Behind-the-Book: The Perfumer's Secret by Fiona Schneider

In 2023, I finished writing my first novel, The Paris Affair, about a Special Operations Executive agent in occupied Paris. As I wrote it, I knew that I wanted to continue exploring the extraordinary bravery of women during the Second World War through the fictional lives of strong female characters.

The Perfumer’s Secret grew out of that desire. Iris Penhallam is an amalgamation of my research into SOE heroes and resistance workers. In 1939, Iris is determined to pursue her dream of becoming a perfumer, yet she finds herself caught in the turmoil of impending war and driven by a need to help her Jewish friends. Her story unfolds against three interwoven themes: perfume, the Orient Express and Venice.

As I researched The Perfumer’s Secret, the history of perfume revealed the enduring relationship between scent, memory, and desire. Surprisingly, perfume production continued during the Second World War, and three now‑iconic French fragrances were created at this time, Chantilly (1941), Femme de Rochas (1943), and Bandit (1944). Many perfumers struggled, however, with rising ingredient costs, shortages of money and the widespread belief that perfume was a frivolous luxury during the hardship of war. Jewish perfume houses, such as the Wertheimer brothers’ Parfums Chanel and Ernest Daltroff’s House of Caron, also suffered from anti-Jewish laws and persecution. It is into this precarious world that Iris steps when she goes to work for an Italian Jewish perfumer in Paris.

During my research, I fell in love with perfume itself. I remember the first time I set foot inside the London perfume shop, Floris, with its cabinets (bought at the Great Exhibition of 1851) filled with glass bottles of scent. The atmosphere of this old perfume house sparked my imagination. At the back of the shop is a small museum and working perfumery, and Floris’ ledgers of formulas and clients stretch back decades, bearing illustrious names such as Florence Nightingale, Winston Churchill, and Marilyn Monroe. That day, I bought a bottle of Honey Oud. I loved its earthiness, strength, and sweetness, and imagined it was exactly the kind of scent that Iris herself might have created.

Eager to discover more about perfume making, I attended masterclasses at the Experimental Perfume Club in London. Until then, I had not realised how little I knew about the sense of smell, nor how limited my lexicon of scents was. I spent a magical day sampling ingredients and writing formulas, and came home with two perfumes of my own invention. This experience shaped Iris’s fictional perfume creations and gave me more confidence in bringing her fragrances to life on the page.

Whilst perfumes continued to be made during the war, one luxury that was abruptly curtailed was the Orient Express. This legendary network of routes had criss-crossed Europe offering decadent travel for royalty, spies, writers, and diplomats. In The Perfumer’s Secret, Iris travels to Venice on one of the last Orient Express trains to run during the so-called Phoney War, ostensibly to create five intoxicating scents for a new collection, but in reality, to rescue her perfume teacher’s nephew from the hands of the fascists.

Although travelling on the Orient Express itself was beyond my budget, I found an unexpectedly immersive alternative. My son was helping to restore a dining car and sleeping carriage at our local heritage railway, and when he told me that they had been part of the Orient Express, I felt a tingle of excitement. Serving afternoon tea to guests and spending time in these former wagon lits carriages taught me about the challenges of working on a steam train, and enabled me to absorb the atmosphere of the restaurant carriage from Iris’s perspective.

Iris’s final destination on the Orient Express is Venice, and, in the summer of 2024, I was fortunate enough to spend time there myself. Before travelling, I had read extensively, including Everyday Life in Fascist Venice, 1929-1940 by Kate Ferris and The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy (From Equality to Persecution) by Michele Sarfatti. Armed with this knowledge, I walked the streets and canals with a keen awareness of the past and of how Iris might have experienced the city. I stayed in Cannaregio, close to the former Jewish Ghetto, and followed in the footsteps of my characters, including a trip to the Franciscan monastery on Isola del Deserto, reachable only by hiring a private boat from Burano.

At its heart, The Perfumer’s Secret is a novel about places, scents and histories that refuse to fade. By following Iris across wartime Europe, I wanted to honour the courage of women whose acts of resistance were as transformative as they were dangerous, and to show how memory, like perfume itself, can linger long after the moment has passed, shaping who we are and the stories we choose to tell.