Historical Fiction Author Interviews

Q&A with historical fiction author Karen Harper

2011-03-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

Q: An Irish princess in the Tudor Era? I didn’t know the Irish had royalty.

A: The heroine’s Fitzgerald family were considered the “uncrowned kings of Ireland.” They controlled much of the country for decades. The heroine’s father, the Earl of Kildare, managed to get along with the Tudors for a while, until his heir rebelled against King Henry. The English king then declared war on the Fitzgeralds and invaded Ireland. His military general arrested many of the Fitzgerald men who were sent to the Tower of London and executed. The king took the Earl of Kildare’s daughter, Elizabeth (Gera) into his court. (Trivia for the day: one reason President John Fitzgerald Kennedy liked to use his middle name was that the Irish, even American Irish of the 1960s, would still feel loyalty to that name.)

Q: So the heroine, Gera Fitzgerald, and her family were all real people. Were they hard to research?

A: They were a prominent enough family that there is much written about them, though, of course, the women members were not as well known. But Gera escaped the devastation of her home and family, made a life for herself and worked to avenge her family’s losses during the reigns of Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth I. When Gera’s life starts to intertwine with these historical figures, including the important man she eventually married, she is easier to trace.

Q: So, if she was living in England after her family fell, did the Irish rebel marry an Englishman?

A: She did, and it was quite a love-hate relationship for a while because she hated the English and the king for ruining her family. And the hero, High Admiral Edward Clinton, worked for the Tudors. Besides, both Gera and Edward were “forced into” arranged marriages before they could finally persevere and marry each other. Even then, their life together and the times were dangerous and turbulent.

Q: As best you can tell, what was ‘The Irish Princess’ really like?

A: First of all, she was a survivor. The two portraits remaining of her show a pretty red head with a very determined look. Gera was once sent to the Tower of London for “plainspeaking to the queen” [this was Queen Elizabeth] but was quickly reinstated as one of Elizabeth’s closest friends. That led me to her feisty nature, her insistence on the truth, her strong backbone and her amazing ability to be a friend of Elizabeth Tudor when Gera had hated the queen’s father. That shaped much of the plot and Gera’s main motivation--revenge. Also, Gera was a beautiful woman, who inspired some of the Earl of Surrey’s poetry. For Queen Elizabeth to allow a lovely redhead to be her friend when she wanted to be the center of attention and the most beautiful woman at court really says something about Gera’s powers of persuasion.

Q: So Henry VIII emerges as the villain in the book?

A: Absolutely! The more I use him as a character, as I have in THE LAST BOLEYN and THE QUEEN’S GOVERNESS as well as in this novel, the more reasons I find to detest the man. I keep coming back to that old saying, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” King Henry VIII dealt with many noble families, especially those with any royal ancestors, by finding ways to utterly destroy them. Of course, I must admit now that I’ve just completed a novel about his parents, I can see why he became so paranoid about anyone who had a drop of royal blood and could threaten his throne.

Q: For those of us who love to travel, what are some of the Irish or English sites associated with the Fitzgeralds?

A: Their stronghold was Maynooth Castle eleven miles from Dublin in County Kildare, but it is much changed from Gera’s time. It was damaged by a siege when King Henry’s forces attacked it. The keep and newer manor house are available to tour. Pictures can be found at http://www.heritageireland.ie/en/midlandseastcoast/MaynoothCastle. In England, Gera would have known many of the typical Tudor places such as Hampton Court and the Tower of London.

Q: You also write contemporary suspense set in Amish country. Isn’t that a real stretch from Tudor England?

A: I love to take my readers into places that are different, and clashing cultures make for fascinating reading: the English vs. the Irish; the Amish vs. mainstream culture. It also works well for the romance angle of the story to have the hero and heroine come from opposing world views. They learn to appreciate and overcome their differences and, hopefully, the reader does too.

Q: Anything else you’d like to add about THE IRISH PRINCESS?

A: Only that it makes a great St. Patrick’s Day reading. Erin go bragh!

Thank you Karen! And feel free to visit Karen Harper online for more information about her amazing new novel THE IRISH PRINCESS.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author William C. Hammond

2010-10-27T22:25:00.000-07:00

Tell us about your novel, FOR THE LOVE OF COUNTRY.

Richard Cutler, the main protagonist in the Cutler Family Chronicles historical novel series, hails from the seaside town of Hingham, Massachusetts. His extended family, which lives in both England and Barbados during the 1780’s, manages a shipping business, its principle source of income the sugar, molasses and rum produced on the family plantation on the island of Barbados. Early on in A Matter of Honor, the preceding novel in the series, Richard sails to Fareham, England to learn that side of the family business. There he meets the beautiful Katherine Hardcastle, a self-described “Daughter of the Royal Navy” who has grown up in the shadow of English aristocracy. She ultimately marries Richard, forsaking the love and devotion of a young English sea officer named Horatio Nelson. Together the newlyweds sail to Barbados where their first son, Will, is born while Richard is serving the infant republic at the Battle of the Chesapeake and the Battle of Yorktown.

Katherine Cutler is the love of Richard’s life, as is ever more evident in For Love of Country. Richard is often away at sea, but separation serves only to intensify their relationship. Two more children are born before Richard sails in an armed family schooner to Algiers to try to ransom his brother Caleb and his shipmates, seized by Barbary pirates and imprisoned under horrific circumstances. From Algiers Richard sails to Toulon, France after a savage sea battle with two Arab xebecs, to confer with Thomas Jefferson, American consul in Paris, and John Paul Jones, his former naval commander and President Washington’s choice as American emissary to the Barbary Coast. While in Paris at the start of the French Revolution, Richard discovers that a former lover is in danger of heading for the guillotine. You’ll have to read the book to find out how that comes out.

How important is history to your stories?

Nothing is more important. Although I majored in American history in college and have read many books of historical significance since graduation, I invested three years of research before starting chapter one of A Matter of Honor, my previous novel. There is more history in these novels than in most works of historical fiction I have read. And this history has been vetted by highly regarded historians. Simply put, I believe I have a commitment to my readers to present the history as accurately as possible in every scene of every chapter I write.

How do you undertake your research?

By reading and taking notes and maintaining files. In doing research for A Matter of Honor, for example, I read perhaps a hundred books, many of them original source material such as the log of Bonhomme Richard, not to mention countless articles on the internet. Research does not end when I start writing a novel. It continues right up to the point of reviewing the final page proofs. I pledged the same dedication to For Love of Country, as I will to every book in the series.

What intrigues you about the early American period in which the Cutlers lived?

First there is the Revolutionary War, a period that has long fascinated me, and in which I concentrated in college. How a ragtag band of farmers, shopkeepers and silversmiths could take on the world's mightiest military on land and sea, and carve out a new country in the process, is truly a saga for the ages.

On a societal level, this period is one in which the notions of loyalty, duty and honor were taken quite seriously. Men dueled and died over a perceived affront to one's honor. While I certainly am not advocating dueling as a means of settling disputes, I salute an era in which a handshake meant something, and a promise, even by a politician, was expected to be fulfilled.

What’s next in the Cutler Family Chronicles series?

At this point, four more novels are planned in the Cutler Family Chronicles. Book III, entitled The Power and the Glory, is set primarily in the West Indies during the Quasi-War with France. That novel is completed and with my agent. Book IV, A Call to Arms, on which I am currently working, is set primarily in the Mediterranean during the war with Tripoli. Book V has as its backdrop the War of 1812, and Book VI, the war against Algiers in 1815. All novels will feature the same supporting cast of characters as is found in Book I, and all novels will emphasize the strong interpersonal relationships that define the Cutler family in both America and England and make my work appeal so much to women readers.

For Love of Country was originally due to be published in Spring 2009. Can you tell us what happened?

In late January of 2009, just six weeks before For Love of Country was to be released, my then publisher, Cumberland House, went out of business. I was as surprised as anyone by this decision, but because Cumberland had posted the original cover of the novel on Amazon months before publication, the impression in the marketplace was that the book was available. In fact, it was not available then, nor has it been available at any time since then. Fortunately, I have an excellent agent, Richard Curtis, who immediately set about searching for a new publisher. We had several expressions of interest before gratefully settling on Naval Institute Press.

Can you describe your writing path to fiction set at sea?

I have always been interested in the navy and dreamed as a lad of attending the naval academy. (Alas, a serious high school football injury earned me a 4-F classification.) I have also been a reading addict since my early days, a gift I inherited from my parents and grandparents. So it seemed natural to combine those interests in reading sea stories of all descriptions, including nautical fiction. In the 1970s, I joined Little, Brown & Company.

William C. Hammond is a novelist, literary agent, and business consultant. A lifelong student of history and a sailing enthusiast, he frequently sails on Lake Superior and off the coast of New England. Bill lives with his family in Minneapolis. Visit the author at www.bill-hammond.com and join his friends on Facebook.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author C. W. Gortner

2010-05-24T11:46:00.000-07:00

How did the idea for THE CONFESSIONS OF CATHERINE DE MEDICI originate?
Anyone with an interest in famous women of history will have heard of Catherine de Medici: she’s that evil queen who allegedly poisoned her enemies and orchestrated a massacre. Or so the legend says. Initially, I was attracted to her because of her legend. I figured, when someone has garnered such a reputation there has to be more to their story. I wanted to know who Catherine de Medici truly was, to search beyond the lurid accusations and hyperbole for the person she may have been. Of Italian birth, Catherine was the last scion of her legitimate Medici blood; she dominated France in the latter half of the 16^th century, a contemporary of Elizabeth I and mother-in-law to Mary, Queen of Scots. Left a widow with small children and confronted by one of the most savage conflicts of the time, she fought to save France and her bloodline from destruction. As I researched her, I realized that, as with most dark legends, there was far more to her than popular history tells us. I thought how interesting it would be if Catherine herself could tell the story of her life. If she had the chance to explain herself, what would she say? All stories have two sides; and Catherine’s is no exception.

How long did it take you to write, and what special research was involved?
It took about two years to write THE CONFESSIONS OF CATHERINE DE MEDICI. The research itself began several years before that; I actually first began researching Catherine de Medici while still in college, as she was part of my Master’s thesis. For the novel itself, I took several trips to France, including one in which I visited the beautiful Loire Valley châteaux where Catherine resided and followed in her footsteps on the long progress she undertook to visit her eldest daughter on the border with Spain (though of course I did my trip by rail and car!) A friend of mine in Paris guided me on marvelous evening walks through the City, showing me specific sites associated with Catherine, including a lone tower that she evidently built as an observatory. I also read her letters, many accounts of her and her court, and the memoirs written by several of her contemporaries, including the fanciful memoirs of her daughter, Marguerite, known to history as Queen Margot.

Catherine’s surviving letters constitute one of those rare treasure troves for the novelist. Letters offer an invaluable glimpse into the person’s thoughts and personality and I found some of Catherine’s letters to be particularly poignant: her impeachable love for her children, her despair over the chaos wrought by war, her pragmatism and discomfort with overt fanaticism, as well as her compassion for animals—unusual for her time—all point to a woman who was very different from the archetypal Medici queen with her arsenal of poisons. Her letters helped me to envision the flesh-and-blood woman behind the legend and understand the challenges she faced both as a person and a queen.

What is one of the greatest misconceptions about Catherine de Medici?
Without doubt, it has to be the accusation that she nurtured a “passion for power.” Catherine was not raised to be a queen, true, and she did in fact rule as regent for her sons until they came of age; but it is unfair to accuse her of a ruthless drive to retain her power at any cost. Catherine faced a unique set of circumstances that would have challenged even the most skilled of rulers: she had under-age children to protect and a kingdom being torn apart, literally, by the nobility. The clashes between Protestants and Catholics during the Reformation became especially intense in France; it was Catherine’s great misfortune to be caught up in them. Her alleged passion for power was in truth an attempt to retain control over the destiny of her adopted realm and safeguard the throne—both of which may have suffered far more, had she not been there. I find it quite sad that to this day, Catherine remains tainted by actions that in essence she did not take of her own volition. She made several serious errors in judgment, without a doubt, but she was motivated most often by the urgent need to salvage a crisis, rather than some coldblooded urge to eliminate those who stood in her way.

How do you strike a balance between depicting the reality of the times with modern day sensibilities? Do you think issues Catherine faced in her era still resonate today?
The balance is always a fine one to tread. It can even become tenuous, in particular when you are confronting issues of religion, race, sexuality, and gender. Many of the freedoms we take for granted today were unknown to people in the 16^th century. Religious divisiveness in particular was a brutal part of daily life during Catherine’s time; Catholics and Protestants were willing to martyr themselves for their cause, destroying countless others in the process. This is something that many of us, much like Catherine, may find difficult to comprehend. Yet that type of extreme righteousness remains very much a part of our modern landscape, as evidenced by acts of terrorism and genocide in several parts of the world. While we are in many ways a more enlightened society, we still carry vestiges of the past with us, and leaders throughout the world grapple with some of the same issues that Catherine did, in terms of placating anger and restoring harmony among people whose lives have been affected by war.

That said, I always consider the needs of my reader to be engaged by my story. While historical accuracy remains a primary obligation—in that the writer should not deliberately alter or distort known facts or have characters behave in an overtly modernized way—I do sanitize certain aspects of the reality of life in the 16^th century. We tend to romanticize the past; we forget the lack of adequate hygiene, running water, antibiotics, etc. While I strive to retain the flavor of the past in my work and avoid the tendency to convert a brutal, quixotic era into a “costume drama”, it is necessary to remember that we can only take so much of the less savory aspects of 16^th century life in novelized form. In the final say, I write fiction. My principal function is to entertain.

What is one of the secrets that Catherine “confesses” in this novel?
For one, the truth about her relationship with the Protestant leader, Coligny. I find it intriguing that so few of Catherine’s biographers have looked more closely at this most enigmatic of friendships. Coligny was at court when Catherine first arrived from Italy as a teenage bride; he was the nephew of the Constable of France, a very important man, and therefore she and Coligny must have met long before they assumed their political roles. They were close to each other in age; they shared a history, as Coligny later served her husband, King Henri II; they probably witnessed to a certain extent each other’s trials and triumphs, before circumstances arose for them to join forces. Coligny and Catherine could not have been more different, both in upbringing and outlook, yet they shared for a time a united response to the conflict threatening France and a mutual desire to seek accord. In this novel, Catherine tells us what brought them together, and what led to that definitive, tragic moment between them.

What do you hope readers take away from your work?
I seek to reveal secret histories, and in some small way restore humanity to people whose legends have overshadowed them. I also hope readers will come away from my work with the experience that they’ve been on an emotional journey. I want them to feel the way these people lived, their hardships and joys, and differences and similarities with us. Though a Renaissance queen faced issues we don’t, love, hatred, power, intolerance, passion, and the quest for personal liberty remain universal themes.

What is your latest project?
I am currently working on a historical novel about Isabella of Castile, tracing her life from her uncertain youth to her triumphant accession as queen of Castile and the first twelve years of her controversial reign. I covered the latter years of Isabella’s life in my previous novel THE LAST QUEEN, which is about her daughter, Juana; while researching that book, I realized I had a solid grounding in the facts of Isabella’s life but had not truly considered who she was as a person. She’s been lauded as a saint by some and a fanatic by others; she set in motion the horrors of the Inquisition yet she also financed Columbus’s vision of a new world and united Spain after centuries of internal strife. Isabella is truly the first queen of the Renaissance; yet few people know the incredible true story of her tumultuous rise to the throne, her love affair with her husband, or of the events that led to the most climatic of years: 1492. Isabella was fallible, and, like so many controversial figures in history, misunderstood. I hope to bring to life her incredible vision and strength, as well as illuminate her intentions.

Thank you, C. W.! And feel free to visit C. W. Gortner online for more information about his amazing new novel, THE CONFESSIONS OF CATHERINE DE MEDICI.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Karen Harper

2009-12-14T17:00:00.000-08:00

Q: Why did you decide to base a historical novel on Kat Ashley when you usually focus on more major Tudor personalities? [Harper’s earlier novels include The Last Boleyn and Mistress Shakespeare.]

A: For two reasons. First of all, Kat (Katherine Champernowne Ashley, 1506 – 1565), was involved with most of the Tudor greats: King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Mary Tudor, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Seymour, Queen Katherine Parr, and, of course, Elizabeth Tudor. Kat was Elizabeth’s governess and foster mother, so this is not only a historical novel but a mother-daughter story. Anne Boleyn was beheaded when Elizabeth was three, and Kat filled the emotional hole in her life as a foster mother. Kat is a great observer of the triumphant and terrible Tudors.

Secondly, Kat has her own great story to tell. The novel is a rags-to-riches novel, a mother-daughter book and a powerful love story with danger and daring throughout.

Q: Then why hasn’t Kat Ashley been the focus of Tudor novels before?

A: I can only guess at that, but I’m glad I have the first in-depth look at her. Of course, Kat has appeared in numerous novels that deal with Elizabeth as princess and queen, but only as a secondary or minor character. I included Kat as one of Elizabeth’s crime-solving companions in my nine-book series, The Queen Elizabeth I Mysteries. One reason that Kat may have not previously been “the hook for a book” is that her origins are obscure. She came from a somewhat impoverished Devon family, so how did she get so well-educated and how did she get to court in London? I think I have answered those questions in the book.

By the way, as you may know, spelling during these early English eras was not standardized. I found Kat’s first name, maiden name, and last name spelled a variety of ways. There is much ado over whether her married name was Ashley or Astley, but Elizabeth herself once spelled it Ashiley, so I’ll let the queen decide for me to use Ashley and not Astley.

Q: Speaking of her married name, who did she marry? Obviously, someone of whom the queen approved.

A: Yes, when I did the research, I was really excited to find that Kat has a bittersweet but triumphant love story. She married John Ashley who was a cousin of Anne Boleyn’s and who originally came to court to serve her. His talents with training horses helped him to survive the Boleyn downfall. He later served the young Elizabeth as secretary and bodyguard and, like Kat, had many honors and responsibilities heaped on him when Elizabeth took the throne. I like to think of John Ashley as the original horse whisperer because he wrote a book called The Art of Riding, which was popular for centuries. As far as I can tell, he was the first to suggest in print that horses not be “broken” to be trained, but be treated firmly and gently.

Q: Did Queen Elizabeth ever record what she thought of the Ashleys?

A: She did—more than once. When Kat and John were sent to the Tower of London to be interrogated about whether Elizabeth was part of Tom Seymour’s treason plot against her young half-brother King Edward IV, Elizabeth wrote a letter, begging the powers-that-be to be kind to Kat, “Because that she hath been with me a long time and many years, and hath taken great labor and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty…and be good to Master Ashley, her husband, which because he is my kinsman.” Later, Elizabeth also wrote, “We are more bound to them that bringeth us up well than to our parents, for our parents do that which is natural to them—that is bringeth us into the world—but our bringers up are a cause to make us live well to do it.” A ringing endorsement, I think, for the many grandmothers, caregivers and foster parents who bring up non-biological children even today.

Q: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve found in doing your Tudor research for your novels?

A: That’s a tough one, but I’d say that, even though I knew Henry VIII was not a good husband (duh!) he was also a very bad father. It’s a miracle that his three children, especially Elizabeth, turned out as well as they did. I am in the camp of researcher/writers who believe that Elizabeth really was The Virgin Queen because she was so traumatized by her father’s behavior to her mother and stepmothers. Twice in The Queen’s Governess Elizabeth becomes involved in a passionate romance, but I think complete surrender to a man was always out of the question with her. She had seen many terrible royal and noble marriages at close range; the strong marriage of her “foster parents,” Kat and John, was an aberration for her. But I digress…as I am doing even as I write this, because I’m concentrating on yet another little-known Tudor-era character for my next novel, Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the “Irish Princess” who lived amid the Tudors for decades.

Thank you, Karen! And feel free to visit Karen Harper online for more information about her amazing new novel!!

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Jessica James

2009-12-11T19:54:00.000-08:00

Your novel, SHADES OF GRAY, tells the story of a Confederate soldier who meets his match in a Union spy. What drew you to this period in history?

Well, the easy answer is that I’m from Gettysburg, Pa., so I’ve been surrounded by Civil War history all my life. But the reality is, I didn’t have much of an interest in the War Between the States until I moved to Virginia in the 80s and learned about Confederate Colonel John S. Mosby. He is pretty much the epitome of the Southern cavalier – gallant, daring, romantic, and chivalrous. I began reading books on him, by him and about him, and, before I knew it, was a complete Civil War fanatic. Now I think I’m drawn to the era, not only because of the stories of gallantry and heroism, but by the morality, the manners, the patriotism and the principles that those on both sides of the war believed in and fought for.

How much of SHADES OF GRAY is based on fact, and how much is fiction?

The main characters are purely fictional, created against the backdrop of the war and interacting with real historical personalities such as Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart. I believe fiction is a great way for people to learn about history so my goal was to keep the reader entertained while giving them a historically accurate foundation.

I gave copies of Shades of Gray to Civil War history professors and other Civil War authors to check it for accuracy, (and even to General J.E.B. Stuart’s great-great grandson, who gave it a favorable review). However, most readers tell me they feel like they’ve read a wonderful love story – not a Civil War story – so that balancing act between fact and fiction is really important.

Your novel goes into great detail about battles that took place during the Civil War. How did you do your research for this?

I really completely immersed myself in the era, reading everything from obituaries and newspaper articles to diaries and war records. Battle scenes were difficult because, needless to say, I’ve never been in one. Attending large-scale re-enactments helped me somewhat with the sights, sounds and smells of battle and camp life. But reading the actual words of soldiers and civilians was what really gave me a glimpse into the horror and chaos of battle.

Tell us something surprising about women's lives during the Civil War.

Those who have read Shades of Gray know that the female character dresses as a man, and serves as a courier and spy for the Union. The character is completely fictional, but I have since learned there are at least 400 documented cases of women dressing as men and serving on the front lines – a few even achieved the status of officers. Most of them were only discovered after being wounded or killed in battle.

While I’m on the subject, at least six soldiers are known to have performed their military duties while pregnant, and two Confederate prisoners of war gave birth while incarcerated.

For those cases that are documented by newspaper articles or letters, one can only guess how many went undetected. I think the role of females on the battlefield during the Civil War is one of the best-kept secrets of that historical period.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on another Civil War novel, called Above and Beyond, in which the heroine plays the part of a strong Unionist in Virginia while secretly spying for the Confederacy.

Unfortunately, she is so convincing in her role that friends, neighbors and even her brother believe she is a traitor to the South. I chose this plotline because I can’t imagine the courage and strong will it would take to be despised and maligned by family and friends while nobly serving a cause – even more so during the Victorian era when reputation and allegiance were everything. I think it could be argued that it would take more strength and fortitude than fighting an outright battle with hundreds of your comrades surrounding you.

Thank you, Jessica! And feel free to visit Jessica online for more information about her novel!

Guest Post With Historical Fiction Author Jeri Westerson

2009-09-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

Elbows Off The Table Or It’s Off With Your Head!

As part of my blog tour to promote my new medieval mystery, SERPENT IN THE THORNS;A Crispin Guest Medieval Noir--I’ve been talking about the various myths about the Middle Ages that I’ve encountered through my research. Today I’d like to talk about medieval table manners.

Now I realize the very term—“medieval table manners”—sounds like an oxymoron. Surely we are talking about a violent exchange of knives, food being tossed about, sleeves wiped across mouths and noses—monkeys in a cage sort of thing.

But really, nothing could be further from the truth. At middle class and upper class tables, there were a host of rules and many rituals to follow. You had to know your place. And one of those places might be to know at which table you belonged and how far you were from the salt.

Obviously, you are seated at a place of honor if you were at the high table with the lord of the manor or at that of a rich merchant. But if you are a minor noble you might be sitting at a table slightly lower than the head table. And if you are merely a courtier or hanger-on, you would be at the farthest table from the high table.

The meal was begun with a prayer and the washing of hands. Two servants would be on hand: one with a bowl and another with a jug of water. Fingers would be cleaned because, after all, these were the tools in which you were mostly to partake of your food. Eating knives were also employed, but a servant might cut your meat for you, offering you the best slices from the platter. Forks were not yet in use on the dining table. A fork was a tool to cook with. It would be gauche to have it on the table to eat with. Napkins, too, were not yet part of the table. But you certainly did not wipe your face or nose on your sleeves. What do you think the table cloths were for, you cretin!

Very often, you were sharing a goblet with your neighbor, so it was considered very bad manners indeed to drink with your mouth full. No one likes backwash. And Seinfeld didn’t have the monopoly on accusations of double-dipping—dipping your food or bread in a sauce, taking a bite, and then dipping that piece of food again. That was considered a no-no. A lot of the plates were communal. Decorum had to be maintained.

So where do we get these notions that medievals were crossing knives and swords at the table or that they were particularly violent? Movies and novels have a lot to do with those notions. After all, it might have been that 1933 Charles Laughton film The Private Life of Henry VIII where we get the idea that medievals tossed their gnawed bones over their shoulders, littering their floors with refuse. But eating halls were general use rooms. They were used for all sorts of gatherings, from court trials, to parties, to religious ceremonies. Tables were portable trestle tables, set up when it was time to dine and stored along the walls to get them out of the way. Often servants slept in the halls when the day was done. They certainly didn’t want to live amongst bones and other detritus from meals. Who wanted maggots in their beds? It was simply not done.

Some of the medieval violence was attributed to lead poisoning garnered from the pewter plates they supposedly ate off of. But pewter didn’t become popular for dining until the fifteenth century, and even then it was only for the rich. Prior to that, the rich might eat off of silver plate, but usually use wood or trenchers, rectangular loaves of bread baked specifically as plates. You’d eat your meal, allowing all the juices to soak into the bread. And when you were done, the loaves would be collected by the almoner who would distribute them to the poor.

