As it's International Women's Day today I thought I would write a blog post about Lily Lawrence. This follows on from the other character posts I've written - on Julius Chancer and on the Tayaut twins. And with it being just a month away from publication of The Rainbow Orchid volume 3, you can expect to see a couple more on their way in the coming weeks.

Lady Lilian Catherine Scott Lawrence (to give her full name and title, though she squirms at being called Lady - see volume 2) has her origins in a script I wrote a few months before I started The Rainbow Orchid, in 1996, in a story called 'Stage Fight'. In that she was called Lily Lowell, a cast member in a terrible melodramatic play that becomes a hit when the two male leads, both sweet on Lily, have their off-stage antagonism spill over into their performances. Another character in that script was one Evelyn Saxon, who would morph into Evelyn Crow for Orchid. I later adapted this story to fit in to the Julius Chancer universe and it appeared as a Lily Lawrence 'origin story' of sorts, called 'Sword of Fate', appearing in The Girly Comic issue 5 back in 2004. A shorter Lily origin (4 panels long) appears in The Rainbow Orchid volume 2

So, what do we know about Lily? She is the daughter of Lord Reginald Tybalt Stone Pritchard Lawrence and Ann Blyth McKay (deceased) and had a brother, Peter Stone Scott Lawrence, who was killed on the Western Front in 1916. She ran away from home to become a stage actress and then ran away from that, to America, where she eventually became a film star at United Players.

Visually Lily took a little while to come through. At first she was too tom-boyish, though I didn't want her to be too 'girly' either. The inspiration for clinching her look came when I saw a photograph of a young Coco Chanel, though she changed more from that point on. Lily has the most complicated hair style and I still sometimes struggle to get it right!

Below is an early watercoloured drawing of Lily, from 1997, and one of the scrapbook pieces I came up with for volume 1 in 2009, Lily on the cover of Picture Show magazine.