A new century is dawning. Vienna in 1912 is at its zenith, an opulent, extravagant city teeming with art, music and radical ideas. It is a place where anything seems possible… Edith and Adele are sisters, the daughters of a wealthy bourgeois family. They are expected to follow the rules, to marry well, and produce […]
The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak
Brunhild was a Visigothic princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet — in sixth-century Merovingian France, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport — these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms […]
The Families of Eleanor of Aquitaine by JF Andrews
The lives of the sons of Eleanor of Aquitaine are the stuff of legend. Her daughters, however, are less well known, and the fascinating personalities of her daughters-in-law have been almost entirely overlooked, as have those of the daughters she bore Louis VII of France. The Families of Eleanor of Aquitaine showcases the lives, travels […]
Historia interviews: Minette Walters
The award-winning, bestselling author Minette Walters speaks to Frances Owen for Historia. I was delighted to talk to Minette Walters by phone recently to discuss her latest novel, The Swift and the Harrier, set in her home county of Dorset during the English Civil Wars of 1642–51, which is out in paperback today. This is a […]
Bonny & Read by Julie Walker
The Caribbean, 1720. Two extraordinary women are on the run – from their pasts, from the British Navy and the threat of execution, and from the destiny that fate has written for them. Plantation owner’s daughter, runaway wife, pirate: Anne Bonny has forged her own story in a man’s world. But when she is involved […]
Rediscovering Edinburgh’s New Town
Sometimes we can get access to a kind of time machine. Reading good historical fiction can transport us to our social and political past, as Sara Sheridan says. But things like Covid lockdowns, when the streets are stripped of crowds and transport, can also open a time portal – which is how she came to […]
Review: Feminine power: the divine to the demonic
James Burge reviews the Feminine power: the divine to the demonic exhibition at the British Museum and finds contradiction, transgression and dazzling mental gymnastics in 4,000 years of art, faith and history from around the world. Visitors to this show are guided through a well-lit labyrinth, past a series of displays – one might almost […]
Widows of the Ice by Anne Fletcher
As Captain Scott lay freezing and starving to death on his return journey from the South Pole, he wrote with a stub of pencil his final words: ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’ Uppermost in his mind were the three women who would now be widows: Kathleen, his own bohemian artist wife; Oriana, the […]