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Contact (US): Sarah Johnson
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Membership in the Historical Novel Society is by calendar year (January to December) and entitles • members to all the year's publications: cwo issues of Solander, and four issues of Historical Novels Review. Back issues of HNS magazines are also available. For current rates, contact:
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Reviews, articles, and letters may be edited for reasons of space, clarity, and grammatical correctness. We will endeavour to reflect the author's intent as closely as possible, and will contact the authors for approval of any major change. We welcome ideas for articles, but have specific requirements to consider. Before submitting material, please contact the editor to discuss whether the proposed article is appropriate for HNS magazines.
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The Historical Novel Society was formed in 1997 to help promote historical fiction. All staff and contributors are volunteers and work unpaid. We are an open society - if yo u want to get involved, get in touch.
From Seed-Corn to Harvest: Karen Howlett talks to D.J TAYLOR about the art & craft ofhistorical fiction ,..,22,..,
IN EVER_Y ISSUE
The Red Pencil: Cindy Vallar Examines Helen Hollick's Fo rever Queen
Inside the HNS Community: Karen Cushman
The Editor's Last Word
The Case for Authors' Notes in Historical Fiction
Do we like them? What are they good for?
Most important, when should we read them? Cindy Vallar investigates.
After finishing Anne Fortier's captivating novel, ]11/iet, _ I read her Author's ote with eager anticipation. Its inclusion was somewhat surprising given the book's modern-day setting, but this story of family curses, murder, and star-crossed loYers also takes place in medieval Italy. Hence the Author's ote. She discussed the origins of Romeo and Juliet and why the actual event originated in Siena, rather than Verona as Shakespeare set it; the liberties she took with the real people of the past who appeared in the story; details of life and traditions in 1340 Siena; her research, and those she thanked for their assistance. These final pages were as interesting to read as her exquisite tales of a fictional Alessandro and Julie and their real-life ancestors, Romeo and Guilietta.
I volunteered to write this article because I included one at the end of my novel, The Scottish Thistle, and I always read them. Curious as to how many of the sixty historical novels on my bookshelves actually included one, I counted 1 Thirty-four included them, although they appeared under a variety of names - Afterword, Historical ~tes, To the Reader I ote, Preface, or Postscript "Author's Note" was the
most prominent, however, and most were inserted at the end of the story. Those that appeared at the start of the novel were usually half a page or less in length, while the ones at the end varied from less than a page to more than ten pages, with three pages being the norm The Scottish Thistle's was five pages long.
I also noticed some authors include notes at both the beginning and the end of their stories. Richard, one such writer, who completed the questionnaire for this article, explained: "I set the historical stage for the upcoming story. I did this after critique groups found the sudden introduction into the action of The S1vords of Faith confusing My style involves lots of dramatic action, with a minimum of narrative exposition. I like to burst into a scene, to energize the pace."
Of th e readers who completed the survey, the majority loves reading Authors' otes Doreen Jensen prefers them to James ~iichener's "footrtotes that went on for pages I found them interesting, but they got me sidetracked (good thing he could always bring me back)." Readers also have preferences as to what to include.
Suzi : I 1vant an author to explain ... 1vhich
details she took a bit of poetic license 1vith so I don't go away wondering if it ivas all tmth or all fiction
Chanta: I'd like to know what compelled him/ her to ivrite the book; airy additional topics/ books regarding the suiject; a!!J other significant events that might have been occurring during the time period the book nm 1vritten.
Rhonda Beardsley: I prefer things relevant to the actual story. Not 1vhat-ijs . . speculations or general comme11ts. Just afactual tidbit if there is one. All of the other stuff would be better placed 011 a 2vebsite.
Marilyn Penner: If the author bent the histon'cal record a little, I'd appreciate an admission. I'd certain/y forgive her if she said 2vl!J. Richard III} usurpation of his nephe1v Edward V was controversial enough that ma,ry novels about it are plausible {An author should not bend the facts too much; I probab/y would not read her story to the end if she did.]
A glossary of archaic 1vords a11d phrases used i11 the book Customs, ideas and beliefs that are strange to us now, but important for the story.
Many readers do additional research to learn more.
Gary Weibert considers doing so "a testament to the author writing a particularly intriguing note/ afterward."
Eleyne Presley: I'm a11 info-geek, a11d if the story 2vas THAT good, I wa11t to continue the adventure Even if the author leaves no notes, if the story intrigues me, I'll do further research
Michelle: I 1vas i11credib/y taken 1vith David Ebersofl} The 19 th Wife and for days eftenvard I looked up facts about the Mormons - their religion, their way of life their attitudes to2vard po/ygamy.
Kathleen Mc Rae: the books that encouraged me to do additional research are also the books I keep, reread, and recommend. Those are the wn'ters I support, b1!Jing every single book thry publish even if thry never tngger another trip to the nonfiction section.
Only one respondent believed Authors' Notes rarely added co the story As to whether anyone had read one on an author's website, Bruce did. It was
"[p]acked with interesting background information on the period and characters." Marilyn felt "U]ooking it up on the site is time consuming and breaks the mood Perhaps when I'm brave enough to buy an e-book, it will have internet capability." Blythe wrote, "To do so might be a 'spoiler.' I have, however, posted blog articles ... about the history surrounding various books."
The greatest degree of variability comes when answering the question, "When do you read the Author's ote?" Some say before, some after. Five always wait until the end. A few consult them while reading. Bruce reads it once he finishes the novel because "I want to experience the novel first as a story." l<ilian also reads it afterward, saying, "It's lagniappe. I save it for dessert." Stephanie reads "it in the middle of the novel when I come across something that puzzles me and I want to see if the author has an explanation for it " She prefers, however, to wait until she finishes the novel because she doesn't "like for the experience of a novel to be interrupted by academia " Gary reads it before since "it even helps me decide whether to purchase the novel."
Everyone agrees they respect the author for revealing literary licenses. They only feel betrayed when this information is omitted.
Kathleen : I respect the author} honesty first (and am more like/y to Jollmv her/ him to their 11ext book for revealing the truth) and truly do not care if thry change events or not. IF thry tell me thry are doing so If a,rything, the Author} Note has increased nry lqyalty to - or en1!JI of - the author because I marveled at ho1v thry made theirplot fit true events, even if certain tweaking was needed to pull it off.
Stephanie: I always respect an author for explaining their choices - all the more if an author reveals a historical inaccura(J' or misimpression the plot may have left 1vith the reader. Better that an author 1vrites a compelling novel with a lengtl!J author} note than 2vn'tes a boring novel that needs no expla11atio11 or qualification.
Rhonda: I alZVf!YS prefer an author who
The Hi s torical Novel Socie ty inv ite reader s to vi sit the web sites of all the authors who participated to learn more about them and their no v els:
Allison Knight, H eart son g www .AllisonKnight.com
Blythe Gifford, Hi s Borde r Bride www.bl y thegifford.com
Bruce Macbain, Roman Gam es www.brucemacbain.com
Cathie Dunn, Lu ck of th e Ir is h www.cathiedunn.com
Chanta Rand, Th e High es t Bidder www chantarand.com
Cind y Vallar, Th e Scotti sh Thistl e www.cindyvallar com
DeAnna Cameron, The Bel ly D ance r www.deannacameron.com
Diana Cosb y, Hi s Co n ques t www.dianacosby .com
Ela y ne S. Venton, Con s t an t in Love www .esventon .com
Gabriella Hewitt, Dark W at ers www .gabriellahewitt.com
Jean Adams, E t ernal H eart s www .jeandrew.co.nz
Kris Kenned y , Th e Iri sh Warrior www.kriskenned y. net
Maggie Anton, Rashi' s Daughters series http://www.rashisdaughters .com
Michelle Cameron, The Fruit of H er Hand s www .michelle-cameron.com
Richard Warren Field, Th e S w ords of Faith www .richardwarrenfield.com
Stephanie Dra y, Lily of tl1e Nil e www. s tephaniedra y .com
Sy d McGinle y, Bys V y ken www. sy dmcginle y .com
Terri Brisbin, Mi s tress of the Sto rm www terribrisbin.com
points out 1vhat thry fudged 011. If I find out 011 JJry 0}1)11 I will indeed resent the author for trying to fool me . . . a flan• in a story is one thing, trying to cover it up and assuming I am too stupid to notice 1101v or in the future is a little insulting.
Marilyn: Sometimes I'm arguing with the author in vry head. I 1vas ticked off try Carol!J Erickson's The Last Wife of Henry VIII because I admired her 11011-fiction about the Tudors she kne1v better than to 1vrite garbage about the reformist Cathen·ne Parr bei11g anxious over the vengeance of Catholic ghosts. Catherine didn't believe such rot. Carol/)' did11 't apologize for it, nor did she sho1v a,!)' bibliograpi?J that backed her up.
The consensus regarding length was one to three pages, although several said it depended on what it contained and where it was located. Two felt the author should determine its length.
Among the memorable Authors' otes, respondents mentioned: fargaret Frazer's, Jonathan R aab's Shadow and Light, fary Stewart's Merlin books, Philippa Gregory's The Other Bolryn Girl, M. f. Kaye's Trade !Finds, Sharon Kay Penman's 117hen Chnst and His Saints Slept, James Tipton's Annette Vallon,
Robin Mv..·well's Signora da Vi11ci, Colleen McCullough's The October Horse, and Stephanie Crowell's Claude and Camille. Another fascinating one appears in Donna Woolfolk Cross's Pope Joan Intrigued with her subtitle, ''\'(/as There a Pope Joan?", I had to know more. Until the middle of the 17 th century, the papacy accepted her reign as fact. Only later did they attempt to wipe out all references to her existence. Being the second edition of the novel, Cross also discussed changes she made to the original version to impro,·e the accuracy of her depiction of life in the 9th century. Some readers provided these corrections to that first edition.
In polling author part1c1pants, all but one included an Author's ote for various reasons.
Allison: I 1va11ted readers to k11011J 11Jhat I 1vas doing and 1vf-!)' Th~• 1vo11/d understand then that the i,iformation I provided 11•as inaccurate but I kneiv 1vhat the correct i1iformation should be.
Donna: [B lehavior ascribed to three of my subjects is mere!J surmised. I chose to use itfor
SLhe , cott1sh ~h1st{e
the sake of my story I believe I'm acmrate, but there are co11tradictory statements that make vry supposition possib!J incorrect, and I 11Ja11t to catego,ical!J state that I took artistic liceme in the 1vn"ting of their characters
Syd: It's usual!J i1iformatio11 I found interesting, but didn't 11Ja11t to i1ifo-d11mp 011 the readers.