And by the way, to get the amount of lead out of a pewter plate that you would need for all that violent behavior would mean you would have to actually eat the plates. Not likely.

I remarked earlier about the salt and where you sat in relation to it. Salt and all spices—which includes peppercorns and sugar—were quite expensive. You were part of the privileged class when you sat above the salt. But if you weren’t so lucky, you were seated below the salt.

Everyone knew their place. So the next time you pass the salt, think about where you might have been sitting...and if you might have been sitting at the feast at all!

Jeri likes to feast with words on her blog of history and mystery at www.Getting-Medieval.com. She also has more information about her Crispin Guest novels at www.JeriWesterson.com. And even her character Crispin has his own blog at www.CrispinGuest.com.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Ruth Rymer

2009-09-16T17:42:00.000-07:00

Ruth Rymer, tell us about Susannah, your second release.

Young college graduate Susannah Reed is brutally attacked in 1877 and nearly killed. While recovering, she vows to study law, although The United State Supreme Court has just declared that women are too timid and delicate to be lawyers.

Undaunted, Susannah reads law at a firm in Chicago as she struggles unsuccessfully to combine her career with a future marriage to a man who will not allow her to become an attorney. She passes the bar and is hired by the firm where she studied. Susannah’s handling of her cases brings her immediate success, but she must face the hostility and jealousy of male lawyers and threats on her life from a resistant public.

When did you first realize you wanted to write?

I've been writing since I was eight years old. As an outgrowth of my diary, I became a character, and everything I wanted happened to that character.

Where do you get your information or ideas for your stories?

With Susannah I read extensively about Chicago between 1870 and 1900, mostly books published by University of Chicago Press. I also read novels written during the period, and both the news section and the classifieds in the Chicago Tribune. I visited upstate New York north of Albany so that I could create the fictional town of Green Valley. It's very important, in writing historical novels to be as familiar with the period and its society as possible. In my mind, I lived in 1877-80 while I was writing Susannah.

What is your favorite writing devise?

I really like alliteration--using many words beginning with the same letter. For example: "Ethical edges easily erase in this effervescent and egomaniacal Eden.”

What was one of the most surprising things you learned while creating your book?

I learned about America in the nineteenth century to a depth I didn't know possible. I'd love to take a time machine there, but I would want to go as a man. Life was very difficult for women during that time.

What does your family think about your career as a published author?

They are all quite surprised!

What is coming up next for you writing-wise?

Maybe a sequel. Perhaps some short stories.

Thank you, Ruth! And please feel free to visit Ruth online for more information about her novel.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Sandra Worth

2009-09-03T21:51:00.000-07:00

In your latest novel, THE KING'S DAUGHTER, you tell the dramatic story of Elizabeth of York. What was it about Elizabeth that compelled you to tell her story?

Thanks so much for having me. Michelle! It’s always a pleasure and a privilege to do an interview with you!

Elizabeth of York was the daughter of a king, sister of a king, niece of a king, and mother of Henry VIII and grandmother of Elizabeth I – quite a pedigree. But oh so strangely, nothing much is known about her and she drops off the map once she marries Henry Tudor! Why is that? We certainly know more than we need about her husband Henry VII, her son Henry VIII and her mother Elizabeth Woodville, and even her mother-in-law, Margaret Beaufort. But Elizabeth of York is shrouded in mystery. When Elizabeth died, a nation mourned and her husband locked himself into his room to weep the heart out that no one ever knew he had and Elizabeth was given the appellation “Elizabeth the Good” by her people. This mysterious and forgotten queen intrigued me.

I wanted to know why we know nothing about her, and I came to believe that it’s because the Tudors kept her captive. That led to more questions—like, why did they do that? And what kind of a threat did she pose to them? Did she believe her uncle, Richard III, murdered her brothers, the princes in the Tower, or – since there’s evidence she loved her uncle – did she believe he didn’t murder them? In that case, one of the princes may well have survived, and the Pretender, Perkin Warbeck, may well have been her lost brother, Richard, Duke of York.

What drama here; what mystery; what heartbreak! Who can resist?

*Tell us something surprising about life as a woman in Henry VII's England.

You would think that no woman stood a chance of wielding power in this kind of a man’s world. But you’d wrong. Margaret Beaufort, the king’s mother, was more ruthless, ambitious and hindered by fewer scruples than her son Henry VII. Only her grandson, Henry VIII, whom she raised, can lift a candle to her.

* THE KING'S DAUGHTER recently won Romantic Times's Best Historical Biography of the Year Award. What does this award mean to you?

Of course, I’m thrilled to bits, and very, very grateful! It’s such an honor. Philippa Gregory was one of the four nominees, along with Susan Holloway Scott and Jane Candia Coleman. I’m still pinching myself!

* How much of the novel is based on fact and how much is fiction? Was Elizabeth's mother really such a shrew?

I make it my policy never to stray from the historical record when information is available, and I only use my imagination to fill in the blanks. As far as Elizabeth’s mother is concerned, her actions speak for themselves—and yes, she was an incredible shrew! She seems to have been a possessive, overly ambitious, avaricious and destructive woman who wreaked terrible vengeance for every perceived slight. For this reason, history records her well. But in the end, some things have to be speculation because not everything survives five hundred years. For this reason, I cherish my review from Publishers Weekly: “Worth examines Elizabeth's life with a journalist's eye, an impressive feat given that her subject left little behind for study.” I do my best given the information available, but sometimes, it’s just not available.

*What are you working on next?
My next novel is on Lady Catherine Gordon and her husband, the so-called “Perkin Warbeck.” With four marriages made for love at a time when men controlled the destiny of women, Catherine not only survived in the deadly Tudor court but managed to carve out happiness for herself. Her fourth husband was twenty-five years younger than her—and it was a love match! A happy ending is hard to find in this period of history, and I’m delighted to have one for my next book.

Thank you, Sandra! And feel free to visit Sandra Worth online for more information about her new novel!

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Eva Etzioni-Halevy

2009-08-01T02:45:00.000-07:00

* In your latest novel, THE TRIUMPH OF DEBORAH, you tell the story of Deborah, a judge in ancient Israel. What was it about Deborah that compelled you to tell her story?

Deborah was the most eminent woman in the Hebrew Bible (The Old Testament.) She was a national leader: sort of a president, chief justice and chief rabbi, all wrapped in one, and deeply adored by the people. But what is special about her is not only her prominence, but the intriguing tale the Scripture tells about her.

Deborah orders warrior Barak to launch a strike against the Canaanites, who threaten their people with destruction. His response is rather unusual: he demands that she accompany him to the battlefield. Over three thousand years ago--a woman in the battlefield?

I found this to be very strange and suggestive. I asked myself: why did he really want her there? Moreover, she ended up going with him to his hometown as well. Yet she was a married woman and a mother, and there is nothing to indicate that her husband accompanied her.

I began asking myself: what did her husband have to say to that excursion? What would any husband say if his wife suddenly went off to distant parts with another man, leaving him to do the babysitting? It makes good sense that this created marital problems between them. Would they be able to overcome those problems? And what transpired between Deborah and Barak when they were together with no husband in sight?

These were the aspects of Deborah's story that I found most compelling, and they prompted me to write the novel. The questions are there in the bible and in my novel I provided my own answers to them.

* Tell us something surprising about the life of women in ancient Israel.

There are several things that I find astonishing about women in ancient Israel, as depicted in the Bible.

For one, the Bible is full of the most dramatic and the most traumatic stories about these women who lived thousands of years ago, and yet are so strikingly similar to us in their anxieties, hopes and desires. This led me to identify with some of them, and visualized their lives as if they were my own.

Also, they lived in a male-dominated society, in which they had few legal rights and their position in the family and society was dismal. Yet they were strong personalities, who did not just sit around and bemoan their fate. Instead, they took destiny into their own hands and shaped it to do their bidding.

Thirdly, and most surprisingly, several of them are described as very sexual personalities. They were not merely "sex objects" but initiated sex. Occasionally they did so as part of what we might call "sexual politics," in order to gain power and obtain various objectives in life.

For all these reasons I decided to hand them a "loudspeaker" by writing novels about them, so that their voices could be heard loud and clear across the generations. I wrote about them as I think they deserve to be written about: stories of love, betrayal and redemption through more love, which are yet totally faithful to the Bible, for which THE TRIUMPH OF DEBORAH is the most recent example.

*In what ways does Deborah defy the conventions of her time?

In the teeth of the conventions for women prevailing at the time, she "cracked the glass ceiling" over three thousand years ago and achieved the highest position of leadership in the nation. She led her people to war, when it was necessary and to peace, when it became possible.

Remarkably, she did so without losing her femininity. In "The Song of Deborah" (in the book of JUDGES), she refers to herself not as a prophetess, not as a judge, not as a leader, but as "a mother in Israel."

In all this, Deborah can serve as an inspiration for us today. Of course, not every woman wants to become a national leader. But what contemporary women can learn from Deborah—as portrayed in the Bible and amplified in my novel—is that no matter what the field in which they choose to realize their potential, no matter what is right for them, they can draw on their inner feminine strength to achieve their goals.

* How much of the novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?

Let me say first that the novel is not just for Bible lovers. It is for anyone who likes an enjoyable read. It is a light story of love and suspense, with a twisting plot, written first and foremost for reading pleasure. Yet it does not deviate from the Scripture by even a hair's breath.

At the same time, the story of Deborah in the Bible is brief, and I had to fill in the blanks. I did so through research, which included visiting the spots in which the plot of the novel took place. I did not have to travel far, since I am so fortunate as to live "on location" so to speak, that is, in the Holy Land. It was awesome to see, for instance, the castle in which part of the story takes place still in existence, though in ruins!

I also filled the gaps through my imagination, but most of all through my identification: the unfathomable feeling I had done some time travel, that I had actually been there, and that this is how things truly happened!

*What are you working on next?

I am now working on a novel about Tamar (the second Tamar in the Bible), the daughter of King David, who was the victim of incestuous rape by her brother. I want to show her trauma and how she rebuilt her life afterward, but I am still struggling with this and it is still far from publication.

Thank you, Eva! And feel free to visit Eva online for more information about her latest novel THE TRIUMPH OF DEBORAH.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Susan Holloway Scott

2009-07-06T17:32:00.000-07:00

* In your latest historical novel, THE FRENCH MISTRESS, a poor young lady from the country arrives at the court of Louis XIV. What are some of the things which would have shocked your protagonist, Louise de Keroualle, upon her arrival?
I’d guess that the hardest thing for Louise to accept about the French royal court would likely have been its patent insincerity. The provincial Keroualles were pious and honorable, and Louise had been raised to be the same. She soon found out that life at Court was all about power, titles, and wealth; without any of them, she was virtually invisible, despite her beauty. Louise realized, too, that a great many unsavory secrets (marital infidelity and abuse, bisexuality, and homosexuality, were only a few that would have shocked a well-bred Catholic girl) hid behind handsome faces and beautiful clothes, and that if she wished to prosper, she must listen, observe, and adapt. In time the hard lessons she learned at Versailles and the Louvre carried her to great success in the English royal court in London.

*What drew you to the courts of King Louis XIV and King Charles II?
Louise de Keroualle’s position was a unique one. Once Charles II had admired Louise in the retinue of his sister, Henriette d’Angleterre, Duchesse d’Orleans, the French king was quick to see an advantage in his English cousin’s desire. Louis swiftly sent Louise to the English court, ostensibly to serve the queen, but really as a “gift” to Charles. Louis hoped the young girl would become a useful agent for France, directing the English king towards French interests by way of the royal bed. While Louise’s influence as a political agent proved limited, her unusual role did earn her the trust and confidences of both kings, and made her keenly observant of both royal courts. I’ve always been fascinated by the many differences between France and England, differences that have led the two countries to war so many times throughout history. For me, Louise became the perfect vehicle for describing this conflict in the late 17^th century, and showing the differences between Louis and Charles, their courts, and their cultures. And, more importantly, her life makes such a great, real-life story!

* How much of the novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
All of the public scenes are historical fact. Royal courts thrive on gossip, and many of the best scandal-mongers of the time, both French and English, kept diaries and wrote letters that have fortunately survived for eager researchers like me. Even the raucous evening where Charles finally claimed Louise’s virginity after a drunken mock-wedding was lasciviously reported by several witnesses. In addition, newspapers and scandal sheets were beginning to raise their tattling heads, and Louise and the king were fair game. As for what exactly took place when the palace doors were shut and Louise and Charles were alone together –– that’s where my imagination took over. It’s an educated imagination, well-stocked with a great many facts from my research, but it’s still imagination. Which is why I write historical fiction rather than history.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 17th century France.
In London, the women involved in Charles’s extramarital intrigues were generally regarded as the king’s whores. No words were minced, not even if the lady were beautiful, rich, and raised to the peerage. Across the Channel in the French court, however, Louis’s chosen mistress was given the official title of maîtresse-en-titre. It was publicly considered a great honor (though likely the catty whispers were less kind), a way of serving king and country, and was rewarded with respect, regard, great wealth, and lavish apartments in the palace. As one court hanger-on declared, “Every [French] woman was born with the ambition to become the King’s favorite.”

* What are you working on next?
My next heroine has already made her appearance in The King’s Favorite as a ten-year-old girl, dancing jigs in the moonlight with Nell Gwyn. Catherine Sedley was the only daughter and heiress to the libertine poet Sir Charles Sedley, and grew into one of the most scandalous ladies of her time. Though her fortune made her much desired as a bride, she refused to marry and let any man take control of her life. Instead she remained independent, becoming mistress to a king, wife to a general, and a countess in her own right, keeping her place at the English court for nearly forty years and through five monarchs. Look for Catherine’s story next summer in The Countess and the King.

Thank you, Susan! And feel free to visit Susan Holloway Scott online for more information about her amazing new novel THE FRENCH MISTRESS.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Donna Wolfolk Cross

2009-06-16T07:07:00.000-07:00

*Your novel, POPE JOAN, explores the life of a controversial figure who may have been the first - and only - female Pope in history. How did you come across Joan's story?
Entirely by accident. I read a passing reference that I originally thought was an amusing typo ("Joan" for "John"--an easy "slip of the pen"). But a few weeks later, I had to drive my daughter to the library for a school assignment. While waiting for her, I had time to kill. Idle curiosity led me over to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, just to check on that odd reference to a "Pope Joan".

I didn't expect to find anything. So imagine my surprise when there was an entry for her! I stood in that library with my jaw dropped open. How was it possible that the story of such a remarkable woman had existed for centuries--and I hadn't even HEARD of her?

I knew immediately that I wanted to write about Joan. I couldn't believe I'd had the enormous good fortune to stumble across this extraordinary story!

*How did you go about researching the novel?
Given your own very well-researched novels, Michelle, I’m sure you know what a tough yet enjoyable process it can be. Historical research starts with easy-to-access sources, readily available in U.S. libraries--sometimes even from inter-library loan! From those, one garners references and bibliography that lead to harder-to-obtain sources available only in rare book rooms and special collections, often in other languages, sometimes in other countries. Fortunately, I can read French, Spanish, Italian, and some Latin, which was an enormous help.

*How much of the novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
Joan's story is told like those of all the other 8th and 9^th century Popes--in very abbreviated form. Chronicle records in the "Darkest of the Dark Ages" were written with uncertain ink on nubbly animal skin (for that's what parchment is). They were short and woefully lacking in detail. If you plucked one of these papal records off the hand-written page and put it into modern print, it would run about 10-15 pages.

So I had to build from a skeleton of a story. Writing historical fiction allowed me to put flesh on those dry old bones, to give this inspirational story laughter, smiles, tears--all the things that make a story human. I tried, however, always to base my "imaginative leaps" on what might reasonably be inferred from the evidence at hand. The details of the ninth-century setting, strange and savage as they now seem, are all factual.

*Tell us something surprising about women in Rome during the 9^th century.
Women were widely considered to be incapable of reason. It was "unnatural" to teach a woman anything at all--even to read and write. The size of a woman's brain and of her uterus were thought to be "inversely proportionate"--that is, the more a woman learned, the less likely she would ever bear children (if only that were true, birth control would be a snap. You don't want to have a baby? Read a book!).

*What are you working on next?
Right at the moment, I'm very busy promoting the wonderful Three Rivers Press edition of Pope Joan, which was just released on June 9th. It's an entirely new version of the novel, with corrections and additions, a revised and updated Author's Note (with startling new evidence supporting Joan's actual historical existence), and a list of "Best of the Best" reading group questions, gathered from my many years of chatting with book groups all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

I'm also starting to promote the equally wonderful movie version of Pope Joan, which will be released this fall (it's by Constantin Film, the same company that filmed "The Name of the Rose").
Anyone who's ever dreamed of attending a movie premiere will be interested in my unusual "Win a chance to Walk A Red Carpet" offer, which you can see here: http://popejoan.com/2009promo.htm

And I'm also plugging away on my next novel, about another strong woman from history, this time from 17th century France. Perhaps the best way for me to sum up what drew me to Joan and my next heroine is with a quote from George Bernard Shaw:

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable people." (n.b. Shaw actually spoke of "reasonable and unreasonable men", so I tweaked this to make it inclusive of women).

Joan was certainly an "unreasonable" woman (and I mean that as a compliment). So is my next heroine--whose name I have artfully not mentioned (largely because my agent has told me she'll cut out my tongue if I do!). But I hope my readers will enjoy my next heroine's delicious "unreasonableness" as much as I do!

Thank you, Donna! And feel free to visit Donna online for more information about her amazing novel Pope Joan.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Karen Cushman

2009-05-15T00:53:00.000-07:00

*Three of your books--Catherine Called Birdy, The Midwife’s Apprentice, and Matilda Bone--are set in medieval England. Why your affinity for this time and place?

My desire to set a book in medieval England began with an idea: what would life be like for young people--especially girls--at a time when they had no power and little value? I chose the time period partly because I love the Middle Ages, with all their excitement and color and brutality, although I am very glad I did not have to live there. But also I saw western civilization, with its growing emphasis on private vs. communal, on self vs. other, on bedrooms and solars and books of manners, paralleling a child’s growth to adolescence, with the same sorts of preoccupations. The idea of a young person living at that time, trying to make sense of her world, appealed to me.

My own fascination has been around for years and years. I started with Anya Seton and Rosemary Sutcliff many years ago and progressed through medieval music, medieval fairs, and collecting things like the 15th century illuminated manuscript page that hangs on my wall. My father’s family is Polish, my mother’s family is German and Irish, so the English were certainly never heroes to either side of the family. But somehow England, especially the England of long ago, spoke to me.

And I think the medieval period is close enough to our own times that I could effectively set a story there. In part it was the fact that I could read most sources without having to learn another language. I couldn’t read early medieval sources in the original, but some, like Bartholomew Anglicus (a 13th century Franciscan monk who created a 19-volume encyclopedia that first made available medical and scientific information from Greek, Jewish and Arab scholars), I could translate from the middle English to modern English, which I never would have been able to do in any other language. It was also because I could imagine myself in medieval England, whereas to think about Medieval Poland or Aztec Mexico was such a stretch. I thought I could come understand these people in Medieval England enough to write about them. I felt a familiarity I wouldn’t have felt lots of other places.

After three medieval and three American books, I returned to England for my new book due out spring 2010. But this time it’s Elizabethan. My interest in the Middle Ages has not waned but I wanted to tell the story of a lame child at a time when ideas about disability and difference were changing and were not, so to speak, so medieval. Hence London, 1574, and Alchemy and Meggy Swann.

* Working from the west coast of the United States, how do you go about finding information sources for life in medieval and Elizabethan England?

When I began, I thought it would be a lot harder than it was. I forgot how long a period the Middle Ages were--hundreds and hundreds of years. And it has been a long time since then. There are innumerable sources. I started out at the University of California, Berkeley, but their sources were scholarly and boring and talked about things I didn’t want to know, like economic and political systems and wars. I wanted to know what people ate and what they sang and where they went to the bathroom. I moved from there to the public library. Once I found a couple of books with bibliographies, I was off and running. With a good bibliography, you’re set.

I found a lot of things reprinted in paperback on the bookstore shelves, such as Housekeeping in the Fourteenth Century and A History of Manners. I hounded used bookstores where I discovered books like Daily Living in the Twelfth Century, John Stow’s 16th century Survey of London, and books of slang and saints and insults.

Now, more than ten years since I started researching Catherine Called Birdy, research has changed a lot. For Alchemy and Meggy Swann I used the internet as much as books. The internet is a wonder of resources and information. I found recreations of alchemical laboratories, reproductions of Elizabethan broadsides, and glossaries of Elizabethan words and phrases. And the web has made interlibrary loan a gold mine--I requested and received a 19th century book about Bartlemas Fair, a reprint about English fairs from a 1934 geographic journal, and Disability in Medieval Europe.

* What about young fictional heroines appeals to you as a writer?

Place, personhood, who I am and where do I belong: these are important questions to young women, and to me, which is partly why I write for a young female age group. Their issues and questions are still mine. A consistent theme in my books is finding a sense of place, somewhere to belong, the search for identity, change and becoming, what it means to be human in this world.

All my books are about ordinary girls in extraordinary circumstances, girls like me: the medieval Catherine who had no power and little value in a brutal world; Alyce, The Midwife’s Apprentice, who longed for a name, a full belly, and a place in the world; Lucy Whipple, dragged unhappily across the country from her home in Massachusetts to California because of her mother’s dreams; the lonely, proud, and superior Matilda Bone, raised by a priest to know a lot about Heaven and Hell but not much about this world; Rodzina, a Polish girl from Chicago, who goes west on the orphan train, looking for someone to belong to, and Meggy Swann, different and angry and alone. I know these girls and their concerns and dreams and fears. And so I write about them. And for them.

* Why do you choose to write historical fiction rather than contemporary, possibly more relevant books for your young readers?

The question I am asked most often--aside from “What does Corpus Bones mean?”--is why historical fiction? I think historical fiction helps young readers develop a feeling for a living past, by illustrating the continuity of life, giving them a sense of history and their place in it.

Historical fiction, like all good history, demonstrates how history is made up of the decisions and actions of individuals, and that the future will be made up of

our decisions and actions. British historical novelist Leon Garfield has written: If the young discover that in the past w have been governed, led, abused, and slaughtered by fools and knave, then perhaps they will look about them and see that matters have not greatly changed, and possibly they will do so before they vote. In itself I find that a great reason for writing what I do.

But mostly I write historical fiction because those are the stories that take me over. Rosemary Sutcliff, writer of gorgeous historical novels for young people, said: Historians and teachers, you and your kind can produce the bare bones; I and my kind breathe life into them.....That’s what I’m interested in--the life in those bones.

I’m sure it would be interesting to write a book about somebody in 2009 living in a suburb with a dog and with divorced parents, but the subject doesn’t have the same appeal to me as the idea of someone assisting a medieval bloodletter and getting involved in real blood and guts. I write what’s interesting to me.

*Your medieval books have been published in England. Do you ever feel nervous that you’re an American writing about historical England and releasing your books at the source of the story?

Sure, I do, especially before I went to Britain. Catherine Called Birdy was written before I’d ever been there. I stepped off the plane and said, "Show me Medieval England!" Of course it’s not there. It’s hardly there any more than it is in Ohio. Sometimes I worry the British are going to say, "You’re an American. Why are you writing about England? Or, this is all wrong. We who live here know this." But on the other hand I realize that with all my research and study I know a lot about everyday domestic life of women and children in Medieval England. Any mistake I make is not going to be enormous. People who read my books aren’t looking for mistakes. It’s not like a Ph.D. committee trying to catch you up. The once or twice people have found a mistake, they’ve written very nice letters that were not critical but just pointed out errors. I’m grateful for it. I haven’t had a bad experience, so I don’t expect another one. But, I could hear from a leech.

Thank you Kamran! And feel free to visit Karen Cushman online for more information about her wonderful books!

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Anna Elliott

2009-05-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

*Your novel, TWILIGHT OF AVALON, tells the famous story of Trystan and Isolde. What drew you to this period in history?
In the spring of 2007, I woke up from a very vivid dream in which I was telling my mother about a plan to write a novel about the daughter of Modred (or Mordred), great villain of the cycle of King Arthur tales. I'd been an English major in college with a focus on Medieval literature, and had fallen in love with the Arthurian legends then. So when I woke up, the idea just wouldn't let me go. I started to do some preliminary research, reading several books that explored the historical foundations of the Arthur myths.

The Arthurian legends as we know them today, with their knights in shining armor, jousts, tournaments, and the tragic love story of Lancelot and Gwenevere, are very much products of a later Medieval courtly chivalric world. But Arthur, if he existed at all, would have been a 5th-century British warlord, a far cry from the king of Cammelot as he appears in the tales. The 5th-century was a brutal, chaotic time in Britain. Roman Britain had crumbled; Rome's legions had been withdrawn from this far-flung outpost of the empire, leaving the country prey to invading Pictish and Irish tribes from the west and north and to Saxon invasions from the east. It was in many ways also a crucible in which the British identity and sense of place was forged and formed. And it is against this backdrop that Arthur appears, a war hero who led--or at least may have led--a victorious campaign against the invaders, driving them back for perhaps the space of a man's lifetime and so inspiring the roots of a legend that still captures our imaginations today.

I was fascinated by this possibility of a real King Arthur, and fascinated by the world in which he might have lived. So I decided to set my story there, to make my particular Arthurian world a blend of the earliest versions I could find of the legends and what scraps of historical fact we know of Dark Age Britain.

