Name: Louisa Lillian Beeton
Character journal name: lost_romance
Your photo-credit/PB: Laura Linney
Age: 42
Nationality: English
Allegiance and why: To king and country. Louisa believes impeccably in the way things are.
Social Status and/or Occupation: An author of romances and guides to etiquette, although her writing allows her to mingle with those of the higher social class she is one of the immerging middle classes.

Brief physical description of your character: Louisa is quite obviously past her prime by the standards of the time. She has lines on her face and hardly bothers with the fashionable clothes she advises her young ladies to wear. She seems quite plain. When at parties she powders her hair and wears out her jewels and best gown, putting forward the respectable face of womanhood that she espouses.

Brief description of your characters history, including family: Louisa was the second child and daughter of a small merchant class family. Her father worked as the middle man, recording the shipments that came in and then selling them on to the city. Her mother quickly shaped her view of womanhood – she was pretty and socially mobile, hosting parties to improve her husband’s contacts or taking care of his children and quietly minding the household. Although both parents believed the best place for a woman was as a wife and mother they believed their children would have a better chance of landing a good man if they were educated. Therefore they both learned to read and writer and do basic accounting. Louisa also learned to speak French and a small amount of Latin.
When she was thirteen her older sister Margaret became engaged to a banker, Jeremy Redgrave the son of one of their father's business partners, and married him two years later, moving out of the city and to the countryside as her husband was promoted to manager of a smaller town branch. Louisa went with them, and to her delight discovered that they were stationed near a barracks and she often went to parties with young soldiers. During this time her sister had her first child, a little girl, whom Louisa doted on. Seeing how happy her sister was with marriage and children Louisa could think of nothing she wanted more. She played nursemaid to the child, treating her rather as her own.
At age twenty Louisa met and became engaged to a dashing young rifleman, Harold Black. They planned to marry when he obtained a promotion in the ranks. Her parents were delighted as was her sister. Giddy and in love Louisa began to plan for her own happiness. However Harold was sent out to fight in the American Revolutionary war where he was killed quite early on in the fighting. In shock Louisa returned to London and went into a period of mourning from which she never really recovered. She never returned to the country instead staying on to nurse both her parents through illnesses and eventually burying them.
She found herself at twenty-seven a spinster, not wanting to marry, with no man to take care of her and she could hardly ask Margaret’s family to take her in again. Louisa rented out rooms in her family’s home and began to write more as a distraction than as a form of income.
Her first novel sold well and so she penned another, publishing always under ‘a lady’ for she did not want to be tarnished with the brush of being a novelist. She wrote romances about young ladies and service men, always with happy endings before branching out into etiquette guides for young women informing them how to land a husband and run households. These guides she published under her own name and it made her an overnight sensation, and also a joke in certain circles – a spinster giving marriage advice.
A newspaper was quick to uncover the romances she also published and for a time she faced quite a scandal over her novel but the foray died down and her publisher suggested from now on they use her name on all her books since there was no point in hiding anymore.
Lately she has become attracted to spiritualism, especially contacting the dead as she believes it is a way to reach Harold. She loves nothing more than to host séances in an attempt to contact lost loves and family members.

One or two plots which you would like to play out in the community: Katherine and Louisa butting heads over novels and the role of women in them. Someone renting one of her rooms and a slow friendship growing between them. Maybe getting involved with the social reformers. Perhaps a late in life romance.

Are there any other characters you would like to see in the game? For instance, family, friends of your character?: Maybe her niece.