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Category Archives: Writing Historical Fiction

CECILY – by Annie Garthwaite

28 Saturday Aug 2021

Posted by ninevoices in Bestsellers, book reviews, Cecily, Historical Novels, Maggie, Newly Published Author, Writing Historical Fiction

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Annie Garthwaite

Before reading this book I was already aware that Cecily Neville – granddaughter of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, the mistress who subsequently became his wife – was feisty enough to face down her enemies at the gates of Ludlow Castle, with her small children at her side. But I knew little else, except that she was wife to Richard, Duke of York, and mother to three famous (or infamous) sons: Edward IV, George Duke of Clarence, and Richard III.

Annie Garthwaite’s stunning new historical novel, CECILY, admirably fills the gaps, providing a vividly female perspective on the Wars of the Roses and showing how a determined woman could operate in a man’s world. Medieval women, we learn from Annie, especially those of the aristocracy, could be responsible for huge households and vast estates – “enterprises similar in complexity and size to mid-sized FTSE companies”. As if that weren’t enough, at the same time as supporting their husband’s political career, they were expected to breed. Failure at which negated all else. Like some twenty-first century women, Annie Garthwaite argues, they “were expected to do it all”.

I devoured this book, influenced by the fact that I have been a ricardian in sympathy since reading Josephine Tey’s book The Daughter of Time in my teens. Not only do my bookshelves heave with tomes about the Plantaganets, but my current historical novel has an 18th century historian who tries (unsuccessfuly) to write about them.

Annie Garthwaite admits that the Wars of the Roses have also been a fixation of hers since being inspired by her secondary school history master. Her debut novel has been long in gestation, and shows it, causing Cecily Neville to leap from the page as a real woman: flawed yet ambitious. Duplicitous, yet vulnerable. Strong, yet capable of tenderness. If you care about the past and appreciate a brilliant eye for historical detail, this book will not disappoint. In fact, I am convinced that Annie Garthwaite is going to give Hilary Mantel a run for her money.

I think Annie herself deserves the last word:

“What can I say? I love 15th century history. No apologies, no excuses. The 100 Years War, the Wars of the Roses. All of that.

“It’s not that I’m a big fan of blood and battles. Personally I can do without that sort of thing. No – it’s the women who interest me. How they negotiated their way in the world. How they managed – some of them at least, probably more than you’d think – to wield power and influence at a time when men seemed to hold most of the cards. And how others, simply, did not.

“For me, the stand out character of the 15th century has always been Cecily Neville. She experienced power in both directions: wielding it and having it wielded against her. She survived eighty years of tumultuous history, mothered kings, created a dynasty and brought her family through civil war. She met victory and defeat in equal measure and, in face of all, lived on. Last women standing, you might say.”

Maggie in Historia magazine

11 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by ninevoices in Fiction, Historia, Newly Published, Uncategorized, Writing Historical Fiction

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Our Maggie, winner of Historia Magazine’s Unpublished Novel Award, is featured in this month’s edition of Historia.

Read the article here…

9 June 2020 By Maggie Richell-Davies

How I won an award and stopped being an unpublished novelist

Part of William Hogarth's portrait of his servants

Maggie Richell-Davies is the winner of the first HWA/Sharpe Books Unpublished Novel Award. She tells Historia about her now-published novel, The Servant, and her journey to publication by Sharpe Books: “Be persistent,” she advises. “But above all find competitions that put your story under the nose of someone who loves the past.”

Continue reading →

Congrats to The Servant

14 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by ninevoices in Competition Win, Ed, Fiction, Historical, Maggie, Writing Historical Fiction

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18th century, London, squalor

The Servant – the book we hope to be reading soon!  Many congratulations to ninevoice Maggie Richell Davies, who has won the Sharpe Books/Historical Writers’ Association Unpublished Award 2020.

The other eight ninevoices have heard this book progress (and change form) for some time now and we know how good it is.  We’re in 1765: and, to quote the HWA website, “Fourteen-year-old Hannah must go where she’s sent, despite her instincts screaming danger. Why does disgraced aristocrat William Chalke have a locked room in his house? What’s sold at the auctions taking place behind closed doors?”   The story evokes 18th century London and its squalor and brutality and also its redeeming features. 