*How much of TWILIGHT OF AVALON is based on fact, and how much is fiction?
As I mentioned above, while I was doing research for Twilight of Avalon, I read several fascinating books that explore the possibility of a real-life historic Arthur. But it really is only that--a possibility.

Very, very little can be discovered or said with any certainty about who the man himself might have been. And at the same time, although I'd decided to set my story far from the legendary Cammelot at a time a real Arthur might have lived, I felt as though there were certain conventions of the later Arthur legends that I wanted to pay tribute to and honor.

I decided to base my Arthur on one of the earliest tellings of the Arthur story: that recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain, written in the mid twelfth-century. In this version, the now famous Gwenevere-Lancelot-Arthur love triangle does not exist; in fact, Lancelot is not yet even present as one of Arthur’s fighting men. Instead, it is Modred, Arthur’s heir, who betrays the king by seizing both Gwenevere and the throne. I used this version of the story as the backdrop for Twilight of Avalon and at the same time tried to place it in a world that was as authentic as possible a representation of what Dark Age Britain might have been.

The historical basis for the characters of Trystan and Marche is even more scant than that for a historical Arthur: the single true piece of evidence for their existence is a memorial stone in Cornwall with the inscription: Drustans hic iacet Cunomori filius, which means, “Drustanus lies here, the son of Cunomorus.” Many scholars have plausibly suggested that the characters referred to are the Tristan and King Mark of later medeival tales, Drustanus being a recognized variant of the name Tristan (or Trystan) and Cunomorus being the Latinized version of the name Cynvawr, who is identified by the ninth-century historian Nennias with King Mark (or March or Marche).

In terms of the other characters, I used the names of the Saxon kings who would likely have been ruling the kingdoms of Kent and Wessex at the time, and my Madoc of Gwynedd is based on the historical sixth-century King Maelgwn Gwynedd, who was indeed a leading king of the age and whom the 6th-century historian Gildas identifies as "Dragon of the Isle." Myrddin (Merlin) may indeed have been a famed Welsh Bard. Apart from these, though, Twilight of Avalon’s Britain is a a blending of legend and truth, an attempt to portray the historical world of sixth-century Cornwall, while still honoring the legends that are, after centuries of telling and re-telling, as real as historical fact

*The story you tell of Tystan and Isolde is very different (and much better, if I may say so!) from the one most people have read. Why is that?
Well, first of all, thank you! As I mentioned above, the Arthurian canon as we know it today is very much grounded in a courtly, chivalric, later Medieval world--and as one of the later additions to the cycle of Arthur stories, this is particularly true of the legend of Trystan and Isolde, with its tragic love triangle that echoes the more famous Arthur-Gwenevere-Lancelot one. And in many ways, also, the story becomes a bit of a Christian morality play. (Which to be honest I think is a disservice to the characters of Trystan and Isolde, whom I loved from my first encounter with them). And yet the Trystan and Isolde story, like the Arthur one, has its roots in earlier legends and traditions. As I was doing research, I started to wonder what those earliest traditions might have been, what the story might have looked like at its first inception during the chaos and violence of Dark Age Britain, the "real" Arthurian age. Twilight of Avalon is my attempt to create a story that both fit my Dark Age setting and might credibly have been told and retold, adapted and changed through the ages to eventually become the Trystan and Isolde story as we know it today.

*Tell us something surprising about women's lives in 6th century England.
Women during the 6th-century actually had greater legal rights than later during the Middle Ages.

The Welsh laws of Hywel Dda (Hywel the Good) were written in the 10th-century, but are assumed to be much older, and are far more liberal in their attitude toward women than those the Catholic Church would be instrumental in instituting later on. Under Hywel Dda's laws, for example, if a woman found her husband with another woman, she was entitled to a payment of six score pence the first time and a pound the second time; on the third occasion she was entitled to divorce him.

*What are you working on next?
Twilight of Avalon is the first of a trilogy, so at the time of writing I've completed the second book of the trilogy, Dark Moon of Avalon, and am at work on the third, Sunrise of Avalon. I'm about 3/4 of the way finished with it. And with a new baby--our second--due in August, I have a good self-imposed deadline to get it done!

Thank you Anna! And feel free to visit Anna Elliott online for more information about her amazing new novel Twilight of Avalon.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Kamran Pasha

2009-04-21T19:28:00.000-07:00

*Your novel, MOTHER OF BELIEVERS, tells the story of Aisha, who married the leader Muhammad and eventually became a leader herself. What drew you to this period in history?
As a practicing Muslim, I have always been fascinated by the stories around the birth of Islam. This was the defining period that shaped Muslim civilization, much like the Exodus is a pivotal historical period for Jews and the ministry of Jesus is for Christians. But unlike the earlier religions in the monotheistic family, Islam was born in the full light of history. The amount of historical data around Prophet Muhammad, his family and followers is staggering. We know facts as minute as how the Prophet tied his shoes and how he ate, along with surprisingly intimate details of his life with his wives. Much of this is due to Aisha, the Prophet’s youngest and most beloved wife, who is the central hero of MOTHER OF THE BELIEVERS. She transmitted over 2,000 historical accounts about her life with the Prophet and the early Muslim community, providing a wealth of detail that created an embarrassment of riches when I was researching the book. In fact, the challenge was trying to get in as much historical detail as I could while keeping the novel to a readable length. Had I followed my original story outline, the book would have been over 1,000 pages, and my publisher would probably have fainted. I had to drop many chapters I loved in order to make it more manageable. Still, the first draft came in at over 700 pages, and it took more painful editing until I got it down to a little over 500 pages. But as a result it is a better book. It’s tighter, and manages to convey the epic nature of the origins of Islam while still retaining an intimate feel.

*How much of MOTHER OF BELIEVERS is based on fact, and how much is fiction?
I state in my foreword that my novel is a work of fiction, as I wanted to make it clear that I am not claiming to present a textbook of Islamic history. Still, I tried to stay within the framework of the major historical events, partly due to my affinity for the underlying history as a Muslim, and partly because when it comes to the events I recount, truth is more remarkable than fiction. The birth of Islam is one of the most improbable and majestic moments in human history, filled with surprise twists and incredibly complex characters motivated by faith, passion, love and revenge. It is such an amazing tale that I really couldn’t “improve” on it with my creative imagination. The main area I allowed myself to indulge in speculation was in looking inside the hearts and minds of the characters, trying to imagine what they were thinking and feeling, what motivated them to take the actions that have been recorded by history. It is in that arena that my novel might generate some controversy, but my interpretations regarding the thoughts and motivations of these historical figures are well within the analysis of Muslim historians. There is really nothing in my book that cannot be found in the opinions of traditional scholars, although the choices I make might surprise some readers. In some ways, the book represents my own personal interpretation of Islamic history as a believer. I synthesized the world as my heart saw it. Perhaps we all do that every day when we look not only at the past, but also at our own lives and try to make sense of it all. The novel is written as a memoir, and I think all memory is a creative act. We remember events not necessarily as they were, but as they fit into our image of ourselves. So, in that sense, I think everyone is living a life that is historical fiction.

*Tell us about women's lives in 7th century Arabia.
Prior to the rise of Islam, women had a very difficult time in Arabia. It was a brutal wilderness with no central authority and a “kill or be killed” mindset that led the strong to prey on the weak. Women suffered tremendously, with no guaranteed rights, since there was no legal code. Arab men regularly performed female infanticide, burying unwanted baby girls alive in the desert. Kidnapping and rape were commonplace, and many women survived through prostitution. Although a few women had the protection of wealthy clans and were able to become prosperous businesswomen in the trading cities like Mecca, for most women pre-Islamic Arabia was a miserable environment. Islam in many ways began as a proto-feminist movement meant to alleviate the suffering of women and children in this chaotic world. Prophet Muhammad was himself an orphan and had grown up in poverty in Arabia after his mother died when he was six. He personally experienced the misery of life for the poor and the weak in the old system and he was very sensitive to the suffering of the less fortunate. And when the Prophet embarked on his mission to bring the Arabs to monotheism, his initial followers came primarily from that impoverished underclass. Women in particular were drawn to his new religion, as he banned female infanticide and started promulgating laws meant to make their lives easier. Muslim women secured the right own property and inherit from the beginning, rights that were not granted Christian women in Europe and America until the 19th century. The Prophet also worked to limit the pre-Islamic custom of polygamy and emphasized that multiple marriages should be undertaken primarily to help poor widows and orphans who needed the security of a family unit. These were remarkable reforms and Arab women flocked to the Islamic movement, which was finally bringing law and order to a barbaric world. And Muslim women continued to play major roles in every aspect of life in the Islamic community. Aisha, the Prophet’s wife and the main character of MOTHER OF THE BELIEVERS, is a remarkable example of an empowered Muslim woman. She was a scholar, a poet, a political leader, and a warrior who led armies into battle. In modern times, many Muslim feminists look back to her example as they fight for their own rights in the Islamic world. Unfortunately, Islam has gotten a bad rap as a misogynistic religion in the modern day, which is ironic considering that it began as a movement meant to liberate women and make their lives easier. But issues of sexism and oppression of Muslim women are very real today, and I hope that my novel will remind people of that liberating spark that is the heart of Islam. I hope that I can remind Muslim men and women what Islam stood for at its beginning and inspire believers to follow the best that is within the Islamic historical tradition.

*How did you go about researching your novel?
I looked at a large collection of historical sources that have been translated into English. I don’t speak Arabic and I had to rely on translations of early Arabic works by Muslim scholars. Thankfully, many of the most important sources have indeed been translated into English and provided a rich level of detail into the world in which Islam was born. As I mentioned earlier, the amount of historical information that is available on Prophet Muhammad is staggering, and the difficult part was not in finding material from which to write a novel, but in picking and choosing which stories to weave into the narrative. At the end of the day, I chose accounts that moved me emotionally, and I hope my love for these stories is evident to the reader of my MOTHER OF THE BELIEVERS.

*What are you working on next?
My next book, SHADOW OF THE SWORDS, is a historical novel on the Crusades. The tale follows the battle between King Richard the Lionheart and the Muslim sultan Saladin for control of Jerusalem. But at its heart, it is a love story with a young Jewish girl at the center who serves as a spy during the conflict. In many ways, I think the book will intrigue many people as it looks at what the Holy Land means to all three monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And it looks at how the human heart can find love and beauty even in the midst of war and death. I think that SHADOW OF THE SWORDS asks some very profound questions about the nature of religious faith and human conflict, and is in some ways a direct analogy to some of the events happening in the Holy Land today. But it is ultimately a story of hope, reflecting my own desire to see reconciliation one day between all the Children of Abraham.

Thank you Kamran! And feel free to visit Kamran Pasha online for more information about his amazing new novel Mother of Believers.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Jack Woodville London

2009-04-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

What prompted you to begin a trilogy set in a small town during WWII?
It is said that men who fought in WWII never talk about their experiences; it certainly seemed to me that we didn’t hear a lot from the women who were caught up in that whirlwind either. Now, just as we are losing both the men and the women of that era at a rate faster than the war killed them, it is important that we not forget them. They endured rationing, separation, and wildly off-base expectations, such as winning the war and remaining chaste. Do we really know who our parents cared about before they married each other, what became of them, and, in the end, how we came to be who we are?

As for the small town, the icon of the home-front is Rosie the Riveter; the fact is that the US was still very rural and, except for those in the military or those who moved to work in the war factories, most Americans still had not traveled more than 50 miles from home. Very few rural Americans became Rosie the Riveter.

Your novel, French Letters -- Virginia’s War: Tierra Texas 1944, is set Stateside during the war. How did you research WWII Texas?
There is a tremendous amount of pure information about the Office of Price Administration (rationing), aircraft factories, military air fields, crops, census, that sort of thing in the source records. The color of ration stamps for what foods or goods, wooden sidewalks, what was on the grocery store shelves and what kind of medical treatment an old-school doctor could provide in the 1940’s, the text of the announcement broadcast in the middle of the night about the invasion of France – that kind of information is out there.

But the people – that required hard work, to get the sense of how they spoke to and about one another, slang, their daily lives – that took work. I spoke with dozens of people who grew up in that era and in small towns, looked at photographs and read snippets of their letters and four-page newspapers.

How much of the novel is based on fact and how much on fiction?
Tierra is fictitious. Virginia, Will, Poppy, all of the people are fictitious. Their stories in the novel are fictitious. But, the background to their lives and their town graded out with early readers as close to one hundred per cent factual. If in the novel a certain color ration stamp was sought for a certain food at a certain date, it is correct. Passing references to events such as freakish rainstorms, the kind of planes that flew from air bases in Lubbock and Clovis, where B-25 bombers were manufactured, how one might covet Lucky Strikes or a pair of shoes, those bits are on the money.

Tell us something surprising about the American young women that our soliders left behind during WWII?
One of the most disgraceful things a girl could do in a small town, worse even than rumored un-chastity, was to send a Dear John letter. It was expected that all girls were good girls who would wait for the soldiers they sent off to war. The fact is before they were our mothers and grandmothers, they were us. They had the same passions, inexperience, uncertainty, and naughtiness that we had when we were teens and twenties. They did not have the freedom we had – unequal pay, peremptory dismissal to give a man the same job, an expectation that a man was the head of the family and not to be challenged, and a very unequal set of rules for intimacy. There were no birth control pills and it was hard to argue that contraceptives were for anything other than sin. Even so, the soldiers who sowed a statistically staggering amount of wild oats, particularly in England during WWII, came home to discover that some of their pastures had been plowed in their absence.

What are you working on next?
Virginia’s War is the novel of a young woman who was expected to wait for her soldier, Will, who was sent off as an army doctor to the war in Europe. I am working on the sequel, the novel of that army doctor, in France. The stories mirror one another.

Thank you Jack! And feel free to visit Jack Woodvile London online for more information about his latest novel French Letters, Book I: Virginia's War, Tierra Texas 1944.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author David H. Jones

2009-04-01T04:29:00.000-07:00

* While your novel TWO BROTHERS: ONE NORTH, ONE SOUTH is primarily about the Prentiss brothers of Baltimore during the American Civil War, what compelled you to integrate Hetty, Jenny, and Constance Cary so prominently into the story line?

Clearly, the remarkable battlefield experiences of Clifton and William Prentiss embody the quintessential "brother against brother" story of the Civil War. However, I wanted TWO BROTHERS to reveal a more comprehensive picture of American society during that turbulent period. To fully appreciate the story, it's important for the reader to understand the context of those times; the beliefs, attitudes, and motivations of a wide spectrum of participants, both military and civilian. Hetty, her sister Jenny, and their cousin Constance individually and collectively represent the transformation of women's role in upper class society, particularly in the South, due to deprivations caused by the war. Hetty and Jenny smuggle critical war materials across the Potomac and Constance blossoms as a writer of some importance; in addition to these contributions, they are the reigning belles of wartime Richmond. Known throughout the Army of Northern Virginia as the "Cary Invincibles" for their ardent patriotism, they make the first three pattern Confederate battle flags and frequently visit friends and relatives at military encampments. Hetty fearlessly crosses the lines on clandestine missions, barely escaping capture on several occasions. She is widely recognized as the most beautiful woman in the Southland and her romance with General John Pegram is a classic tale. It's no surprise that the poetic portion of Hetty's epitaph reads "Beautiful, Brilliant, Brave; Of Pure and Noble Heart, True and Generous Soul; In The Battle of Life Heroic, In Death Triumphant." How could I not want these three dynamic women to have a significant presence in this novel?

* How much of TWO BROTHERS is based on fact and how much is fiction?

The novel is closely based on real people and events; only a few characters and circumstances were created to benefit the telling of the story. As TWO BROTHERS was written as an historical fiction, I employed a strict criteria that there must be no evidence to the contrary regarding the imagined elements of the novel. Thus, the dialogue and scenes were written to be as historically accurate and authentic as possible.

* Tell us something surprising about Southern women in 19th century America?

Until the Civil War, traditional rules of American society prevented women from being conspicuous in public activities, as it was thought that such involvement would taint them and subject them to criticism, circumstances entirely unacceptable to their fathers, husbands, and brothers. Thus, women had to remain almost entirely within the domestic sphere. The emergence, by necessity, of women into the public sphere during the war forever transformed their role in society and helped set the stage for the women's suffrage movement that gained momentum later in the century. The prominence of woman in public endeavors also developed rapidly following the war with the emergence of ladies' memorial associations throughout the South. These powerful organizations were at the forefront of a campaign to recover the bodies of Confederate soldiers and arrange proper burial, something that Southern men could not accomplish due to constraints imposed upon them by Federal authorities. Southern upper class women achieved great success in this public forum and there was no turning back.

* How did you research the historical characters and events portrayed in TWO BROTHERS?

I discovered the Prentiss brothers story while researching the Civil War regiments of my ancestors. Clifton Prentiss served with my great great grandfather, James Touchstone, in the 6th Regiment of Maryland Infantry (US). I soon learned that Clifton Prentiss had a younger brother who served in the 1st and 2nd Maryland Battalions (CS) and that Walt Whitman wrote about the Confederate brother while a patient at Armory Square Hospital. My fascination increased dramatically when I found that both brothers were in close proximity on the same battlefield one week before Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. I spent nearly three years researching primary sources such as military records, letters, memoirs, and period books and newspapers to document all aspects of the story. In the process, I became convinced that this was a story that must be told.

* Are you working on another historical fiction, and if so, what is it about?

Following publication of TWO BROTHERS, I learned that a descendant of another 6th Maryland officer compiled three journals in 1866 containing vivid accounts of his wartime experiences. In one portion, the battle on April 2, 1865 is described in detail and the officer reveals that he was close to Major Clifton Prentiss during the fighting. His firsthand account varies slightly with the novel's description of the climactic moment of the battle, which I had written consistent with the preponderance of available evidence. While I do not intent to revise the historical fiction, the rich details provided by these journals have me considering the possibility of writing a non-fictional account of the 6th Maryland Infantry throughout the war. It would essentially be a regimental history and I believe that it would be a good companion piece to my novel. Nevertheless, the finding of these journals demonstrates 1) that historical "fact" to subject to modification when new, credible information comes to light; and 2) that well crafted, authentic historical fiction is not that different from non-fiction, as both are based on the opinions and interpretations of historians. Our understanding of history evolves through various means; both historical fiction and non-fiction have a place in this process.

Thank you David! And feel free to visit David H. Jones for more information about Two Brothers.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Anne Easter Smith

2009-03-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

* In your latest novel, THE KING'S GRACE, you tell the story of Grace Plantagenet, who thus far has only been a footnote in history. What compelled you to tell her story?
Grace Plantagenet's name jumped out at me after reading about Queen Elizabeth Woodville's death while researching "A Rose for the Crown." She was mentioned in a contemporary chronicle as one of two gentlewomen who accompanied the queen's body on the funeral barge from London to Windsor, where Elizabeth was buried with her husband, King Edward IV. The actual verbiage is: "Grace, bastard daughter of King Edward, ..." and I wondered why a bastard of her dead husband would have been anywhere near Elizabeth, let alone have the singular honor of being one of the mourners on the barge. It sparked an interest in exploring a possible relationship between the two. That is all we know about Grace--that one fact, so I had to make up her backstory, her age, and what happened to her. It was fun. I also was looking for the perfect narrator at the court who could tell the compelling, mysterious tale of Perkin Warbeck. As "A Rose for the Crown" told the story of King Richard III through Kate Haute's eyes, "The Kings Grace" is really about Perkin Warbeck, although Grace herself is a lovely young woman who readers will care about.

* Tell us something surprising about life as a woman in 15th century England.
Women were obviously second class citizens, dependent upon a man for everything economic, but they were also given lots of responsibilities when their men were away fighting or elevating themselves at court. Most noble women ran the households at those times and men under them did their bidding. It was only when England stopped going to war so much, in later Tudor times and on, that women started becoming more subservient. Some medieval women even donned armor and fought alongside their men in defending their castles. I liked that about them. They were less namby pamby than in later periods.

* How much of your novel is based on fact, and how much on fiction?
I think I explained above how much of Grace's story is fiction, BUT every event that happens around Grace as with every character who is not fictional has been thoroughly researched and is authentic. From the time Perkin is caught and brought to Henry VII's court, I am faithful to history as it deals with him.

* How did you go about researching THE KING'S GRACE?
The same way any historical novelist does it! Read, read, read, go and look, look, look and gather as much information as will fit in your filing cabinet or on your bookshelves! It's a lot of work to get the history right, the people right, the clothes right, the food right, the lifestyle right, the weather right, the flora and fauna right, etc. etc. It makes me tired just thinking about it!

* What are you working on next?
Since I finished "The King's Grace" in May and in between editing that book through September, I have been researching the life of Cecily of York, wife of Richard, duke of York, who were the parents of Edward IV, Richard III and Margaret of Burgundy. The manuscript is due in January 2010.

Thank you Anne! And feel free to visit Anne Easter Smith online for more information about her latest novel The King's Grace.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Jules Watson

2009-02-24T08:31:00.000-08:00

* In your historical trilogy, beginning with the novel THE WHITE MARE, you take readers back to the first century AD. What was it about ancient Scotland that fascinated you enough to make it the setting of an historical series?
Few historical authors had tackled Scotland in that era, so it was uncharted territory. Also, people had a view of England being a Roman province, but not many people knew that the Romans invaded Scotland many times, ultimately unsuccessfully. So choosing Scotland gave me an exciting plot framework - the well-oiled and heartless Roman war machine rolling over the mystical, sacred land of the ancient Scots, which they defend to the death. Battles, ambushes, rescues, danger, dramatic partings and reunions were easily spun from that background! Aside from the storytelling, Scotland is a spiritual home for me; I was entranced with its wild landscape on my first visit. It's at the dangerous, unknown borders of everything, and that has always appealed to me - the edge of the known world at the time; the modern edge of Europe, jutting into the stormy Atlantic; and the borders of the unseen, or Celtic Otherworld. On a ghostly day, when the mountains or islands disappear into mist, you can believe in anything.

* Your latest novel, THE SWAN MAIDEN, signals a departure from your Dalriada trilogy, and tells the story of Deirdre, an Irish legend. What was it about the legend of Deirdre that captivated you?
This is the story of star-crossed lovers separated by a cruel world, a theme of which humans are so enamoured it has echoed down the ages in the tales of Romeo and Juliet, Helen and Paris of Troy, Tristan and Isolde, and Guinevere and Lancelot. We are transfixed by the idea that a love could be so strong that a couple would defy all the rules of family and society to pursue it; that they would give up belonging, safety and status, revelling only in each other, unable to be separated even by death. It’s that defiance against those who would seek to destroy us that sits at the heart of so many great stories, I think.

As far as tragedies go, this is also the “big one”. It has all the elements that make up the most riveting adventures — escapes and chases, battles and near-misses, and terrible twists of fate. More than that, it encapsulates the most rousing of human emotions: the wonder of unbreakable love, the sorrow of betrayal and death, and the excitement of great acts of courage and sacrifice. People first made up stories to be recited around a fire on a stormy night, and the best have the “ooh” and “aah” factor as the audience is thrilled and dismayed in turn. Deirdre is a great ooh and aah tale.

The more authorial reason is that the Irish myths set in the pagan Iron Age were originally oral, and only written down much later by monks when Christianity and medieval society had brought in a new world-view. The Irish heroines are often portrayed as manipulative seductresses bringing destruction and death to men, and there is an implied derision at and fear of their sexuality and innate power. I was therefore intrigued by the idea of “resurrecting” the maligned Deirdre and imagining what she might have been like. Deirdre, in my book, is a free-thinking, rather wild soul who in running away tries to break the shackles of her male-dominated society, only to be sucked back in again, of course. To me, this makes her a modern heroine with whom the women of today can identify.

* How much of THE SWAN MAIDEN is based on fact and how much is fiction?
The plot, being based on an original myth, is entirely fiction. Outside the myths, which survive in fragments of early manuscripts, there is no evidence the characters existed. The stories were originally passed on orally by bards, and not written down until the 12th century, so scholars have also questioned whether they can reflect anything of the pagan Iron Age a thousand years earlier, or whether they only present what Ireland was like in early medieval times. However, many of the traditions are supported by archaeology and historical sources. The tales portray a warrior society immersed in battle and cattle raids, who ride around on horses or in chariots, boasting, drinking and feasting, taking enemy heads as cult objects and being devoted to the honorable notion of single combat of champions. The nobility are obsessed with appearance, wearing flashy clothes and jewelry, and decorating their horses, houses and everything they could get their hands on. They worshipped many gods, had priests called druids, and venerated natural places such as springs and rivers. Caesar and other Roman writers attest that the Gauls and British tribes did conform to most of these stereotypes. In many cases archaeology backs them up. Chariots, ritual horse burials and gaudy horse-harness fittings have been found widely in Britain and on the Continent. Valuable drinking vessels, tableware and deposits of animal bones support the feasting aspects, and the many finds of ornate jewelry and weapons confirm their love of decoration, adornment, and war. Statues, reliefs and bone evidence show they did worship the cult of the head. There is evidence for their named gods from other areas of the Celtic world, and in many places, including Ireland, ritual objects of gold and bronze are often found as offerings in marshes, springs and rivers.