Kris: S 0111eti111es I elaborate 011 elements of the story itse!f, and give a little of the real history 011 a certain histon"cal figure or event I might also give real-life instances that inspired or othenvise informed the 11111.ting, perhaps 1vith characteTiZfition or plot. (Ex: in The Irish Warrior, I explained id!J I created a fictional barOI!)' rather than used an actual Ofle.) Author's l\rote also allo1vs me to give a 1vider or deeper sense of the histon"cal penod, ll'hich I kflo1v increases vry 0J/Jn ery'!}ment as a reader.
DeAnna: Histoncal fiction can be such a tncky beast By its very nature, it strives to stitch together 11Jhat is true 1/Jith 1vhat is not (or 1vhat can on!J be surmised), and to do it in a 1vqy that creates a compelli11g story. Every author handles thzs ba!a11cing act different!}\ and readers 1/Jho care about hzstory 11at11ral!J //Jail! to k1101v 1/Jhere the author has draivn the !i11e.
Stephanie: Its vry one chance to have a discussion 1vith nry readers - to explain the point ef 11ry novel bl!)!Olld its historical context. Theres no 1vay I'd miss out on that!
Michelle: As a historical novelist, I have a double responsibility - to the historical record and to nry 01vn story. For a book to be dramatic, cohesive, and thematical!J so1111d, I sometimes have to sacrifice absolute acmrary. In the novel I just completed ... I condensed the history and moved a historical character and certain events ma,ry years fonvard. l'v' hile this 1vas necessary to complete vry overarching theme, it clear/y isn't "kosher" in historical terms. So I need a medium to communicate to 11ry reader, to let them k1101v 1vhere the story is fictional and 1vhere it is (supposed/y) fact.
Although no one has posted their Authors' Notes on their websites, almost half thought it a good idea. Terri directs readers to her website "to point readers to where I have more background about the real history." Several others do this, too, posting other background information on their websites - information not found in their stories. 2
Like readers, these writers prefer Authors' Notes be kept short, although they weren't as specific about the length as readers were. DeAnna writes, "There is no single perfect length. Just as each story is different, each Historical Note will be different. I prefer those that are brief and convey only the pertinent information the reader needs to know about the historical figures and events that play into the novel, or the history that has been altered to serve the story."
Almost all read other authors' Notes. J\lichelle wants "to learn more about the novel itself, and . . to learn from other writers how they have handled writing their otes. I love the 'story behind the story' aspect of these Notes, particularly if a writer includes why he or she was inspired to write the novel in the first place." Kathleen, on the other hand, reads them if the story is compelling. "If the story is slow but a certain aspect of the plot is intriguing, I may skip ahead to see if [the note] generates enough interest for me to continue reading. That doesn't happen often, but when it does, the notes actually sell me
on the story and encourage me to stick with the book."
When do writers feel readers should read the Author's Note?
Kris: After. While its not going to hurt readers' enjqyment or give arrything aivay if thl!)I read an Authors Note before, I think reading an Aftenvard or Authors Note can help in the '1vithdra1val'from story, if you've been deep!J immersed.
Kathleen: I believe it depends on the nature ef the story. I've seen it both 1vays - used before the story helps draw the reader in easier because she/ he understands this is based on or inspired ry tme events. A short 'beforehand' helps set the stage ef the tone ef the times, as 1vell, and gets additional info to the reader much better than backstory can.
Stephanie: I prefer thl!)I read it later, because it contaim spoilers! But real!J, if it coniforts a reader to check the notes first, I 1von 't olject.
THE
OTHER
BOLEYN GIRL
SHARON KAY PENMAN
Dianna Rostad: I 2vo1dd prefer readers go in the order of pages
Terri prefers them at the end of the story, but sometimes the publisher decides on the placement. "I was disappointed when one Author's Note ended up at the beginning of the book and was a spoiler of a pivotal point in my story!"
All the authors felt readers were okay with inaccuracies in novels and wouldn't feel betrayed, unless the author failed to disclose the inaccuracy
Gary: For historical fiction, I think st1ch a mistake (that's noticed fry me, rather than the a11thor admitting they 're even mvare of the mistake) 2vo11/d be a serio11s t11rn-off and jeopardize the a11thor's credibility, which is especial!J crucial in HF.
Michelle: In The Fruit of Her Hands, my main character, Shira, was invented. 3 I have had maf!)I readers tell me how disappointed they were to find that Shira 1vas not a historical character . .. B11t they've accepted my reasons for inventing her and agree that her invention enriched the story. I have also gotten letters from other readers 2vho have .found incorrect details. The most recent 2vas a readerfrom Minnesota ivho mentioned that E11ropeans co11ldn't have been grinding corn during the Middle Ages (and of course, she
was nght). She 2vas clear, tho11gh, that she didn't allow that anachronism to rob her of her enjqyment of the noveL I j11st hope most readers 11nderstand that 1ve do our best - but that those inaccuracies zvi/1 sneak in, no matter hoiv careful 1ve are.
Richard: As a reader, I think bending the truth in a historical novel is fair game, as long as the author indicates that he or she has bent the tmth, or offered speculation. I wo11ld hope readers 2vo11!d feel the same 1vqy about my 2vork.
Kris: I think they LOVE it! I don't think most readers and lovers of historicalfiction mind inaccuracies as much as they mind a11thors not realizing they 're making an error Intentional J11dging' is better than blissjitl ignorance.
Maggie: I think it's very important for a historical novelist to disc11ss 1vhat is based on historical fact and 1vhat the author invented/ created. Readers get angry when they discover what they consider inacmracies, and it's best far the author to diff11se this in an author's note.
Should writers include an Author's Note in their historical novels? Blythe, who's penned five, offers: "\'v'hen a longtime fan fi-
nally read my first novel, the only one without an Author's Note, one of her comments was that she wished I'd written one so she would understand the historical context. I guess I'd better keep doing it since it is something my readers have come to expect and appreciate!" Gary concurs "In Jack Finney's sci-fi time travel novel Time and Again, set circa 1880's, his author note explains how his reading centuryago newspapers from New York City was the catalyst for numerous scenes and in many regards the novel itself. This increased my belief in the validity of the detail of his scenes, and was an intriguing way to learn what inspired him to write the novel." Allison thinks otherwise. "Sometimes I think they are overdone if there is a real event mentioned, or some job or position held by the main character that affects the plot and the event or the position is not something widely known, then I want information. Otherwise, Notes or Afterwords are unnecessary."
Perhaps Cathie sums up the best reason for including them when she explains why she reads them:
If yo11 are interested in history, an Author's Note is immense!J helpful in getting a better picture.
Especially if the novel is engaging, it helpsyou stay i11 the story a little longer.
Notes:
1. A few of my treasured "keepers" include The Snow Mo1111tai11 by Catherine Gavin, A lVoman Called ,Hoses by farer Heidish, Angel in the Rigging by Erika Nau, 11'0111an with a Sword by Hollister Noble, Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, Ride the [Vind by Lucia St. Clair Robson, and Tn-,1iry by Leon Uris.
2 . I did this for The Scottish Thistle My sister's maps, included in the first edition of the book, can be found at my website, as can photographs of my trips to Scotland and the places in the novel. I also include a bibliography of resources consulted. Bruce Macbain and Stephanie Dray are t\vo other authors who do this.
3. I was astounded to learn in Michelle's Author's Note that Shira was fictional, because she seemed so real, but this did not detract from the story for me . If you'd like to learn more about l\,fichelle's novel, The Fmit of Her Hands, you'll find it spotlighted in my " Red P encil" column in the November 2010 issue of So/ander.
A retired librarian, Ci11cfy Vallar is a freela11ce editor, the editor of Pirates and Privateers, and a 1vorkshop presente1: As an associate editor for So lander, she pens the column "Red Pencil. "
Special Thanks ...
I wish to thank the ladies in the From the Heart Romance Writers Chapter of RW A, who took my Researching and Writing Historical Fiction Workshop last fall, for completing the survey. A special thanks to my critique partners, one editing client, and the readers and writers of the Historical Fiction Writers and Historical Novel Society lists for sharing their input.
-Cindy
THOUGHTFORTHEDAYHISTORICAL FICTION EDITION
The 23rd Day ofApril, A.D. 1212
What is history?
A question for the ages. I have something like an hour to settle it. The sun is high, the King is with the Queen, and outside in the yard the servants load the wagons for today :S departure.
History is a record of events. Self-evident. What else is there to say about it? There is much. For in that simple sentence lies a pivotal distinction: on the one hand, the occurrence, the event itself; and on the other, the recording of it.
There is need of definition, too. For instance, what is an event? A tree falls in the forest. An occurrence, yes, but hardly an event. Suppose it falls and kills the king. We have a notable occurrence now; no more than that. It needs a witness, someone to remember or record it. Does it not? If, on this spot five hundred years ago, this king were terminated by this tree and no one saw or knew or ever will know, can we call it an historical event?
To be less theoretical, there is the chronicler at Osney. I have seen this fellow :S work. He makes an entry for each year. In general, he writes a single sentence: ''Nihil memoriale accidit." The year that Henry died, the year that Richard went with halfofEurope on Crusade: to mark such things, this man has written, "Nothing memorable happened. "
I have spoken to the man. He is not brilliant. Neither is he deaf nor blind nor lunatic. He simply does not see the loss of Normandy as an event. The passing of his abbot or the fire that destroyed the priory, these things he carefully notes down.
He has a point. An irritating point, I grant you, but it comes to this: the witness makes a judgment. The historian selects. It must be so. Suppose the King employed a million clerks and put them to a million towns and cities, charging them to write down everything that happened every day. The war is lost, the barber :S pig had piglets; a complete and total record. Is it history?
Obviously not. Why obviously? Because history is a record, not a reproduction. Clearly, something is required of the keeper of the record. Something which involves the use of minimal intelligence.
Historians are much like storytellers, are they not? They take events and put them into order. Facts must be connected, they must shed light or have some bearing on each other. In a word, there must be form ...
The proper use of history is the elevation of mankind.
-James Goldman, Myself As Witness
C LASS, STAT ION, & COMMONE R_S: Power & Powerlessness in English
Historical Fiction
By S arah Kell y
"The truth is vast; I sliced a part of it."
-James Goldman
By the time this issue of Solander lands on your doorstep, the most important royal wedding of the century so far will have taken place. After years of rampant speculation, Prince William and Catherine Middleton will do the nuptial dance in Westminster Abbey, and there are infinite ways in which we - the non-invitees, that is - can celebrate it: Harrods is selling commemorative mugs and plates, while other, more irreverent establishments are hawking everything from Royal Wedding Knitting Kits to Royal Wedding Loo Roll. In record time, indeed, the American Hallmark network has released the television movie Kate & Wills: A
Of course, this is largely a moot question, as these future historical figures are alive and well and, presumably, have excellent attorneys . A welter of films and documentaries, including The Queen (2006) and The King's Speech (2010), were forced to delay production and release until the passing of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mocher in 2002, not only to avoid offense, but to gain access to critical information regarding the royal co u rt prior to the current Queen's accession. Following their release, both films named above were wildly popular and highly favoured at the Academy Awards Bu t novels? The only popular works of fiction abo u t the current royal family are firmly tongue-in-cheek: see Alan Bennett's novella The Uncommon Reader (Faber
about the courts of George V (19101925) or Queen Victoria (18371901)? Or any British monarch, for that matter, who followed Charles II (1660-1685)? Here's a question: do they even exist?