It’s clear from the descriptions of the short- and longlisted novels how strong a field the judges had to choose from.  Our congratulations to all those authors in those lists!  See http://www.historiamag.com/hwa-sharpe-books-unpublished-novel-award-winner/

Footpads vs Muggers

26 Tuesday Dec 2017

Posted by ninevoices in Ed, Vocabulary, Writing Historical Fiction

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18th century, Chemists, Crime, Footpads, Muggers

I should stop reading novels set in the 18th century.

The other dark evening I went to join a group of family and friends at a pub on our local common, a little way from the road and reached by an unlit path lined by bushes on one side. On arrival I announced that I had arrived safely, unmolested by footpads. None of the seven people present knew what I was talking about; none know the word ‘footpad’. Was I referring to something bought in the footcare section of the local chemist?

Had I said ‘mugger’ I’d have been understood but my announcement would not have had the intended jocular effect. (Not that being a footpad’s victim would have been any less unpleasant than being a mugger’s …)

So, repeating the question Maggie asked last week in her posting https://ninevoices.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/does-historical-fiction-need-purple-prose/, should a historical novelist use a word contemporary with her or his setting but unknown to most readers today? Would they look the word up, or skate over it and guess at the meaning; or would its use be off-putting? Hmm.

Who Ate the Pies?

12 Sunday Nov 2017

Posted by ninevoices in Maggie, Writing Historical Fiction

≈ 5 Comments

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Ben Elton, Bloomsbury, Celia Brayfield, Chaucer, Diaries of Parson James Woodforde, Duncan Sprott, Francis Spufford, George III, Golden Hill, Hampton Court, Hilary Mantel, Jane Austen, Sir John Franklin, Upstart Crow

Ecod, methinks Master Edward hath right verily strucken a hand-wrought nail upon its noddle…

Having enjoyed Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, Ed wondered in his 8th November post how much research a historical novelist needs, and whether they should strive to use exact language and idiom. Or just wing it.

When I began my current book, set in C18 London, I spent long hours studying contemporary novelists, together with the entertaining and informative Diaries of Parson James Woodforde. I subsequently foreswore contractions, larded my first draft with the phrases and expressions of the time, and made my humble characters respectful and the educated ones God-fearing, with behaviour that was (outwardly, at least) formal. Jane Austen‘s fiction, after all, portrays an era when men and women would agree to marry before they were even on first name terms.

However, although what I’d written was comprehensible, it reminded me of having to listen to Chaucer being read out at school. It wasn’t remotely like the page-turning spiral of darker and darker mysteries that I wanted to unleash on unsuspecting agents.

I set my sights lower. After all, however much research you do, some clever clogs will spot errors. In the entertaining Upstart Crow, Shakespeare‘s dad complained that the pastry of his pie was hard and inedible. When visiting the kitchens of Hampton Court recently, I was told the delicious-looking pies on display weren’t what they seemed. They were flour and water shells, designed to cook and tenderise meat. After being broken open, they were thrown away. Did Ben Elton realise this? Does it matter? I suspicion (thought I’d throw in some archaic language) that the destitute of the day would have been glad to gnaw on them. After all, didn’t Sir John Franklin eat his own boots when starving in the Arctic in the C19?

As my husband reminds me, a historical novel is a work of fiction. I clearly shouldn’t have suffragettes throwing themselves in front of George III’s coach, or adventurers sailing to New York in a week. But, as long as the things I write could possibly have happened, my fingers are crossed. Sufficient facts important to my plot are true. I have British Library references to prove it.

Top flight historical novelists like Hilary Mantel do, of course, adopt a scholarly approach, but lesser mortals like myself can hopefully settle for something more modest.

 

(Anyone attempting this genre could do no better than invest in Bloomsbury‘s Writing Historical Fiction, by Celia Brayfield and Duncan Sprott)

 

 

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