* How did you do your research for the novel, given that the story is based on Irish mythology?
I used the same research as for my Dalriada trilogy, set in ancient Scotland, to paint the everyday background and lifestyles of the Celts. I also sought out information on Iron Age Ireland and what particular jewelry and swords they had there, for example. I used other ideas, too, such as evidence from bog bodies and other archaeological sites in Ireland. For example, the excavations of the royal site of Emain Macha, now known as Navan fort, unearthed information about the destruction of a great sacred building, which I use in the second book. Other tidbits are interesting, too, such as the fact the skull of a Barbary Ape from North Africa was found there, in a supposedly far-flung place isolated from the Roman world. My king now has a pet monkey. Oh, and my most favorite factoid ever: the body of a warrior found preserved in an Irish bog had hair stiffened with a paste made from pine resin and herbs. Pollen studies showed it came from continental Europe - so the men were importing luxury hair gel!

* What are you working on next?
I am tackling another much-maligned female from the Irish myths - Queen Maeve, or Medb. She is portrayed, rather juicily, as a war-mongering nymphomaniac, whose bloodlust ignites the great Irish battle The Tain, or Cattle Raid of Cooley. The Tain leads to the death of many brave heroes and the destruction of whole provinces, and all this is laid at poor Maeve's feet. I am not retelling her myths (of which there are many) but "re-imagining" what she truly could have been behind the lurid headlines, as it were. Of course, being Celtic myths, the Otherworld and the sidhe, the immortal inhabitants of Ireland, are also wound through the romance and action.

Thank you Jules! And feel free to visit Jules Watson online for more information about her latest novel The Swan Maiden.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Karen Harper

2009-02-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

*In your latest novel, MISTRESS SHAKESPEARE, you explore an aspect of William Shakespeare’s life that no other historical fiction writer has delved into. What fascinated you about William’s love affair with Anne Whateley?
Other writers have used Anne Whateley in two dramas I know of, but no one—as far as I can find—has written her story in a historical novel. However, the “other Anne” theory has had its scholarly champions over the years. Proof of Anne’s deep involvement in Will Shakespeare’s life hangs mostly on the fact that an Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton is recorded in a still extant marriage bond as betrothed to Will previous to the entry that he would wed Anne Hathaway of Stratford. (My website www.karenharperauthor.com has more on this, including a link to the marriage bonds, which are in Latin.)

Also, I see Anne W’s footprints other places in Shakespeare’s life. In his will, he left Anne H. his “second best bed,” and there has been much discussion over the years about who got the first best bed. Also, Shakespeare arranged for a friend to inherit the Blackfriar’s Gatehouse where he lived in his heyday in London—in other words, neither it nor its profits went to Anne H. And who was the Dark Lady of his sonnets and the inspiration for many of his feisty, bright female characters? I love writing mysteries and detective stories, and in this case, clues point to “Will’s other wife” having a great impact on his life.

Let me emphasize that I think Anne W. would see herself as Shakespeare’s wife and not just his mistress. They might well have married secretly. In that era, of course, the word mistress meant Mrs. or wife, not only lover or kept woman.

But to your question—everything fascinated me about Anne Whateley. If people can argue about what Will did in his “lost early years” and even whether or not he really wrote the plays, let them take a look at my novel and then argue Anne Whateley.

*How much of MISTRESS SHAKESPEARE is based on fact and how much is fiction?
Nothing that is known of William Shakespeare’s life or times has been fictionalized, although, as in all historical fiction, scenes and dialogue are created. Also, since little is known of Anne W’s life and background—but much can be surmised—I did have to fill in blanks in her life. If Shakespeare himself, with all the research scholars have done on him over the years, has some mystery years in his biography, a lesser known historical character like Anne could be expected to also. In a way, as in all historical fiction, MISTRESS SHAKESPEARE is what Alex Haley, the writer of ROOTS, dubbed ‘faction.’

*Tell us something surprising about women in 15^th century England.
Let me broaden this a bit to what surprised me in general. Although Queen Elizabeth’s true desire was to let each man’s religious conscience be his own private matter, because of her advisors (and the Catholics who hated and wanted to assassinate her), England grew to be quite a police state. My research revealed how closely the queen’s government tried to censor writers, especially the popular playwrights of the day. If some stepped out of line—like Christopher Marlowe (a flamboyant character in this book) or like Will himself—they could be fined, imprisoned, or worse. I think Shakespeare’s genius and popularity with the queen (and in this book, Anne herself) saved his hide more than once.

*How did you go about researching Anne Whateley’s life?
Mostly through researching Shakespeare and his times, but I also read everything I could find about her village of Temple Grafton near Stratford. I researched the Whateley families who lived in the area. And, nothing like research trips to England! I’ve been to the British Isles to research various Tudor-era sites numerous times, including to Stratford. I’ve been an Elizabethan scholar for years, teaching Brit Lit, especially Shakespeare’s plays. My Masters Thesis was on the dark comedy All’s Well That Ends Well. My office walls are lined with books on Shakespeare and his era; I have three framed portraits of the queen herself staring at me right now. I’ve written other novels on the era, including THE LAST BOLEYN and a nine-book mystery series called THE QUEEN ELIZABETH I MYSTERIES. In short, I’m not only a crazed Anglophile but an “Elizabethanophile.”

*What are you working on next?
I’m sure this will come as a surprise—I just completed a historical novel set in Elizabethan England! The tentative title for this is MY LIFE WITH THE TUDORS. It is the fictional biography of Katherine Ashley, who was governess (and foster mother) to Elizabeth Tudor, but had quite a life of her own. As with Anne Whateley’s story, there are blank passages in her life, including who her parents were, so she also makes a wonderful character on which to hang a book. Kat, as Elizabeth always called her, lived an exciting, dangerous life intertwined with the Tudor family, including King Henry VIII, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Jane Seymour, King Edward VI, Queen Katherine Parr, Queen Mary I and, of course, Queen Elizabeth herself. What a cast of characters!

Thank you Karen! And feel free to visit Karen Harper online for more information about her latest novel Mistress Shakespeare.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Robin Maxwell

2009-01-07T18:15:00.000-08:00

You’ve written six novels about 15th and 16th century England and Ireland. What possessed you to abandon the Tudors and head south to Renaissance Italy?

I feel that, for now, I’ve “written myself out” with the most fascinating individuals of that most fabulous and colorful place and time. I always insist on being, if not the first to write about a given character (nearly impossible with such well-known figures) then having a strong and wholly original “angle” or “hook” for my story: Elizabeth I and Robin Dudley’s illegitimate son in The Queen’s Bastard; the intimate mother/daughter connection from beyond the grave in Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn; and the early lives of Anne and Mary Boleyn at the erotic French court in Mademoiselle Boleyn.

For some time I’d been intrigued by the ridiculously fertile mind and staggering accomplishments of Leonardo Da Vinci. Long before The Da Vinci Code, he was a firmly entrenched icon in human culture and consciousness, but my research piled mystery upon mystery about this polymath genius. However, Leonardo was so obsessively secretive about his personal life, and was such a success in that regard, that with all his thousands of pages of notebooks and various works of art, invention, science, architecture and philosophy, very little was revealed about Leonardo the person.

And while we do know something about Da Vinci’s father, Piero – his social climbing and business successes, his almost inhuman coldness to his bastard son, and his struggle to sire legitimate children – we know next to nothing about Da Vinci’s mother. By my own simple logic I deduced that Piero, while an intelligent and resourceful man, never displayed an ounce of creativity, that divine spark that utterly defined Leonardo.

That would, of course, leave his mother as the donor of the “genius genes.” But of the woman who gave birth to one of the world’s most remarkable minds we possess exactly two facts: 1) Her name was Caterina. 2) Leonardo was taken from her the day after his birth to be brought up, as a bastard, in the Vinci home of Piero’s father, Antonio.

Virtually everything else is conjecture. What I can (and did) imagine is how any woman would feel having her child ripped from her arms one day after he was born, knowing that the household he was going to be raised in would be an unloving one.

*Was it a stretch to create an entire novel around a woman with so little history?

All of my research added up to an enormous hole in a most fascinating period, within the life of its most compelling personage. As the writer of historical fiction, these gaping chasms are what I live for. They provide a rare opportunity to create something from little or nothing. I am happily forced to take the tiniest cluster of cells, no larger than a fetal blastula, examine the medium in which it develops, the world into which it is born and grows, its ancestors and associates, until it blossoms into a living, breathing, thinking, feeling human being. With so little known about Caterina, the sky was the limit.

Because I had chosen that she was the parent responsible for not only Leonardo Da Vinci’s brilliance, but his sweet temperament and supreme open-mindedness, I was free to give her the best qualities a woman could possibly have. I made her the mother that every child deserves to have – one who, without becoming a martyr, would do anything and everything to protect that child, shower him with love and tenderness, and provide him with every possible opportunity.

Happily for me, what began as sacrifices Caterina made for Leonardo, turned into the greatest adventure a woman in fifteenth century Italy could imagine in her wildest dreams. Disguising herself as a man, being accepted into the Platonic Academy, becoming the lover of Lorenzo the Magnificent, meeting and conspiring with the greatest minds of the times, were not only boons to Caterina’s character arc, but they were doorways into the topics that I was keen to explore in a book about the period.

*You rarely see Lorenzo’s de'Medici's name tied with Da Vinci’s. Yet in Signora Da Vinci, Lorenzo acts as Leonardo’s “godfather.”
Lorenzo’s tie with Leonardo is pondered in some detail by historians. Some say the maestro was ignored by Il Magnifico, who felt the lowborn artist was “below him socially.” Others go so far as to suggest that Leonardo – like Michelangelo after him – was actually housed for a time in the Palazzo Medici and treated as a son.

While there’s little evidence that the artist lived in the Florence palace, I find it hard to believe that Lorenzo would not have held the insanely talented young man, apprentice to the family’s own court artist, Andrea Verrocchio, in very high regard.

And I believe that in 1484 Leonardo’s leave-taking from Florence for Milan, to the court of Lorenzo’s friend, Ludovico Il Moro, was a well-planned move, probably to protect the well-known heretic and necromancer (scandalized by his sodomy trial) from the worsening religious persecutions he would certainly have suffered had he stayed. Too, Lorenzo was such a man-of-the-people that I cannot imagine him snubbing Leonardo simply because he hadn’t been born noble.

*How plausible is it that a woman could successfully live as a man, as Caterina does in Signora Da Vinci?

Cross-dressing in history has always interested me, especially women who have taken on the guise of a men. The nearly unbelievable examples are females who have put on soldiers’ garb and gone to war for extensive periods, serving on the battlefield with male comrades, only being found out after their deaths.

Caterina, living alone as she does in my story, had it easier. It was my creative choice to have her menstrual cycle disrupted when, through misery, she lost a great deal of weight after Leonardo departed for his apprenticeship in Florence. This simplified certain parts of her existence. My favorite tidbit of historical research on the subject was the “horn” that cross-dressing women used to have a normal-looking male piss in public.

Certainly one needs readers who enjoy a “suspension of disbelief” in this regard, but not only was Caterina’s disguise possible, such behavior was commonplace enough to have several books written about it (refer to my Acknowledgments).

Thank you Robin! And feel free to visit Robin Maxwell online for more information about her latest novel Signora Da Vinci. As I wrote in the blurb for your book, this is one of the best historical novels I read in 2008!

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Katherine Christensen

2008-12-01T03:55:00.000-08:00

*Your novel, A RIB FROM EVE, tells the story of a powerful and educated woman named Malgven as she makes her way through life in the seventh century. What interested you in this remote, yet fascinating, period of history?
After the tragedy of 9-11, like most Americans I found myself searching for answers. As a software engineer I used the internet, researching history, going back in time to try to find where this incredible friction between peoples began. This is when I stumbled upon this amazing time period I like to call "the final taming of the Caucasian tribes". In the fourth century Rome literally surrendered its empire in the west to the Caucasian Tribal Leaders and continued its decay there-after. The most powerful formidable family line, the Merovingians of the Frankish tribes, emerged as clear leaders filling the former void of Roman tyranny. It was now a Europe without borders, and by the sixth century, all other tribes were either paying homage to or being thrashed by these Kings. Caucasian women, during this time period, had incredible influence with their men, almost to the point of enchantment, some hinted.

During Malgven's early seventh century, the patriarchal Catholic Church has gained a strong foothold in these Kingdoms and conversion from Pagan to Christianity is at its peak. Rapidly the Clergy are becoming fed up with the power these women have over their men.

*How much of A RIB FROM EVE is based on fact, and how much is fiction?
Strong influential women were key fixtures among Celtic tribes of the Franks, Saxons, Danes, English and Irish up to and well after the demise of Roman Imperial Power. Fictional and mythical characters are woven among strong historical figures depicting clashes for power as well as the chaos of Pagan conversion to Christianity. The story centers around the family of Malgven, fictional daughter of the historical Merovingian King Dagobert I. Through her family's eyes we bear witness to an era of new beliefs, treacherous times, and violent enemies.

I now own a concise library of both modern and historical literature on the subject which serves as sources for the historical figures and events.

*Your novel includes several creative elements (definitions, footnotes, a map) to enhance the reader's enjoyment of the story. Can you explain what gave you the idea to do this?
One of my all time favorite authors is Ann Rand. I first read one of her novels over twenty years ago and still find myself picking one off the shelf every couple of years to read it yet again. Passion can only describe my feelings about this time period and the facts have proven more fascinating than fiction. My goal is to reach readers on a number of levels: those who just enjoy an entertaining read, those who find themselves fascinated with the time period, and those who enjoy discovering new layers within a novel after they pick it up for the third or fourth read.

*Tell us something surprising about women's lives under the Merovingian King, Dagobert I.
Women in aristocratic families were opinionated, respected, well educated and at times, formidable. Pagan influences were very strong, even in Christianized households. There are many disputes about the historical ordination of women -- that is a woman who held a cleric position such as Deaconess or Episcopa(female Bishop). It is very evident that our ancient sisters' achievements were often neglected or erased by historians. Given women held strong positions of power and influence as priestesses and warriors, prior to the taming of the tribes, it seems only logical this would carry over into the early Caucasian Christian era, for a time in any case.

*What are you working on next?
I often find the greatest inspiration for my novels when I walk some of our pristine wilderness areas in the Pacific Northwest with my four footed hiking buddy, Lucy, a very athletic Australian Shepherd. My senses seem to come alive on the trails allowing me to process storylines, climb inside characters and wrap around historical events as if I were actually there myself.

My next project is a prequel to A RIB FROM EVE featuring the notorious Merovingian Queen divas, Brunhilda and Fredegunda.

The late sixth century lived through one of the most violent Merovingian blood feuds in history fueled by these sisters-in-law. The hands of both dripped with the blood of their own family members, slaughtered at their whims through the kings under their influence. In this next novel, these fierce women and their progeny will interact with pivotal, historical figures and not only witness, but participate in underhanded and appalling political intrigue as well as dastardly behaviors.

By the way, the historical Fredegunda is Malgven's great grandmother. . . .

Thank you Katherine! And feel free to visit Katherine Christensen online for more information about A Rib From Eve.

Q&A With Historical Thriller Author M.J. Rose

2008-11-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

* In your REINCARNATIONIST series, you alternate between the past and the present as your characters discover the possibility of reincarnation. What prompted you to write a series on the subject of reincarnation?
When I was three years old, I told my great grandfather things about his childhood in Russia that there was simply no way I could have known. He became convinced I was a reincarnation of someone in his past. And over time, after more incidents, my mother - a very sane and logical woman -- also came to believe it. Reincarnation was an idea I grew up with that my mom and I talked about and researched together. For years, I wanted to write a novel about someone like my mother - who was sane and logical - who started out skeptical but came to believe in reincarnation. But I was afraid if I did people would think I was a “woo woo weirdo”.

I tried to start the book and the series ten years ago after my mother died but I was too close to the subject and missed her too much to be able to explore it objectively. Every once in while the idea would start to pester me again but I still stayed away from it. Then a few years ago on the exact anniversary of my mom's death my niece, who was a toddler at the time, said some very curious things to me about my mother and I - things she really couldn't have known -- and the pestering became an obsession.

* Your sequel THE MEMORIST take readers back to the time of Ludwig van Beethoven. How did you research 18th century Austria?
I spent almost two months in Vienna - a city whose past is still very much alive- and then I read about a half dozen books about Vienna in the 18th century. I also looked at a lot of art created during the years the book takes place.

*How much of the novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
As with the first novel in this series, THE REINCARNATIONIST, there is a lot of fact mixed in with this fictional tale. The funeral ceremony, musical instruments, culture, customs and flora I describe in the ancient Indus Valley were carefully research and I've tried to keep true to what is known.

In almost all cases dates and descriptions of historical events such as the Congress of Vienna are accurate as are most of the locales in that beautiful city As far as I know the Memorist Society I wrote about in the book doesn't exist but there were many secret societies in Austria that broke off from Freemasons - some of which might still be functional.

Tell us something surprising about Ludwig van Beethoven's time.
The Austrian Orientalist, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall who along with Sir William Jones in England and Silvestre de Sacy in France, were responsible for the great dissemination of Eastern knowledge in late 18th century Europe. In those early days of the age of Enlightenment the study of Eastern philosophy -- including reincarnation -- became very popular. Ludwig Van Beethoven was, in fact among those interested in these doctrines. His own notebooks contain quotes a number of passages from Bhagavad-Gita. As well as a quote from William Jones that was included in his Hymn to Narayena, We know this only, that we nothing know.

*What are you working on next?
The third book in the series, The Hypnotist.

Thank you M.J.! And feel free to visit M.J. Rose online for more information about her latest novel The Memorist.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Jeri Westerson

2008-10-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

In your debut novel VEIL OF LIES: A MEDIEVAL NOIR, a fallen knight named Crispin Guest is investigating the murder of a London merchant who has been found murdered inside a locked room. What made you decide to write medieval mysteries?
I wanted very much to write historical fiction. I've always been a huge fan of historical novels. I grew up with them at home as well as a glut of history books on the Middle Ages. With an Anglophile mother and a father studying to teach medieval history, it wasn't uncommon to have a discussion at the dinner table about the British monarchy or some other point of English history. So when I decided I was going to try for a career as a novelist it wasn't a great leap to choose historical fiction. With a heady background in history under my belt, I began to write, and spent ten years writing novels and trying to get published. It was a no go. This was a time when historicals were all but dead and they were a tough sell not only to editors but to agents. I did manage to land an agent and she worked hard trying to place my manuscripts. Eventually, she suggested that I try writing medieval mysteries instead as something more marketable. I really had no interest in writing mysteries, mostly because I didn't think I could! But like anything you try, you merely have to give it a bit of research to understand what needs to be done. In the end, all novels are really mysteries when you get down to it. The reader doesn't know who is important in the story and they don't know how it's going to turn out. So I learned to write a medieval mystery, giving it that added twist of going darker and edgier and coming up with what I call "Medieval Noir."

* How much of your novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
Interesting question. Crispin and his friends are fictional, but they live in a factual London. The sheriff he deals with—Simon Wynchecombe—was indeed one of the sheriffs of London in 1384 (who could make up a name like that?), and John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, was a large figure in England's politics. He was Crispin's mentor and saved his life when Crispin was convicted of treason.

And there are cases where knights were "degraded", that is, forcibly dispossessed of their knighthood, with varying degrees of nastiness. It's really about the "what if" factor. What if a man lost his knighthood? How could an intelligent and clever man make a living? What were his options? And even though there was no such thing as a medieval private eye, given the circumstances, there could have been. It's not any more implausible than a monk or a nun solving crimes. It might even be more plausible. By using real figures woven with the fictional—and using them plausibly—it makes for a more compelling story.

*Tell us something surprising about women in 14th century England.
I think many people tend to think that woman played a very subservient role in the past, and though they may not have had the same rights as men, they certainly were not helpless. They could own businesses, though usually it was the business their husband started, and if they became widowed they were allowed to continue in that occupation. Which also included blacksmithing. Women were brewsters—ale brewers. They were potters and minstrels. They were allowed a lot of latitude. They even sued and were sued in the courts.

*How is Crispin Guest different from other "detectives", so to speak, in medieval mysteries, a genre which seems to be growing by leaps and bounds?
Is it? I'm happy to hear that! Well, Crispin is a bit different. The beginning of the medieval mystery genre can be attributed to Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael series and soon thereafter there were other medieval mysteries with monks and nuns as detectives. Well, Crispin is definitely no monk! Though there are a variety of other medieval detectives on the page now, Crispin is a bit different in that he is of the hard-boiled variety. It's Sam Spade meets Brother Cadfael. He's a private eye, earning his keep on the mean streets of 14th century London for sixpence a day, plus expenses. He's not called a "private eye", of course. He's called the Tracker. Since his disgrace eight years earlier when he lost his title, his lands, and his livelihood, he had to make his own way with nothing but his wits. He's great fun to write because he's a bit of tragic hero, not really belonging to the people he now must live amongst and never again allowed into the community into which he was bred. That left him with quite a chip on his shoulder, but he also has an extreme sense of honor and a code of chivalry which he will not cross. Puts him in a bit of bind, sometimes.

* How did you research VEIL OF LIES, which depicts London society in the fourteenth century?
I love London; the London of today as well as the London of yesterday. It becomes a bit of a character itself in the books. And I'm lucky in that there is a wealth of information about London. London has been continuously inhabited since Roman times, and even a bit before, though it was never the settlement the Romans made it. There is so much information through archaeology—accidental and intentional—that is learned everyday. And because this is the time of Chaucer, there is a great deal of scholarship on the fourteenth century. This was the era of the Black Death; of English coming into its own as the court language where previously it had been Norman French; tournaments and battles; courtly love; a child king who, by the end of the century, is deposed and murdered. There's a lot going on and a lot of texts written about the era, including a medieval bestseller, The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's masterpiece gives us insight into everyday people, not something you usually get in the histories written by their contemporaries.

So I took my cue from Chaucer's writings, certainly, but from many other sources as well. It's not just about the time period, even though I had a good background in it already. But there is also constant research in weapons, criminal law, heraldry, London itself, Westminster Palace, forensics, clothing, mores, customs, religion, relics, cult of the saints, language, landscape, histories of certain figures...the list goes on and never stops. But it's all good. Most of it never makes it to the novel but becomes backstory, background, or fodder for upcoming books. For instance, there's a lot of archery in the next Crispin book that will be released sometime next year, called SERPENT IN THE THORNS.

Thank you, Jeri! If you'd like to follow Crispin's thoughts, you can read them on his own blog www.CrispinGuest.com or read an excerpt of VEIL OF LIES at www.JeriWesterson.com.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Linnea Heinrichs

2008-10-15T01:16:00.000-07:00

*In your novel THE FIRST VIAL, your protagonist, Lady Katherine, must try to survive not only the Black Death - which has devastated her village - but the machinations of a power-hungry priest who covets her lands. What drew you to this tumultuous period in history?
In high school I had a superb history teacher who stimulated my interest in the past. I belonged to a book club, from time to time ordered nonfiction books on history, and bought a fascinating book called Life in a Medieval Castle by Joseph & Frances Gies. After a visit to Victoria, B.C. which included a tour of a replica of Anne Hathaway's cottage, I was hooked on the period. Gruesome but riveting contemporary drawings further enhanced my interest, giving a tremendous sense of the plague's impact on the people of the medieval period.

*In what ways is Lady Katherine typical of women in the 14^th century.
Marriages were typically arranged by one's family. Katherine's marriage was no different. Paraded before prospective husbands she had but little choice in the matter. A considerable number of women owned property, in general it is thought, because men were frequently absent for war and other purposes. For Katherine to retain ownership in her dead husband's lands would be a fairly normal practice.

*How much of your novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
The onset, virulence and results of the plague are based on fact. The actions of Edward III are based on fact. Victor's description of the battle of Crecy is based on fact. My characters and their story are fiction as are the village and castles in which they lived.

*Tell me something surprising about women in 14^th century England.
There are rebels in every age and the 14^th century had its share. Sometimes these rebels were women. Spectacular tournaments were arranged to celebrate the king's foundation of the Order of the Garter. (An account of the event that prompted the king to form the order is found in The First Vial). In almost every place where the tournaments were held, "a band of women would come as if to share the sport, dressed in divers and marvellous dresses of men – sometimes to the number of forty or fifty ladies, of the fairest and comeliest (though I say not, of the best) among the whole kingdom. Thither they came in party-coloured tunics, one colour or pattern on the right side and another on the left, with short hoods that had pendants like ropes wound round their necks, and belts thickly studded with gold or silver-nay, they even wore, in pouches slung across their bodies, those knives which are called daggers in the vulgar tongue; and thus they rode on choice war-horses or other splendid steeds to the place of tournament." – quoted from The Black Death by George Deaux. Apparently they caused quite a stir and there were rumors some women even went so far as to appear bare-breasted.

*How did you research THE FIRST VIAL?
My research came from a variety of sources – the public library, my book club, book stores and flea markets. Anywhere I found anything pertaining to the medieval period I snatched it up. I picked up costume books, books on building castles, books on knights, armor and jousting. I even found a terrific picture of the cross section of a castle, showing usual room layouts. Most of the descriptions of the plague were drawn from The Black Death by George Deaux. The battle scene was based on what I read in The Hundred Years War by Desmond Seward. The Three Edwards by Thomas B. Costain added information about Edward III. Frances & Joseph Gies' excellent books, Life in a Medieval Castle, Life in a Medieval Village, Women in the Middle Ages and Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages, rounded out the balance of my research material.

Thank you Linnea! And feel free to visit Linnea Heinrichs online for more information about her latest novel The First Vial.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Sharon Kay Penman

2008-10-13T12:24:00.000-07:00

* DEVIL'S BROOD is the final novel in your historical trilogy on Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. What was it about these two larger-than-life monarchs that fascinated you enough to write three books on them?
It is almost as if Henry and Eleanor lived their lives with the needs of historical novelists in mind. We have Eleanor, the only woman to wear the crowns of both England and France, mother of three kings and two queens. She went on Crusade, stirred up scandal, dared to take her destiny into her own hands by wedding Henry, then dared to rebel against him, only to exercise her greatest power in her twilight years after enduring sixteen years of confinement as Henry's prisoner.

