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Category Archives: Writing Historical Fiction

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Our Maggie, winner of Historia Magazine’s Unpublished Novel Award, is featured in this month’s edition of Historia.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How I won an award and stopped being an unpublished novelist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Maggie Richell-Davies is the winner of the first HWA/Sharpe Books Unpublished Novel Award.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

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

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 Many congratulations to ninevoice Maggie Richell Davies, who has won the Sharpe Books/Historical Writers’ Association Unpublished Award 2020.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  See http://www.historiamag.com/hwa-sharpe-books-unpublished-novel-award-winner/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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Tags

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

Tags

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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