The question struck me while reading The Devil's Brood (Putnam, 2008), the last in Sharon Penman's Plantagenet Trilogy. Not long after I was thumbing through the Historical Novels Review. The HNR handily divides its reviews by the centuries in which the novels take place, and after half a dozen-odd issues, a clear thematic pattern began to emerge: the earlier the historical period of the novel, the more likely it was to revolve around a historical figure immediately familiar to readers. Of early modern histori-
THE ONLY POPULAR WORKS OF FICTION ABOUT THE CURRENT ROYAL FAMILY ARE FIRMLY TONGU E-IN-CHEEK: SEE ALAN BENNETT 'S NOVELLA T HE U NCOMMON
READER OR SuE ToWNSENo 's Q UEEN C AMILLA .
Royal Love Story to abysmal reviews. The relationships between our royals fascinate us, without doubt, but it makes bad television. Would a novel be any better, and if it were, would we care?
& Faber, 2007) or Sue Townsend's Queen Camilla (Penguin, 2006).
By the by, you'll say, and rightly: this stuff is hardly historical. But when's the last time you picked u p a book
cal fiction, for example, literary agent Irene Goodman says, "The market wants novels about someone who actually existed - preferably female." But the further one presses ahead in time, the further the eye of the novel
strays from che people we've heard of, focusing instead on what academics would call social history, and what everyone else might call "people like us".
The Devil's Brood is almost entirely peopled with European nobility, based as it is on the ungovernable family of the Angevin Heney II (1154-1189). This family is an allscar case in itself: who among us hasn't heard of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard che Lionheart, or King John? On its release, Penman's meticulously researched novel landed easily on the New York Times Bestseller list. By contrast, another runaway bestseller, Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White (Canongace, 2002, and currently being broadcast as a fourpart miniseries on BBC Two), set in 1870s London, is decidedly poscMarx, pose-Freud, and pose-feminise critical theory; and, apart from the fictitious Lady Constance Bridgelow and a handful of ocher walk-on characters, the nobility is nowhere in sight. or, for chat matter, are any real people, though Faber makes his own characters real enough co bice. In face, the only reference co che royals comes when the fragile Agnes Rackham admonishes herself against over-indulgence: petite women who eat coo much, after all, end up looking like Queen Victoria.
There is one relatively obvious reason chat historical fiction is more likely co engage street life and common folk che closer ic comes co our own times. First, historians - or simply enthusiasts of history - more information about the recent past than about che distant past. Faber, for example, consulted now freely-available Victorian pornographic work in writing Crimson Petal; any medievalist will cell you what a miracle it would be co find any similar text eight hundred years older. As James Goldman wrote in MyselfAs Witness, a remarkable novel about che lase years of King John,
"Sometimes whole centuries go by wichouc a book. " Increased literacy and leisure for self-involvement has led inexorably co che increased minutiae available to historians.
Being an leisurely, self-involved English historian, though, I wasn't content co leave the question there. No, it won't do: che answer is insufficient. There must be something else ac work. So I read , and I thought, and I thought, and I read, and what I came up with was chis: che English Bill of Rights (1689), and a fellow named Robert Walpole (1676-1745), widely known, where he's known at all, as Britain's first 'first' or 'prime' minister.
Bear with me.
Lee's whizz through the history of power in England, through a telescope:
England is conquered by the Romans, the Danes, che Saxons, sundry ochers, and finally, the Normans (who says Britain's never been invaded?). Under Henry II, an empire - as so many never tire of saying - greater than Charlemagne's; the advent of trial by jury. Under John, Magna Carta. Goldman, the master playwright behind The Lion in Winter and Robin and Marian, wrote Myself As Witness -his only novel - as penance for his brutal misrepresentation of John in his ocher work. "Unlike the historian whose interest centers on the faces, " he writes in his foreword, "my interest centers on the people." Told from the point of view of Giraldus, Angevin chronicler, the novel shows us chat humans and humanity are alive and well in the England of A.D. 1212:
My instincts as a chronicler are faulty We are on our way to London, having spent three days refining all the terms of our alliance, and all I can think about is leaving jean this morning.
Moving on.
Edward Longshanks gees Wales under his boot-heel; the House of Commons is founded under Edward III - who, not insignificantly, also established what we now know as the five ranks of peerage, as well as the Order of the Garter. What follows is chaos. Richard II deposed and starved to death; the beginning of the Hundred Years War; Henry VI dispatched with a blow co che back of the head in 1471. The Wars of the Roses, ending with che Battle of Bosworth and the ascendancy of a Welsh nobody named Henry Tudor in 1485.
This is the point at which England 's limited monarchy will simply no longer do: enter Henry VIII, the breach with Rome , and "chis realm of England is an empire" (which is co say, answerable co no power outside itself). This is England's unparalleled era of monarchic absolutism. In Hilary Mantel 's hands, such unheardof power feels arbitrary, inevitable, timeless:
The fact ofpeoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force ofa phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh offlesh against flesh. The king - lord of generalities - must now learn to labour over detail, Led on by intelligent greed. As his prudent father's son , he knows all the families of England and what they have He has registered their holdings in his head, down to the last watercourse and copse Now the church's assets are to come under his control he needs to know their worth. The law ofwho owns what - the law generally - has accreted a parasitic complexity - it is like a barnacled hull, a roofslimy with moss. But there are lawyers enough, and how
much ability does it require, to scrape away as you are directed? (Wolf Hall)
When re-imagining the Henrician court, the Herculean (or, I suppose, Henrician) task is to turn these remote and motionless icons into human beings.
But steady, we're still going: suddenly, the kingdom's being ruled by two women - first Mary I, then Elizabeth I. There's more than enough recorded pith for even the clumsiest wordsmith to make Elizabeth grand and entertaining, from "I will have but one mistress here, and no master" to "My Lord, I had forgot the fare." But it is in trying to make Elizabeth warm flesh that so many authors have stumbled: Gloriana, after all, is not a woman, but a goddess.
the beginnings of popular freedom. We know better. Oliver Cromwell wielded more power than Henry VIII, establishing a decade-long iron rule over England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Needless to say, Cromwell's ethos of dictatorship in the name of freedom didn't long survive his own death.
Finally, we come to Charles II and his brother James II, the last kings of England and Scotland who attempted to be kings in the old school, ruling both people and Parliament. Charles, canny as he was, managed to get away with it, or at least died before he could get spanked. James did not, and for the second time in fifty years, a king was knocked off the English throne.
From the Restoration there is no end
1707, England and Scotland were, finally, formally joined. All of this allowed space for Robert Walpole, Whig leader and first minister under George I and George II, to take the reins of power into his fat, moist hands. And that - for a lot of readers of historical fiction - turns the royal court into a big yawn.
To the naked eye, the caravanserai of German Georges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are indistinguishable from one another. The first two didn't even speak credible English. And as the Victorian age descended, far more interesting things were happening on the ground than at court. The British Constitution did its uttermost to ensure that Parliament ruled, and whoever the sovereign happened to be didn't especially matter.
THE ONLY REFERENCE TO THE ROYALS COMES WHEN THE FRAGILE AGNES
RACKHAM ADMONISHES HERSELF AGAINST OVER-INDULGENCE: PETITE WOMEN WHO EAT TOO MUCH, AFTER ALL, END UP LOOKING LIKE OUEEN VICTORIA.
Wave goodbye now to Elizabeth, and to the Tudors, too: James I, the first of the Stuarts, descended from Scottish kings, assumes the English throne in 1603. One might say that England and Scotland are now joined in a recognizable 'united kingdom'; a more truthful picture is of two very different kingdoms which, by happenstance, have the same king. Enter The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, Jarnes's infamous tract about the absolute authority of kings. Enter James's son Charles, who, as king, shores up the family art collection with taxes raised for the Navy, imposes smells-and-bells Anglicanism on a Presbyterian Scotland and an increasingly Puritan England, plays a few rounds of croquet, and gets his head cut off in 1649.
Suddenly: no monarchy.
At first glance, this might look like
of drama: Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber (1944), the story of a mysterious country girl who rises to become one of Charles's many mistresses, brings to life a teeming Restoration London and a marvelously corrupt and debauched royal court. Bur it's also a farewell, of sorts: after Charles and James, no sovereign would have the authority - or the temerity - to fight Parliament again; there would be no more grand, witty, competing mistresses or favourites. Kings and princes, from this point on, would have to make do with pulp-grade infidelity, barely worth turning a page for, and leave the readable romps to their inferiors.
From 1688, power politics advanced rapidly. The Bill of Rights enumerated Parliament's powers over the sovereign; in 1701, the Act of Settlement debarred any Catholic from ascending the English throne. In
Another curious thing happened in the nineteenth century: the suffrage movement. Men, followed by landless men, followed by women - they all wanted to vote. So by the early twentieth century, who holds power? Not a king - or a queen, for that matter - but, increasingly, the people.
But is this why we want to read about them? I don't think so. When power was no longer unilaterally held by a sovereign, it did not, of course, transfer immediately to the manyheaded. Historical fiction grounded in the eighteenth and nineteenth cenruries is an exploration, rather, of powerlessness - the awareness of and discomfiture with it, the chafing beneath it - and of the unlikely agency within submission and invisibility, and the myriad, infinite forms which this agency can take. The opening of Faber's Crimson Petal
introduces the reader to Caroline, a housewife-turned-factory dressmaker -turned prostitute, early on a dull winter morning not far from Leicester Square:
Responsibilities, responsibilities. To get enough sleep, to remember to comb her hair, to wash after every man: these are the sorts of things she must make sure she doesn't neglect these days. Compared to the burden she once shared with her fellow factory slaves, they aren't too bad. As for the work, well. it's not as dirty as the factory, nor as dangerous, nor as dull. At the cost of her immortal soul, she has earned the right to lie in on a weekday morning and get up when she damn well chooses. (12)
Caroline, a St Giles prostitute, and Henry VIII, the most powerful monarch in England's history, both face the same decision, with the same personal weight, and make the same choice: the ostensible sacrifice of their immortal souls. Just a few streets away, Crimson Petal heroine Sugar finds her power in ambition and imagined vengeances; but when she finally gets what she wants - escape from servitude at her mother's brothel - she finds her resolve weakening:
Years ago, even months ago, ifshe'd been handed the iconoclast's mallet, she'd gladly have smashed the opera houses to the ground; she'd have sent all the fine ladies fleeing.from their burning homes straight into the embrace of poverty. Now she wonders this spiteful vision ofpampered ladies growing filthy and haggard in factories and sweater's dens alongside their coarse sisters - what sort ofjustice does it strike a blow for? (413)
Even when we do come across the odd and rare "common" characters in the best medieval and early modern historical fiction, they unequipped with anything like an "iconoclast's mallet", because this ethos - Sugar's ethosbelongs almost uniquely to the nineteenth century and subsequent eras.
