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Why we love to read novels about queens: Part I

Written in Historical Fiction, Stephanie Cowell, W&M Contributors

Do readers never tire of reading about queens? What is the great fascination?

I decided to ask some novelists, readers, bloggers, and experts.

I met Sarah Johnson, the author of Historical Fiction II: A Guide to the Genre and compiler of the blog Reading the Past (http://www.readingthepast.com), at the semi-annual Historical Novel Society U.S. conference. She told me, “It’s safe to say that the fascination for such novels has been ongoing for some time. Dumas was writing novels about Marguerite de Valois and Marie Antoinette in the 1840s and ’50s, for instance, and he wasn’t the first. The trend comes and goes, and now it’s firmly on the upswing with novelists such as Jean Plaidy, Norah Lofts, Margaret George, and Philippa Gregory and many gifted others.” (Sarah believes perhaps a few dozen such novels were published in 2011.)

But why do we want to read about queens? Sandra Gulland, author of the magical trilogy about Josephine Bonaparte (the empress) and Mistress of the Sun (mistress of Louis XIV), answered, “I think we simply are hungry for stories of women in a position of power, because it’s so rare. Some handle it gracefully (i.e. Josephine Bonaparte), and others wilt in the harsh glare of such light (Louise de la Vallière).” Sarah Johnson replied, “The majority of novels about queens take place in eras (12th through 18th centuries) when women had little say in the major decisions affecting their lives, but most queens, whether they were rulers themselves or consorts, had a wide sphere of influence. Plus, these women were served the finest cuisine, wore the most expensive gowns, had the most talented artists and musicians around them… and readers love descriptions of court life. (This is assuming the queens didn’t end up in the Tower or its international equivalent!”)

Novelist C.W. (Christopher) Gortner told me, “I think we are fascinated both by the queens’ celebrity appeal as well as their fragility. Their lives, while outwardly glamorous, were full of trials and tribulations, tragedies and triumphs: we know that they struggled to survive. Their fragility and courage exert a powerful effect on our imaginations. The issues they faced were monumental.”

He added, “I first became enamoured of historical fiction in my pre-adolescent years, when my mother gave me a copy of Immortal Queen, a novel about Mary of Scots, for my birthday. We lived in southern Spain; a ruined castle that had once belonged to Isabella of Castile sat near the beach by our flat and I used to clamber about its crumpled battlements all the time. I was surrounded by history. It made me an addict for life.” Christopher’s new novel, The Queen’s Vow, which follows young Isabella of Castile in her dramatic rise to power, will be available on June 12, 2012. He is also continuing his Tudor mystery series.

Finally, I simply had to this burning question: Can anything else possibly be said about Anne Boleyn?

“I’ll say yes,” replied Sarah Johnson, “because I know we haven’t seen the last of Anne in historical fiction! I’m anxious to read Hilary Mantel’s take on her downfall, for example. Every author brings a new angle on her life to the table, or at least tries to.” And Christopher Gortner added, “Anne Boleyn went for the crown and she got it. And it destroyed her. But she did it anyway. She’s tough to beat, in terms of sheer drama and pathos. “

Christopher concluded, “I often say that in the hands of a skilled novelist, these women can shed their marblized images and reclaim their humanity, in all their glory and foibles. Historical fiction about queens shouldn’t really be just about queens; it’s about us, too, about how we live and make choices and confront challenges. These women represent us – with more lavish clothes!”

Come back for the second part of this article featuring book bloggers and more novelists.

Ah to live like a queen! If not then, to read about them!

Historical novelist Stephanie Cowell is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart and Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet. She is the recipient of the American Book Award. Her work has been translated into nine languages. Her website is http://www.stephaniecowell.com.

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My thousand historical research books

Written in Historical Fiction, Research and Writing, Stephanie Cowell

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some of my book shelves

by Stephanie Cowell

1848 Lady Book with old pressed flowers

I have been accumulating research books or, when they are very rare, consulting them since I first began to write historical novels. In the late 1980s when I began we still had many used book shops in New York City with wood shelves too high to reach but by ladder, shelves often sagging with the weight of books and with that definite smell of wood, dust, old paper, old bindings. Each new book was an enchanted encounter.