And then we have Henry, who hired mercenaries and sailed off to England to overthrow King Stephen at the ripe age of fourteen. When he ran out of money, he had the audacity to ask Stephen to pay his way back to Normandy, and Stephen was so amazed and amused that he did! Henry then stunned their world by wedding the greatest heiress in Christendom. Eleanor had been divorced by the French king for her failure to give him a son; she gave Henry five. By twenty-one, Henry was King of England, and for the next thirty years he was the dominant figure in continental politics. When he was finally defeated, it took his own son to do it. History's verdict has been kind; Henry is judged to have been a great king. But as a father, he was grievously flawed. It was his tragedy that he loved his sons, yet he could not trust them.

Devil's Brood is really about the implosion of a family, carried out on an international stage. We have a husband and wife at war, intimate enemies who could only watch helplessly as their sons turned upon one another. And then, with an awful inevitability, the final act was played out, father against son, with one last betrayal upon Henry's deathbed, the most bitter of all. Now what writer could resist a story like that?

* How much of DEVIL'S BROOD is based on fact and how much is fiction?
As improbable as it may sound, Devil's Brood is based very much upon actual history. Obviously imagination has to play a role, but the book has a strong factual foundation. The internecine warfare between Henry and Eleanor, Henry and his sons, his sons against one another--it all happened as I relate.

What I do is fill in the blanks, proving motivation for their actions. For example, the facts indicate that Henry's son Geoffrey had a happy marriage with Constance, the Duchess of Brittany. They were almost always together once they wed, a good indication of the health of a medieval marriage. The reverse is true, too, of course, as in the marriage of Geoffrey's brother Richard and Berengaria of Navarre. So what I attempted to do in Devil's Brood was to show why Geoffrey and Constance were drawn to each other; they had common goals and were similar in temperament and ambition, determined to safeguard Brittany and their children's future.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 12th century England.
What an interesting question. I hope you don't mind if I expand the question to include Wales, for the greatest surprises are to be found in the land of the red dragon. None of this will come as a suprirse to those who've read my book Here Be Dragons. But it is bound to be startling to those who have not. A Welshwoman could not be forced into marriage against her will. Welsh law provided specific grounds for the dissolution of a marriage; this put Wales at odds with the Catholic Church, but gave Welshwomen a greater degree of independence than their sisters in England and France. A Welshwoman could divorce her husband if he contracted leprosy, if he was three times unfaithful, if he dared to bring a concubine into their house, if he was impotent, or if he had foul breath. He in turn could divorce her only if she'd claimed falsely to be a virgin on their wedding night, if her marriage portion was less than her family had promised, or if he found her in compromising circumstances with another man. And she had the right to claim custody of their children if the marriage ended, a right unknown in the rest of Christendom. The husband got the first child, the wife the second. Welsh law does not specify what happened if there were more than two children!

Returning to their less fortunate sisters in less enlightened countries, I initially found it surprsing that a widow did not have the right of guardianship of her own children. This was true mainly of the highborn, where property was at stake. The wardship of a young heir or heiress was a valuable commodity, too valuable to "waste" upon the widow when it could be used to reward a king or earl's supporters. Sometimes the woman was allowed to retain the physical custody of her children, but she had no legal say in their future.

Widows could be forced into marriage against their will, too. This happened to a character in Devil's Brood, the heiress Hawisa of Aumale, who wed Henry's close friend, the Earl of Essex. When he died suddenly soon after Richard became king, Richard "gave" Hawisa to one of his knights, for she was a great heiress in her own right. She balked at the marriage and Richard then seized her lands, holding them until she yielded. After a few years, she was widowed again and again Richard immediately married her off to one of his friends. When she was widowed for the third time in King John's reign, she paid John the vast sum of five thousand marks for the right to remain unmarried.

* In which ways did Eleanor of Aquitaine defy the conventions of her time?
Eleanor always saw herself, first and foremost, as the Duchess of Aquitaine, and marriage to the kings of France and England did not change her outlook. While on Crusade to the Holy Land with Louis, the French king, she objected to her husband's refusal to come to the aid of Edessa. When he insisted his crusader's vow obligated him to continue on to Jerusalem, she announced that she and all of her vassals would remain in Antioch. Louis was stunned by her defiance, by her meddling in those matters best left to men, and his advisers convinced him that she had been bewitched and/or seduced by her uncle Raymond, the Prince of Antioch, who had urgently argued that the crusaders must go to the rescue of Edessa. They could understand Eleanor's actions only if they were the result of adultery and incest, for to medieval men, Woman was above all a sexual being, a daughter of Eve, weak and easily led astray, led into sin. The result was that Eleanor was taken from Antioch by force. This scandal was to shadow her for the rest of her life; more than forty years later, an English chronicler was to interrupt his lavish praise of Eleanor's intelligence and energy with a snide, "Many of us know what I wish none of us did know. This same queen was in Jerusalem...Not another word, please...Hush!"

This was not the first time that Eleanor would pay a high price for defying convention. But she continued to blaze her own path. When her marriage to the French king ended, she shocked all of Christendom by quietly and quickly wedding Henry Fitz Empress, the nineteen year old Duke of Normandy, an act of open defiance to the man who was her liege lord as well as her former husband. She would later cause an even greater scandal by joining her sons in rebellion against Henry. History was rife with rebellious sons, but never a rebel queen, and while Henry forgave their sons--repeatedly--he never forgave Eleanor.

After Henry's death, Eleanor then acted as Richard's mainstay. Crossing the Alps in the dead of winter, she brought Richard's bride to him in Italy. She did what she could to keep her faithless son John from heeding the siren songs of the French king, taking military action against John's castles in Richard's absence. When Richard was taken prisoner on his way home from Crusade, she assumed responsibility for collecting the vast ransom demanded and personally brought it to Germany to secure his release. When Richard's captor, the duplicitous Holy Roman Emperor, pulled an eleventh-hour double-cross and demanded that Richard do homage to him in order to gain his freedom, Eleanor was the one who pragmatically and cynically advised her son to do so. And she played a major role in gaining the English crown for her youngest son, John, after Richard's death.

You notice that I've made no mention of Eleanor as Queen of the Courts of Love. This is one of the many myths that sprang up around Eleanor in the centuries after her death. Another is the legend that she confronted Henry's mistress, Fair Rosamund, in the maze at Woodstock and gave the unfortunate girl the choice of poison or a dagger. When Rosamund died in 1176, having piously retired to the nunnery at Godstow in her final illness, Eleanor was Henry's prisoner and had been his prisoner for the past three years.

Eleanor was a patron of the troubadors, just as her husband, her sons Richard and Geoffrey, and her daughters were. But she was never a disciple of Courtly Love. She was a political being, a duchess, a queen, a woman who enjoyed the exercise of power no less than either of her royal husbands did, and she played the game of statecraft with a sure hand, especially in the last fifteen years of her life, for unlike Henry, she'd learned from her mistakes. I think she would be very pleased that her fame has lasted for almost nine hundred years, not as the Queen of England or France, but as Eleanor of Aquitaine.

* What are you working on next?
I am going to miss Henry very much; after all, he was my houseguest for more than fifteen years. But I wasn't ready to turn the page. I wanted to continue the Angevin saga and I am happy to report that my publisher and editor agreed with me. So my next book will be Lionheart, continuing the story of Eleanor and her sons Richard and John and the daughter most like her celebrated mother, Joanna, Queen of Sicily.

Thank you Sharon! And feel free to visit Sharon Kay Penman online for more information about her latest novel Devil's Brood.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Robin Maxwell

2008-10-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

* In your latest novel MADEMOISELLE BOLEYN, you explore a period in Anne Boleyn's life that no other historical fiction writer has delved into very deeply. What fascinated you about Anne's early life and education?
First, that despite so many historical novels about Anne that have been written, none had touched on her education at the French court, which became so vital to the person she became. It was there she learned how to be the sophisticated young lady of many graces -- dancing, singing, playing the lute -- being the ultimate coquette. But she received an extremely progressive religious education from King Francois' sister, Duchess Marguerite, that set her apart from every other English girl when she returned to Henry VIII's court. While everyone else was an unquestioning Catholic and beholden to priests for all spiritual guidance, Anne was already conversant with Lutheran ideas and reading the bible herself in the French language. Later, of course, she was an important player in bringing the Protestant Reformation to England. As the duchess, as well as Francois' mother, were his closest political counselors, Anne also realized that a woman could be something more than a quiet, meek little plaything or brood mare to her husband. Besides that, Anne's early years in Francois' inner circle as a bright, very well-thought-of young woman, held her in good stead with Francois, who later became the only European monarch who supported Anne's marriage to Henry. She was witness to what was considered the most licentious court in all of Europe, and watched as her sister Mary was passed around from King to courtier to courtier, receiving the nickname "The English Mare," since all the men had "ridden" her. Finally, the fact that Anne was so precocious at such a young age intrigued me. She learned French so young (at eight, during a one-year stint in the Burgundian court) -- that she was used as a translator between the French and English ladies by age nine. This was one extremely accomplished female. It's no wonder that Henry was obsessed by her and moved mountains to have her.

* How much of MADEMOISELLE BOLEYN is fact and how much is fiction?
Strangely, this book may be the most fact-based of all my books, except perhaps its sequel (published in 1997) The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn. Where I played with "the holes in history" the most were around Anne's association with Leonardo Da Vinci. There is no doubt that they were both part of Francois' small "inner circle" during the time I wrote about, and most certainly knew each other, but it was my imagination that had Leonardo befriending Anne and becoming her mentor. The French king's deep friendship with Da Vinci was a fact, as was the secret tunnel between the royal residence of Amboise and Leonardo's manor house called Cloux. That the king took his nearest and dearest through that tunnel on a "magical mystery tour" was a scene I imagined, but it is something that I believe probably happened (though not documented in any history book). Her wonderful relationships with Queen Claude and Duchess Marguerite were well known. That Anne was present at the "Field of Cloth of Gold" is probable, but not provable. I believe she was there, and I wrote a long and important set-piece that takes place at that celebration attended by the entire French court and the English Court on a plain just inland from the coast of Calais.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 16th century France.
They bathed. I had always heard that the French, like most Europeans, never bathed and were quite filthy. But the wealthier folks not only took baths, but took them communally. They had bath attendants and used flowers and herbs and oils in the tub and even ate on special trays while gossiping the day away in the hot water. I thought it was so interesting that I put scene in the book that takes place during one of these soaks.

* In your next historical novel, you will be writing on the mother of Leonardo Da Vinci. Again, this is a subject that no other historical fiction writer has touched (I believe). In what ways was Da Vinci's mother an extraordinary woman?
The truth about Leonardo's mother, Caterina, is that we know almost nothing about her. There are stories that she was a middle-eastern slave girl, a servant, and a woman "of good blood." Some say she was from Vinci, some from another town. The age she was supposed to have given birth to Leonardo was anywhere from 15-25. All agree that Leonardo's father, Piero -- a well-to-do and quite ambitious Notary of the Republic -- did not choose to marry her, and that the infant was taken from Caterina the day after he was born, to be brought up in Piero's father's household.

Of all my historical novels, this had had the largest "hole" to fill (with regard to my main character). I had to use extrapolation to a very great degree. But my thinking was, Leonardo's father was a petty bureaucrat who gave his son no love (leaving nothing to him in his will) and didn't appear to have a creative bone in his body. The genius of Leonardo had to come from somewhere, and it wasn't a difficult leap to believe it sprang from his mother.

Some historians suggest that despite being separated from her son and her lover Piero (who married another girl nine months after Leonardo's birth), that Caterina became his wetnurse and very well might have continued seeing him even after she'd been married off to another local man. This gave me the idea (spoken of in history books) that this mother deeply loved her bastard son and went to great lengths to be close to him. Imagine how humiliating it would have been for this girl who bore Piero's child and was not considered "good enough" to marry, going to work as a servant -- wetnurse in that household -- and having to watch her lover marry another young woman. It was a fact like this that gave me the idea that Caterina loved Leonardo so much that she would actually follow him into Florence where he was apprenticed at thirteen, in order to watch over him as he grew to manhood.

Thank you Robin! And feel free to visit Robin Maxwell online for more information about her latest novel Mademoiselle Boleyn and her upcoming book Signora Da Vinci.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author India Edghill

2008-09-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

In your first novel, QUEENMAKER, you wrote about King David's wife Michal, and in your second, WISDOM'S DAUGHTER, Michal's influence affects the lives of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. What was it about Michal that made her so compelling? Michal is an amazing character. She's the only woman in the Bible of whom it's specifically noted that she loved a man. ("And Michal Saul's daughter loved David…" 1 Samuel 18:20) Her life parallels the rise of the monarchy, illuminating the changes in rulership styles. I told QUEENMAKER entirely from Michal's point of view – and was surprised to discover how much influence she had on WISDOM'S DAUGHTER, although Michal dies before that book takes place. In WISDOM'S DAUGHTER, Michal is seen through the eyes of others, and they see different things – including the fact that Michal learned to manipulate power as cleverly as any other politician.

Your new novel, DELILAH (St. Martin's Press, the end of 2009), is about the notorious Delilah and her relationship with Samson. What was it about Delilah that fascinated you? The most fascinating thing is how little we know about this woman who brought down the most powerful hero of his time. I must confess that I was heavily influenced in favor of writing about Delilah because Cecil B. DeMille's 1949 SAMSON & DELILAH is one of my favorite movies. Then there's the rather peculiar, perverse erotic subtext of Judges 13-16, where the story of Samson is told. You keep wanting to ask these two people what they were thinking!

How much of Delilah's life is fact and how much is fiction? Since we know nothing about Delilah except her name – people usually assume she was a Philistine, but all the Bible says is that Samson "…loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah." (Judges 16:4) – everything about the Delilah of THE IVORY GATE is fiction. I tried to set her in a specific time and place. Despite our modern usage of "Philistine" to mean "uneducated boor", the Philistines were the most cultured and artistic people of their era. Ancient Ascalon was a beautiful city to work with. It was a jewel; a rich trading capital, with a massive road that led from the harbor to the city gate. I imagine it as being as vibrant and volatile as New York City.

Tell us something surprising about life in Delilah's time (circa 11th century BC) The most surprising fact I ran across was that there was a dog cemetery in ancient Ascalon! Archaeologists say the dogs weren't sacrifices, but had been carefully and loving buried after a natural death. That was the basis for my temple "therapy dogs".

What was the average woman's life like in ancient Canaan? The average woman ran her household and raised her children. She spent a lot of time spinning and weaving; grinding grain and baking. She would have been responsible for the household gods. Woman's work's never done, and it's always been cyclical.

In what way is Delilah distinctive of her time? In what way is she unusual? She's of her time in her faith and her dedication to that faith. She's unusual in the strength of her loves and hates.

Are you working on another historical novel, and if so, what is it about? Yes. Actually, it's already written. It's called THE MIRROR'S DAUGHTERS, and retells the story of Esther, interweaving the stories of Queen Vashti and Esther.

Thank you, India! And feel free to visit India Edghill online for more information about her upcoming release Delilah! To read an excerpt, please click here!

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author C. W. Gortner

2008-07-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

* In your historical novel THE LAST QUEEN, you write about the
daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella who becomes known as Juana La
Loca . What was it about Juana that compelled you to write her story?
I’ve been fascinated by Juana since childhood. I was raised in Spain, and
her story is woven into the very landscape. Every schoolchild learns about Juana;
we even sing a rather disrespectful rhyme about her. But I had occasion to
play in the ruins of the summer castle her parents once owned, and I used
to think that she must have once stood where I was, looked out at the same
view, touched the same stones. When I first visited the Cathedral in Granada
where she’s buried, I was shocked to see her stone image on her tomb. She
looked so alone. I couldn’t reconcile my vision of a young, vibrant princess with
that effigy of a tired and tormented queen. I wondered what would it be like to
hear her side of the story, which has always frankly maligned her? I wrote my
first short story about her in childhood; years later, when I embarked on my
thesis for my MFA, the nonfiction paper I’d drafted on her and other queens of
her era transformed into the first seeds of the novel.

* How much of THE LAST QUEEN is based on fact and how
much is fiction?
Most of THE LAST QUEEN is based on fact; the fictional part is
how I chose to interpret those facts. It’s like the grout between the bricks:
what holds the facts together is, for me, the essence of historical fiction. I’m a
devoted researcher; I spent nearly six years researching Juana, yet what most
struck me as I compiled piles of documents and books was how singularly
dedicated history seemed to be to promulgating her alleged insanity. It was
almost like a conspiracy. I therefore became a sleuth. Facts are facts; they can’t
be altered, but we all know that life is incredibly complex and often there’s more
than one side to a story.Juana herself has left almost nothing in her own hand.
We know very little about her actual thoughts and emotions; everything she
said and did was channeled via historical accounts by others, mostly men,
whose prejudices reflect their era and the story they were paid to tell (yes,
most historians were hired and paid by the current ruler). I had to take all this
into account. Thus while I strived to stay true to established facts, my novel is
a fictional interpretation of Juana in that she herself gets to tell her side of the
story. Still, for readers who might wonder, the wilder episodes of her life, including
her giving birth to Charles V in a privy closet, her rebellion at La Mota and
attack on Philip’s mistress, her frantic attempt to escape on horseback while
pregnant and opening of the coffin, are corroborated by several contemporary
sources.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 15th century Spain.
They had more freedoms than we might suppose. Juana’s mother, Queen
Isabella I, was a feminist to a certain extent. She patronized women teachers
(the first in Europe) at the University of Salamanca and she had more ruling
power as queen than her husband Ferdinand did as king. Because of Spain’s
historical complexity and its divisions under various kingdoms before Isabella
and Ferdinand’s rule, women held complex feudal rights over property and inheritance
that were unknown elsewhere. Husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers could be away
for years fighting the Moors and others; they often died doing so. The medieval Spanish
woman thus became a legal guardian of her estates. It’s interesting to note that during
Isabella’s reign, for example, France prohibited female succession and in England only
one woman had ever held the throne (Maude) and her accession caused a devastating
civil war with her cousin, Stephan. Spain crowned the first female monarch of the 16^th century,
and she united a historically fractured and extremely divisive country under one rule.
Her methods have been widely criticized by historians who judge her by today’s standards,
and indeed she did some terrible things, as did many of her male counterparts. Still, she
ruled and she ruled well against many odds – an extraordinary accomplishment not seen
again until Elizabeth I.

* Although Juana was the Queen of Spain with Philip as her consort, her husband retained more power than she did. Why was this?
Actually, it was the opposite. Juana retained more power; in fact, she had all the power and
this was what fueled her battle with Philip. As sovereign queen of Castile, who also stood to
inherit Aragón upon her father Ferdinand’s demise, Juana stepped into her mother’s shoes.
Philip, like Ferdinand before him, held his title as king-consort of Castile only through her.
He could never have been declared king of Spain without Juana as his wife; and he would
never have inherited her crown if she died before him—but, according to Isabella’s codicil
of succession, Juana and Philip’s sons could inherit, as in fact the eldest one, Charles, did,
becoming the Emperor Charles V. What Philip did wield was that he was the Hapsburg
Emperor’s son and heir; he therefore could draw on the Hapsburg resources and alliances,
such as with France, which had the potential to wreak havoc in Spain. The Imperial money
and clout, coupled with France’s ancient enmity toward Spain and his own attack on her
mental ability to rule, were powerful forces he aligned against Juana. It is testament to her
considerable mettle that she didn’t back down, but rather fought him in return with
everything she had.

* Are you working on another historical fiction novel, and if so, who will be
your protagonist?
I’ve completed a novel on Catherine de Medici that will be published by Ballantine Books.
She’s another powerful woman in history who’s been unjustly maligned and she proved a
daunting subject, not only in terms of the length and intricacy of her life, but also in understanding someone who’s been accused of some of the 16^th century’s most heinous crimes, including the Massacre of St Bartholomew. Her black legend has so obscured her, I had to dig deep to uncover the person she might have been. I discovered she had an astonishing gift for compromise and a sincere desire for peace, even as she labored under constraints that would have felled a lesser queen. She had an amazingly tumultuous life; her relationships with her six surviving children, with the rapacious Guise family and the Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny; the bizarre trio she unwillingly made with her husband Henri and his mistress Diane de Poitiers— these are fascinating, complex events for an historical fiction writer to explore. Though I’ve had to do a lot of work on this novel, she’s been worth every moment, and I hope I’ve done her some justice.

Thank you, Christopher! And feel free to visit C.W. Gortner online for more information
about his fantastic debut novel The Last Queen!

Q&A With Historical Fiction Authors Mary Reed and Eric Mayer

2008-07-01T12:49:00.000-07:00






* In your historical mystery series with Eric Mayer, beginning with the
novel ONE FOR SORROW and now up to SEVEN FOR A SECRET, John,
lord chamberlain to the emperor Justinian, finds himself investigating a
series of murders. What was it about 6th century Constantinople that
fascinated you enough to make it the setting of a suspense series?
Constantinople during the reign of Emperor Justinian I occupied an uneasy
position between the classical and medieval worlds. The classical world
was, in fact, dying or perhaps metamorphizing into the medieval world,
although the people who lived in the Eastern Roman Empire probably
wouldn't have realized that. They still thought of themselves as, and
referred to themselves as, Romans. Yet this Rome, while retaining the
name and much of the architecture -- the public forums, the baths, the
Hippodrome -- and laws, traditions, and literature of classical Rome, was
fundamentally different in that it was officially Christian rather than
pagan. Nevertheless, the eastern empire preserved much of what we
associate with the early Roman empire for 1,000 years. It seemed a
complex and fascinating setting, one which hasn't been used when
we began writing John's adventures, and one that people generally haven't
heard much about, even though there is a wealth of scholarly material
available.



* Your latest novel SEVEN FOR A SECRET continues to follow John, the
lord chamberlain, as he attempts to solve crimes whilst  staying out of
the way of the fearful Empress Theodora. How much is of Theodora's
character is based on fact and how much is fiction?
That probably depends on whether one considers Procopius' Secret History
to be fact or fiction. A great deal of what is known abut Theodora,
particularly with regard to her personality, comes from this notorious
account by her contemporary. Procopius had written the well-regarded
factual A History of the Wars covering the period, and also The
Buildings, a panegyric to Justinian's architectural accomplishments but
his scurrilous Secret History was, not suprisingly, never made public
during his lifetime. It is essentially an extended rant against the
emperor and empress which, among other things, depicts Justinian as a
demon and Theodora as quite thrilled at the prospect of marrying the
King of the Demons.

There remains a lot of debate about how much of the Secret History is
rooted in reality and how much sprang full blown out of Procopius'
apparent hatred of the imperial couple. For dramatic effect, we tend to
adopt Procopius' views.

There is no doubt, however, based on the indisputable historic record,
that Theodora took an unusually large role in governing and so we are
probably safe in depicting her as strong-willed and determined to have
her own way.


* Tell us something surprising about women in 6th century
Constantinople. 
A law against what we now call stalking appears in Justinian's laws,
one of which deals with infliction of injuries and states generally
speaking this means "anything which is done without any right".
Among examples listed are "constantly following a matron,
or a young boy or girl below the age of  puberty..." (1913 translation by
J. B. Moyle at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/ijust10.txt )


* In which ways did Empress Theodora defy the conventions of her time?
For one thing former actresses were not supposed to be married to
emperors. In fact, there was a law against such marriages which Emperor
Justin changed, shortly before his death, to allow his nephew and
designated heir Justinian to marry Theodora.

The term actress in those days was more or less synonymous with
prostitute, so Theodora confounded all conventions by rising far above
her proper station. She was the daughter of a bear trainer and mistress
to a wealthy aristocrat before she arrived on Justinian's doorstep.

As if that all wasn't bad enough, she was to all practical purposes
Justinian'sco-ruler. There is some evidence that she involved herself in
machinations behind her husband's back, some even contrary to his
policies, although the pair might have contrived for her to seem to do
this for political reasons. And this in an era when the term power
couple hadn't been invented! Which is not to say it wasn't a love match
as well. Theodora died twenty years before Justinian and he never remarried.



*What are you working on next, and will the ever-resourceful John
continue to be your protagonist?
John will continue to be our protagonist, but in the next book he will
not be Lord Chamberlain since it is a prequel, taking place before he
rose to that position. The story is set during the Nika riots of 532
when angry mobs almost forced Justinian from the throne. It has been
recorded that Theodora convinced him not to flee, thus assuring that all
of Justinian's accomplishments would come to pass, from rebuilding the
Hagia Sophia, completing codification of the laws, and reconquering
Africa and Italy. But, of course, in order for that to happen there is
also the little matter of a murder John has to solve. Procopius somehow
neglected to mention that. Perhaps he had a gripe against John as well.
So we're going to tell that missing part of the story.

Thank you Mary and Eric! And feel free to visit Mary Reed and Eric
Mayer online for more information about their seventh novel Seven for a Secret!

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Catherine Delors

2008-05-31T19:23:00.000-07:00

In your debut novel MISTRESS OF THE REVOLUTION, your
protagonist, Gabrielle de Montserrat, is caught up in the doomed
world of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. What drew you to write
about this period of French history?
Oddly enough, I had no particular prior interest in the French Revolution,
though I knew of its importance in the formation of modern Western thought.
I had studied the Revolution in high school, of course, but I had found it
incomprehensible. All I understood was that most people, including many
in the nobility, were extremely unhappy with the Old Regime, and wanted
things to change. What I did not grasp was how the chain of events unfolded,
how an idealistic endeavor turned into a national and international conflagration.

