Historical Fiction

Ivory Bangle Lady

by CarolineLawrence April 15, 2013

Sometimes I miss Rome so much I think I might die. They found her body in York. Her bones show she died young, aged around 19. She was probably beautiful, for her skull is symmetrical and her teeth were good. Isotopes (trace elements) in her molars prove she came from a hot country, almost certainly [...]

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Imagine a world without the arts

by stephaniecowell April 6, 2013

by Stephanie Cowell “The world will be saved by beauty,” Dostoevsky once said. I try to remember that when I find the life of a professional writer difficult. Before writing I was a classical singer and for a brief time an actress and I have spent many hours (likely weeks if you add up a [...]

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Book News

by tracybarrett March 20, 2013

by Tracy Barrett (W&M Contributor) I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve joined HarlequinTeen with a deal for two books, the first slated for release in July, 2014, and the second a year or so later. Random facts I’ve learned about HarlequinTeen: they don’t publish only romance they’re a very new imprint of Harlequin Harlequin is [...]

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A historical novelist’s search for the secrets behind Shakespeare’s Sonnets

by stephaniecowell March 11, 2013

by Stephanie Cowell It is fortunate we have these miraculous sonnets at all, as only thirteen copies remain of their original publication in 1609. The writing of them, the subject of them and the unexpected bisexuality of them (incomprehensible to some) remain much disputed more than four hundred years after that date. Here is something [...]

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Getting My Books Into Readers’ Hands

by tracybarrett February 20, 2013

by Tracy Barrett (W&M Contributor) Historical fiction has devoted—sometimes rabid—fans. In the case of historical fiction for young readers, that fan base is still devoted, but it tends to be pretty small. Most kids are interested in reading about their contemporaries—whether human or zombie, or whatever the beast du jour is—rather than about the past, [...]

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Poetry, pain, and opium in Victorian England: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s use of laudanum

by stephaniecowell February 4, 2013

by Stephanie Cowell Elizabeth Barrett began to take laudanum, a tincture of opium, for what is thought to have been a spinal injury at the age of fifteen. It is believed she continued to take it through two more serious illnesses in her early 30s (hemorrhaging of the lungs and some extended unspecified illness). It [...]

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Mastermind of a Ten-Year-Old – How does one explain the child prodigy Mozart?

by stephaniecowell December 30, 2012

by Stephanie Cowell At the age of ten he was catching flies, making up silly songs for his music teacher father, performing before kings, stealing his older sister’s diary, and composing symphonies. He was expert on violin and piano. What made the boy Mozart such a phenomenal prodigy as well as such a human kid? [...]

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12 Days: Christmas… a Roman Holiday?

by CarolineLawrence December 12, 2012

by Caroline Lawrence (Wonders & Marvels contributor) When I was researching my sixth Roman Mystery, set during the mid-winter festival called the Saturnalia, I was amazed by how many ancient Roman customs have survived, embedded in our Christmas celebrations. Here are twelve! 1. Five day vacation. In the first century AD the Romans set aside [...]

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12 Days: The Greatest Voice of Her Age

by Mary Sharratt December 11, 2012

By Mary Sharratt (W&M Contributor) Born in the Rhineland in present day Germany, Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a visionary abbess and polymath, a Renaissance women before the Renaissance. She composed an entire corpus of sacred music and wrote nine books on subjects as diverse as theology, cosmology, botany, medicine, linguistics, and human sexuality, a [...]

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12 Days of Books: Twelve

by tracybarrett December 10, 2012

by Tracy Barrett (W&M contributor) Twelve days of Christmas. Twelve months in a year. Twelve inches in a foot. Twelve hours on a clock and 12 x 2 hours in a day. Twelve apostles. Twelve gates to the city. Twelve animals in the Chinese horoscope. Twelve Sanskrit names of God. Twelve disciples of Mohammed and [...]

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12 Days of Books – Memories of Monet

by stephaniecowell December 9, 2012

By Stephanie Cowell (W&M Regular Contributor) I’m giving away a copy of CLAUDE & CAMILLE: A NOVEL OF MONET. The novel grew from my childhood; both my parents were artists. The easel, the drawing tale, the precious brushes and pens and curled tubes of oil paint were a natural part of my life. One day [...]

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SALIERI and MOZART…who were they really? And how did Peter Shaffer write AMADEUS?

by stephaniecowell November 30, 2012

by Stephanie Cowell I have read a huge amount about Mozart: his letters, biographies, etc. I own cds of all the music he ever wrote and I wrote a novel called MARRYING MOZART (Viking Penguin) about the young Mozart and the four young musical Weber sisters, one of whom he married (eventually). But the shadow [...]

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Ariadne, Theseus, and the reader—and a giveaway!

by tracybarrett November 20, 2012

by Tracy Barrett Recently an interviewer asked me why young readers would be interested in historical fiction, specifically, how a teenage girl today could relate to Ariadne, the priestess of the moon-goddess (and future goddess herself) in Dark of the Moon. The story is set in the Bronze Age, after all—how much can a modern [...]

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Dinner at Oxford with the World’s Greatest Elizabethan Scholar

by stephaniecowell October 30, 2012

by Stephanie Cowell He came up the stairs of the community room in Jesus College Oxford one July afternoon asking for me by name for we had been corresponding for a time. He was Dr. A.L. Rowse, then in his mid-eighties and generally acknowledged to be the greatest Elizabethan scholar in the world. He was [...]

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17th-century medicine and me: a novelist’s unlikely tale

by stephaniecowell September 29, 2012

by Stephanie Cowell Novelists sometimes find themselves writing about areas of which they know little and believe me, I was the last person in the world to write about medicine or science. I had walked out of biology in eighth-grade when my teacher had encouraged us to stick our fingers in a cow’s heart. My [...]

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