The next guest on my Historical Fiction Week is Charlotte Betts, Piatkus author of The Apothecary's Daughter (August, 2011), The Painter's Apprentice (August, 2012), The Spice Merchant's Wife (August, 2013), The Chateau on Lake (November, 2015) and the recently released The House in Quill Court. Read all about her writing, her novels and her love for Historical Fiction in this interview:

Hi Charlotte and welcome. 

Hi, Alba! 

First, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m a daydreamer who loves the magical world of reading. I came to writing late and it has developed into a passion. Writing is such an integral part of my life now that I can’t imagine why I didn’t start to write earlier. Starting late isn’t necessarily a problem as no experience is ever wasted for a writer: the sad and happy times, travel, work opportunities and family life, especially family life! I’ve always been creative and worked in the design and property spheres but it’s difficult to write a book a year when you have a demanding day job. After five books I’m so excited to be able to write full time now.

Your latest novel, The House in Quill Court, tells the story of Venetia Lovell, a sensible and artistic girl who in 1813 is forced to leave her home in Kent and move with her frivolous mother and idle younger brother to London to start a new and challenging life. What sparkled this idea?

Sometimes it’s easy to pinpoint a specific event or moment that inspires a novel but for The House in Quill Court it was more like gradually turning up the volume on a radio until the story was shouting to be written.

There are so many things I’ve loved about the Georgian and Regency eras for as long as I can remember: the architecture, the fashions, the elegance and the opulence, Jane Austen – the list is endless. Part of the attraction is that this time is not so far in the past that it feels alien and yet it’s still a different and often surprising place.

I was interested in the contrasts between the romantic idea of the Regency era with the seamy, crime-ridden world of the filthy alleys and rookeries in London that were only a step away from the elegant townhouses in their garden squares. I wanted to explore what might happen when these two worlds collided.

Your novels are set in different times and places. How do you research your settings? And which one did you find the most difficult to recreate in your novels?

I have three published novels set in the mid-seventeenth century, one at the time of the French Revolution and now The House in Quill Court in the Regency era. I’m currently working on another set at the end of the Regency. So far, all have been at least partially set in London. The reason for this is that I do like to visit the locations in the book, wherever possible, because accuracy and a sense of place is important to me. I take a notebook and jot down anything I can see, smell, hear and touch that might have been there in the period I’m writing about. It helps me to create the story world if I can include the details that make a place feel real for the reader. 

The internet is useful for an overview of a setting, especially for photographs. I’ll then follow leads to other sources and immerse myself in whatever I can find to make the setting come alive; books newspaper reports, poetry, historical travel writing, museums, maps, etc. My current work-in-progress includes real historical figures who lived in Pesaro, Italy, where the story opens, and I’ve recently visited this location to soak up the atmosphere and add credibility to the story.

I love to use maps and particularly like old maps in a CD format so that I can put them in my laptop and zoom in to see individual buildings. This enables me to plan where my characters might live and work, where their horses are stabled, how long it might take them to walk to the shops and what they might see on the way.

The most difficult setting for me was the Loire valley in France for The Chateau on the Lake. I’ve visited France many times but had only passed through this area. The story location needed to be within a reasonable distance from Paris and it had to be in an area where there were vineyards. I read a great deal about viticulture in this area of France and studied maps, photographs and history books but it wasn’t possible for me to visit the area before the manuscript had to be delivered to my publisher. 

If you could switch places with a character from one of your books, who would it be and why?

This is such a hard question! I think the only answer I can give is that it would have to be the heroine of whichever novel I’m writing at the moment. This is because, during the year it takes to write a novel, I become that heroine and her life and world are completely real to me. I feel as though I have a foot in both her life and my own, as if in a parallel universe. It’s important to me that whatever hardships and trials beset my heroines, they all, somehow, have a happy ending or I wouldn’t be happy either.

Why did you decide to start writing Historical Fiction?

I started out writing contemporary novels but then I wrote a love story set in World War II. I very much enjoyed researching this period and subsequently decided to write a historical novel set further back in time. Whilst considering the time frame in which I’d like to set the story I read Pepys’ diary and was fascinated by how the wonderful details brought him so clearly to life. Soon after this I was inspired to write The Apothecary’s Daughter, which was my first published novel.

Alba, thank you for inviting me onto your website.

The House in Quill Court is currently available as an e-book and will be published in paperback on 25th August.

You can find out more about Charlotte Betts and her books on:

Website: www.charlottebetts.co.uk

Twitter: @CharlotteBetts1

About the book:

Title: The House in Quill Court

Author: Charlotte Betts

Published: January 7th 2016 by Piatkus (ebook)

                          August 25th 2016 by Piatkus (paperback)

Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb: 1813. Venetia Lovell lives by the sea in Kent with her pretty, frivolous mother and idle younger brother. Venetia's father, Theo, is an interior decorator to the rich and frequently travels away from home, leaving his sensible and artistic daughter to look after the family. Venetia designs paper hangings and she and her father often daydream about having an imaginary shop where they would display the highest quality furniture, fabrics and art to his clients. When a handsome but antagonistic stranger, Jack Chamberlaine, arrives at the Lovell's cottage just before Christmas bringing terrible news, Venetia's world is turned upside-down and the family have no option but to move to London, to the House in Quill Court and begin a new life. Here, Venetia's courage and creativity are tested to breaking point, and she discovers a love far greater than she could have ever imagined...