All that changed with a casual conversation I had with my late father. We were
talking about the names of the streets in the little town of Vic, in Auvergne, where
I spent all the summers of my childhood. My father asked whether I knew
Coffinhal, after whom Coffinhal Street was named. And I answered: “Oh,
he must be a former mayor, right?” Wrong! My father told me that the man had
been the Vice President of the Revolutionary Tribunal.And in the same breath,
he mentioned the Chevalier des Huttes, who had been an officer in the regiment
of the Queen’s Bodyguards. He had died to save Marie-Antoinette and
was also from Vic. And there was the infamous revolutionary
Carrier, who was born in Yolet, a few miles away.

I was amazed: a tiny town, with three characters who played a substantial
part in the Revolution! I had heard of Carrier, of course, because of the
massacres he ordered in Nantes, but the other two, Coffinhal and the Chevalier
des Huttes, were unknown quantities. The Chevalier was by all accounts the
perfect gentleman, and I discovered that local legend had him in love with
Marie-Antoinette.

But I was in for a surprise with Coffinhal. Many contemporaries had feared
and hated him, and Michelet, the great (and greatly flawed) 19^th century h
istorian, depicts him as blindly devoted to Robespierre, ruthless and violent.
I thought Coffinhal would make a wonderful protagonist in a novel. I must say
that he has been very cooperative as a character, and even “winked” at me
during a visit to the National Archives in Paris, where I stumbled, without at
all looking for it, upon the original decree appointing him to the Revolutionary
Tribunal.

How much of your novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
Gabrielle, my heroine, is fictional. The Montserrats were inspired by
actual people, but I didn’t wish to hurt anyone’s feelings, so I changed
all names and, hopefully, deleted any references that would have made
the actual family identifiable.

I was very fortunate with Coffinhal because, though he came from a
well-to-do family of attorneys, little is known of him personally
before and even during the Revolution.The only thing that is ascertained
about his early to mid-twenties is that he gave up the practice of medicine,
and left Auvergne, to become an attorney in Paris. Why not ascribe this
dramatic change in his life to a failed love affair with a noblewoman?
That was inspired by an incident in the life of another revolutionary,
Lazare Carnot.

The – fictional - relationship between Gabrielle and Coffinhal during the
Revolution, was inspired by the true Osselin affair, to which I refer in 
Mistress of the Revolution. So whenever I needed to fill the blanks,
I did so based on historical fact.

And the physical appearance of Coffinhal, as reported by his contemporaries,
was indeed what I describe in the book: a sort of giant, ugly, with a booming voice.
Perhaps that was one of the things that attracted me to him. I have always had a
soft spot for ugly men.

Tell us something surprising about women in 18th century France.
For most women, pre-revolutionary France was a harsh place.
They passed from the near absolute authority of a father (or, as in
Gabrielle’s case, a guardian) to that of a husband. They were totally
at the mercy of said father, guardian or husband. Widows had a measure
of independence, though not always financial independence. That is what
I show in Gabrielle’s story.

Women, apart of course from Marie-Antoinette, or royal mistresses
during prior reigns, had very little power. The exception was within the
Church. This is what I show with the character of Gabrielle’s sister Hélène,
the Abbess of Noirvaux. Not only is Hélène an authority figure in the moral
sense of the term, but she wields a great deal of material power. As Abbess,
she manages the financial affairs of a wealthy convent, and she has the right of
high justice over its estates (which means that she supervises a court of law.)
Helene is a woman in a position of authority and power.

This reminds me of MIDDLEMARCH, to me one of the greatest novels in the
English language. George Eliot describes Dorothea as a woman stifled by the
desultory pursuits and rarefied social atmosphere of her class and time, 19^th
century English gentry. Her extraordinary human qualities only elicit mild ridicule.
Eliot hints that, in another time and place, Dorothea might have become a Saint
Theresa of Avila. I believe that is true. In extremely patriarchal societies,
like 18^th century France, the Church often offered women the sole opportunity
to live up to their potential.

How did growing up in France influence your writing of this book?
In so many ways! First, the fact that French is my first language obviously
facilitated my research, since most primary documents are only available
in the original language, and English translations are sometimes unreliable.

More importantly, I have strong emotional connections with Auvergne,
in particular Vic, Coffinhal’s birthplace, and Paris, the main locales of
MISTRESS OF THE REVOLUTION. When I write about Gabrielle
falling in love at first sight with Paris as a teenager, and remaining
in love with the city for the rest of her life, that’s purely autobiographical.

And still more importantly, the fact that I was born and raised in France
allowed me to avoid a pitfall of some English-language novels about the
Revolution: francophobia. The French Revolution is part of my heritage.
This does not mean that I am blinded to its mistakes, or to the atrocities
committed in its name. But it does mean that I recognize its achievements,
such as the abolition of slavery in 1794 and the Declaration of Rights, which
inspired the American Bill of Rights.

How did you go about researching for MISTRESS OF THE
REVOLUTION?
The French Revolution is almost too easy to research. The
documents are written in quasi-modern French, very easy to read, there are no
ancient scripts to decipher, and a tremendous amount of primary materials is
available online. I listed my sources on my website.

I read scholarly works as a complement to the rest of the research. I will readily
admit that I much prefer working from source materials, such as trial transcripts,
speeches, letters of the time. Also, since MISTRESS OF THE REVOLUTION
is a fictional memoir,I read many real memoirs. I wanted to see for myself how people
recounted the events, howthey looked back on them, what their emotional reactions were.
That was only possible with first-hand accounts.

Thank you, Catherine! And feel free to visit
Catherine Delors online for more information
about her novel Mistress of the Revolution!

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Deanna Raybourn

2008-04-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

* In your historical mystery series, beginning with the novel
SILENT IN THE GRAVE, your heroine, Lady Julia Grey, finds
herself entangled with the mysterious Nicholas Brisbane in attempting
to solve a series of murders. What was it about Victorian England that
fascinated you enough to make it the setting of a romantic suspense
series?
When I first started to write Silent in the Grave, it was set in the Regency.
I got about fifty pages in when I realized that setting—bright, sparkling, fun—
was completely wrong. I needed something darker and grittier. I immediately
thought of the late Victorian period. There’s something atmospheric about the
gaslights and fogbound streets, and that suited the book much better.

* Your second novel SILENT IN THE SANCTUARY continues to
follow Lady Julia Grey as she helps Brisbane investigate the murder
of a man in Belmont Abbey. How much of the novel is based on fact
and how much is fiction?
Silent in the Sanctuary is entirely fictitious. I based Silent in the Grave on a
case in France, albeit with a string of female victims. I turned and twisted that
story until it was completely different, but it did have its roots in a historical case. 
Sanctuary was my chance to play with the classic mystery country house setting.
I wanted an opportunity for Julia to investigate a murder and explore her relationship
with Nicholas Brisbane outside of London, without all of the distractions of city life.
In this case, I chose the setting and developed the plot from there.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 19th century England. 
Women in nineteenth-century England were not just sitting by the fire,
needlepointing cushions and waiting for their husbands to come home.
They were becoming doctors and investigative journalists. They were
demonstrating for the vote for women, for children’s and animals’ and
workers’ rights. Some were advocating vegetarianism and free love.
Others were traveling independently and often completely alone.They
were dynamic and resourceful and much more interesting than people
sometimes realize.

* In which ways does Lady Julia defy the conventions of her time?
Julia starts off as a rather predictable Victorian lady, but widowhood is
really the making of her. She decides that life is too short to be dull, so she
throws off her widow’s weeds and takes control of her own money.
She forms friendships  that polite society would frown upon, and she engages
in a flirtation with Nicholas Brisbane that puts her completely beyond the pale
socially. The beauty of her situation is that, because of her money and title and
the support of her family, she doesn’t much care what anyone else thinks.

* What are you working on next, and will the ever-resourceful
Lady Julia Grey continue to be your protagonist?
I am just putting the finishing touches on Silent on the Moor, March ’09.
After that I am very excited because my next project is something a little different.
I will be writing a mysterious historical novel set in Scotland and Transylvania in 1898.
Once that book is finished, it should be right back to the Julia Grey series for me.

Thank you, Deanna! And feel free to visit Deanna Raybourn online
for more information about her second novel in the Julia Grey Series, Silent in the Sanctuary!
If you haven't already read her first novel Silent in the Grave, do yourself a favor and pick it up!

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Karen Harper

2008-04-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

* Your latest historical mystery, HOODED HAWKE, is the ninth in a fantastic series set in the court of Elizabeth I. Which of Elizabeth I's historical qualities made you think she would be as good of a sleuth as a queen?
THE HOODED HAWKE is the ninth book in my QUEEN ELIZABETH I MYSTERY SERIES. Elizabeth Tudor makes a great amateur sleuth because she is extremely intelligent and has the might and means (at least after book #1, where she is a virtual prisoner of her royal sister) to investigate crimes. Of course, the trick is to make her also personally endangered in each book--but her life was often on the line. I also surround the queen with a coterie (her "Privy Plot Council") to help her solve crimes.

* Given that your novels fall into the categories of both historical and suspense, how much of your mysteries are based on fact?
All of the nine books in the series are based on some momentous event (or even an actual murder) that occurred in Bess Tudor's life at the time of the story. The other fun thing is that each book focuses on some aspect of Tudor life: herbs, mazes, medicine, London, sports... I do a lot of research, then try to make it seem so blended into the story that no one will notice. I've been thrilled to have readers tell me it's a great way to "enjoy" history.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 16th century England.
Let me mention two things about women in 16th century England that surprised me. I am amazed that so many women--for the first time in English history--were quite well educated. The queen was, of course, but also a woman like Mildred Cecil (married to Elizabeth's chief secretary) and others. However, something that appalled me was how "cruelly," at least by out standards, children were treated. Young girls were hardly coddled and were too often seen as marriage pawns. Lady Jane Grey's life is a tragic example of this, but it was quite common among the upper classes.

* The first book in your Queen Elizabeth I Mystery Series is THE POYSEN GARDEN. Did you know when you began the series that someday you would be writing book 9?
When I wrote book #1 of the series, THE POYSON GARDEN (each title in the series has a word with an "antique" spelling), I had no idea how many books there would be. I did want to keep the queen quite young in her reign, so that she could physically investigate and not be the older version of herself with the white make-up, etc.

*Will there be any more adventures of Elizabeth I, and if so, when will the tenth book in your series come out?
So, alas and alack, nine books will be it for the series. However, I am firmly entrenched in writing Tudor era historical novels. THE LAST BOLEYN, which I wrote 20 years ago, and Random House republished recently, focuses on Anne's sister Mary. (Yes, the Mary of THE LAST BOLEYN GIRL, but I wrote of her life quite a while before Philippa Gregory found her.) Next January, I have a novel out called MISTRESS SHAKESPEARE, in which Queen Elizabeth makes several appearances in her mature years. I hope readers will visit my website, which is www.karenharperauthor.com.

Thank you, Karen! And feel free to visit Karen Harper online for more information about her latest novel The Hooded Hawke!

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Sandra Worth

2008-02-28T11:03:00.000-08:00

* In your novel LADY OF THE ROSES: A NOVEL OF THE WARS OF THE ROSES, an ardent Yorkist named John Neville meets and falls in love with Isobel, the Lancastrian ward of Queen Marguerite. What compelled you to tell John and Isobel's story?
John had been a secondary character in my debut novel of the Rose of York trilogy and touched so many hearts that readers kept writing me asking if I were going to do a book on him. I wasn't at the time, since I was involved with the trilogy, but eventually I realized his story needed to be told.

* How much of your novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
I try hard not to stray from the historical record and only create to fill in the blanks to keep my stories as close to fact as possible.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 15th century England.
We all think of medieval women as being helpless and subjugated by men. But the truth is very different. All during the Wars of the Roses, history was driven almost entirely by women! To put it sadly, men fought the battles created by women. Here I have in mind two famous queens whose destinies ran strangely parallel: Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville, both of whom are hugely important characters in LADY OF THE ROSES.

* Your novel is told through Isobel's eyes. What made you choose her as the narrator, versus making LADY OF THE ROSES a third person narrative?
I had written the earlier books of my trilogy in the third person so I could take my readers far afield to experience battles, exiles, and the hatreds of the personalities whose decisions fueled the Wars of the Roses. For this novel, I wanted a change of pace and more of a love story. I also didn't want to cover all the battles -- there were so many of them! Though Isobel plays an active role in some, she doesn't have to put on the armor and slash her way through the carnage. The reader is spared the horror of the battlefield, and bonds with Isobel through the tumultupous experiences of her life, and of the man she loves.

* How did you research LADY OF THE ROSES, which draws heavily on events that occurred during the wars raging between the Lancastrians and the Yorks?
Thanks to my trilogy I had spent ten years researching the period and already knew much of the general background. During that time I visited many of the castles and battlefields associated with John Neville in England. I also examined the few personal items that had once belonged to him and which are kept at the British Museum, where I had privileges. So I already had a good grasp of John, and the era. What holes remained I filled by reading biographies of the personalities that shaped this earlier period of LADY OF THE ROSES, and by revisiting some of my earlier research.

Thank you, Sandra! And feel free to visit Sandra Worth online for more information about Lady of the Roses !

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Susan Fraser King

2008-02-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

* In your most recent novel LADY MACBETH, your protagonist is nothing like the infamous Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare's play. What drew you to her story?
The historical evidence that surrounds her is fascinating. When I began the research and saw some exciting aspects of her story, I wanted to know more, and the story grew from that curiosity. One Latin document directly refers to her, and much of the rest has been extrapolated by historians based on events around her, and what is known of the men in her life, including Macbeth and others. Her bracket dates are not known exactly, but she likely married as a young teenager, when her father Bodhe, a prince of the royal Celtic line, was still alive. Her son Lulach, born in 1032/33, was the son of Gillecomgan of Moray, her first husband--who was killed in 1032, probably leaving his wife pregnant and vulnerable to Macbeth's ambitious plans. She and Macbeth were married for 25 years and ruled Scotland for 17 years, and though they never had a son (two young sons disappear from their line, probably early deaths), Macbeth never set her aside, though it would have been customary when children were not produced. She was likely still alive in 1050 when Macbeth went on pilgrimage to Rome--he would never have left his country unless he had a capable regent ruling in his place. This (and other evidence) suggests cooperation between them, and strong loyalty around them.

The circumstantial evidence was compelling--this young queen was not the hand-wringing harridan of Shakespeare's play. She was a young woman in a traditional Celtic culture, and her marriage was a longterm relationship that began in conflict and probably developed into respect and responsibility. Macbeth is now viewed as a decent early king of Scotland, and he seems to have had the support of his peers. His queen seems to have shared that.

Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth is so widely known as a villainess, and is so infamous and well known, that taking this on was intimidating at first. Once I began researching and putting the story together, I knew that my Lady Macbeth (who would not have been called that in her own time) would be very different from Shakespeare's fictional lady. So I felt free to go for it.

* How much of your novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
The historical framework of the story is based closely on what is known of that time period. I was careful to stick to known or established historical knowledge. Where specific incidents are known, or specific people, I did my best to incorporate them into the story. Where there are differing theories and historical camps, I sometimes had to make my own decisions based on how I viewed the historical landscape, and sometimes made decisions for the sake of the story.

Fiction is a great vehicle for facts and historical theories, and a good amount is known regarding the time, the culture, the events in general that involved Macbeth and his queen, and the other warlords of the time. Historically we can guess what motivated them because we know that this, or that, happened -- but we don't know what they actually did, said, felt, thought. It's a challenge to balance fact, fiction and story structure so that a novel isn't overly reliant on fact (risking dry informative passages) or on fictionalizing (which can wander away from the historical framework, unless that is the aim of the book). If the goal is accuracy and authenticity combined with an interesting story--as mine was, for Lady M--then that balancing act is really important.

So how much fact and fiction in LADY MACBETH? A lot of both, with the fiction dependent on and interwoven with the facts.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 11th century Scotland.
In the early 11th century, Scotland was more Dark Ages than entirely medieval in its society -- true "medieval" aspects came later with the outside influences introduced primarily by the Canmore kings, and the further infiltration of the Church, with its views on women. In Lady Macbeth's time, Scotland was still provincial, insular and very Celtic. The culture of the Scottish Gaels at this time was a mixture of Pictish, Irish, and Norse traditions, with some Saxon influence in the southern regions. Women had a nice independence in the Irish and Scottish Celtic cultures, with a level of equality that Saxon and European women had never known, which the Church would try to obliterate once it got a good foothold. But in the 11th century, some of that Celtic foundation was still intact in Scotland.

So in the years before medieval elements changed Scotland, it's reasonable that an 11th century Scottish woman--particularly in Highland regions--would have been familiar with the fighting arts as well as household arts. Women, particularly in early Britain, Scotland, and Ireland, were expected to fight alongside men if defense of home and region was needed. And it was often needed, with the Vikings to one side and the Saxons to the other, and all manner of local feuds and rivalries in between. My Lady Macbeth is a product of her time and her society, and understands war as part of life, regardless of gender.

*How did you research LADY MACBETH, which draws heavily on medieval Scottish culture?
A lot of what I knew about the culture and the time was cumulative, after years of studying, researching and writing about the medieval culture as well as Scotland. For LADY MACBETH, I went back into the historical record and read reams of Annals, and read the works of historians from medieval to Victorian to current. I studied various aspects of Celtic culture--early literature, myths, poetry, music, language, astrology, and so on. I talked to Celtic and Scottish historians and to other experts in various fields--harping, weaponry, falconry and others. Bit by bit it came together.

* Are you working on another book, and if so, will it also be set in Scotland?
I am working on another book set in Scotland, and when we have a final title and more official info, it will be posted on my website.

Thank you, Susan! And feel free to visit Susan Fraser King online for more information about Lady Macbeth: A Novel !

Q&A With Historical Romance Author Lynna Banning

2008-01-02T10:01:00.000-08:00

* In your historical romance CRUSADER'S LADY, you write about
a woman named Soraya al-Din who disguises herself as a boy during the Middle
Ages. Although Soraya is a fictional character, is there any historical
Precedent for women cross-dressing as men during the 12th century (or even
earlier)?
I don't know about historical precedent, but logic would suggest that women traveling
alone (or even in company), unless they were nobility, would be much
safer in disguise. Many noble women were kidnapped anyway by
pirates and sold into slavery. Sounds too wild to be true, but it is.

* How much of CRUSADER'S LADY is based on fact and how much is
fiction?
The true part is that Richard the Lionheart was in fact captured by German knights while traveling overland on his way home to England from the third crusade. One story goes that he was disguised as a monk, and when the German knights burst into the inn, Richard tried to masquerade as a cook, turning a spit.

The other true part is that Richard's mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, acting as regent, collected
the requested ransom of some 200,000 silver marks and personally traveled across Europe to deliver it. Eleanor had been waylaid and almost kidnapped years before, in Aquitaine, and after that experience she often traveled in disguise.

It is also true that the famous worthy knight William Marshall, who had been fiercely loyal to Henry II (Richard's father), pledged himself to Richard and to Eleanor and his appearance in Eleanor's court at Winchester would be authentic.

* Your novel spans many countries, but eventually, Soraya journeys to
Richard the Lionheart's kingdom. Tell us something surprising about women
in 12th century England.
Noble women rarely married for love but were used as pawns to gain property and secure "family heritage." Common women, however, were much freer (in England) to be courted and to marry for love, or because they were already expecting. The "jumping the broom" ceremony was common in the countryside--a couple simply committed themselves to each other and from then on were considered married by the community. The Catholic church didn't like this one bit.

* CRUSADER'S LADY brings together two very different cultures. Soraya is
a spy for Saladin, while your protagonist Marc is a Scottish knight on Crusade with Richard I. What prompted you to bring such different cultures together in one book?
In the first place, it intrigued me that the Scots did in fact contribute crusader knights to the cause. Later, after the brutal 14th C dissolution of the Templar order, many Templar knights of "the brotherhood" fled to Scotland. In the second place, I am fascinated by "culture clash"--where different cultures meet and overlap. I guess I like to suggest that throughout history beneath cultural, religious, etc. differences, human beings are human beings.

* Are you working on another historical romance novel, and if so, where
will it be set?
I am in fact working on another historical romance; this one (tentatively titled Pilgrimage of the Heart) revolves around another cultural "mix"--that of Christian and Moorish culture in Spain and southern France in the 12th century. The novel setting begins in Granada and moves to Carcassonne. The heroine is half Arab (but Christian); the hero is a (ahem) Templar, sworn to celibacy and fighting in the crusades. BUT he was raised, as a Christian, by an Arab foster family in Moorish Spain. I love the heady mix of cultures in Arab Spain--Jewish, Muslim, Christian. One historian I read refers to this time and place as "Paradise."

Thank you, Lynna! And feel free to visit Lynna Banning online for more information about Crusader's Lady .

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Carla Nayland

2007-12-01T12:59:00.000-08:00

* In your most recent novel, PATHS OF EXILE, your protagonist, Eadwine, inhabits the world of seventh century Britain. What drew you to this period in time?
First, it’s in this period that the countries we know as England, Scotland and Wales first came into existence. In the pre-Roman Iron Age, Britain was composed of lots of tribal territories. The Romans turned the southern half of the island, south of Hadrian’s Wall, into a single Roman diocese and the northern half stayed non-Roman. By the time William the Conqueror arrives in 1066, that Roman vs non-Roman boundary at Hadrian’s Wall had vanished and been replaced by forerunners of the modern countries, none of which has a political boundary along Hadrian’s Wall. How did that happen?

Second, seventh-century Britain was astonishingly diverse. There were at least four main ethnic groups (Picts, Britons, Irish and English), each of whom were further subdivided into distinct kingdoms, at least five languages, at least three religions (English heathenism, whatever the pre-Christian religion of the Picts was, and Christianity – which itself had several variations, such as British, Irish and Roman), and cultural links with Byzantium, Scandinavia and Merovingian France. They were all fighting with each other, marrying each other and learning from each other. No one culture had come to dominate the whole island. People make much of today’s “multicultural society”, but the seventh century probably ran it close.

* How much of your novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
There aren’t many facts in seventh-century Britain! It’s a period that’s just starting to emerge into history, largely thanks to the book written by Bede in 731. The main character in the novel, Eadwine, is a historical figure, but Bede tells us very little about his time in exile, which is when the novel is set. So almost all the novel is fiction, but it’s woven in the spaces between the facts. Where I could find a solid fact, I would not change it. I summarised the few facts in the Historical Note in the novel and on my website, http://www.carlanayland.org/exile/historical_note.htm, and am gradually compiling a series of articles going into more detail, which can be found on my blog (http://www.carlanayland.blogspot.com/).

* Tell us something surprising about women in 7th century Britain.
There seems to be a rather lazy assumption around that because the Middle Ages was a misogynistic era, women must have been treated even worse in the less well documented early medieval period. Even a cursory glance at the primary sources shows how far from the truth that image is. Bede tells us that the queen of East Anglia in the 610s influenced – arguably even dictated – her husband’s religious and foreign policy, and says of Abbess Hild of Whitby in 680, “…. not only ordinary folk but also kings and princes used to ask her advice and take it.” Queen Eanflaed of Northumbria in the 650s arranged for St Wilfrid’s education and convinced her husband to grant land for a monastery as penance for a political murder. A warrior captured in battle in 679 called in favours from his time in a queen’s service to get himself ransomed. The Old English poem The Husband’s Message, in which a man who has won fame and wealth by military adventure in a foreign country asks the woman he loves to join him because without her his life is not complete, is as romantic a declaration of love as any I know of from any age. And in Old English the word ‘man’ meant mankind in general, with separate words for an adult male (wapman) and an adult female (wifman). This suggests to me that men and women were seen as fulfilling different but equally valuable social roles, with neither being subservient to the other. I hope that isn’t surprising; but perhaps it is.

* Your protagonist, Eadwine, is a king of Deira, which was once located in northern England. Your descriptions beautifully evoke the richness of the land. Did you imagine most of the landscape, or did you draw inspiration from visits, photos, or books?
Thank you! I’m a keen hillwalker, so I knew most of the upland locations long before I started writing the book. All the places are real, and you could walk the moors above Severa’s farm and follow the route of Eadwine’s journey along the cliffs in the snowstorm. The moors haven’t changed much since they were deforested in the Bronze Age, so the bogs and the boulders that Ashhere thinks are trolls are just as described in the story. In the lowlands, there would have been more forest 1400 years ago than now, low-lying areas that are now drained for arable fields would still have been marsh, and places that are now villages would probably have been single farms, if inhabited at all. So I had to imagine the landscape with more trees, more marshes and fewer people.

* How did you research the complicated history behind PATHS OF EXILE?
I start from Bede’s history, because he was writing only about 100 years after the events so he’s the nearest we have to a contemporary source. I also use surviving British sources, such as the Historia Brittonum, the Welsh Annals and the Welsh Triads, since although they were written down quite late they may contain kernels of older tradition. They give a perspective from another point of view, which is invaluable when trying to imagine such a diverse period. I use modern history books, but some are very speculative so I treat them with caution and I check the references wherever I can. Surviving literature, such as Beowulf, The Husband’s Message, The Wanderer, the Exeter Book Riddles, and Welsh poetic epics such as Y Gododdin and the Canu Heleldd gives a starting point for imagining social values and attitudes. Almost nothing is known of the pre-Christian English religion, but the names of the gods were the same as those of the Norse gods, so I draw freely on Norse myths. Then there is the archaeology, which can tell us about the burial customs people followed, the clothes and jewellery they wore, the structures they built, and the tools, utensils and weapons they used. I put all this together, and then I start using my imagination!