Even the majority of the men who signed Charles I's death warrant had to have their hands guided: they knew, after all, that they were signing away the only world they knew. We as readers follow where agency and power follow, and this could be why we'd rather read about Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Elizabeth Woodville, or Henry VIII, than about the people who tanned their boots and paid their taxes, and were - much as we object, much as we don't understand it - largely happy to do so.
Coming to the end of this exploration - for now, at least -I find myself oddly discomfited, knowing that I've raised more questions than answers. A conclusion doesn't leap out at the ready because I know that I could go on for pages more, chapters more. All historical fiction shows us a new world, but we as readers have agency in choosing which new world we want to be shown. In this, we have more agency than the writers themselves - but then, all writers start out as readers, and are reading still. Will the landscape of historical fiction change - will we want to know more about medieval tanners and taxpayers - as society changes? I suppose we ' ll simply have to wait to find out.
HISTORICAL FICTION PITCH CONTEST
Agent Irene Goodman is looking for brilliant new historical fiction, and is holding a pitch contest to find those hidden pearls. Irene currently represents historical fiction authors Carrie Bebris, Amanda Elyot, Diane Haeger, newcomers Anne Barnhill and Juliet Grey, and many New York Times bestselling authors. Pitches must be submitted to GoodmanPitchContest@ gmail.com by July 15, 2011. Check rules and dates at www.irenegoodman.com.
50LANDER Short Story Award Winner
THE LAST KING OF GAUL
by Tim Raveling
There are crimson petals on the golden air, spiraling down through the dust and sunlight to rest in a carpet on che scone. The wood of che wagon creaks beneath him, and light glows on the white skin of the oxen that draw it. The king shifts, dazed. The daylight hurts his eyes. There is a sound almost beneath his c~nsciousness, che sound of adulation like a distant ocean, and for a moment he thinks--ALesia? and his mind is filled with the sharp cold scene of autumn air, an1 the fiery gold of the forests chat screech out from che cliffs around his city, with the smell of wood smoke, wich the trust in the faces of his people.
But chis is not Alesia. This is not Gaul. The faces he sees, blurring into focus as his eyes blink against the light, are dark-skinned and dean-shaven, aquiline. They are faces with shadows of resemblance to the grey-eyed general, the giant-killer, the war-hawk. They are his people. They are noc che people of the king.
Alesia. The sound of death surrounds him. Columns of black smoke cower in the sky over the plains of Cisalpine Gaul. The faces of his commanders are drawn, and only a few will meet his eyes. The double wall of che Romans still stands between him and his rein-
forcing army. The enemy waits in silence, a gray mass punctuated here and there by the red of the centurions. In the center, between him and the villages of his childhood, is the pavilion of the General and the bronze eagle of his empire.
The king looks over his men. They are all strong warriors, but they are weary, and they are few. The king considers forming chem inco a single right force and rushing che Roman defenses in a single suicidal rush. To die in blood and glory against a worthy opponent would be a good death indeed, and for an instant he almost gives the order.
But they've fought long enough. They have families, many of chem, farms and homes in the green country of Gaul, and, suddenly tired, he cannot ask them to die without hope of victory.
All eyes turn to him as he mounts his horse and straps his sword at his side. His back is straight as he rides down the hills of Alesia and through his defensive lines. The Roman sentries step aside as the king approaches the General's pavilion. He rides three rimes around it, his horse 's hooves pounding in the sofr bloodstained earth , and then draws up before che tent.
The gray-eyed general steps out into the sun and stands , arms folded ,
watching. The king dismounts, teeth clenched, and lays down his sword . Piece by piece, he removes his armor. His eyes meet chose of the General and the General nods once.
The war is over.
Now, here in chis great city, there is jubilance. The crash of voices grows in his ears as his mind struggles for clar-
a time when these arms were su re and strong. There was a time when the enemies of Gaul fell before him like w h eat before the reaper, when he waded in blood with his army at his back and his bright sword before him, and in the faces of his enemies was only hot, white-eyed terror.
Now his beard, once fine and full, the color of summer's wheat, is tangled and
sky are coo beautiful for words, and the scent of bread and frying meat on the air is maddening. Perhaps, he thinks, he could break his bonds, leap of the wagon, cake a sword
No. His wr ists are bound, and the cord around his neck, the coarse rope, is eight. There will be no escape.
He closes his eyes and sees carrion birds
THE GODS DID NOT FIGHT FOR ROME. THE GODS DIDN'T HAVE TO. ROME WAS LED BY THE WAR-HAWK GENERAL, AND AGAINST SUCH A MAN EVEN THE GODS MIGHT FALTER.
icy, as his body slowly awakens from its long dormancy. The oxen lumber before him, curved horns swaying back and forth with their gaits, and the faces slide by. The red petals slowly fill the Boor of the wagon, and drift around the king's scarred knees.
There is a coarse tightness around his neck, and the king's arms tremble as he tries co steady himself co see. There was
matted, unkempt, rwisced into his hair in a mane like a beast. His fine armor, his stee l circlet, are gone, and he is clad only in the rags of a prisoner. His hands tremble, and for che first time in his life, he feels a glimmer of fear. He has been in the dark for an endless passing of unmarked days, kept beneath the streets of the gray-eyed general's city, awaiting chis moment, and now here it is--and the sun and blue
Tim Raveling grew up in the mountains of western Montana, where he developed a love for writing The wilderness of the mountains and the sparse history of th~ local Native American tribes, early explorers, and the hardy loggers and miners that founded his small town of Hamilton in the late nineteenth century also fostered a strong interest in experiencing the world as it is through the lens of what it has been Upon reaching adulthood , he added travel to his interests and combined the three, making excursions to Italy, former Yugoslavia, Syria, Turkey , and the ex-Soviet nation of Georgia. Starting in June of 2011 he ' s taking his writing, his interest in history , and his inherent nomadicism on the road long-term for a threeyear voyage around the world , sans air travel You can follow along (and read some of his non-fiction work) at his blog, Good and Lost, at http : //www.goodandlost.org.
circling on the air above the citadel of Gergovia, strong and proud, its steep sides littered with the bodies of the Romans, coo quick in their surety co heed the warning of their war-hawk commander and slain in scores as they crashed against Gergovia's walls. Children pick among the dead, running back co the walls holding aloft glinting Roman coins, the statuettes of gods, bits of bone jewelry, the crimson cloth
Nan Hawthorne is the author of An Involuntary King : A Tale of Anglo Saxon England and the soon to be released Crusades novel, Beloved Pilgrim . She is one of the team at HNS Online Book Reviews, and a prolific and varied blogger on her own . She also runs a Celtic radio station on Live365.com. A founding board member of Independent Authors Guild, Hawthorne lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and dotes upon cats .
of centurions. Mars failed Rome chat day, slinking back in terror before the nameless forest shadows of the druids, his sacred eagle trampled beneath the hooves of che great black-bristled boar. The sun was hoc, the wind cold, and Gaul was drawing in on itself, uniting under the king against the relendess advance of the Romans from the south. Alesia was two weeks away, and there was still a strong hope of victory.
That was in another life, the king chinks, and sways, almost falling against the ropes char hold him. He shakes himself, opens his eyes. A shadow passes over the wagon, a high wooden arch chat, in time, will be replaced with a marble one. The supremacy of the grey-eyed general, writ in scone.
Gergovia, before the war. The soft, placid faces of the city fathers, asking him co leave. His is a fire, they say, a burning torch char could strike the flame of rebellion into the tribes of Gaul, and what will become of chem then? They are not warriors. Rome
will consume chem like the last paltry scraps of a feast.
--Will you lie down, then? he asks chem, his hand on the hilt of his sword Will you case down your sword undrawn and accept the Roman yoke wichouc opposition?
The soft faces turn down co the ground and their feet shuffle. They are afraid, and they will not stand.
The young men, though, face h im unblinking, and the king can see the light in their eyes. The fire, he chinks, is already lie. There is no extinguishing it now.
He accepts his exile, knowing chat it will only be for a short time.
Now, the wooden care jolts, sending shocks of pain through the king's awakening legs and back. The air smells of incense, and the sinking sun sends blades of light through the pillars of Rome and the dust of the procession. Priests, as pious and pretentious as the
druids had been, chant at the edges of the crowd, singing songs of praise co their gods of war.
The king knows better. The gods did not fight for Rome. The gods didn't have co Rome was led by the war-hawk General, and against such a man even the gods might falter. The king chinks char perhaps co be defeated by such a warrior as chis is no great humiliation. To simply accept, the way the fathers of Gergovia had wanted, chat would have been a humiliation . That would have been the true death, the forgetting of names and abandonment of place . This way, a good war against a powerful enemy, the lase days of Gaul will become immortal, twisted into the eternal tapestry alongside the name of the king and of the great General of Rome
The king's mind wanders then, even farther, co the days of his childhood. He is young and strong, bent over the back of a straining mount, crashing through the forests north of his village, bow and iron-tipped arrow held at the
Now HE IS THE DEER, CAUGHT BY A STRONGER HUNTER AND DYING IN THE SNARE.
ready. The deer's flanks flash as it leaps out into the meadow, and the king , with a sure hand, draws a bead and lets fly.
The wooden shaft buries itself to the feathers in the deer's side and the deer twists, thrashes, and goes down. The king's heart pounds with the thrill of the hunt and he dismounts.
The deer lies in the grass, struggling against its death and fading quickly. Its wide bright eyes flicker back and forth in the terror of mortality, finally settling on the young king to be. Its body goes still. The king is silent for a moment, then offers a prayer to the spirit of the deer, thanking it for the hunt and for the food it will provide.
Now he is the deer, caught by a stronger hunter and dying in the snare. But the king has also been the wolf, and so the circle of his life is made complete.
The towering marble of the senate rises
before him, and on his throne on the highest step sits the gray-eyed General, draped in violet, impassive, surrounded by the white-draped figures of the senate, as soft and greedy-eyed as the fathers of Gergovia. For a moment the king looks at them and remembers his own exile. Beware these men, he thinks to the General, for this sort prefers knives in the dark to swords and battle.