I have published five historical novels and have more in draft than I’m willing to admit. Each began with a history book: a rare volume on Elizabethan London printed about 1894 with a red binding which I found I don’t recall where, a biography with fragile pages of a 17th century English archbishop which was waiting for me in a very small shop for very little money. A small book with leather covers and gilt-edged pages by Marcus Aurelius discovered in a cold, empty New England book barn where there were tens of thousands of books and the footsteps of one lone browser…me. The original 1665 book on the early microscope by Robert Hooke (Micrographia) in the New York City Arents Collection and one of the thirteen extant copies of Shakespeare’s 1609 sonnets perused and almost wept over at Yale. (Was this WS’s own copy perhaps?) And the rather astonishing heavy Victorian Godey’s Lady Book printed in 1848 and given to me by a friend, between whose pages I found a sheath of very dry flowers and leaves, almost colorless. (Who pressed them there and tiptoed away?)

I bought more books by catalog in the 1990s: newer books but on rare subjects such as a history of English workhouses, the Glastonbury Tor. In my travels I bought books. On my trip home from England I brought twenty-seven books. That was before the planes weighed your luggage or perhaps the weight allowance was higher. (I think I gasped with delight when I found a map of Elizabethan London.)

Then came the fabulous internet and every book I ever dreamed of waiting in some shop in Arkansas or the Cotswolds for me. I ordered How Shakespeare Spent the Day. I ordered an old book on the daily lives of French artists. And now my husband has given me a Kindle and I have found to my extreme delight a number of books on 1860’s Florence published in that time and all for free. One has a list of banks and food shops of the period and where you can hire a donkey cart.

And when I finish a historical novel, what happens to the books? Well, I give some away sometimes. I truly recall giving several away which I had used for my Monet novel so do not understand why a huge pile of them still weigh down the top of a file cabinet in the den. My books on the Brownings are scattered all over the house but my English history books are mostly in one whole shelf. Sometimes I wander from room to room touching the book spines. I hear the books murmuring softly, “And when will you write me? There is a story waiting within my pages! What are you doing researching that other book in the next room…I know all about you, you see!”

And I tell them, “Perhaps 2012 will be a good year for your story!” I know they are patient books though they do grumble in their dusty way and that they know in their inky souls that I truly love them and that I will come back.

Historical novelist Stephanie Cowell is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart and Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet. She is the recipient of the American Book Award. Her work has been translated into nine languages. Her website is http://www.stephaniecowell.com.

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Tales of an old English Christmas

Written in Food and Drink, Stephanie Cowell

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by Stephanie Cowell (W&M Contributor)

Some years before I became a novelist, I was a wandering English Christmas minstrel. I gathered legends and customs of Christmas in England from the medieval through the Victorian and put them together in a lively narrative. I added about twelve carols, from the obscure “There is no Rose of Such Virtue as is the Rose that Bore Jesu,” to “Deck the Halls” and handed out song sheets.

I was a professional singer then (high soprano) and of course I drew on my love of English social history.

I gave the program in the most interested places (and the audience sang with me, though no one knew “There is no Rose…”) In one private party at a jeweler’s shop, when we got to the “five gold rings” part of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” the jeweler ran to his safe and danced through the room with a tray of precious rings. At another party, the host had designed a feast to go with the program, including a suckling pig with an apple in its mouth and a sad look on its little roasted face. I almost shrieked. I gave An English Christmas in a historical mansion lit only by candles and felt I had stepped into another century.

Misplaced among my papers is a copy of the script, but reaching back into my memory here are a few of the stories:

The real truth behind the carol “The Boar’s Head.” Somewhere in the twelfth century a student was walking on a road outside Oxford, reading a sacred book when suddenly a fierce boar rushed from the bushes to attack him. Having no weapon to defend himself, the quick-thinking student stuffed his book into the beast’s mouth, thus choking it. He then cut off its head and carried it back to college for dinner. This proves that learning is useful.

Good Queen Bess greatly encouraged the giving of New Year’s Day gifts to herself.

During the Puritan regime, Christmas feasting was forbidden. Some took it as a day of fasting and all suggested carols were very depressing, about death and hell etc.

A recipe for gilded peacock. Alas, the details are lost to my memory (I was never much of a cook) but a major newspaper printed part of my recipe and when they asked me what I was planning to make for my own family for Christmas, I said, “Something much simpler.”

Wishing you all good cheer and merry wassail this season!

About the author: Historical novelist Stephanie Cowell is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart and Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet. She is the recipient of the American Book Award. Her work has been translated into nine languages. Her website is http://www.stephaniecowell.com.

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The woman who almost married Mozart

Written in Art, Historical Fiction, Stephanie Cowell

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by Stephanie Cowell (Wonders & Marvels contributor)

Mozart almost didn’t marry his lovely wife; he almost married her older sister. And if he had married the sister, I believe we’d be missing a great deal of his music today.

