Things that inspire me 5… Historical Fiction.

Some of my fave's!

To be transported back to another age and lose yourself there for an hour or two’s reading…what could be better than that?

Luckily, the teaching of history at my school did not put me off the subject, but neither did the study of the English three-field system in the eighteenth century capture my imagination; enter Mary Queen of Scots.

I imagine many people with a serious interest in history might have been attracted to historical figures by first reading a novel centred around them, and so it was with me. My mother read Maid of Honour by Elizabeth Byrd in the early 1980s and passed the book on to me; straight away I was hooked by the tale of the Queen of Scots and her maid of honour Mary Seton. A novel of Elizabeth the First had to follow, and I think the first I read was My Enemy The Queen by Victoria Holt, which dramatizes the love triangle between Elizabeth, Robert Dudley and Lettice Knollys; I was fascinated.

I then discovered the novels of Jean Plaidy and probably borrowed every single one of them that our local library possessed, but the desire to know the real facts behind these stories was awakened. Back in time I was drawn, to the giant figure of Henry VIII and the ruthless Plantagenets before him, to William of Normandy and the Anglo-Saxons, and Britons conquered by Rome. Oh the tangled webs of wicked Livia and Augustus in

I Claudius by Robert Graves, who could resist?

Going forward I was not so fond of The Stuarts, probably because of James the First and Sixth’s lack of support for his mother; against the fire and drama of Elizabeth Tudor and the early heroine of my imagination Mary Stuart he seemed dull and serious. I did rather like the histories of the Old and Young pretenders though, especially as a certain John Caryll to whom my family may have a connection was in the service of Mary of Modena, following James the Second into exile. Family history and ancestry research, another passion of mine, but that’s for another day!

There are so many historical fiction novels that have led me to discover the real lives of their subjects but I must pay tribute to one of the most famous, Phillipa Gregory, of whom I am a huge fan. To mention only one of the ideas she presents, the suggestion that just maybe Anne Boleyn had slept with her brother George to get a child out of pure fear and desperation definitely made me think again. I had always firmly believed that that charge was completely ludicrous and invented solely as a sure means to bring Anne down, but I returned again to Carolly Erikson's excellent biography of Anne to consider this afresh. Well, of course we will never know, but this is exactly the thought provoking writing from our wonderful historical fiction writers which continues to send me back to the history books, which I feel is a great thing.