The crimson petals of Rome continue to drift down on the warm breeze, settling in the king's hair and on his worn clothing. It is fitting, he thinks. The color of the Roman kings is violet, but the color of war will always be red. The king is a warrior, and he is satisfied.
The wagon rumbles to a stop , and silence falls over the crowd.
The General stands, and the king looks into his eyes. The trembling in his hands slows, and stops. His bent back straightens and he holds his head high.
You are Caesar, he thinks, and you are a great conqueror. Your name will be the name of empire for centuries.
But I am Vercingetorix, king of the Gauls. I fought well, and today I die.
Caesar salutes, and silence falls over the crowd. A moment of understanding passes between the two men, from one king to another. Caesar nods, a solemn farewell.
The rope around the king's neck tightens, and the gold and crimson of Rome begins to fade. There is a final flash through the king's mind, a mernory of running through waist-high grass in a Gallic summer, the warm smell of pollen on the wind, and a full and brilliant future open and unwritten before him.
Then the final blackness closes in, and the last king of Gaul is dead.
Of Artists & Actors) Musicians & More
Claire Morris profiles STEPHANIE COWET4TJ
Ayone who has read Stephanie Cowell's historical novels even just one of them) might be surprised to learn that she wrote four books over a seven-year period before she found a publisher. How, one might ask, could the industry overlook such monumental talent? The more cynical among us would point to the vagaries of the publishing world over the past two decades, while optimists would suggest chat good stories always find an audience - eventually.
This is exactly what happened with Stephanie's writing.
"Somewhere during that seven-year period, my Elizabethan novel Nicholas Cooke began to attract the most interest," Stephanie explains. "But I kept coming so close to a sale and at the last moment the editor would leave the publisher or say the novel was just too unusual. Eventually two agents gave up
on it, so I turned my back on agents and decided to submit on my own. (I now have a very lovely agent, by the way!)"
Determined to share the novel, Stephanie kept passing it on to friends, often in a manuscript box at church coffee hour. This strategy proved to be fortuitous. At one church supper, two older ladies who had read and loved the manuscript began talking about it to a man at their cable who happened to be the office manager of WW. Norton. He approached Stephanie and said, "I want to show your book to my favorite editor." The next thing she knew, the editor called her and said, "Who are you?" Then, two weeks later, she called again and offered Stephanie a twobook contract.
"It turned out chat so many aspects of the book were of particular interest to her," Stephanie says. "Elizabethan the-
ater, Shakespeare, Ireland, early medical history, 17 th -century science and spiritual search. So the very combination of things that perplexed others delighted her."
Which just goes to show that "fit" is
everything Bue, according to Stephanie, mencorship had much to do with her path to pub lication too. Both the great Elizabethan historian Dr. A.L. Rowse and author Madeleine ~Engle had read Nicholas Cooke and loved it, and Stephanie was able to include their endorsements in her query letter. Madeleine also wrote a book-jacker blurb when the novel was published in 1993. Nor only did Madeleine "cheer Stephanie on" during the period when publication seemed elusive, bur she was always available when Stephanie needed support.
"Ir's so important to have a mentor to guide you in your creative life because they have walked the road before you and can encourage you," Stephanie says.
Some of her inspiration for her Elizabethan novels came from A.L. Rowse's research, though Stephanie fell in love with Elizabethan London when she was about twelve years old, and the novels grew our of her great love for the ciry. "I sti ll feel it's a second home; I have this strange sense that I have friends waiting for me on Wood Street in the old ciry of London 1593," Stephanie says.
The second installment in the twobook deal with WW Norton was The Physician of London (1995), which continues the story of Nicholas Cooke, and this was followed by The Players: A Novel of the Young Shakespeare, also published by WW. Norton in 1997. The Players tells the story of Shakespeare when he was simply Will, the actor and writer who enters the uncertain world of the London theatre circa 1590 .
Stephanie's fourth novel is Marrying Mozart, which she modeled on Mozart's Le No=e di Figaro, in which "one character comes in and tells something char the other character can't know and there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding". In this novel, Stephanie
tells the story of the four Weber sisters of Vienna and the struggling composer who fell in love with all of them in different ways, eventually marrying one. Published by Viking in 2004, Marrying Mozart has been translated into seven languages.
Perhaps this choice of subject and period might seem an abrupt switch from Elizabethan England, bur Stephanie sang a lot of Mozart during her years as a classical singer. She appeared in nu-
merous operas and also as an international balladeer, formed a singing ensemble and a chamber opera company, and was generally immersed in the music world. Music, she says, is one of the deepest parts of her life. She admits to loving Mozart and his world, so much so that she has gathered material for a second "Mozart novel".
For her latest novel, Stephanie chose yet another subject and period: the world of the impressionists . In Claude and Camille (Crown, 2010), she relates the love story of Monet and his muse, the up-
per-class Parisian girl who abandoned a life of privilege to share the trials of the yet-to-be famous painter. Since her parents were artists, Stephanie grew up with tales of the impressionists, and she believes this early influence contributed to her desire to write about Monet. Like her other books, Claude and Camille has been extremely well-received, eliciting praise such as: "Stephanie Cowell is nothing short of masterful in writing about Claude Monet's life and love" (Boston Globe) and "Stephanie Cowell is building a reputation writing beautiful, cinematic books that bring to life artists from various eras. She seems poised on the cusp of very great things. This feeling is backed by her most recent work, the rich and satisfying Claude & Camille." Qanuary Magazine, which named Claude and Camille as one of the best books of2010).
So what is it about creative typesartists, musicians, actors, writersthat attracts Stephanie? Not only did she grow up in a household where art was revered and encouraged, not on ly did she inhabit the world of music for many years, but most of her friends have been artists of one sort or another - people who live with tremendous passion to act or paint or sing opera on a major stage. She is married to the poet Russell Clay. And she lives just a short walk away from the Metropolitan Museum of Arr in New York Ciry.
"I also was on the edge of theater for a long time," Stephanie explains. "In my teens, my friends and I used to read Shakespeare on weekend sleepovers, as well as our own writing. So the world I know best and the struggle I know best is that of having an artistic goal at rhe center of your life. For many years, it was the only world I knew."
This is one theme char her novels have in common -a focus on the struggle of famous people to "make it".
"I think the struggle to achieve something is such a fascinating story," Stephanie says. ''And often there is a long struggle to succeed. Everyone knows the image of old Monee in his garden but who really knows the young Monet who was desperately in love and didn't have a franc to his name? I am so very interested in finding the real person beneath che marble bust, so to speak, to see them as they were in their daily lives. I love chat geniuses come out of ordinary life where their shoes hurt or they didn't think anyone would love them. I find it fascinating chat Shakespeare likely had to take his shirts to the laundress on the day he went co meet his patron!"
Stephanie's focus on these details may well be the reason why her characters seem so wonderfully alive. When asked what makes a historical novel work for her, she says chat she has to love the time and place but she also has to love the characters, by which she means they must come across as real, with depth. For her own work, she only chooses characters chat she can understand. She tries to put herself in a character's mind, co real ly understand the way she or he sees che world. Shakespeare would not have worn cargo panes or a baseball cap, Mozart did not have electric lighting in his concert halls, and Monet would not have carried a cell phone, but Stephanie believes chat we are all people with needs and emotions that are strikingly similar no matter the century in which we live
To maintain her focus on character, Stephanie tends co read a loc about her subject and then put the research material away for a time. "I cry co physically feel my character and what he or she is doing," she explains. "When I wrote Claude and Camille I would walk down to the river every day and watch the colors of the sky and water change. In the novel I am currently writing, the woman is quite sick on and off, and I am trying co make myself very aware of
what that would be like."
This new novel is well underway. It focuses on the great love story between the fragile Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. Just as Camille Doncieux turned her back on life as she knew it to be with Monee and his painter friends, so Elizabeth Barrett Browning left behind the many brothers and sisters whom she loved so passionately, running away co live in Italy with Robert Browning
in the 1840s.
Stephanie plans to visit Florence chis year - to obtain a better sense of the places her protagonist inhabited. She did likewise when writing Claude and Camille, visiting Paris even though the buildings where Monee had his studios are no longer standing. Despite the face that Paris is also now a larger city than che one in which Claude and Camille conducted their courtship, Stephanie points out chat much remains che same.
"It's perfecdy wonderful when you can
visit che places where your characters spent time!" she says. "Giverny is now restored to much the way it was when Monet lived there; even his dinner dishes are on the cable as if waiting for him to come in. When I stood on the Japanese bridge I half expected him co come down the path with his easel and say, 'Who are all these people? Don't touch the flowers!'
"Salzburg looks much the same as it did during Mozart's time. I did not go to Vienna when writing Marrying Mozart, though after it was published I did manage to visit the city and was able to walk just where he would have walked. Many people who read che book wrote co me saying things like: 'I lived there for years and you described ic perfecdy!' I was very surprised!"
This ability to apply accuracy must come from Stephanie's insistence on remaining true to her characters and their locations. She shares that she once cried setting a book in che late antiquity period but that it did not work for her because she could not "feel the place".
"To hold the audience, we authors have to create a dramatic story above all else," Stephanie says when considering the question of whether writers of historical fiction should sacrifice story to remain faithful to history. "If we do it right, the end result will be more fascinating chan if we put in every daily occurrence For example, Monet and his muse moved around a great deal more than I included in Claude and Camille. They also encountered far more horrific poverty than that portrayed in the novel but I had to condense the truth and make one incident represent this or I knew I would drown the srory. I won't move the dace of a war, but I believe it's perfecdy fine to move the season of a marriage."
St~phani~ ~eels chat historical fienon wnnng can get very cerebral when the writer is crying to
fit the historic details into their story. Whenever it threatens to overwhelm her, she relies on the intensity of music and of Shakespeare, from whom she's learned a lot about writing. "He is very immediate, very dramatic, and has the most gorgeous words," Stephanie says.
And what advice does she have for aspmng historical fiction writers? "Kee p writing! Put away the history books for a time and 'feel' your characters. You can verify the details later. Walle around as your characters. Feel what they felt and try to mimic their actions. Allow them to become as
real as your best friend."
Stephanie also recommends getting online with other historical novelists or joining a writing group to learn from others. Having critique partners. She believes that if one person suggests a change or an addition to your story, you should tuck it into your mind for future consideration, and if two or three people make a similar suggestion, pay serious attention.
"Your book goes through a stage where it is your dream world on paper and then it has another stage where
that dream must be communicated successfully to others. This is where you need the support of a writing community."
Stephanie Cowell is the author of five historical novels. Her latest, Claude and Camille, has recently been released in paperback. For more information on Stephanie and her work, please visit www.stephaniecowell.com.
Claire Morris is a professional writer, and was the Managing Editor of Solander from 2004 to 2009.
