Deborah Swift's Blog, page 40

The Promise by Ann Weisgarber, the Galveston Hurricane

I loved Ann Weisgarber's other novel, so couldn't wait to grab this when it came up on Vine. Lovers of literary or historical fiction will find this a fascinating account of the Galveston disaster - a hurricane and tidal wave that swept the shores of Texas at the turn of the 20th century.

The two women telling the story have very distinct voices and I felt myself alternately rooting for first one and then the other.From different backgrounds, the two women are forced into each others company by their relationships with the same man, Oscar, and the child, Andre, left behind after the death of his first wife.

The relationship between the women is naturally uncomfortable, but this is subtly drawn, and never vocalised. The two main characters, Catherine and Nan, each tell it how it was for them, their view of the other, and great tension arises from this. The settings are so real you think you have been there. When the hurricane strikes the drama is all in the characters - in a way they make an impression far bigger than the hurricane, though that too is beautifully descibed. Poignant and moving, I was gripped and stayed up late to finish it - highly recommended.


I'd never heard of this hurricane or Galveston, so I have been educated as well as entertained.If you want to know more about the disaster, then here is the wiki link
after the hurricane

My writing year ahead, a conference, an anthology, a publication

I have just finished the copy-edits for A Divided Inheritance (scheduled for publication with Pan Macmillan in October) and can now get back to writing my fourth novel. My previous three have all been set in the 17th century, but for my fourth I am trying something new. It is still a historical novel but set in much more modern times - in 1945.

So what are the advantages to writing outside my usual box?
Firstly it gives my imagination a new place to roam, and enables me to tackle a whole new vein of research. A more modern novel demands different types of dialogue and a closer adherance to the way people behave now. In earlier times punishments were written large - death by burning or hanging, arguments could be settled by the sword or by the gun. In more modern times punishments can be loss of freedom, arguments settled by the tongue. The earlier periods were often (though not always) a more magnified version of our current times. A more modern novel has to scale these down to create a believable society.

So I am enjoying these new challenges, and working on a period which is just within living memory.

But it's not all work and no play.


Recently I was lucky enough to meet some other writers at Pan Macmillan's Women's Fiction Party. One of these was Pamela Hartshorne whose time-slip novel Time's Echo I very much enjoyed. It is set in Tudor York, which is a glorious evocative setting. And if you love history, romance and ghosts, you'll love this. I also was able to congratulate Margaret Dickinson on her twentieth novel. I finished her book  'Jenny's War' about an evacuee in WWII a couple of months ago and really enjoyed it. Her new one, 'The Clippie Girls' is coming out on Valentine's Day. Not sure I'll manage to write twenty books like Margaret has before I expire, but it's definitely something to aim for! I also met up with Diane Allen, whose debut saga, 'For the Sake of her Family' has been a big success. Diane is another northener who works at Magna Books who published two of my novels in Large Print editions.



I enjoyed meeting fellow writers, and I'm looking forward to meeting more - this time in America at The Historical Novel Society Conference   I have been invited to appear on two panels ('Making it to Mainstream' about my unusual route to publication, and 'The Virtual Salon' about how blogging can link writers with readers). If anyone is going to the conference, particularly if you have read my books or are a fan of the 17th century, please come and say hello. Or you could rescue my husband who as yet does not know what he is letting himself in for!

More News:Short Story Success!My short story, 'A Dog's Life' was shortlisted for the Historical Novel society short story award. The good news is, the HNS are going to publish all twelve stories in an anthology, to be made available soon as a Kindle book.Watch this space!

The Gilded Lily, out now in the USA.
The Gilded Lily was selected as one of the '13 must reads in 2013' by Good Morning Texas TV programme.

Elizabeth Murray and The English Civil War

[image error] Anita SeymourI had been following Anita Davison's blog, The Disorganized Author for a while because like me, Anita is passionate about the 17th Century. We both blog at Hoydens and Firebrands - a blog that specialises in 17th century history and interests. 
After talking online for a bit, we managed to touch base briefly at the Historical Novel Society conference where she told me about her latest book. Now re-named as Anita Seymour, her historical biography about Elizabeth Murray was taken up by Pen and Sword Press. Seymour is a grand historical name! 
Those of you who enjoyed my book The Lady's Slipper might want to discover more about the English Civil war through Anita's book. My copy should be dropping through the door any day soon. The story of how a painting inspired Royalist Rebel can be found on my other blog, Royalty Free Fiction 

Royalist Rebel by Anita Seymour
Intelligent, witty and beautiful, Elizabeth Murray wasn’t born noble; her family’s fortunes came from her Scottish father’s boyhood friendship with King Charles. As the heir to Ham House, their mansion on the Thames near Richmond, Elizabeth was always destined for greater things.
Royalist Rebel is the story of Elizabeth’s youth during the English Civil War, of a determined and passionate young woman dedicated to Ham House, the Royalist cause and the three men in her life; her father William Murray, son of a minister who rose to become King Charles’ friend and confidant, the rich baronet Lionel Tollemache, her husband of twenty years who adored her and John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale, Charles II’s favourite.
With William Murray at King Charles’ exiled court in Oxford, the five Murray women have to cope alone. Crippled by fines for their Royalist sympathies, and besieged by the Surrey Sequestration Committee, Elizabeth must find a wealthy, non-political husband to save herself, her sisters, and their inheritance.Royalist Rebel by Claymore Books, an imprint of Pen and Sword, was released on 17th January 2013
http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Historical-Fiction/c/146/
For a little background on the novel, see Anita’s Book Bloghttp://royalistrebel.blogspot.co.uk/
The National Trust Website of Elizabeth Murray’s former home, Ham House, at Petersham near Richmond, Surreyhttp://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ham-house/

Simples and Treacles – botanical secrets of 17th century England

I have loved researching 17th Century botany and herbs for my novels, The Lady’s Slipper and The Gilded Lily. For both of them I have had to research the botanical beliefs of a society that relied on native plants for a good many things, including medicine, cleaning agents, and home-manufactured goods such as cloth. One of my characters is a “cunning woman”, a person skilled in folk medicine. She has no daughters and is looking for someone to whom she can hand down her vast store of knowledge. Remedies were passed down orally, and the plants used were readily and commonly available to a populace which was mostly illiterate. Because little was written about it, evidence of these remedies is most often to be found in kitchen manuals because cooking and medicine were so closely related.

The difference between folk medicine and the “official” medicine was largely that folk medicine used plants that occurred naturally in Britain and had not been brought over from abroad. Official medicine drew on metals, chemical compounds and herbs and spices imported from other countries, such as the Mediterranean or Arabia. Physicians could charge more for their exotic-sounding imports, which by dint of their strangeness appeared to offer more appeal.

In the 17th century many Folk remedies were “simples”, ie a single species of plants used as a cure or palliative, whereas apothecaries mixed perhaps thirty or more of ingredients for their “treacles”. Venice treacle, given by Thomas Sydenham to Lady Sedley in 1686, contained more than 70 ingredients including:

wormwood, orange peel, angelica, nutmeg, horseradish, scurvy grass, white horehound, centaury, camomile, and juniper berries. All infused in 5 pints of sack!

And what was this medicine for? A headache.

Servants probably made do with feverfew leaves, and were probably better off for it. So in one of my books the middle-class Thomas Ibbetson is given a ‘drench’ (Pouring a vast quantity of liquid medicine into the throat) which worsens rather than cures his condition. In the 17th century, the richer you were, the more likely you were to die of the treatment rather than the disease. Mercury and antimony were common remedies, as was copious blood-letting to release stagnant humours.

17th century herbalists such as Gerard, Pechy and the Puritan, Culpeper, were immensely influential in their day, and there was much cross-over between the medicinal and the domestic. For example Culpeper recommends the leaves of the Alder tree for burns, but also for attracting fleas. The leaves were strewed on the ground to attract the fleas, and then the whole lot could be swept out and disposed of. Culpeper’s Herbal is one of the few 17th Century books still in print today.  I can also recommend Nicholas Woolley’s book about Culpeper, The Herbalist.

Napier’s History of Herbal Healing says that nettles were used as a pot herb in the Spring, but also its fibres were used in weaving instead of flax, to make tablecloths, sheets and even shirts! It was used medicinally to treat anaemia and as a general tonic, and also to dye the hair as it produced an intense yellow dye. With interest in ‘green’ products today, nettle fibre is again being used to make clothing.

Along with the practical uses of plants was a vast body of mythological lore, both superstitious and religious. Ideas such as that making love under a Rowan tree was a certain cure for infertility, were common. So the herbs themselves were used in a broad rather than a narrow context, embracing the physical, emotional and spiritual being of the user. Many people believed in the “doctrine of signatures” of Paracelsus. This suggests that each plant bears a physical sign, placed there by God, of what it should be used for. So the small bulbs of celandines should be used for piles, because that’s what they look like.

In The Lady’s Slipper, Alice Ibbetson is an artist fascinated by painting wild-flowers, the lady’s slipper being a rare wildflower with medicinal properties.

In The Gilded Lily the plants are used as a beauty aid by Ella Appleby, a serving maid who becomes obsessed with her appearance and the glitter and glamour of Restoration London.

Nettle blouse!

Many 17th century beauty preparations involved common plants. One for a fair complexion is to “take wilde Tansy and lay it to soake in buttermilke.” I haven't tried this yet, but I probably will.For more recipes I can recommend The Artifice of Beauty by Sally Pointer.

This post was first written for the Hoydens and Firebrands blog, why not visit them  - a great site about the seventeenth century.

The King's Carver

CONGRATULATIONS to Susan who is the winner of The Lady's Slipper picked out of the hat today!
Many thanks to everone else who stopped by my blog and made the effort to enter, wasn't it a great idea of Amy's. Hope you might have won something in the other draws.


A short post today as I'm one of the stops on the Fantastic Historical Fiction Holiday Blog Hop.




THE LADY'S SLIPPER 
Top Pick! Swift's eye for detail and language augment this atypical debut. Compelling and intriguing, this is a well-told story full of wonderful prose and surprising events. It's a vivid addition to the genre.
--RT BookReviews
To win a copy of my debut novel THE LADY'S SLIPPER please leave a comment below. 
Giveaway Open Worldwide. Don't forget to leave an email address. One extra entry if you follow this blog, and another if you tweet my post.
As for the Historical Holiday Blog Hop - Just look at the fabulous prizes you can win! Click on the banner above to follow the other blogs on this hop.Historical Holiday Blog Hop Grand Prizes - $25 Amazon or Barnes and  Noble Gift Card - Prize package(s) from SIXTY historical novels. 
GRINLING GIBBONSGrinling Gibbons - such a wonderful name - was the "King's Carver", in the Restoration period and was famous for beautiful carved wood decoration for St Paul's Cathedral, the Palace of Windsor, and the Earl of Essex's house. Legend had it that his carving was so fine that the wooden pot of carved flowers above his house in London would tremble from the motion of passing coaches.

Walpole later wrote about Gibbons: "There is no instance of a man before Gibbons who gave wood the loose and airy lightness of flowers, and chained together the various productions of the elements with the free disorder natural to each species."

Grinling Gibbons was introduced to Christopher Wren by the diarist John Evelyn who spotted him at work and was impressed by his talent. He was able to make wood appear to flow and move and was thus one of the master carvers of the Baroque style. More information about this seventeenth century sculptor in wood can be found at wanderings in eden
 or in the book, The Work of Grinling Gibbons by Geoffrey Beard
A Man's cravat, carved in lime wood by Gibbons,
courtesy of the V&A MuseumI love comments!

The King's Carver - and A Blog Hop

A short post today as I'm one of the stops on the Fantastic Historical Fiction Holiday Blog Hop.




THE LADY'S SLIPPER 
Top Pick! Swift's eye for detail and language augment this atypical debut. Compelling and intriguing, this is a well-told story full of wonderful prose and surprising events. It's a vivid addition to the genre.
--RT BookReviews
To win a copy of my debut novel THE LADY'S SLIPPER please leave a comment below. 
Giveaway Open Worldwide. Don't forget to leave an email address. One extra entry if you follow this blog, and another if you tweet my post.
As for the Historical Holiday Blog Hop - Just look at the fabulous prizes you can win! Click on the banner above to follow the other blogs on this hop.Historical Holiday Blog Hop Grand Prizes - $25 Amazon or Barnes and  Noble Gift Card - Prize package(s) from SIXTY historical novels. 
GRINLING GIBBONSGrinling Gibbons - such a wonderful name - was the "King's Carver", in the Restoration period and was famous for beautiful carved wood decoration for St Paul's Cathedral, the Palace of Windsor, and the Earl of Essex's house. Legend had it that his carving was so fine that the wooden pot of carved flowers above his house in London would tremble from the motion of passing coaches.

Walpole later wrote about Gibbons: "There is no instance of a man before Gibbons who gave wood the loose and airy lightness of flowers, and chained together the various productions of the elements with the free disorder natural to each species."

Grinling Gibbons was introduced to Christopher Wren by the diarist John Evelyn who spotted him at work and was impressed by his talent. He was able to make wood appear to flow and move and was thus one of the master carvers of the Baroque style. More information about this seventeenth century sculptor in wood can be found at wanderings in eden
 or in the book, The Work of Grinling Gibbons by Geoffrey Beard
A Man's cravat, courtesy of the V&A MuseumI love comments!

