsiness while conducting a funeral service.

“One Good Sonnet” was inspired by Mrs Bennet’s brag in Pride and Prejudice that Jane Bennet, when only fifteen, had “some verses written on her” by a smitten young man in London.

Mr Perry, the apothecary, divines all in “A Highbury Christmas” – thanks in part to the loquacious Miss Bates – while Mr Knightley takes centre-stage in the deeply moving “Mary Rose”.

The startling misadventures of Mr Elton at Bath – culminating in his offering to Miss Augusta Hawkins – completes Pride and Perjury with the eponymous short story.

EXCERPTS (from Pride and Perjury)

Despite this pretty exhibition of ruffled feathers, Elton believed the lady less offended than flattered by the ‘puppy’s’ presumption – or, at least, that she would have been flattered, had Mr Jackson only had sufficient sense to have been rather better-born.

*

Meanwhile, as Mrs Suckling wished the music to commence, there ensued an anxious parade over which should lead, and five young ladies performed, though not one in any danger of throwing their audience into ecstasies.

*

Lydia laughed. ‘Oh, you are impossible! You do realise that you are impossible?’

‘I have often enough been told so,’ said Wickham.

‘So, do you make a habit of kissing ladies, then?’

‘Only if they are excessively pretty.’

‘And do they never object?’

‘That depends.’

‘Upon the quality of the kiss?’

‘Upon the quality’ said he, ‘of the lady.’

*

‘What,’ inquired Lady Catherine, ‘is the point of a racehorse?’

‘I believe, to eat a great deal, and most of it money. So said Amelia, at any rate.’

*

‘Lizzy returns tomorrow, I think,’ said Lydia at breakfast. ‘How long a time she has been in Kent! And would not it be very good fun if she was engaged upon her return?’

Mr Bennet shook his head. ‘I have very little hope,’ said he, ‘of disposing of even one of my daughters much before luncheon.’

*

Well, the new young master of Netherfield has called at last and is very fine-looking indeed. A face as open as a puppy’s – a fine, fluffy, cream-coloured puppy with wide eyes and a shock of fair curls.

*

Then she was banging on the door to the library, all in a flutter. I was pretending to be examining the dust in the stairwell, just to hear what clever thing Mr Bennet might say, for the master will have his little joke.

‘Mr Bennet, oh Mr Bennet,’ she cried, entering. And he, lifting his eyes from his great book, wished to know if it was a flood or an earthquake, or the return of the Messiah with a choir of angels.

*

I trotted upstairs to fetch the collar. Then I bustled down to the kitchens, where Bessy was attacking the silver, and told her, ‘And here is one for you, my girl, for I lack your deft touch with the needle!’

‘The French collar? What is amiss with it?

‘It wants repairing, the mistress says.’

‘Mercy! And why was I never told as Miss Jane was to be presented at court?’

‘Nay, for she is not – but the mistress fears that, should the new master at Netherfield observe imperfect lace on Miss Jane’s collar, he will return to town in a dudgeon, and not wed her after all.’

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