Michelle, thank you very much for the opportunity to answer these questions.

Thank you Carla! And feel free to visit Carla Nayland online for more information about Paths of Exile .

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Rita Charbonnier

2007-11-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

* In your debut novel MOZART'S SISTER, your protagonist, Maria Anna Mozart (nicknamed Nannerl), is denied the spotlight in favor of her talented brother. What drew you to Nannerl's story?
I was immediately struck when I found out that Mozart had a sister who, from an early age, had been a musical prodigy. I think that it was my sister who first brought her to my attention; we were both studying music and she came across Nannerl in the Maestro’s biographies. I found it both fascinating and saddening to think that two children had been born into the same family, one male and one female, musically gifted alike, but that only the boy succeeded in expressing his talent; the girl child did not get the chance.

Later, finding myself working on “Shakespeare’s Sister” by Virginia Woolf, I had something of a revelation. I was writing an article for a magazine and in preparing an historical digression I went back to the essay A Room of One’s Own that I had read some time before. In it, Woolf sketches the biography of William Shakespeare’s imaginary sister-poetess in order to demonstrate that had Shakespeare been born a woman, not only would he not have known success but he would also have come to a bad end.

Suddenly the figure of Nannerl flashed before my eyes; Shakespeare’s sister had never existed but Mozart’s sister had! I decided that I absolutely had to tell this story.

* How much of your novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
The main characters are all based on real people, with the exception of one female character who is fictional. Otherwise I have changed some dates and made up a lot of events but essentially have kept to documented facts. The inventive part above all concerns the characters’ psychology; the ways in which they react and their reasons for reacting like that.

For example, in the novel I have created a relationship between Wolfgang and his father, Leopold Mozart, that becomes closer and closer as the years go by. When Wolfgang leaves Salzburg and goes to live in Vienna, he does so with the full approval of his father, who even organises the journey and the move. In reality, the event took place in a very different manner; Mozart remained in Vienna against his father’s wishes; and he probably could not wait to be permanently away from him. However, I needed to create a dynamic between them that was coherent with the emotional web of my story and create a sort of male alliance against the protagonist, who at this point is completely crushed.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 18th century Europe.
The process of researching that period brought me into contact with various musical women, and many more than I would have imagined; among them even women composers. When I could, I brought them alive in the novel: Mademoiselle Jeunehomme, Princess Maria Antonia... Naturally, they were infrequent cases, and they were not usually ‘normal’ women; if a princess wants to compose, no-one would be very surprised and certainly no-one would mock her for it, which means a lot.

One aspect that made me smile was discovering the foul-mouthed language used by Anna Maria, Mozart’s mother. The same taste for obscene jokes that has made some of the Maestro’s letters so famous can be found in his mother’s letters too; there is even one, addressed to her husband, in which she composes a sort of rhyming poem about excrement. Nannerl’s letters, on the other hand, contain nothing of the sort, she was a very well-mannered woman and probably somewhat inhibited when it came to expressing her emotions.

* Parts of your novel are told through Nannerl's letters. What made you choose to tell some of the story in this way?
I suspect that it was reading Mozart’s correspondence that led me unconsciously in that direction. I initially wrote various letters but had not yet had the idea of making the first part of the novel the ideal account of her life that Nannerl gives to the man she loves, through a correspondence.

When the character’s psychology became more clear I understood that Nannerl is a woman whose extreme sensitivity is hidden beneath a thick carapace that is simply a reaction to the pain she has suffered. The private and emotional dimensions to the love letters allow me to express this hidden sensibility.

* How did you research MOZART'S SISTER, which draws heavily on Nannerl's passion for music?
As soon as I had decided to work on Nannerl’s story, I left for Salzburg. I wanted to go to the Mozarteum library and above all to visit where Mozart was born and lived, in the hope of absorbing the feeling of the places. It is a mania that I have always had, even before becoming a writer. My love for history is not fed by the study of facts, dynasties and wars but by interest in the human world of the past; often when I visit historical places, I begin to fantasize about who lived there in times gone by. I feel the bond with former generations and sometimes indulge in thought that every ancient place conserves a scintilla of the people who have gone before, and that we can feel that spark.

As for music, I did not have to do a great deal of research because I had the fortune of studying the piano from when I was a small child. For a while, when I was an actress and singer, music was my profession, and even now it is a fundamental part of my life, and one that I could not do without. To tell of Nannerl’s feelings as she plays, or doesn’t play, meant essentially drawing on my own past feelings, when I was on the stage, and then when I decided to come off the stage... probably for the last time.

Thank you Rita! And feel free to visit Rita Charbonnier online for more information about Mozart's Sister: A Novel .

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Erika Mailman

2007-10-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

* In your historical novel THE WITCH'S TRINITY, you write about
a widow named Güde who is accused of witchcraft in 16th century
Germany. What was it about this time and place that fascinated you?
I’ve always been compelled by the medieval time period. I loved
The Once and Future King when I was a kid and I think that influenced me.
I also did a lot of reading up on witchcraft because I was always fascinated by such
misogyny: an early feminist!

In terms of place… well, I grew up in Vermont and so I felt in my bones it was
important for this story to take place in snow. There is something about the
woods in snow at nighttime that was exactly the atmosphere I was looking for.
I was also heavily influenced by Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on
A Snowy Evening, which was wonderfully illustrated on the first page of my reader
when I was in first or second grade.

Secondly, I am of German heritage and this novel provided a way to explore that.

Third, Germany was one of the countries where the witch craze was the strongest.
The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, one of the most popular witch hunting bibles,
were German men blessed by the pope in their purpose. Fourth, the Grimm Fairy Tales
were set in Germany, and although The Witch’s Trinity is definitively not a fairy tale,
it does borrow from the surprisingly cruel familial relationships of the original stories.

* How much of THE WITCH'S TRINITY is based on fact and how much
is fiction?
The story is completely fictional—but it could very easily be true. Güde is sort
of an “every woman” to me. The witchcraft hunts in Europe lasted 400 years,
and the scope of the holocaust was so huge that I felt it would be easier to
understand through one woman’s story. I hope when people close the book, they
will think that my character was just one of thousands of Güdes.

I could go through and differentiate fact from fiction for each page of the book,
but my hope is that it will lead people to do their own searching if they’re interested.
Here’s one example, however, of how I used fact and twisted it: The pebble trial that
another character, Künne, faces was a real way of testing witches. However, I
made there be exactly three pebbles for the friar to honor the Holy Trinity.

The book has a nonfiction Afterword where I write about my ancestor Mary Bliss
Parsons, who was accused of witchcraft in 1600s Massachusetts. Her story was
fascinating: She was accused of things as mundane as always being able to find
the house keys, even when hidden from her, and as colossal as causing a newborn
baby’s death. She went to trial twice and was both times… acquitted. It was a
relief to be able to conduct this research knowing that she outlived her accuser
and died of natural causes in her eighties.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 16th century
Germany.
I was surprised that some sources state that witches were not burned alive at
the stake—that at the very last minute, they were garotted (strangled). While
I’m sure that happened, I’m a little cynical that it was the norm. After all, once
you research the appalling instruments of torture that were used on these women,
it’s hard to believe that the gleeful tormentors had an eleventh hour dose of mercy.
But I hope for the women’s sake it was true.

One note on torture: I knew that for this book to be palatable, I had to downplay
the torture element. I myself would not want to read a book that outlined what really
happened to these women. The Witch’s Trinity gives a little taste of what the
horrors were, because the whole of it would be too hard to swallow.

* What was life like for the *average* woman of the lower and
middle class during the period that THE WITCH'S TRINITY
takes places? Would a lower class woman's rights be any different
from those of an upper class woman?
For all classes, it would be important for a woman to have the support of male kin.
Most witchcraft sources agree that women who were on their own—whether spinsters
or widows—were most in danger. This certainly hints that women were powerless.
At the time clergymen were debating whether women had souls. Everyone took quite
literally the idea that original sin was Eve’s fault, and thus women were to be reviled as destructive temptresses. That kind of scorn radiates through the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum.

An upper class woman would certainly have the benefit over a lower class woman
(although her coveted property might then open her up to pointed witchcraft
accusations), because she would fit more solidly into society, fade more into the wallpaper.
My feeling is that women at this time would want to keep their eyes downcast, be as
bland as possible, and try not to attract attention. Beggar women or those who otherwise
insert themselves into the lives of those not their kin— those were women who people begin
to look askance at.

While villages were small, people could take responsibility for these outsiders, but as
the population of Europe grew, the sense of responsibility dissipated and the feeling of annoyance grew. And then add in a famine or a food shortage, and either you give food
to this woman and then feel resentful, or you don’t and then feel guilty—either emotion is extremely uncomfortable and you just sort of start to wish she wasn’t there. And then you notice that after you passed her in the lane one day, you tripped on a rock and barked your shin….

* Are you working on another historical fiction novel, and if so,
who will be your protagonist?
I have a novel outlined set in revolution-era France and in fact took a research
trip last September. But I find that my mind is more taken with an entirely
different novel that’s set in the modern day and involves medical students,
cadavers, artists, infertility and parallel lives. And that’s all I’m going to say!

I love historical fiction. I read it voraciously and it’s my favorite thing to read.
Two of my favorite novels are Girl with a Pearl Earring and Year of Wonders—
and I just today finished The Nature of Monsters and thought it was fabulous.
Doubtless I’ll wander back to historical fiction at some point, but for now the pot
bubbling on the stove is very much 21st century. Michelle, thank you so much for
the opportunity to answer these questions. I really enjoyed Nefertiti and am looking
forward anxiously to your next novel! Hurry up and write it!

Thank you Erika! And feel free to visit
Erika Mailman online for more information about her novel
The Witch's Trinity.

Photo credit: Sherry LaVars

Q&A With Historical Thriller Author Tess Gerritsen

2007-09-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

* Your thrillers have become NYT Bestsellers, but THE BONE GARDEN is your first historical thriller. The novel is set in both the present day and 19^th century Boston where a seventeen year old seamstress named Rose Connolly must try and stop a killer. What was it about the 1800s that fascinated you?
It was medical history that first attracted me to this time period. I was fascinated by an illness called childbed fever, which was rampant in that era. Up to a quarter of women admitted to hospitals for childbirth died from the disease, and it was truly an excruciating death. Soon after giving birth, a woman would develop shaking chills, her abdomen would swell with bacterial gases, and pus would flow from her uterus. Often there’d be intractable vomiting, and the pain was described as so horrible that just to stroke the skin of the abdomen would cause the victim to shriek. Almost inevitably, she would die. And here’s the most horrifying detail: The illness was spread by doctors, who did not know enough to wash their hands. They would walk straight from the autopsy room to the lying-in wards, and with filthy hands would examine women in labor, spreading death straight down the rows of beds.

The first American doctor to realize that the contagion was being spread by physicians was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who in 1843 presented a scientific paper advising his colleagues to wash their hands. I wondered how he’d come to his conclusions. Was there a particular case or incident that opened his eyes to the doctors’ role in disease? I wanted to explore the circumstances of his revelation, and I wanted to see Holmes as a brilliant young man. In 1830 he was a medical student, and it was an era of real medical horrors, when doctors in training sometimes had to dig up cadavers for anatomical training. It was an era before anesthesia, before antibiotics, even before microbial theory. There was so much about medicine then that was truly grotesque, and I was fascinated by the challenges that doctors faced. It seemed like the perfect era in which to set a serial killer story.

* How much of THE BONE GARDEN is based on fact and how much is fiction?
I tried to stick to the facts when it came to details of Holmes’s life. His penchant for reciting poetry, for instance, and his longing to study medicine in Paris. I also tried to be as realistic as possible about 1830’s medicine and the gruesome realities faced by student doctors. I read 1830’s medical treatises and published speeches given by medical faculty. When I wrote the amputation scene in the story, I used instructions from an 1809 surgical textbook by Dr. Samuel Cooper (a textbook that was still in use during the Civil War.) I also used maps and newspapers of the time, and read both the works of Holmes and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to absorb as much of the rhythm and floweriness of the language.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 19^th century America.
It was the era of the Transcendentalists in Boston, and I was surprised by how women were such a vibrant part of the intellectual scene at the time. I had assumed that their accomplishments were discounted and ignored, but in fact, there were a number of well-respected women contributing to the arts and to education. Already, there was pressure to admit women into the ranks of physicians, and that would soon follow with the establishment of a women’s medical college in Boston. Of course, things were different for the lower classes. Poor Irish girls (such as Rose Connolly, my heroine) were still invisible for the most part, except for their back-breaking contributions to the labor force.

* One of your characters, Norris Marshall, is a “resurrectionist.” Can you explain what a “resurrectionist” is to our readers, and why being one would have been profitable at that time?
Because of a shortage of anatomical specimens, medical schools of that era were forced to scrounge up cadavers from wherever they could find them. Executed criminals were automatically relegated to the anatomist’s knife, but there weren’t nearly enough of those to fulfill the needs of the schools. So a ghoulish trade sprang up involving body snatchers, otherwise known as “resurrectionists,” who’d sneak into cemeteries after dark and dig up newly interred bodies. The going rate for a body at the time was around $20 – a large enough sum to keep the trade thriving. Students themselves would often do the snatching themselves, and in fact it became something of a rite of passage for doctors-in-training, to sneak into cemeteries and dig up their prizes. So many medical schools were springing up in New York and Pennsylvania that the schools began to import bodies from the south, many of them no doubt deceased slaves. As the trade of snatching grew, naturally the parallel trade of grave protection also grew, paid for by families anxious to protect their deceased loved ones. Wealthy families could pay for armed guards and iron cages or locked tombs to protect the dead. It was the poor – isn’t it always the poor? – who suffered the worst indignities.

* Is THE BONE GARDEN the beginning of a series, and if not, what are you working on next?
No, it’s a stand-alone. My next book will be back to the Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles crime series. But I’ll be bringing in a bit of history into the new story, in the form of archaeology!

Thank you Tess! And feel free to visit Tess Gerritsen online for more information about her novel The Bone Garden.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author David Blixt

2007-09-09T14:19:00.000-07:00

* Your debut novel, THE MASTER OF VERONA, can be considered a prelude to Romeo and Juliet. As a Shakespearean actor, you must be quite familiar with most of Shakespeare's plays, so what made you choose to write a book exploring the reason behind the feud between the Montagues and Capulets?
R&J was my first Shakespeare show, way back in high school, and the one I’ve done most often since (at present I think it stands fourteen or fifteen productions, in almost every male role). But when I first sat down to direct it and started studying the script, I came across a line I’d never paid attention to. At the end of the show, after everybody has died, Lord Montague has this out-of-the-blue line relating how his wife is dead as well. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it – Lady Montague has three lines in the play, all in Act I Scene i. Here we are, we’ve just seen Romeo drink poison and Juliet stab herself – why do we care if some lady we don’t even remember has died?

I broke it down. Okay, dramatic structure says that an off-stage death is symbolic – death symbolizes an ending – the only thing that has closure is the feud, when Capulet and Montague shake hands. Stringing those thoughts together, it meant that Lady Montague’s death was symbolic of the end of the feud. Well, that didn’t make any sense. Unless – unless she were the cause of the feud in the first place! Betrothed to Capulet, she ran off with Montague instead. A feud that ends in love began in love! That was the initial inspiration for the novel. A single line from Shakespeare.

* How much of THE MASTER OF VERONA is based on fact and how much is fiction? I used as much fact as I could find – the battles, the politics, the poetry, the people – then interwove Shakespeare’s Italian characters, making them featured players as well. Once or twice I was able to merge real people with the Shakespeare characters – the Prince in the R&J is named Escalus, a Latinized version of Scala, the ruling family of Verona. So in essence I’ve set Shakespeare and his sources dancing between the raindrops of history.

In picking a time and place for the origin of the feud, I’m in good company. Dante himself mentions the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues in his Divine Comedy – he even calls them to task for it by name! Still, the one aspect of the book I’ll take the most heat for is Dante’s son, Pietro Alaghieri. He was a real person – his descendants still live on the vineyard he bought just outside Verona – but not much is known about his early life. I made him my hero, and made him take a fictional part in historic events. My only defense is that Shakespeare and Dante both would have done it, as they loved a good story.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 14^th century Italy.
In another strangely Shakespeare twist, it’s amazing just how often women donned armor and led their husbands’ troops into the field. Most often it was when their spouses were held for ransom, or else had been killed without an heir of age. The local lord would demand soldiers, and in response the more daring women led those soldiers themselves. It reminds me of all the cross-dressing women of Shakespeare – Viola, Rosalind, Portia. So I have a nod to that, too, in the novel.

* Romeo's mother, Lady Montague, plays a major role in your book. In what way, if any, does she reflect the typical Italian woman of her class in 1300s Verona?
“Of her class” is a very important caveat. Because, raised to the nobility, she has fallen for the upper-class fad of “courtly love” that swept the 13^th and 14^th centuries. Poetry and music extolled the virtues of the noble love-from-afar. The French stories of King Arthur were all the rage, with Guenivere and Lancelot being the ideal of True Love. Romeo’s mother is completely convinced that Love cannot exist without suffering – something she, of course, passes to her son.

* Is THE MASTER OF VERONA the beginning of a series, and when can we expect a second book?
The sequel is complete and on my editor’s desk at this moment, while I begin work on the third. That second book will be out sometime in Summer, 2008, I imagine. I’d love to give you the title, but it’s in flux at the moment (either THE FALCON’S LURE or THE VOICE OF THE FALCONER. I’ll happily take votes for either on my blog – www.davidblixt.com). However, I can tell you with complete certainty the title to the third – FORTUNE’S FOOL. Both of these books follow Pietro and his ward, young Cesco della Scala through their return to Verona and beyond. Cesco is in for some very rough treatment at my hands, because at some point he’s going to change his name and become one of Shakespeare’s most enigmatic characters – Mercutio.

For more about the books, Shakespeare, Dante, and everything else that went into the making of THE MASTER OF VERONA, please stop by www.themasterofverona.com.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Dora Levy Mossanen

2007-09-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

* What was it about Persia that made you want to set both HAREM and
COURTESAN: A NOVEL there, albeit in different times?
Since I spent twenty formative years of my life in Iran, and my family’s Persian roots go back more than 2500 years to the time of Darius the Great, it felt most natural to set my novels, HAREM and COURTESAN in Persia. My own background is somewhat unusual, since I was born in Israel, settled in Iran at the age of nine, then fled to California with my family at the onset of the Islamic Revolution. What is apparent, though, is that I will always treasure the wealth of factual stories my historian grandfather recounted to me during his lifetime and will forever draw from them for my future books.

* In your most recent novel, COURTESAN, you follow three generations of
Jewish women who live in France. Simone, however, travels from France to
Persia to be with the man she loves. How much of these women's lives are
based on fact and how much is fiction?
The three generations of Jewish woman in COURTESAN are fictional characters born of my imagination. But, each one, the grandmother, Madame Gabrielle, the daughter, Françoise, and the granddaughter, Simone, carries a combination of traits and habits that throughout the years, I carefully observed in a number of influential women in my life, my mother, grandmothers, aunts from another fascinating generation. In the end, all writers are voyeurs, don’t you think?

* In researching COURTESAN: A NOVEL, was there anything you were shocked to learn about courtesans in 19th century France?
The most shocking fact I learned about courtesans in 19^th century France was tremendous their influence on powerful men of the time, even kings, and how they sometimes succeeded to change the political course of a country. A number of courtesans were highly educated, articulate, and invested shrewdly at a time when women were expected to remain far from the financial arena. I find it ironic that the same men who expected their wives to stay home and raise kids admired courtesans who were the exact opposite.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 17th century Persia, where
your novel HAREM is set.
Women in ancient Persia, and specifically women in the Shah’s harem, were surprisingly resourceful, able to overcome insurmountable hurdles, ruthless and ambition. During my research for HAREM, I was constantly shocked to learn how very rife with danger harems of the time were.Murders, poisoning, and plotting were prevalent, not to mention sexual favors to advance one’s position. But by far the most surprising fact I learned was that a number of these women had sex with eunuchs and even fell in love with them. Unbelievable!

* Are you working on another book, and if so, will it be set in Persia?
I am currently working on another historical novel, this one set in Russia, of all places, and during the last Romanovs, another decadent, tumultuous, and tragic era.

Thank you Dora! And feel free to visit Dora Levy Mossanen online for more information
about her novel Courtesan.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Debra Finerman

2007-08-01T13:00:00.000-07:00

*What drew you to Manet’s paintings?
Edouard Manet fascinated me as an artist and as a personality when I began to study the Impressionists at Christie’s graduate program in Art History. He was the first modernist in the sense that he presaged modernism. He opened the door for later artists to walk through like Monet, Picasso, Rothko, and generations of future contemporary painters. It all began with Manet. History scholars consider the last great flowering of ideas, revolutions and wars was born in the late nineteenth century. Charles Baudelaire, the great French poet wrote in the 1860’s of shifting temporality-- the eternal captured in the fleeting moment. These ideas inspired his friend Edouard Manet whose proto-Impressionist painting style expressed Baudelaire’s poetry and prose.

The themes found in Mademoiselle Victorine resonate today. For example, the speed of change in daily life evidenced by the advent of gas and electricity, railroad travel, photography, the dislocation of the familiar found in the urban re-design of Paris by Baron Haussmann, are paralelled today in jet travel, digital imagery, internet and cell phone communications, the frantic pace of daily life, even in the architectual brandism of great cities like London, New York, Shanghai, Barcelona. It is said to this day that on some level, the French have never recovered from the trauma of Haussmannization.

* How much of your novel was based on fact and how much on fiction? Did your protagonist really exist?
The history part is very accurate and informs about 80% of the story. My heroine, Victorne Laurent, is a fictional composite of two fascinating women who lived in Paris in the 1860’s. One was an aristocratic courtesan, the Countess of Castiglione, and the other was Manet’s model and muse, Victoroine Meurent. The real Victorine ended her life pitifully as an alcoholic beggar. The real Countess of Castiglione also spiraled downward into dementia. That was not the vision I had for my lovely and tempestuous Mademoiselle Victorine! I fused the best of the two and created a character as ambitious and mercurial as the Countess of Castiglione, but as vulnerable as the seventeen year old Victorine Meurent. Many people may not be familiar with French history so I have a page on my website devoted to the history and the actual personalities that my characters are based upon. Readers are encouraged to go on mademoisellevictorine.com for historical facts.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 19^th century Paris.
Women in the early part of the 19^th century had very few opportunities but during the 1860’s, women’s options began to change. That is why change is a thread that runs through the entire novel. It was a time that one’s birth status determined the rest of their lives, as was true of many ages in history. If a girl was born into the upper classes, she would receive a good education in a Catholic school and be married off by her parents in an appropriate, if loveless, match. If she was born poor, like Mademoiselle Victorine, she would not have had the education necessary for the only two professions she could reasonably enter—school teacher or millinery shop assistant. Most likely she would become a prostitute or a laundress. That was it! But in the 1860’s, as I mentioned above, things began to change. Young women from the provinces arrived in Paris via the new railroad system to work and find love, living independently in the big city. Changes in social relations between men and women were a result of a newfound self-awareness, a trend observed by Edouard Manet, Charles Baudelaire and others in the avant-garde of literature and art.

*In your novel, Victorine Laurent scandalizes the Grand Salon by posing for a sexually provocative portrait. Historically, were women who chose to act as models for painters treated differently by society? If so, what kind of girls would to do this?
Girls who chose, or more accurately were forced by circumstances, to model for painters did so for two reasons. Either to earn extra money or to gain fame. Some aspiring actresses tried to be chosen as artist’s models because it would help further their careers. In the novel, Mademoiselle Victorine agrees to pose for Edouard Manet for that specific reason. She aspired to be a courtesan and hoped that posing for him would attract a better quality of “protector” as the gentlemen were euphemistically called. (In 1860’s Paris, the grand courtesans were like our celebrities and movie stars today. They lived flamboyantly, owned palaces with servants and were copied by other women for their style and fashion sense).

The act of posing nude for an artist wasn’t considered scandalous in itself because the nudes were never portrayed as contemporary women. They were clearly recognized as allegorical figures—wood nymphs, Greek goddesses, characters from the past. The scandal arose because the iconoclast Edouard Manet broke tradition and portrayed Victorine Meurent as a woman of the 1860’s, unashamed of her body and staring boldly at the viewer from the painting. He wanted to paint Truth, not a lie. His message said to the viewer, “We both know this isn’t Aphrodite or Diana the Huntress but a young woman from the Paris streets. Let’s not pretend to each other. Let’s be honest in art.” That was the cause of the scandal.

* How did you research MADEMOISELLE VICTORINE, which draws on Manet’s paintings and the vibrant history of salons in Paris?
Research began at Christie’s graduate program in Art History, although I didn’t know the result of my homework assignments would become an historical novel. Studying about the Impressionists felt like reading a really good story. Next, I hit the stacks in the library. I read books about 1860’s Second Empire Paris by historians and social commentators. Some were written by people who had lived at that time and were writing their memoirs. I traveled to Paris many times and researched the streets, the way the light fell on a certain square and especially the terrain of Montmartre where the final scenes in the book take place during the bloody Commune uprising. Going to Paris was no hardship, though. I speak French, have French friends and in my soul, I feel utterly Parisian so it seemed like coming home each time.

Thank you Debra! And feel free to visit Debra Finerman online for more information about her debut novel Mademoiselle Victorine .