The Temptation of the Restoration

The seventeenth century in England had a lot going on. First there was the English Civil Wars where brother fought brother over the division between King and Parliament. Secondly, there was the Plague. And then there was the Great Fire of London. All of these events took a massive toll on human life. 84,830 men were killed in the Civil Wars, 70,000 more died in the Plague. The Great Fire of London destroyed most of the familiar old Tudor streets. What’s more, the beheading of King Charles I had a huge impact on England’s psyche. There was a sense that the governance of England hung in the balance – that the old order was subject to change, and that nothing could be relied upon. It is hardly surprising that at this time, astrologers predicted doom and destruction to come.
Yet the period just after King Charles II was restored to the throne, known as the Restoration period, was one of unrestrained celebration and entertainment. There was a mere five years between 1660, when Charles arrived back in London to fanfares and jubilation, until June 1665 when the first impact of the Plague deaths hit London. I was fascinated to write about this period, a time eclipsed by the bigger events of the century, sandwiched in between the dark days of Cromwell and his Puritan rule, and the dread disease that ravaged the country.
This was the time in which I set The Gilded Lily – a time of surface optimism, but with undertones of unease beneath. The two sisters, Ella and Sadie Appleby, on the run from the Law, escape their rural village hoping for a new and better life in London. This was a quite different City of Londonfrom Tudor London where the Queen aimed for political expansion and gripped the nation with a firm hand - looser and more reactionary.
Lely - Nell GwynVery much as London in the 1960’s was known as the “Swinging Sixties” and heralded a new era of sexual exploration, 1660’s Londonwas a city of new fashions, of theatres, entertainment, lavish food and a renewed moral freedom. The King gathered his “Merry Gang” around him, the wits, the rakes, the young bloods, such as Buckingham and Rochester. Their sexual exploits fuelled the gossip of the nation, as Charles went through no less than thirteen royal mistresses, and probably a few more undocumented liaisons besides. Men dressed like peacocks in ribbons and bows, women’s décolletage drifted ever lower. An actress like Nell Gwynn could come from nothing yet make her fortune at court.
In The Gilded Lily, Ella, the bolder sister, has her sights set firmly upward on handsome Jay Whitgift, the son of a pawnbroker, who in turn is fixed on moving upwards to enter the coterie at Court and buying himself a baronetcy. If you have seen the film, The Libertine, with Johnny Depp, this is the sort of society in which Jay Whitgift moves, and to which Ella aspires.  I modelled Ella partly on paintings by Gerrrit Von Honthorst, a 17thcentury Dutch artist, who painted Courtesans and women of the lower classes with clarity and detail.
 Sadie, the more timid sister, finds the size of Londonterrifying. Londonin these times is owned by the young – many older people lost their lives in the Wars, there is a feeling that life is short. Death by burning is the penalty for those, who like Sadie and Ella, have stolen from their employer. Writing the story through Ella and Sadie’s viewpoints was eye-opening. In an age of conspicuous wealth there is always the flip-side, and Restoration London is no exception. Poverty and the accompanying criminal underworld lurk just beneath the surface, and I enjoyed researching these. London is well-documented at this time, and I spent much time poring over old maps to find where they might have lived. Blackraven Alley, where I placed their lodgings, was later destroyed by the Great Fire of London.
I encourage anyone interested in this period to explore a little further by reading: The Daling Strumpet by Gillan Bagwell – a lovely account of the life of Nell Gwyn, The Apothecary’s Daughter by Charlotte Betts or Year of Wonders by Geraldine Green, two very different books about the Plague, As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann about the English Civil Wars, and Restoration by Rose Tremain - insights into Charles II and his court. Please feel free to add to my list!
Today there are reviews up for The Gilded Lily at One Book at a Time and at The Eclectic Reader. Giveaways are running at both. This post first appeared on The True Book Addict Blog.- A great blog with the feature 'this Day in History.'

Celebrating the Missing Maidservants

Camille Pissarro 1857 The MaidservantAs you know, I like to write fiction about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. No Kings and Queens for me, but the hidden, often unseen, lives of the ordinary people. The missing maidservants so often ignored by historical biographers, but loved by historical novelists as the ideal witnesses to great historical events. With this in mind, my post on recommended books featuring feisty maidservants is over here at One Book at a Time along with a chance to win The Gilded Lily. Why not go over for a look to see which books I've chosen? Have you any historical fiction books you would recommend featuring interesting maidservants?