When Mozart was twenty-one and unemployed, he was invited to the home of a violinist Fridolin Weber who had four musical daughters, ages fourteen through nineteen. Aloysia was sixteen: she was gifted with a gorgeous voice and quite ravishing. The other three Weber sisters could not come close to her and she knew it.

Mozart was so much in love that he wanted to turn over his own struggling career to promote her singing. (Again, think what music we may have lost!) But there were several obstacles in his path. Her mother was a bit crazy; she thought Mozart would never make a penny and wanted her beautiful daughter to marry a wealthy man. His father was controlling; he didn’t want his son to marry anyone but to send all his money home (if Mozart ever made any).

Mozart had to travel in search of earnings, and when he finally found his love again in Vienna, she had forgotten him and was now pregnant by a tall and handsome actor. Mozart was not very tall and not very handsome. When his heart healed a little, he found himself as a boarder in the house of the three remaining Weber sisters. He could have married any of then, but that is a complicated story, so complicated that I wrote a novel about it called Marrying Mozart. He settled on the third sister and had a happy life. He also began to make a good deal of money now and then.

Mozart died at the age of thirty-five and his wife spent the remaining fifty years of her life preserving and sharing her husband’s music. By the time Aloysia was quite old, Mozart’s name was famous throughout Europe. One of his admirers came to visit the aging prima donna in Salzburg and Aloysia swore to them that Mozart had never ceased to love her. “But why did you refuse him so many years ago?” the admirer asked bewildered and she replied that at that time she was not capable of appreciating his talent and character…” Hmm.

So he didn’t get the first girl he loved but he got the right one for him and the right one to save his work for posterity. And if it were not for the music Mozart wrote for Aloysia Weber Lange, history would scare remember her name.

About the author: Historical novelist Stephanie Cowell is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet and Marrying Mozart. She is the recipient of the American Book Award. Her work has been translated into nine languages. Her website is http://www.stephaniecowell.com.

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All Hallows’ Eve and All Souls’ Day

Written in Magic, Spirituality, and Witchcraft, Stephanie Cowell

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by Stephanie Cowell

Dusk which falls early, cooler winds which rise, dry leaves rustling around old gravestones. This last day of October, known as All Saints’ Eve or All Hallows’ Eve (now called Halloween), was a somber season, marking the very ending of the warmth of the earth and the long entry into a cold winter. Its ancient customs are a haunted mixture of Christian and pagan.

Originally celebrated in the middle of lovely May, All Hallows’ Eve was only moved to its present drearier date about eight hundred years ago.

It was a religious eve. In some parts of Europe, bells rang out at dusk for departed souls and people lit candles on graveyard tombs and left them burning all night in the darkness and solitude of the cemetery. In rural Brittany, four men would go from farmhouse to farmhouse ringing bells, asking prayers for departed souls. According to Polish custom, ghosts haunted empty churches at midnight. People would courteously leave windows and doors open the next day in case a ghost wished to come in.

All Hallows’ Eve is derived from the Celtic Night of the Dead. The Celtic people divided the year by four major holidays. The festival observed at this time was called Samhain (pronounced Sah-ween); the Celts believed that this night, the souls of those who had died this past year were traveling their lonely way to the other world, and thus, for those few hours, division between this mortal world and the world to come all but vanished. Ghosts could walk the world and did.

In medieval England, on the 2nd of November (All Soul’s Day), children and the poor went “a-souling,” going from door to door to beg for a special little cake, marked with a Cross, called a soul cake. Each cake eaten would free a soul from Purgatory which, if you look at any medieval church painting, was a pretty terrible place. Turnips were also carved into lanterns as a way of remembering the dead. Soul cakes were left in graveyards to feed the dead and prevent any mischief they might be contemplating.

But why were the dead seen as malevolent? Perhaps because they so envied the living who were sitting home by their fires drinking warm ale? Was this the beginning of Gothic horror tales, stories of vampires and the dead arisen?

What do you think?

About the author: Historical novelist Stephanie Cowell is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart and Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet. She is the recipient of the American Book Award. Her work has been translated into nine languages. Her website is http://www.stephaniecowell.com.

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An Old Man and His Garden: The Story Behind Giverny

Written in Art, Stephanie Cowell, W&M Contributors

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By Stephanie Cowell

The Water Lily Gardens at Giverny

Claude Monet always wanted a garden, but his years as a struggling artist had seldom allowed it. He was forty-three years old and still rather poor when he first rented the house at Giverny. He had recently lost his beloved wife Camille. He moved in with his two sons, his new sweetheart Alice, and her children. Many years later he purchased additional land to create his water lily gardens. By then he had six gardeners and a great deal of money.