Q&A With Historical Romance Author Deborah MacGillivray

2007-07-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

Coming August 7!

* Why did you choose to set your novel A RESTLESS NIGHT in 13th century Scotland?
I spent twenty years helping my grandfather, a retired British Historian, sort, restore and rewrite the history of our family in Scotland and England. That is where I came across the basis for my historical novel, A RESTLESS KNIGHT, set in the year before the rising of William Wallace. I was working on pages for the history of my family in the late 1200s, and thought it a perfect story for a marvelous Historical Romance.

I used to get stories of Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, Andrew de Moray and Sir James Douglas as bedtime tales from him, instead of the usual faerytales. It wasn't until I was about nine, that I understood these weren't family members! The period is one I am comfortable with, so I guess my fascination with the family story took root and possessed me.

* How much of your protagonist's life is based in fact and how much is fiction?
It's hard to set a precise percentage. There was an English Knight who did claim a lady in our family. However, so many records of this period were destroyed by Edward Longshanks in his campaign to bring the Scots under his fist. He actually took all the Scottish Regalia, the Stone of Destiny (only recently returned•so they say), and sent wagonloads of records of the Scots South to England. Nearly all these records just are not there today. It cripples efforts to really root out fact from fiction. Add in centuries of lost, ruined or destroyed documents...it’s often very frustrating trying to solve the riddles.

I was working from a story that was being translated by my grandfather, which was written down by another ancestor back in the 18th century, who copied it from another document to preserve it, who copied it from "tales" spoken around fireside. I spent several years trying to prove as much as I could. Then I finally stopped. The document, real history or just a fictional account•even exaggerated a bit•was still in and of itself something very special.

I understood the fascination of the tale•two cultures, Pagan and Christian clashing, two manners of life Scot and English•well, it just had all the elements you need to make a super story. It obsessed my mind to the point I just had to write my version. The actual tale was stronger, darker and much longer, but as a new writer I knew it would never be published in that form. They just do not publish historical sagas of the 500-600 page range anymore. Someday I will see it in print for collectors interested in the story in its less kind, less politically correct form.

* Tell us something surprising about the women of 13th century Scotland.
The women of the Highland clans were different from the Lowland clans. The lower country clans were often as much Norman or English as they were Scot. They spoke, dressed and affected many of the courtly manners of the English, even spoke their language, which was French. Many possibly were losing their Gaelic or had lost it completely. This saw the females’ rights and freedoms (or lack of them) stemming from English laws and rules.

The women of the Highland clans were different. They still kept their maiden names. This proves troublesome to people researching their family trees today. When Mary Ogilvie wed John Macgillivray...she didn't become Mary Macgillivray, but remained Mary Ogilvie her whole life. This is often (including in my own books) not reflected in female character names. You would have to stop the story and explain to people unfamiliar with this why anomaly exists within your novel. Halting your story is a big No No, so for expediency your editor will want you to work within the perimeters of what readers know and understand. It's okay to feed them history in small bites, but don't stop your Historical Romance to give a History lesson. If people want history, they will read a history book. Another quirk, it is incorrect to call a woman Mary MacIain. Mac means 'son of', so a name like MacIain means 'son of Iain'. Well, a female is not a son of anyone! She is a daughter. So the proper female name would be Mary nic Iain. Again, you won't often see this form of female name used in Scottish Historical Romances. Originally, Tamlyn MacShane was Tamlyn nic Shane. My editor suggested the change to the familiar.

The women of the Highlands, for a large part, were descended from the ancient race we now call the Picts. They were one of the few matriarchal societies that have existed in the world. Women could marry more than once•meaning they practiced polyandry, similar to polygamy only it was 'her turn'. In truth, this was a very viable situation•if all parties got along. One man stayed and protected the fortress and her, another would farm and a third would hunt. Of course, men being men, they had to go ruin all this! Women could own land, held titles in their own right, could divorce their husband and all dowries were paid to them directly over a period of years so that if she divorced a man she generally left him broke! Right of Line would pass through the distaff side, making for a stronger king. Instead of father-to-son, titles and rule passed through her blood. Any male•son, brother, uncle or father•could be considered for head of the clan.

Many of these rights survive even today. Scotland has always had divorce for females, while Ireland and England did not.

* Often, historical romance writers will choose to tell the story of an extraordinary heroine who defied the conventions of her time. In medieval Scotland, what was the *average* woman’s life like?
The average woman had it very hard. It was feudal times. Women were born to the land. Most were born, lived and died within the same smallholding; few ever traveled more than 50 miles from their homes in their whole lifetime. Sickness, disease, and childbirth took their toll. Frequently, food supplies were not plentiful. In Scotland they learnt to eat seaweed and the root of silverweed in hard times. What medieval knowledge was passed from healer-to-healer. Most had few choices in marriage. You could be given in marriage without love or choice. You had to get the lord’s permission to marry. They rose before daylight and labored until dark. During the bleak winter months, if they were lucky to have livestock, you shared your small home with the animals! They had to cook, weave, sew, make candles, and try to prepare food for saving. Even the strongest woman would be worn down by this constant grind. It was a grim life, likely why we write about Ladies highborn. Their lives were hard enough, but there was a bit more hope to their existence.

* There is a sequel to A RESTLESS NIGHT called IN HER BED that has just been released. Both books feature proud Scottish heroines. In what ways are Tamlyn MacShane and Lady Aithinne Ogilvie distinctive of their time (13th century) and country (Scotland)?
In the women of Glen Shane and Glen Eallach I drew on their Pictish roots. I have them granted a charter by Malcolm Canmore affirming their right to rule in the ancient Pict ways. The holdings of Tamlyn's Glenrogha and Aithinne's Coinnleir Wood are lands and titles that have passed through to them from their mothers. The charter upholds their right to pick their own husbands. These were women of ancient Scots blood, who held titles and lands, and no man could tell them what to do. They were steeped in the Ways of Auld. Yes, Christianity was making great inroads during this period, but the Highlands also clung to ancient beliefs.

I wanted these women to reflect this reverence of the older Scotland. It provides the conflict that drives the whole series. Here were these women of Ogilvie blood, who are used to ruling in their own manner, suddenly faced with the cultural conflict of having arrogant English lords imposing their will upon them, their Christian piety.

While this puts me in the unique category of writing Scottish Historicals with the heroes not in kilts, I wanted to draw on the lesser used elements of the history and pocket lore of this fascinating period.

Thank you Deborah! And feel free to visit Deborah MacGillivray online for more information about her novel A Restless Knight and its fabulous sequel In Her Bed.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Susan Higginbotham

2007-06-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

* What was it about your protagonist, Eleanor le Despenser, that compelled
you to tell her story?
Just a few years back, I re-read Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II and somehow became fascinated by the historical background to the story. After a while, I became particularly interested in the relationship between Edward II and his last favorite, Hugh le Despenser the younger—the relationship that destroyed Edward's kingship but that strangely has been overshadowed by his relationship with the much better known Piers Gaveston.

In my research on Despenser, I saw it mentioned that his wife, Eleanor, had married one of his captors. Naturally, I wondered what had led her to marry one of the men who had helped to destroy her husband. I began to dig around to find further facts about her, and the more I dug, the more interesting things I learned about her. Her life was ready-made for a novel—love, lust, lucre, loss, land, and litigation, with some startling turns of Fortune's wheel.

* How much of your protagonist’s life is fact and how much is fiction?
The framework of the story—Eleanor's service as a lady-in-waiting, the politics and infighting of Edward II's reign, her imprisonments, the fates of her children, her marriage litigation, and so forth—is all based on historical fact. It's also evident from the gifts she was given and the trust that was placed in her that she was a favorite of Edward II throughout his reign. What the records don't reveal was what she was like as a person and what her motivations were, or what she thought of people like her brother-in-law Piers Gaveston or her grandfather Edward I. So as far as Eleanor's personality, thoughts, and relationships with others were concerned, I pretty much had to fill in the blanks. There are a few business letters of hers that survive. They have a certain charm of expression to them, but otherwise aren't very revealing—unlike the letters of her husband Hugh, where his character is very apparent.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 14th century England.
What surprised me about Eleanor, and about so many other women of her time, was how resilient they were—it's a picture so at odds with that of the damsel in distress waiting for some knight to save her. So many of these women lost close family members, either through violence or, later in the century, to plague, and yet they kept on going through the routine of ordinary life: running their estates, giving to the Church, hosting their feasts, marrying off their children. We go on today about how empowered women are, but I think in many ways the women of centuries ago were much, much tougher emotionally.

* Often, historical fiction writers will choose to tell the story of an
extraordinary woman who defied the conventions of her time. In your chosen
time period, what was the *average* woman’s life like?
Busy. Even a wealthy woman with plenty of servants had to run her household , and when her husband was away, she would have to be able to help manage his affairs too. Although a noblewoman's children were taken care of by servants, she might have other people's children in her charge, as Eleanor did in the case of the king's younger son. Visitors and travelers had to be entertained daily.

I get amused and at the same time quite irritated by romance novels that have medieval high-born heroines hopping heedlessly from bed to bed as if they're in a fourteenth-century version of "Sex in the City." While sexual mores weren't as tight as they were, say, in Victorian times, a young woman of high birth in medieval England was expected to be a virgin on her wedding day, and there weren't very many opportunities for her to run around unsupervised. (Widows, on the other hand, could get up to more trouble, as Eleanor demonstrated.)

One thing that I think tends to get overlooked by novelists, perhaps because it doesn't make for a particularly juicy story, is the importance that patronage played in the lives of noblewomen. Eleanor was instrumental in making the choir of Tewkesbury Abbey, with its beautiful stained-glass windows, the glorious sight that it is today, and her sister Elizabeth was a patron on a much larger scale, whose many good works include the founding of Clare Hall at Cambridge University.

* In what way is Eleanor le Despenser distinctive of her time (14th century)
and country (England)?
That's hard to answer, because in many ways she was a very conventional woman of her times. Certainly in what seems to have been her unswerving, perhaps even blind loyalty to her husband, she was fulfilling the role that a woman was expected to fill—it was her misfortune that her husband wasn't worthier of her devotion. On the other hand, she certainly had a reckless streak, shown by her theft of the crown's jewels—which, unfortunately, is one of those episodes in which we know nothing about her motives.

Eleanor's mother, Joan of Acre, a daughter of Edward I, was notorious in the thirteenth century for her love match with Ralph de Monthermer, a squire whose birth is so obscure that we today don't even know who his parents were. It's interesting that both Eleanor and her sister Elizabeth seem to have made similar runaway matches, though we know a lot less of the circumstances behind them. In acting in defiance of the king, all three of them evinced an independent streak that would definitely not have been appreciated by the men around them.

* Who is one historical woman you would like to write a book on, but
probably won’t?
I'm interested in Constance, the second wife of John of Gaunt. In most novels where she appears, she's a minor character and a very unprepossessing one—dour, gloomily pious, obsessed with the Castilian throne, and not given much to bathing—as opposed to Gaunt's mistress, the glamorous, charismatic Katherine Swynford. Yet Constance seems to have tried to fit into English life as best as she could, and as a young foreigner coming to England to marry a man who already had an established mistress, she was in a very difficult position. I'd love to see a novel where she was the protagonist instead of being the foil to Katherine Swynford, but the idea of tackling her life story and all of the associated goings-on in Castile is too daunting for me.

Thank you Susan! And feel free to visit Susan Higginbotham online for more information about her novel The Traitor's Wife.

Q&A With Fiction Author Anna David

2007-06-06T20:45:00.000-07:00

*Your debut novel PARTY GIRL features a protagonist named Amelia Stone who writes for celebrity magazines and finds herself caught up in a past-paced life of sex and drugs in Los Angeles. Like Amelia Stone, you are a former celebrity journalist and have also dealt with substance abuse. Is this novel a roman à clef, and if so, how much is fact and how much is fiction?
I feel like I'm supposed to offer far enigmatic answers than I do on this topic, but the fact is that much of what happens in PARTY GIRL is based on my life. I was a wildly self-absorbed, alcoholic girl who toiled at celebrity weekly magazines. I kept getting in my own way and would always wonder why I couldn't seem to get anywhere in my career or life. And I always seemed to be that girl that crazy things happened to -- people would love to hear about my antics. But after years and years of increasing drug use all the time, the stories became less cute and there were far fewer people around to hear them. I think that's how I became fascinated by the idea of the way someone's life looks, and the assumptions people make about it being fabulous or glamorous, and what it's really like. I'm glad that I waited until I was at least five years sober before I tried writing about the experience because it took me at least that long to get some perspective on it.

*Although your novel is not considered historical fiction, PARTY GIRL explores a segment of Los Angles society that historians may someday look back on and wonder about. Could Amelia Stone be a poster-child for her generation, and if so, why?
When you look at what's going on with the Hollywood party girls -- the Lindsay, Paris and Britney contingent -- and the fascination our culture (particularly young girls) has with them, it does seem like the struggle to control substance abuse is one of the central issues of our time. In many ways, I think this is a good thing and a result of the great advances that have been made in terms of dealing with or arresting alcoholism. Before the 1930's, alcoholics or drug addicts would be institutionalized. And while programs have existed to deal with alcoholism for several decades, being a sober alcoholic was still something to be ashamed of. Now everything's out in the open and I do think that makes this an important time in the fight to arrest addiction. I think Amelia's obsession with celebrity and fame also speaks to this generation. I've read studies about how kids interviewed today would rather be famous than be president and you need only glance at the newsstand to see how the adventures of the bold-faced names are covered in more meticulous detail than ever before. Because Amelia does end up getting sober and realizing how self-absorbed and self-destructive she is, it would be wonderful if she could be the poster child for this generation; I'd love for us to be considered the group that deals with problems and doesn't just allow them to fester.

*As an investigative reporter, you wrote several pieces for Details Magazine about crystal meth use and high-class prostitution. Did any of this research feature in PARTY GIRL?
I'm so glad you asked that because while I didn't use any of that material for PARTY GIRL (I'd actually done all that "research" first hand), I fictionalized a lot of what I unearthed in the high-class prostitution story for a novel I recently completed called KEPT. I'd spent six months infiltrating the world of prostitution in Los Angeles, a slice of life I knew nothing about, and was always sad that the bulk of that information couldn't be included in my 1200-word Details story. I'd love to be able to incorporate more research into future fiction because honestly, I feel like I'm running out of life experience to cover.

*Are you currently working on a new novel, and if so, will it be set in Los Angeles?
Another excellent question because after finishing KEPT, I realized that I'm incredibly burned out on Los Angeles, and particularly Hollywood, as a backdrop. I have an idea for another book -- really just a seed of an idea right now -- and I'm toying with the idea of placing it in Idyllwild, this beautiful little mountain town I recently visited. I'm still not sure if I've just come up with this idea as an excuse to spend time there, though.

Thank you Anna! And feel free to visit Anna David online for more information about her debut novel Party Girl.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Mary Sharratt

2007-06-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

*Tell us something surprising about women in 17th century England, where
your novel THE VANISHING POINT begins.
Our view of women’s history tends to be sadly distorted. Too often we rely on lazy stereotypes that women in the past were always completely helpless and disempowered, or we base our view of women in previous centuries on the Victorian model.

Women in the 17^th century, in fact, were freer in many ways than their Victorian counterparts. Far from being dismissed as idle “angels of the home,” 17^th century women played a crucial role in their family’s economy. Upper class women managed estates and supervised servants, while tradesmen’s wives often acted as business partners, even taking on the role of “deputy husband,” independently managing business affairs if their husbands were traveling or otherwise indisposed. Women were brewers, tavern-keepers, even itinerant preachers, not just wives, mothers, and homemakers.

Also, unlike the Victorians, people in Restoration era England were quite frank about sexuality—they would have held little regard for a frigid, sexless Victorian lady. On the contrary, men of science believed that female orgasm was essential for the conception of children.

*Your novel also takes places in America. How were women's lives different
in America than in England at that time?
The Thirteen Colonies were quite heterogeneous. Thus, women’s lives in Maryland and Virginia during this era were very different from those of their sisters in both Old and New England. The slave trade brought both malaria and yellow fever to the Chesapeake region, and the resulting mortality rate was so high that, until the end of the 17^th century, immigration contributed more to the white population than live births. There was also a skewed gender balance—three white men for every white woman—and most of these women were indentured servants. Female mortality in childbirth was very high, families were fractured, and orphans were commonplace. Female servants were subject to sexual predation by their masters, who could use the servant’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy as an excuse to prolong her indenture. A harsh double-standard was in place. Whereas New England Puritan society at least attempted to enforce the same moral code on men and women, men of wealth in the Chesapeake region could do largely as they pleased, while adulteresses and unmarried women who bore bastards were punished by whippings and public humiliations. The scene in my novel where an adulteress is dragged behind a boat until she is nearly drowned is based on a documented event.

All the above problems were exacerbated by the fact that most people lived on far flung plantations; the social support networks that might have helped women back in England did not exist here.

*Often, historical fiction writers will choose to tell the story of an
extraordinary woman who defied the conventions of her time, like Hannah
Powers. In 17th century England, what was the *average* woman’s life like?
Married women spent most of their fertile years bearing and raising children, while, at the same time, contributing to their family economy by working on the farm or in the family business. The work-life balance is nothing new. Upper class women supervised, trained, and often disciplined their servants. The average woman took care of the medicine for her household as far as minor ailments were concerned. Most kitchen gardens contained medicinal herbs. The average woman was expected to help care for the sick and aged in her community and to attend childbirths even if she had borne no children herself. The average woman could expect to spend her few “leisure” hours spinning wool and flax to keep her family clothed. Thanks to the Protestant emphasis on Bible reading, most women of the middling and upper classes were literate and would teach their daughters to read and write, as well. Pamphlets were circulated, spreading new ideas. The 17^th century was a period of profound social change and the average woman would have played some part in that rapidly changing society.

*In what ways are May and Hannah Powers not distinctive of their time (17th
century) and country (England)?
With May’s character I wanted to explore what would happen to a late 17^th century woman who was determined to carve out her own destiny and who demanded the same liberties, both social and sexual, as a man. Her uncompromising will to live out her desires makes her a rebel, not only for her sexual passions but also for her lust for life. She is a woman who refuses to be ruled by anyone. She is definitely transgressive in the choices she makes.

Hannah, her younger sister, is very different. Her physician father has given her a secret and forbidden education in medicine and surgery, something she is not legally allowed to practice. Only by crossing the ocean to the frontier of an unknown world, can she hope to make use of her talents and live out her dreams.

I think it’s important to point out that, although Hannah and May are fictional characters, they are not anachronistic. The late 17^th century certainly had its share of unconventional and adventurous women. A shining example is Nell Gywn, an illiterate orange girl who rose to become Charles II’s celebrated mistress. Every inch the commander of her own destiny, she was one of the first women to act on the stage in England. Aphra Behn is another huge idol of mine. She earned an independent living by writing plays and novels, and reputedly traveled to Surinam and later to Antwerp, where she worked as a spy for Charles II. Although she was briefly married, her husband remains an obscure footnote in her very colorful life.

*Are you working on another historical fiction novel, and if so, who will
be your protagonist?
The Art of Memory, my recently completed fourth novel, is a ghost story set in and around Manchester, England during the Industrial Revolution and the present day. The theme is that the past never dies—the souls lost in the tumult of historical progress continue to haunt and exert their influence on contemporary lives.

The heroine of the historical part of the novel is Annie, a girl whose father, an impoverished handloom weaver, dies in prison after taking part in the East Lancashire machine breaking riots of 1826. Though still a child, Annie has promised her father that she will do everything in her power to keep the surviving members of her family together. Working fourteen hours a day in a cotton mill, Annie must go to terrible lengths to fulfill her vow to her dead father.

Thank you Mary! And feel free to visit Mary Sharratt online for more information about her novel The Vanishing Point.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Cindy Thomson

2007-05-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

* What was it about 5th century

Ireland

that compelled you to set your story there in your debut novel BRIGID OF IRELAND?

I was intrigued by the fact that there were only a handful of Christians in
Ireland at the time. I wondered how they kept their faith and I also
wondered about the pagans. What did they believe? I am amazed that
Christianity spread so smoothly in Ireland. The early Christians there had
to have been amazing people.

* How much of your novel is based on fact and how much is fiction?
The story is based on legends. Not much about 5th century Ireland can be proven. The legends were written down hundreds of years later. At the time of my story, there was very little written language in Ireland. But the Irish have a reputation for being storytellers and the stories were preserved orally.

The setting is as accurate as I could make it and I used the actual names of people that appeared in those legends. Some characters are completely from my imagination. I tell people to look for the names that are easy to pronounce. Those are the ones I made up.

* Tell us something surprising about women in 5th century Ireland, a pagan country about to be visited by the figure we know today as Saint Patrick.
Two things:
Some people are surprised to learn that women held high positions in that society. They were druidesses and warriors, just like men. The idea that Brigid could have been ordained a bishop is not really as far fetched as it seems.

The other thing is that there were slaves in ancient Ireland who did not think their lot in life was that bad, and many of them were women. To be on your own, not connected to any clan, was much more frightening. Not that there weren't abuses. We know that Patrick did not like being a slave. But there was a lot of poverty and for many people being a slave meant you could survive.

* In what way is your protagonist, Brigid, characteristic of her time (5th century) and country (Ireland)?
Well, like I mentioned, women were held in high regard so it wasn't unusual that she obtained a place of influence. But being a Christian would not have been characteristic of that time. Also, giving everything you had to others, during a time when basic survival was uncertain, would have been highly unusual and is probably what made her a celebrity of her time, or at least a
curiosity.

* In 5th century Ireland, what was life like for the *average* woman of the lower, middle and upper class?
The classes at the time could have been described this way:

Royal: you were a member of the royal family or connected in some way, such as being a king's druid. A woman here could have been someone of great influence or just a pampered member of the clan with servants to wait on her. Life was not secure, however. A war could displace you.

Landowner: More than owning land, if you owned livestock, you were wealthy. A woman who either owned land (like the woman in the story who owned an orchard) or cattle was wealthy and secure--until there was a cattle raid, but that's another story!

Slave: A woman could be well taken care of or be abused by her owner. Either way, she had food to eat and a roof over her head.

None of the above: There were no cities, so if you did not belong to any of the other groups, you risked your life living out in the forest. There were women who had trades (seamstress, herbalist, warrior, for example) but they would have been connected to a clan.

* Are you working on another historical fiction novel, and if so, will it be set in Ireland again?
I have written another based on another Irish saint, Brendan the Navigator. My publisher ceased publishing fiction so I'm searching for a home for it. The story of St. Brendan fascinated me. An abbot and some monks climbed into a leather skin boat and sailed, some believe, all the way to North America--and in the 6th century! What they must have seen and experienced would have been truly amazing to them, and frightening. They went out of obedience to God and what Brendan learned changed him forever. The story goes on beyond the journey, however. He was one of the evangelistic monks who set up monasteries across Ireland and into Europe.

I'm currently working on a non Irish novel, a baseball mystery set in the early 20th century, and a non fiction book on the spiritual lessons we can learn from the ancient Irish saints. People often call them Catholic saints, but there was only one church at the time. Their lives have much to teach us whether we are Catholic or not (and I'm not.)

Thank you Cindy! And feel free to visit Cindy Thomson online for more information about her novel Brigid of Irela nd.

Q&A With Historical Fiction Author Sheila Kohler

2007-05-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

* What was it about your protagonist, Lucy Dillon, that compelled you to tell her story in your seventh novel BLUEBIRD, OR THE INVENTION OF HAPPINESS?
She was such an intelligent and inspiring woman. She seems to have used every occasion, even the most dangerous, to learn something. When hiding out from the mob, she takes singing lessons from an Italian, and after her baby was born at the height of the Terror, she has the doctor give her lessons in midwifery while she instructs him on how to sew! She lead a dangerous life filled with tragedy ( she lost all her many children except for one) but seems always to have been able to maintain a sense of who she was and what she believed in. Mostly, it was her curiosity and her ability to continue to learn that inspired me to write about her.

* In your writing, how much of Lucy Dillon’s life is fact and how much is fiction?
I tried to stay true to the facts and not to alter things, but at the same time to take the greatest freedom in the writing that was possible. I wanted to enter the minds of my characters and find out how they would have thought and felt in that particularly time and place. It took a lot of work, a lot of research and time to allow oneself the freedom to leave the facts behind and let the imagination roam.

* Tell us something surprising about the women who frequented Marie Antoinette's court.
These women were often intelligent and had a certain amount of power. They held salons and could invite or not invite as they wished. Often they wrote memoirs of considerable literary quality. I was surprised by their independence, their learning and courage.

* In what way was Lucy Dillon totally uncharacteristic of her time (18th century) and country (France)?
Lucy, being of Irish origin, a Jacobite and from a military family was perhaps more of a rebel than some of her fellow countrymen. For example, when asked to attend a ball in white she comes entirely dressed in blue from her blue shoes, to her blue fan and up to the two bluebirds I place in her hair. I think she was, even for that time, unusually intelligent, well-educated, and curious about all aspects of life: the practical ones ( she was a great seamstress) as well as the less practical ones.

* During the Revolution, what was life like for the *average* woman of the lower and middle class?
The revolution was an uncertain and violent time for everyone. In the end even the revolutionaries like Robespierre and Danton were guillotined. Violence was often random, and war brought suffering for everyone. Still, there must have been a heady sense of change and the promise of freedom in the air. Perhaps Dickens sums it up: "The best and the worst of times."

* Will your next novel be historical fiction?
Yes, I'm writing about the Brontes.

Thank you Sheila! And feel free to visit Sheila Kohler online for more information about her novel Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness.