When talented musician Gray Robinson persuades Belle to abandon her university studies and follow him to Silverwood, home to an artistic community on the Cornish coast, Belle happily agrees even though they’ve only just met. She knows she is falling in love, and the thought of spending a carefree summer with Gray is all she […]
The Cornish Rebel by Nicola Pryce
In the wake of her mother’s death, Pandora Woodville is desperate to escape her domineering father and finally return to Cornwall in 1801. Posing as a widow, she safely makes it across the Atlantic, bright with the dream of working at her Aunt Harriet’s school for young women. But as Pandora is soon to learn, […]
Asylums and prisons: locking women away in madhouses
Nicola Pryce tells Historia about the historical background to her latest novel, which touches on various kinds of imprisonment; the most shocking is the 18th-century practice of locking inconvenient women away in madhouses, as she explains. The Cornish Captive is the sixth novel in my Cornish series. My heroine is mentioned before in passing but […]
The Key in the Lock by Beth Underdown
“I still dream, every night, of Polneath on fire…” By day, Ivy Boscawen mourns the loss of her son Tim in the Great War. But by night she mourns another boy – one whose death decades ago haunts her still. For Ivy is sure that there is more to what happened all those years ago: […]
The Cornish Captive by Nicola Pryce
Cornwall in 1800. Imprisoned on false pretences, Madeleine Pelligrew, former mistress of Pendenning Hall, has spent the last 14 years shuttled between increasingly destitute and decrepit mad houses. When a strange man appears out of the blue to release her, she can’t quite believe that her freedom comes without a price. Hiding her identity, Madeleine […]
Review: A Cornish Betrothal by Nicola Pryce
The internationally best-selling author Nicola Cornick reviews A Cornish Betrothal, the fifth book in Nicola Pryce’s Cornish Saga series. A Cornish Betrothal by Nicola Pryce is a historical novel set in Cornwall at the turn of the 18th century (the clue is in the title!). Historical novels of this era and with this setting, particularly […]
Beyond Poldark
Our guest this month, author Noel O’Reilly, on the ‘Poldark effect’ and why fiction set in Cornwall doesn’t have to be corny. The fourth series of the Poldark TV drama is currently being aired. With 6.1 million viewers watching the final episode of the previous series, inevitably publishers of historical fiction set in Cornwall are casting […]
Poldark: BBC’s Crowd-Pleaser is Back with a Bang
We last saw Ross Poldark (Aiden Turner) atop a windswept cliff, arrested for looting a wrecked ship, inciting a riot and murdering his rival’s cousin. Season two opens without missing a beat (there’s a story so far preview available on BBC iPlayer if you want to jog your memory) as Ross is dragged away from […]