In the last twenty years of his life, Claude Monet cloistered himself inside Giverny and painted almost nothing else but his flower gardens. The deaths of his stepdaughter, Alice, and his older son Jean had wounded him; he had seen the horrors of the Great War and his eyesight was failing. I think he sought to find some peace and eternal truth in the reflections of clouds and willow tree branches in the water. Though he was a man who did not believe in God, many people find his paintings deeply spiritual.

He was eighty-six when he finished the last great paintings and died a few months later.

Slowly the gardens began to fall apart. His devoted stepdaughter Blanche remained in the house, retaining only one gardener. However, when she died in 1946, the property was inherited by Monet’s younger son Michel who neglected it. Rats infested the gardens; the lily pond shrank to a fetid pool, closing around the broken remains of the rotted Japanese bridge. The windows of the house were broken and three large trees grew in the studio. The earth took back everything.

It was only on Michel’s death that the Académie des Beaux-Arts began to restore the gardens as Monet had planned them. After several years of work, they were opened to the public; the directors expected perhaps a few thousand visitors a year. Today that number exceeds half a million.

When I visited there to research my Monet novel, I could almost imagine the old painter himself pushing through the crowds of tourists, murmuring, “Don’t trample the flowers, don’t trample the flowers.”

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Contributor Q&A: Stephanie Cowell

Written in News, Stephanie Cowell, W&M Contributors

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By Holly Tucker

As you may have seen, we’re adding some contributors to Wonders & Marvels. We want you to get to know each of them, so we’re planning on doing a Q&A (like the one below) with each new contributor. This time around, we’re hearing from Stephanie Cowell.

Stephanie Cowell

Q: Could you tell us a little bit about your work?

A: I write literary historical fiction and have published five novels: Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet, Marrying Mozart, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Nicholas Cooke and The Physician of London. I fell in love with some earlier periods of history quite young and felt in some way I lived there. I was a lonely child, living in books and in my imagination and I felt somehow freer to express myself not as myself but as someone else in another time. To this day I feel I have several addresses (besides my own in NYC). I have a strong inner conviction that I have friends waiting for me on Wood Street in the old City of London 1593 in a half-timbered house, and that I could knock on Mozart’s door in the Domstrasse Vienna and he would open to me. I can’t go through a museum without seeing a book from 1500 or a 1300 stairway or so many things and hear a strong urgent whisper from them, “I hold a whole story within me! Write me!” (I want to do a post about this!)

Q: What have you found to be the most challenging part of writing historical fiction?

A: Historical people ambled about their lives pretty much from day to day unless in immediately danger; they also lived huge lives as most of us do with many friends, houses, loves, interests. The great challenge is simplifying their lives and creating a plot to show them. Most lives have many plots, as intertwined as a ball of yarn after a kitten has played with it. You have to pick the top one or two. I don’t concern myself with plot first but character and it is always a scramble to put one in.

Q: And the most rewarding?

A: It is a deep, spiritual and rewarding experience to create a whole book where another time and characters can live and be real for me and the reader.

Q: Can you talk a little about what your writing workflow looks like?

A: It’s bumps and roller coaster rides! I wrestle early images into a plot. Seriously, each book starts with a sketched paragraph or two which likely won’t end up in the novel. I write 3-5 hours most days, starting right after I wake up. I write all sorts of scenes as they come to me, not at all in order. Many get changed or eliminated. Sometimes a book comes in less than a year but Claude & Camille took five years. I couldn’t figure out the scenes to build plot tension. My agent read it about five times. Finally she said, “Suppose someone thought Claude killed his wife Camille?” I thought that was ridiculous…but in the end the novel starts with Camille’s sister writing Claude a letter saying, “I hold you responsible for the death of my sister.” He didn’t murder Camille of course, but she lived a difficult life with him as he struggled from poverty.

I also sometimes work on 3-4 books at a time. I run back and forth from 1537 England to 1858 Florence and sometimes have to remember to go and do ordinary things in my own life! Like change the sheets and buy bread!

Q: Now for the fun part. If you could spend one day in the past – where would you go? Who would you meet? What would you do?

A: Without question, I would sit in on a rehearsal for Hamlet at the Globe. And then I’d go out with Shakespeare and his friends later to some tavern and listen to them talk about the play and their world and their lives. I’d follow him home and watch him go to sleep and just look at him for a long time.

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