Deborah Swift's Blog, page 31
May 23, 2016
Lady Anne Clifford – travelling 17thC style, with 40 carts
You can’t live in the Westmorland area and not know anything about Lady Anne Clifford. In the 17th century she travelled around her vast Northern estates accompanied by more than forty carts which contained everything she needed to make herself comfortable at her great castles, which were in ill-repair. What she took with her included […]
May 18, 2016
Cabinet of Curio-stories – An Elizabethan Hair Pin
Silver bodkins for your hair, bobs that maidens love to wear The Pedlar’s Song, from ‘The Triumphant Widow’ 1677 I love looking at what people have found under our feet by metal detecting or digging in their garden. The past is buried so close to the surface! Here’s an Elizabethan pin found by Don Sherratt […]
May 16, 2016
Historical Fiction – Virtue no 2 The Non-Fiction Novel
The ‘non-fiction novel’ was a phrase originally used by Truman Capote in 1966 ��to describe his book ‘In Cold Blood – A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences.’ Since then, true crimes have been fictionalised with much success, books such as ‘The Suspicions of Mr Whicher’ leading to a slew of similar […]
May 12, 2016
Historical Fiction – learning from ‘The Nightingale’ and ‘The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez’
Vianne and Isabelle are sisters whose challenge is to survive after the fall of France to the Nazis in WWII. Vianne’s house is requisitioned by the Gestapo, whilst her husband is away fighting, leading to knife-edge tensions as she tries to protect her daughter Sophie, and her Jewish neighbour, and best friend, Rachel. Meanwhile, rebellious […]
May 6, 2016
Cabinet of Curio-stories – Shoes from the Mary Rose
The Mary Rose, warship of ��King Henry��VIII, lay undiscovered beneath the waves for almost 300 years until one day, a fisherman���s line got tangled in the wreckage and her whereabouts became known. That was in 1836, but the salvage wasn’t attempted until the 1980’s when��about 60 million people around the world switched on their TVs […]
May 5, 2016
Historical Fiction – Seven Virtues – No 1 Bravery
Having thought about what might constitute the Seven Deadly Sins in Historical Fiction, I’m now getting a little balance by paying attention to the Seven Virtues. And one of them for certain is bravery, and by this, I mean courage with the language. It is a chance for us to wield words from the past […]
May 3, 2016
Research Find of the Week – ‘Tudor Wimbledon’
��I bought this from a charity shop in Kendal for ��1.29. ��As Wimbledon was a village so close to London (then 10 miles distant), it does include a few anecdotes about famous London personages, such as Catherine Parr, and Henry VIII. The King visited Wimbledon in his last days, when he was ill and could […]
April 29, 2016
From Queen to Queen, the fate of A Tudor Rectory
The Old Rectory, Wimbledon’s s oldest surviving residence, was originally known as the Parsonage House. Once a moated Manor, it was built in the early 16th century, close to St Mary’s Church. In 1536, after the dissolution of the monasteries, Parsonage House was handed to Thomas Cromwell by the King. However, after Cromwell’s death in […]
April 25, 2016
17th Century Research Find of the Week
My local bookshop has 100,000 second hand books. It’s a five minute drive, or��a��brisk half hour walk along country lanes. I always think I must have exhausted their supply of Tudor and Stuart gems, but they keep getting more stock, and this week I was lucky. Here is my find – ‘Rude Forefathers’ by F […]
Historical Fiction – deadly sin no 7 – mistaking it for a genre
Like most readers of historical fiction, I have my favourite eras. I love the seventeenth century, the Tudors and the medieval period, with the occasional foray into Victoriana, WWII and Greek myth. So I am unlikely to purchase anything set in the Napoleonic era, ��Roman times, or the Dark Ages – that is, unless you […]