Stephanie Cowell s current work-in-progress explores the love story of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
From Seed-Corn to Harvest...
Karen Howlett talks to DJ TAYLOR about the art and
craft ofhistoricalfiction
D.J. Taylor is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Thackeray (1999) and Orwell: The Life which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003, and of Bright Young People (2007), an account of the bohemian partygivers and aristocratic socialites of the 1920s and 30s. Of his nine novels, the most recent are Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006), Ask Alice (2009) and At the Chime of a City Clock (2010); Derby Day is to be published in June 2011.
I first encountered David Taylor's work through Ask Alice, a novel about a woman's rise and fall, which begins in Kansas in 1904 and spans thirty or so years, moving to Edwardian London, a crumbling country house, the provincial theatre and the drawing rooms of the highest society. There are echoes in the book of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and even E.F. Benson, and Beverley Nichols himself, delicately waspish, recounts scenes of
courtroom drama in his 'diary' in the later stages of the storybut that is just part of the gloriously detailed, richly imagined world realised within its pages. The reader becomes absorbed in the multi-stranded narrative, following the eponymous Alice from her humble American origins to her eventual position of wealth and power between the wars, her story connected to that of the young Ralph Bentley and his eccentric uncle, Alfred, who by means of a surprising discovery make their name and fortune and achieve an entree to a previously closed social milieu It's a delicious novel and it whetted my appetite for more from its author.
I then moved back in time to Kept: A Victorian Mystery, which begins with the reports of the deaths by misadventure of two men in East Anglia, three years apart. The men are connected, the widow of the younger one being the ward of the elder, and
although Mrs. Ireland's dependent state is due to mental instability following the death of her child, quite why she is apparently detained at her guardian's gloomy and neglected country house, and why those inquiring after her are denied knowledge of her precise whereabouts and welfare, is a puzzle.
As in Ask Alice, real people and events act as background to the intricate fretwork overlay of the fictitious ones The plot travels from the Highlands of Scotland to the flat land of Norfolk, from the wilderness of Canada to the teeming streets of 1860s London, all these locations linked somehow with the reclusive, impecunious guardian, his ward's disappearance and an audacious robbery. The influences here are obvious: Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, for example, but, whether you call it a pastiche, an episodic narrative which apes its progenitors, or a grand old yarn in the best high-Victorian man-
ner, like Alice, it's a captivating read.
At the Chime of a City Clock is a very different book in terms of its scale and complexity, but its quality and integrity keep it on a level with the two previous novels . Set in the early 1930s in the seedier parts of London, it features James Ross, a writer on his uppers who is reduced to selling carpet cleaner door to door When he meets the glamorous Susie he thinks life is looking brighter, but there's something suspicious about her boss, the mysterious Mr. Rasmussen, and when the police take an interest in Rasmussen's activities, and cause Ross to stay incognito at a country house weekend, events take an unexpected turn.
In these three books alone, D.J.
Taylor's range and depth are obvious, and his beautifully precise prose powers his stylish narratives throughout I wanted to know how he does it.
KH: When you're beginning to think about a new novel, which comes first, the general setting, or the specific story you want to tell? Your books are so well-constructed, so finely detailed, that I wondered whether you approach them rather as an architect whose briefis to design a building to suit a particular piece of land, or the other way round, having the house in mind and seeking out the site on which to put it
DJT: I'm delighted you think the books are finely constructed, as they tend to begin with random evocations of scene, plotlines that develop almost as they go along. The seed-corn is usually a real historical event. For example, the idea for Mrs. Ireland in Kept came from Thackeray's first wife, who went mad shortly after giving birth to her third child, and the tone of her first-person narrative was inspired by the journal kept by Thackeray's daughter Anny. Similarly the theme of Ask Alice grew out of my study of the Bright Young People, and also out of a longterm interest in those sprawling early 20ch century American novels by writers like Dreiser and
James T. Farrell . I discovered that several of the celebrated London society hostesses of the 1920s were actually American expats, and that at least one -a woman named Mrs. Corriganwas very humbly born, a farmer's daughter from Wisconsin, I think. I thought it would be an interesting idea to create a fictitious grande dame with discreditable events in her previous life that then come following her across the Atlantic
KJ!: 7here are large areas of common ground between your fiction and your non-fiction. Which tends to come first - does the biographical research, say, provide the framework for a subsequent novel, or does the preparatory work for a novel spark an interest which you then pursue in non-fiction terms?
DJT: I find that the two tend to inter-relate, sometimes in quite unexpected ways . For example, much of the raw material for Kept was certainly inspired by the research I did for my biography of Thackeray Alice, as I've mentioned, grew out of the Bright Young People . Chime grew out of Alice. But there are also ways in which fiction leads you back to non-fiction. At the moment I'm working on a novel set in 1939, but I'm aware of how fascinating I find what were known as 'lost girls' - the clever, rackety and faintly disaffected young women who worked on literary magazines of the period and hung about on the fringes of Bohemian London. I don't
know if this will lead to a work of non-fiction, but it very well might.
KH: Kept, Ask Alice and Chime span the years from the 1860s to the early 1930s, while some of your other novels are set in the present or very recent past. Are you happiest writing about those earlier periods, and ifso, what is their particular draw?
DJT: In all honesty, the stimulus is usually literary. I feel comfortable setting things in the Victorian era because I have read a great number of Victorian novels. The inter-war era fascinates me as it seems to prefigure so many of our modern arrangements and to provide all manner of fascinating parallels: a coalition government, for instance, not to mention the first stirrings - and this is something I touch on in Bright Young People - of modern celebrity culture.
KH: In your novels, you mix real characters and events with fictional ones; is this for added verisimilitude, or just for fun?
DJT: My template here 1s George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman novels. I always think fiction has much more bite, and much more scope, more room for manoeuvre, if there are real people wandering around in it.
KH: On the subject offun, your books read as though you get enormous enjoyment from writing them. In Kept, to take one example, you use several different nar-
rative styles and lead the reader down some blind alleys - does that dexterity keep the novel fresh and dynamic for you as you're writing it?
DJT: If you aren't enjoying yourself when writing then there is no point in even picking up the pen. Always, when writing, I'm trying to keep myself amused as much as the prospective reader.
KH: It occurred to me when reading Ask Alice that it was like look-
ing at a painting by Frith, and then subsequently I came upon the passage in Kept where you comment on Frith, specifically, " [ J his art lies in design, in what he sees and what he does not see, in what he hastens to include and what he chooses to omit. It is remarkable [ ] how often the eye remarks their chains of quiet connection [... ] the effect is so very singular." Do you consciously try to emulate Frith on the page, or does your love of detail just in-
vite that comparison?
DJT: I am fascinated by Frith. My forthcoming novel Derby Day, of course, takes its tide from his famous painting. I think what I am trying to suggest is that Frith was no more a realist than, say, Monet. His Derby Day, for example, was painted in the studio, using models, arranged in groups of three - 'real life' but devised in a wholly artificial way, and also full of interior narratives, connections between the people in it that are both spelled out and also only hinted at, existing simultaneously on the surface and beneath it. This is very fruitful fictional territory, I think.
KH: Does Frith himselfplay any part in your Derby Day?
DJT: There's a piece in Frith's autobiography which I quote as an epigraph, where he talks about the race offering a perfect subject. Originally we were going to put the painting on the jacket, but it didn't workthere was too much going on, and it would have lacked focus. At one point I wanted to have Frith himself in it, but I feared it would turn into art criticism. As it is, it's a Victorian mystery whose climax is reached at aversion of the 1868 Epsom Derby. Though not a sequel to Kept, it brings back several characters from the earlier book, including the villain, Mr. Pardew.
KH: Regarding what you include and what you omit, would you
tell us something of your working methods, for example, do you tend to go through many drafts of a book before you're happy with it, and to what extent do you rely on your editor?
DJT: To be perfectly honest, I sit down and write it, in long-hand, and then I type it up. I haven't time, or inclination, to work in any other way. I exist entirely from my pen and there are three growing children to support. I have two wonderful editors at Chatto & Windus - Jenny Uglow and Juliet Brooke, to whom I habitually defer as their judgment seems to me to be copperbottomed. Juliet's contribution is invaluable.
KH: You furnish your books comprehensively and beautifully (even when you're depicting a Less than salubrious part of town) - we know what your characters wear, eat, see and smell what their homes and places of business are Like, what they are reading, even. Are these finer points necessary steps for you in building a character or a scene, or are they the dressing or titivating, as it were, which comes later?
DJT: I don't really know where all this comes from. Sometimes I like a stripped-down, ironic modernist style, like the early Anthony Powell, and sometimes I like detailed profusion. Some of the detail in Kept and Alice is at bottom a kind of skit on the way in which the books at which they gesture were written. I think if one is going to pastiche
bygone styles then one should also pastiche the creative assumptions that produced them.
KH: Kept and Ask Alice are rich books, full of opulence, colour (quite Literally in the case of the latter), texture, contrast. At the Chime of a City Clock is more austere: it feels Like a black and white film, its down-at-heel characters and scruffy settings perfectly rendered. Which do you find is the
greater challenge to write well?
DJT: Chime's austerity. Certainly. It's set in the grim 1930s, and the effect was to produce something down-market, shabbygenteel. I don't find either kind of book an enormous challenge. Historical fiction is far less hard to do than contemporary - between 1986 and 2001 I wrote five contemporary novels and found them much harder work. Incidentally, there are sound commercial reasons for all this. Kept, for instance, sold five times as many copies as any prev10us
novel of mine.
KH: You are very skilled at depicting the periods in which you set your books as they would have seemed to the people ofthose times, for example, in Kept a character reminds herself that she's Living in the age of steam engines and the Crystal Palace, thus highlighting modernity, progress, Looking forward. What helps you to think yourself into the mindset and attitudes of the period?
DJT: Again, it's the grounding in the fiction of the time. Chime, for instance, draws on the world of the '40s writer Julian Maclaren-Ross, whom I've always greatly admired. Minutiae that gives you an idea of how the people actually lived and thought is one of his strongpoints.
KH: What are you currently working on, and what is the next historical novel you have in mind?
DJT: A sequel to Chime, called Secondhand Daylight, will be out next spring. I'm two thirds of the way through a novel set in 1939 which I hope to finish by the spring of next year. Then I intend to come back to the here and now.
D.J Taylor's website zs at www. djtaylorwriter.co. uk
Karen Howlett reviews for various periodicals and writes about books at www.cornflowerbooks.co. uk
THE ~ED PENCIL CINDY VALLAR
analyzes the work behindfinished manuscripts. In this issue, she profiles HELEN HOLLICK'S Forever Qyeen.