Below: A Woman and her Maidservant feeding a Pancake to a Dog.
by the Dutch artist Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667)In The Gilded Lily Sadie and Ella cook pancakes or griddle cakes in this way, although their surroundings are not nearly so lavish!


Below: Lady with her maidservant holding a letter by Jan Vermeer




Below: My favourite - The Chocolate Girl by Jean Etienne Liotard

The story behind the commissioning of this painting sounds like a fairy-tale romance. The girl in the portrait, Anna Baltauf, worked as a maidservant in one of the Viennese chocolate shops which had become hugely popular during the 17th and18th centuries. She had little chance of good marriage as her father was too poor to give her a good dowry, however in the summer of 1745, a young Austrian nobleman - Prince Dietrichstein - came into the shop. He fell in love with the Chocolate Girl and asked her to marry him, despite objections from his family As a wedding present to his 'chocolate girl' he commissioned this portrait of his wife wearing the maid’s costume she was wearing when he first set eyes on her. Is this true? I guess we'll never really know.Ella Appleby from The Gilded Lily would have loved this story. It was what she dreamed about for herself! Sadie, her sister, would have gently told her to stop dreaming and to deliver the tray to the customer before the chocolate went cold.



Maidservants spent a lot of time fetching and carrying, but also a large proportion of their time cleaning - here is an interesting post about buttermaking and cleanliness in 17th century. Food for thought!

What to do with Snow

Today you can find the latest review of The Gilded Lily on Luxury Reading, a site dedicated to books of all varieties; fiction, non-fiction and childrens. A treat for bookworms and bibliophiles - and if you don't know the difference between a bookworm and a bibliophile, pop over and be enlightened.
There is still a Giveaway for The Gilded Lily open too at the Lit Bitch along with an interview about my writing process.

Meanwhile here are some photos taken during our severe winter in the UK in 2009. Probably not as severe as the Little Ice Age of the 17th Century, but it still took us all by surprise, and provided me with real snow through which I could imagine the scenes of snowbound London in The Gilded Lily.

I remember at that time (2009) there seemed to be an interest in sculpting figures sitting on town benches. I loved these - they are very evocative - something about their ephemeral nature expresses the human condition really well. They are strangely meditative in their white snowy stillness and tell their own story by their solitude or togetherness. Enjoy!

17th century transport in Snow - The Gilded Lily

Today The Gilded Lily is being reviewed at The Book Garden blog. Why not take a stroll to the Book Garden and see what the reviwer makes of it. Meanwhile I'm continuing my snowy theme as The Gilded Lily takes place in the little Ice Age, a time when temperatures in London dropped as low as -30 degrees and the Thames froze solid.


In the seventeenth century a sedan chair was a favoured means of transport for a lady. Sadie Appleby is horrified when her sister Ella takes a sedan as this signifies she has gone up in the world. Originally called a 'litter', it was created by lashing two poles to a chair. For royalty or the very well-to-do, it could consist of a bed or couch for the passenger or passengers to lie on. These were carried by at least two porters in front and behind, or by horses.























For the Sedan chair -an enclosed cabin- the porters were known as "chairmen". Sedans were commonly in use until the 19th century and were accompanied at night by link-boys who carried torches. Where possible, the link boys escorted the fares to the chairmen, the passengers then being delivered to the door of their lodgings. There are still houses in Bath and London that have the link extinguishers, shaped like a candle snuffers, outside the door. On this Victorian print featuring life in earlier times you can see the link boy, except there he is carrying a lantern. It shows well how precartious this method of transport might be in snow!


Link extinguisher
There is no evidence I can find that snow shoes were used in the 17th century in England. But I did find this print of a snow-shoe race outside the Crystal Palace in London in 1867. It must have been quite hard work as the men are bare-chested. What was a common form of transport in snow in the 17th century was a sleigh or sledge. Rich people owned several carriages and at least one sleigh for use in ice and snow. They were beautiful objects but not many examples survive except in diary entries. Here is a horse-drawn sleigh  from the Saskatchewan Museum.





Above - Seventeenth Century sleigh travel (as interpreted by a Victorian artist). It looks very romantic, but probably the realities would have been harsh, with freezing conditions for the occupants, skidding horses, and hidden ruts and obstacles.

And just for fun for my american readers and to complete today's snowy journey I've added this wonderful picture of New York in a Blizzard in 1888. Picures from The Daily Glean There should definitely be a book about this blizzard, it sounds spectacular.



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