Barbara Copperthwaite talks about Charles Dickens-inspired Estella’s Expectations - and finding a passion for writing in Skegness

An author who first discovered her passion for writing as a Lincolnshire newspaper reporter is preparing to publish her seventh book.

Famed for her psychological thrillers, which have topped Amazon and Kobo as well as appearing in the USA Today chart, Barbara Copperthwaite says her days as a Lincolnshire journalist was a great way to start her writing career.

Her latest novel – Estella’s Expectations - is inspired by the Dicken’s characters Barbara studied at A-level and is billed as an origins story of the famously cold-hearted Estella, reared from childhood in a house of darkness by Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.

The historical novel is being released under the pen name Barbara Havelocke and will be published by Hera, on May 9.

“I’ve always been a bookworm. Great Expectations was one of my GCSE texts but I somehow managed to avoid actually reading it and still passed my exam. When I took A-level English we were studying, you guessed it, Great Expectations and there was no way I could avoid it,” recalls Barbara, who grew up in Friskney and Skegness, where she attended Skegness Grammar School.

“And then I thought ‘wow - this is what all the fuss has been about!’ I just fell in love with it. One of the things that kept coming back to me all the time were the women in the book, particularly Estella who is told throughout her childhood to never love, never trust. The way she’s treated would be regarded as child abuse today, it’s absolutely terrible.”

Barbara worked on the novel during lockdown. Unable to travel to Kent to seek first-hand inspiration for her work, she drew on her own experiences and memories of the Lincolnshire coastline.

‘“Because I couldn't get to Kent to see the marshes that Dickens so vividly describes, I thought about the sea marshes at Friskney and as well as Satis House, in my mind's eye I envisaged Bateman's Brewery,” says Barbara, who now lives in King’s Heath, Birmingham.

“Lincolnshire often features in my work, I used Lincolnshire locations in a couple of my other novels – the wind was almost like another character in The Darkest Lies.”

Barbara fell in love with writing when she joined the Skegness Standard after leaving school. It was after completing her A-levels, while she was working as a barmaid that she spotted an advert for a junior reporter.

“It sounded really interesting – I loved meeting all the characters and hearing their stories,” she says. “The job is all about people, you’ve got to be interested in them. I learnt so much from that first job, that’s where I really found my tribe.”

The paper proved the springboard for Barbara’s writing career, which took her the Louth Standard for a year, before she briefly moved to Glasgow where she worked in a prison, and as an air hostess while she saved up enough money to put herself through a formal journalism qualification.

She then wrote real life stories for numerous titles including Chat, Daily Mail, Guardian, Real People and Woman. As she moved up the career ladder she took on the role of deputy editor of Pick Me Up magazine and helped redesign and relaunch Full House!

But it was her love of writing which made her reassess her career and she took redundancy from her magazine role just before she turned 40, when she turned her attention to fiction. She relocated to Birmingham with partner Paul Humphreys, who also hails from Friskney, and wrote her first psychological thriller, drawing on her time working at a category A men’s prison in Glasgow.

Invisible was self-published in 2014 and went on to become an Amazon bestseller. It was followed by Flowers for the Dead the following year. In 2016 Barbara gained a four-book deal with Bookouture. Next year she has a new psychological thriller out with them, as well as publishing the second instalment of her Estella historical series with Hera.

“Over my 20 year plus journalism career I’d been very privileged to have met people from all walks of life, who had experienced all manner of things happen to them. This depth of experience lends my novels psychological insight, and a feeling of reality for the storyline. There is nothing I love more than writing gritty fiction with heart - and that’s what I believe I owe my success to,” she says.

Barbara is also returning to Lincolnshire later in the year when she will be appearing at Boston Crime Book Festival on June 9.

*To find out more about Barbara’s work visit barbaracopperthwaite.com

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