Ema was uncertain whether t was growing need to visit the privy or the remaining queasiness ofmal de mer, seasickness, that was making her feel so utterly dread.fol. Or was it the man waiting at the top of the steps? The way he was looking at her, with the intensity of a hunting hawk, that was so unsettling? A man she had never seen until this moment, who was four and thirty years to her thirteen , spoke a language she barely understood and who, from the morrow was to be her wedded husband.
Spring. Three days after the celebration of the Easter Mass, in the year of Christ I 002. Her brother had agreed to this marriage of alliance between England and his Duchy of Normandy for reasons of his own gain. Richard ruled Normandy, and his brood ofsisters, with an iron will that imaged their father's ruthless determination. Their father, Richard's namesake, Emma had adored. Her brother, who thought only ofhis self advancement and little else, she did not.
Her long fingers, with their bitten, uneven nails, rested with a slight tremble on Richard's left hand Unlike her, he appeared calm and unperturbed as they
ascended the flight of stone steps leading up to the great open-swung doors of the Cathedral of Canterbury. But why would Richard not be at ease? ft was not he, after all, who was to wed with a stranger and be crowned as England's Queen.
With unbound, unveiled fair hair and her large shining eyes, Emma was passably pretty, but she was aware that /Ethelred, surveying her from the top of the steps was assessing that her legs were too long, her nose too large, her chin too pointed. Her breasts and hips not fall and rounded
The dri=ling rain had eased as the Norman entourage had ridden through Canterbury's gates, the swaths of mist, hanging across the Kent countryside like ill-fitted curtaining, not deterring the common folk from running out of their hovels to inspect her. England and the English might not hold much liking for the Normans and their sea-roving Viking cousins, but still they had laughed and applauded as she rode by; had strewn blossom and spring-green, new-budded branches in her path. They wanted peace, an end to the incessant i-vik.ing raiding and pirating, to the killing and bloodshed
. . If Emma minded being so blatantly used for political gain, it was of no consequence to anyone Except to Emma herself
/Ethelred was stepping forward, reaching out to take her hand, a smile on his face, crow's-foot lines wrinkling at his eyes. She took in his sun-weathered, leathery face and fair curling hair that tumbled to his shoulders, a moustache trailing down each side ofhis mouth to run into a beard with flecks ofgrey hair gri=ling through it. She sank into a deep reverence, bending her head to hide the heat of crimson that was suddenly flushing into her cheeks. At her side, Richard snorted, disgruntled that she should be greeted before himself He had not wanted to escort her to England, had vociferously balked at meeting face to face with this English King.
"I would not trust a man involved in the murder of his own brother to gain the wearing of a crown any further than I could spew him," If they were his thoughts about this King, then why, in the name of sweet jesu, had he arranged for Emma to wed him? Why was she here, feeling awkward and uncertain, fearing to look up at the man who would soon be
bedding her and taking her innocence of maidenhood?
. . . What if /Ethelred was ugly? What if his breath and body stank worse than a six-month uncleaned pig-pen? What if he does not like me? The questions had tumbled round and around in Emma's mind these three months since being told of the arrangement; had haunted her by night and day. She knew she had to be wed, Richard had been insistent on good marriages for all his sisters and it was a woman's duty to be a wife, to bear sons for her lord. Either that or drown in the monotonous daily misery of the nunnery! There would be no abbess's veil for Richard's sisters, though, he needed the alliances, the silver and the land. Richard wanted all he could get, and he wanted it not tomorrow or next year, but now. One by one his sisters had been paired to noble marriages, but they were all so much older than Emma. She had not expected to be bargained away so soon.
From somewhere she had to gather the courage and dignity to look up, to smile at /Ethelred she clung to the talisman of her mother's last parting words as if they were a cask of holy relics: "No matter how ill, how frightened, or how angry you might be, child, censure your feelings. Smile. Hold your chin high, show only pride, nothing else Fear and tears are to be kept private You are to be crowned and anointed as Queen of England. The wife and mother of kings. Remember that."
She took a breath, swallowed. Looked up ai the man standing before her. Looked at /Ethelred who was to be her husband, and knew, instantly, that she disliked him.
Thus begins A Hollow Crown, published in the UK in 2004. Helen Hollick, the author, felt "[i]t never received that 'final polish' that it deserved. Sadly, Heinemann (and my ex-agent) had lost interest in me, and I think at the time, historical
fiction was a waning genre. No one told me they didn't want an epic tome - as was the fashion for historical about 8-10 years ago. I was not experienced enough when writing Crown to know the techniques of writing so I made some enormous technical blunders. Point of View 'head hopping' for one."
Perhaps other authors can empathize; when I wrote The Scottish Thistle, my writing method lacked the experience that comes with writing and polishing over time. Once we acquire this skill, we might wish we could go back and improve the manuscript, but few authors get to do so. Not Helen. Sourcebooks offered to publish her manuscript here in the States. She agreed, but found one stipulation a bit daunting - cut 45,000 words from the manuscript.
First reaction? Horror. Then panic, then a little hostile, and then utter cowardice!
My ex-agent dropped me several years ago and no replacement has wanted to take me on, so at times I feel very alone and vulnerable - not having anyone to bang the drum or stand up for you is difficult at times. There is, also, no one to plea "help!" to.
I am fortunate to have author Elizabeth Chadwick as a dear friend, though She is so practical and down to earth (not at all the dizzy air-head blonde that I am!) and she tells the truth. That might be hard to take at times - but when she says something is good, you know it truly is, she's not just being "nice. "
(My motto? Ifyou don't want to hear an honest opinion - don't ask for one!)
I e-mailed her, something along the lines of "Eek! What do I do!11!????"
As always her wzse advice set
me on a calmer path. "Take this as a fantastic opportunity to turn what is a good book into the great book it deserves to be."
My editor at Sourcebooks [also] cut unnecessary words, tighten[ed] it up; mark[ed] up scenes I paragraphs I words that were repeated or rambled.
Some ofthe scenes she suggested we could cut horrified me! '1 know we've already had a battle scene, "I said in one e-mail, "but we cannot cut out the Battle of Ashingdon - it's very important. Cnut wins his crown because ofhis victory. I'll cut the other battle" (at Thetford - I now just mention it, not write it in detail.)
She also wanted me to entirely cut the scenes building up to and including where Emma climbs the cliffi.
'Tll pare the wording down, " I said, "but that scene stays!"
I get more e-mails about that scene than anything else, and besides, that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book in the first place - to use that real event. 1 It stayed.
It's amazing how easy it is to cut once you get going; do I really need 'it was a gloriously beautiful day?' When glorious or beautiful could quite easily go (and probably should not have been there in the first place!}
The thing to watch, is keeping the continuity going - cut a thread, yes, but make sure it stiff Leads somewhere and is not left dangling in the wind.
By the time I reached the second half I had gained the confidence to cut entire chapters. Did we need yet another political murder when a briefparagraph would do?
That's the thing about having confidence in yourself and your editor. OK so it might have taken hours, maybe days, to write that scene. Come the final edit, if it doesn't fit, if it doesn't really serve a purpose - why is it there?
Pressing that delete button can be the hardest thing a writer does, but more often than not, the wisest.
Some changes Helen made are minute - ones readers may not notice - but combined with the major rev1s10ns, the opening chapter of The Forever Queen provides readers with a better glimpse into Emma as a young girl, probably around thirteen years old, on the day she first sees her much older husband-co-be, /Ethelred. She is insecure, with a poor self image - much like young girls are today, which allows female readers to q~ickly identify with Emma. Helen's goal here is intentional. The story spans forty-one years, and she wanted "co show Emma growing in maturity and confidencechanging from a shy, rather frightened, lonely girl into the woman who would do anything ro retain her crown."
Emma was uncertain whether it was a growing need to visit the privy or the remazmng queasiness of mal de mer, seasickness, that was making her feel
so utterly dreadful. Or was it the man assessing her with narrowed eyes from where he stood at the top of the steps? A man she had never seen until this moment, who was four and thirty years to her three and ten, spoke a language she barely understood, and who, from the morrow, was to be her wedded husband.
Did he approve of what he saw? Her sun-gold hair, blue eyes, and fair skin? Maybe, but he was more probably thinking her nose was too large, her chin too pointed, and her bosoms not yet firm and rounded.
. . . Hiding her discomfort as well as she could, she stared at this King's sunweatheredface. His blond hair, curling to his shoulders, had silver streaks running through it. His moustache trailed down each side of his mouth into a beard flecked with grey hair. He looked so old! Her long fingers, with their bitten, uneven nails, rested with a slight tremble on her brother's left hand. Unlike her, Richard appeared unperturbed as they ascended the steps leading up to the great open-swung doors of Canterbury Cathedral. But why would he not be at ease? It was not he, after all, who was to wed a stranger and be crowned as England's anointed Queen
The dri=ling rain had eased as their Norman entourage had ridden through Canterbury's gates; the mist, hanging like ill-fitted curtaining across the Kent countryside had not deterred the common folk .from running out of their hovels to inspect her. England and the English might not hold much liking for the Normans and their sea-roving Viking cousins, but still they had laughed and applauded as she passed by. They wanted peace, an end to the incessant i-viking raiding and pirating, to the killing and bloodshed. ...
If Emma minded being so blatantly used for political gain, it was ofno consequence to anyone. Except to Emma herself What if I am not a pleasing wife? What if he does not like me? The questions had
tumbled round and around in Emma's mind these three months since being told of the arrangement, had haunted her by night and day. She knew she had to wed; it was a woman's duty to be a wife, to bear sons. Either that or drown in the monotonous daily misery of the nunnery, but there would be no Abbess's veilfor her.
Richard wanted all he could get, and he wanted it not tomorrow or the next year, but now. One by one his sisters had been paired to noble marriages, but they were all so much older than Emma. She had not expected to be bargained away so soon.
./Ethelred was stepping forward, reaching out to take her hand, a smile on his face, crow's-foot lines wrinkling at his eyes. She sank into a deep reverence, bending her head to hide the heat of crimson suddenly flushing into her cheeks. At her side, Richard snorted, disgruntled that she should be greeted before himself
He had not wanted to escort her to England. . . . '1 do not trust a man involved in the murder ofhis own brother to gain the wearing ofa crown, " ...
If these were his thoughts, then why, in the name of sweet jesu, had he agreed to this marriage? Why was she here, feeling awkward and uncertain, fearing to look at the man who would soon be taking her innocence of maidenhood? . . .
From somewhere Emma had to gather the courage and dignity to raise her head, smile at ./Ethelred She clung to the talisman of her mother's parting words: "No matter how ill, how ..frightened, or how angry you might be, child, censure your feelings. Smile. Hold your chin high, show only pride, nothing else. Fear and tears are to be kept private. You are to be crowned and anointed Queen of England. The wife and mother ofKings. Remember that. "
Emma took a breath, looked at the man who was to be her husband, and knew, instantly, that she disliked him.
