Kate Griffin’s new novel, Fyneshade, takes her love of Victorian Gothic to a new level. Who could be better to select the top six film and TV adaptations of the ultimate governess in a strange house story, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, for its 125th anniversary? The year 1898 saw the publication of […]
Revisiting St Petersburg?
When RN Morris went to St Petersburg to research his second 19th-century crime novel it felt as if he was revisiting the city he’d imagined so vividly: so much that his guide, a native St Petersburger, said his book had an “authentic atmosphere”. One day – who knows when – he’d like to be able […]
How Victorian literature helped me write my debut novel
Katie Lumsden’s debut novel, The Secrets of Hartwood Hall, is a “love letter to her favourite books” — the classics of Victorian literature. She explains how these works didn’t just inspire her writing; they also helped her to craft a book which is Victorian in its voice, feel, and richness of plot and character, but […]
Extreme research: how far should a writer go?
What lengths will writers go to in order to research their books? For some, it’s quite far. Like drinking buffalo blood, or going to the Amazon jungle or the South Pole. For Louise Morrish, author of Operation Moonlight, it was grabbing her horror of heights in both hands and jumping out of a plane. She […]
My voyage discovering Charles Darwin
The historian Diana Preston travelled around the world to retrace Charles Darwin’s momentous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle for her new book, The Evolution of Charles Darwin. She tells Historia about her own voyage of discovery in his wake. After months of planning, I finally arrived on the densely-forested island of Chiloe, off Chile’s south-western […]
Adding the ‘little’ bits to enrich a story of Saxon historical fiction
The stomach-growling smell of roast meat, the hit of mead, the arm-ache from embroidery; wind, rain, fruit in the hedgerows: details like these are the ‘little’ extras that add more period and atmosphere to your story, says MJ Porter, author of Anglo-Saxon period historical fiction. In Warrior of Mercia, the third book in the Eagle […]
The book that tells 60,000 stories
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a great – and little-known – resource for historical novelists. Frances Quinn found the idea for her new book, That Bonesetter Woman, there. As anyone who’s had dealings with the publishing industry will know, one of the things it loves best is ‘the same, but different’; in other […]
The gift of writing historical fiction
Liz Hyder, author of The Gifts, talks about her own writing process and her love of history, and celebrates the “fascinating, brilliant, inspiring joy” of writing historical fiction. Her book has just been published in paperback. I’ve always been interested in history ever since I can remember. I grew up near the edge of Epping […]