Through deleting, rev1smg, and reordering her words, Helen shows Emma "as a young girl bewildered, lonely and frightened." As the story progresses, though, she "realises her inner strength," which permits her to do whatever she must to survive.
One word Helen chose to retain is "moustache." A reader sees this word, processes and understands it immediately, then continues reading without interrupting the flow of the story. A good historical novelist strives to produce a story that is as authentic as possible, bur here Helen deviated from chis "rule " The language of Emma's time period was Latin or Old English, bur few of us are conversant in these tongues. "Moustache" doesn't derive from either of those languages; nor does it enter English until several centuries later. Rather than break the story's flow with "trail of hair beneath his nose running down each side of the mouth," which comes across as "clumsy and contrived," Helen opted for a word chat immediately creates an image we understand.
Was this scene how Helen opened Emma's story in her first draft? No. Initially Emma rode "co Canterbury from Dover. T figured, in the second or third re-write, that the impact of this young, somewhat nervous girl walking up chose steps and look[ing) for the very
first time into the older, indifferent face of the man who was to be her husband, had far greater impact, so I ditched the original opening." She's right!
Wh en I interview an author for this column, I always ask what else he/she would like to share. Helen says :
I think of Emma as an equal to Eleanor of Aquitaine - they are two very similar women but almost everyone interested in history has heard ofEleanor - very Jew people know who Emma was. I wrote the novel to bring her to readers' attention.
1here are violent scenes; rape, murder, battle - but these were violent times. It is no good writing a historical novel that tries to re-create a flavor of that pastand then censor the nasty bits.
For myself, until Forever Queen was published by Sourcebooks . . . I did not have much pride in the book.
Heinemann and my ex-agent had Lost interest in me and my work (I went through four editors at Heinemann in a couple ofyears - one I never even met}. 1hat can so undermine an author's confidence - it certainly did mine! When A Hollow Crown was released, Heinemann did no marketing To know those supposedly supporting me had no faith in the book, or me, was devastating.
Plus, just as I was about to start writing it . . . my closest friend died suddenly. . It is so hard to write when your heart and soul is grieving.
However, Sourcebooks gave the bookand me-a new Lease ofLife. My US editor, Shana Drehs, has been so supportive and enthusiastic. I can't thank her - or the managing director, Dominique Raccah, and all the production team- enough.
When I read historical novels, I often pick up stories set in modern times, but a Publisher's Weekly reviewer wrote of 1he Forever Queen: "Hollick does
a remarkable job of bringing to life a lirrle known but powerful queen, as well as the milieu and world she inhabited. The scope is vast and the cast is huge, bur Hollick remains firmly in control, giving readers an absorbing plot char never lags over the course of a far, satisfying book." 2 I concur. Not once did Helen's 628-page tale break the spell she wove as she transported me back to medieval England. 3
Notes:
1. Of this scene, Helen writes: "Before I even started writing I knew I wanted to use the scene where she climbs the cliffs when the ride curs her off. Ir is a factual scene from several centuries later - 1918/ l 9 to be exact! My own grandmother - also called Emma - found herself in exactly char situation and climbed the cliffs in full Edwardian dress and holding my father in her reerh. I wanted to honour her heroism. Queen Emma was the right character to make use of it.
2. This review appeared in rhe 6 September 2010 issue on page 23.
3. If you would like visit Helen, you can learn more about her and her writing at Helen Hollick's World of Books (http:// www.helenhollick.net/) or Helen Hollick Historical Fiction & Historical Adventure (http://www.acorne.blogspor.com/). You'll also find her on Facebook and Twitter. The video trailer for The Forever Queen is online at www.youtube.com/ warch?v=o5JXoCsf_4k. Emma's story continues in I Am the Chosen King ( US edition) or Harold the King (UK edition).
A special note to authors: If you have a published or soon-to-be-published historical novel you'd Like to see spotlighted in "The Red Pencil, " please contact me at cindy@ cindyvallar.com and I'll send you the particulars. Keep in mind you must have an early draft ofyour manuscript available. Cindy Vallar is a freelance editor, an associate editor for Solander, and the author of The Scottish Thistle (www.cindyvallar.com/ scottishthistle.html} A retired Librarian, she also writes about pirates, presents workshops, and reviews books.
INSIDE THE HNS COMMUNITY
Lucinda Byatt talks to author KAREN
CUSHMAN
When did you join HNS and can you tell u s how the occasion arose?
I saw the society mentioned in a bibliography ten or so years ago and grabbed the chance co join
Tell us briefly why you enjoy HNS?
I love being part of a community of historical fiction fans and authors. I n the Review, I turn first co the news of upcoming books, t h en the reviews, circling ones co seek o u r. That migh t explain the toppling n ature of my co - beread pile Solander l read cover co cove r
Did you school enjoy (or history at university)?
I hated history at school. Ir was all abo u t dares and battles, kings and barons and po li tical maneuvering. le was n't unti l I discovered historical novels and realized char history was peop le and stories char I fe ll i n love with it.
Can you tell us what drew you to HF in your own writing for young adults and how it has developed?
The question I am asked most oftenaside from "What does Corp us Bones mean?"-is wh y historical fiction? I chink historical fiction helps young readers develop a feeling
for a living past by illustrating the continuity of life, giving chem a sense of history an d th eir place in i t.
Historical fiction, like all good history, demonst rates how history is made up of the decisions and actions of individuals and that the future w ill be made u p of our dec isions and actions . Asked why he writes historical fiction, Leon Garfield sai d If the young discover that in the past we have been governed, led, abused, and slaughtered by fools and knaves, then perhaps they will look about them and see that matters have not greatly changed, and possibly they will do so before they vote I fin d chat a great reason for writing.
Bur mostly I write h istorical fict ion because chose are the stories that rake me over. Rosemary Sutcliff, writer of gorgeo us historical novels for you n g 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 interes t ed in-the life in those bones. I'm sure it woul d be int eresti n g co w ri t e a book abo u t somebody in 2011 living in a su b urb with a dog and divorced parents, but the subject doesn't have the same appeal co me as rh e idea of someone ass ist ing a me di eval bl oo dl er re r and getting in vo lved in real b lood an d g u ts. I write w h at's interesting co me
Which period or city have you most enjoyed researching or writing about?
My fascina t ion with medieval England has been around for years I starred long ago w ith Anya Seton and Rosemary Sutcliff and progressed t h ro ugh medieval m usic, me d ieval fairs, an d collect ing things like the 15th century ill um inated manuscript page ch ar hangs o n my wall. My father's fam il y is Polish, my mothe r's German and Ir ish, so the Eng li sh were certainly neve r heroes co either side of the family. Bur somehow England, the England of long ago, spoke co me .
Do you have any favourite maxims for developing or sticking to a writing routine, or do you have any advice for "would-be" HF novelists?
I've n ever been good at fo ll owing rules or ocher peop les' examples. I'm coo oppositional, but it works for me. So I te ll would-be writers co find what works for them, what insp ires ch em. I want them co g ive themselves permiss ion co write, co work hard, co scop writing, co rake a walk and dream. To make their own rules. I found on t h e internet recen tly instructions on how co li ve the good life, attribu ted co a variety of sources from Buddhist teachers co a hotel management
co urse in New York cicy: Show up. Pay atte nti o n. Te ll th e truth . Let go of the o u tcome. If wr iters are going to fo ll ow a n y rul es, I reco m mend th ese: sh ow up , pay atte n tion, te ll the tru th , an d le t go of th e o u tcome.
An d h e re is m y fi n al advice: Write with pass io n , fro m yo u r h eart. Dream b ig an d fo ll ow yo ur d reams. Doi t yo u r way. Blaze yo u r tra il. Goeth e wrote As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. I say "w rit e" : As soon as yo u trust yo urself, yo u w ill kn ow how to write.
The inevitable question, what is your favourite HF novel/or favourite author? {or what are you reading at the moment?)
A t th e m o m ent I'm rereadi n g Vision
of Light by J udith Me rkle Riley And I love and will read anyth ing by Ell is Peters or Rosemary Sutcliff.
If time travel were possible, name a historical figure whom you would like to meet, and perhaps explain why?
Eleanor of Aq ui ta i ne There are so m any stories a bo u t her. I'd love to see what 's real and w h at 's myth.
My website is karencushman.com. Co m e and visit.
THE EDITOR.'S LAST WOR.D
As I write this, royal wedding furor is at a fever pitch, but it hasn't happened yet - but by the time you read this, Prince William and Catherine Middleton will have tied the knot. It less than a century ago that George V decided that his descendants should be allowed to marry subjects, a decision which almost immediately stopped members of the royal family gambling on a love match with remote, high-born foreigners.
Still, the discomfiture continues: Princess Margaret was prevented from marrying Group Captain Peter Townsend because he would have had to divorce; more recently, Camilla Parker-Bowles, herself a divorcee, has been debarred from the tide "Princess of Wales", in spite of being married co the Prince of Wales, and promises are being made now - though who knows if they'll be kept? - that when Prince Charles assumes the throne, Camilla will be "Princess Consort", not Queen of England.
But we must thank Heaven for small favours: things are better than they were. Who can forget the Prince Regent 's disastrous marriage to Caroline of Brunswick in 1820? Prince George spent his wedding night with his head in the fireplace, and could only consummate the marriage after a sufficient dose of brandy. Marrying for love, rather than for policy, seems to have promoted an upswing in gallantry, at least. Half the western world can't wait for Kate and Wills to walk down the aisle, and the ocher half couldn't care less, but I'm sure there are few enough who wish them ill. Getting rid of my television was one of che best decisions I've ever made, but now I'm scheming co get a place in front of a flat-screen for April 29.
In the meantime, spring has sprung, and with it a new issue of Solander chock-full of goodies to inspire your summer reading list. From the King of Gaul to Monet, from the Saxons to the Victorians, the authors featured in chis issue are diverse enough to please everyone. Cindy Vallar, our Industry Editor, spoke with a score of authors co dig in to what really inspires the historical novel's Author Note, and in so doing examines the accuracy - and ideas about the necessity of accuracy - in hisrorical fiction I take my own turn at writing, creating a demographic profile of the main characters in English historical fiction from pre-history to the twen ciech cen cury.
Finally, chis issue has an announcement and a reminder: literary agent Irene Goodman, a regular contributor to Solander, has started a chapter-pitch contest for all the aspiring historical novelists out there Visit www.irenegoodman.com for details We'd also like to invite you to the Historical Novel Society conference in San Diego in June - there are only a few spaces left, so register while you can. More information can be found at hns-conference.org/registration.
As for me , much as I'd love co continue chis chat, there's London sunshine to be soaked up, and one never knows how long chat will stay. So, until next time, have a great summer, and happy reading!