From the multi-award-winning author of The Apothecary's Daughter, The House in Quill Court is a gorgeously evocative Regency novel bursting with historical flavour and characters you won't forget. If you love Philippa Gregory and Joanne Harris, you will adore Charlotte Betts.

The next guest on my Historical Fiction Week is Tracy Lee, author of Amy Snow (April, 2015), The Richard & Judy Bestseller, and the recently published Florence Grace (June, 2106). Today she stops by to talk about the inspiration behind her latest book:

The next guest on my Historical Fiction Week is Lucy Ribchester, author of The Hourglass Factory and The Amber Shadows. Read all about her writing, her novels and the inspiration behind her stories in this interview:

Hello Lucy and welcome to Alba in Bookland. First of all could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi Alba, thanks for having me! Where do I start? I live in Edinburgh and I write novels and short stories set in the past with a mix of history and fiction. I love researching hidden or lost stories of women and also letting my imagination run riot among bygone ages. I studied Shakespeare for my masters and it was then that I discovered rather than taking an academic approach to literature and history I preferred to respond creatively to things that I was discovering. 

You have recently released you second book, The Amber Shadows, which is a mysterious story about a typist during WWII who transcribes the decrypted signals from the German Army and one day starts receiving pieces of amber from Russia. What sparkled this idea?

Loads of things tend to blur together in my mind to spark an idea, but I suppose for this story it was a combination of my intrigue at the life of secrecy lived at Bletchley Park and an intrigue into the disappearance of the Amber Room. When I first began reading about the park I became fascinated by the extreme nature of the secrecy: the act of doing such secret work that you weren’t allowed to talk about it even between the various huts within the park. I began to wonder how that would affect your emotional life – old relationships, new relationships, your trust of loved ones and the things they tell you, paranoia that people are spying on you or testing you. I first read about the Amber Room when I was doing a copywriting project for the National Trust for Scotland and it was always at the back of my mind. When I started looking into Bletchley it kind of bobbed up again. 

Each of your novels is set in a different time. How do you research your settings? 

I use a variety of sources, but I try to get my hands on as many primary sources as possible, partly to avoid having to see the time period through the lens of a historian, who will invariably project their own narrative onto it, but also just because it’s more stimulating to see, hear (and if possible taste and smell) the things you’re writing about. For both books I visited the National Archives and looked through records, memos and old letters. I also made visits to museums – the Museum of London has great resources on suffragettes, and the Imperial War Museum’s Fashion on the Ration exhibition was extremely useful for The Amber Shadows. For that book I was lucky enough to be able to spend a few days at Bletchley Park just soaking up the atmosphere and trying to absorb details of place, and the little day-to-day details in the reconstructed huts. In the evenings after the museum closed, I’d wander round the town looking for locations to use, like pubs and billets. I noticed recently that someone from Bletchley has posted a lovely review of the book saying that they’d been inside Honey’s billet! Luckily they were happy with all the details, so phew, I think I passed. At the end of the day however, I’d always prioritise the story over historical fact – with fiction I’m looking for emotional truth or truth within the story. 

One of the topics in your debut novel, The Hourglass Factory, is the suffragette movement. Why did you chose this?

I didn’t learn anything about the suffragettes or the wider women’s movement at school and I only had a smidgen of patchy and dodgy knowledge about it when I decided to look into it. It was really my interest in music halls and cabaret that came first with Hourglass. I liked the idea of a space where women could perform and subvert the boundaries of social expectations – be bawdy, muscular or sexual for instance. But at the same time I wanted to look more overtly at the history of feminism. One day I just made the connection that music hall’s golden age –a time when it segued into the more respectable ‘variety’ – was the same time the suffragettes were fighting for votes. This seemed to me to be a natural juxtaposition – both involved stunts and bravery, and both gave voice to women. Then Frankie just popped up out of nowhere and started barging about taking over the story. So I also had to look into journalism…

While reading it, I especially enjoyed reading about the fashion of that period, how some girls chose to wear pants and were regarded as too manly or how wearing a hat with a taxidermied seagull glued to it was seen as elegant. What role do you think fashion had during that time?

I think fashion has always had great scope for self-expression, alignment to a cause and exploring new identities. I was interested in Edwardian fashion because of the paths it was beginning to take into unusual or subversive ways of dressing. Orientalism had become fashionable due to the emergence of the Ballets Russes and the designer Paul Poiret, and this meant ditching corsets for a more shapeless fluid style. In addition, corsets themselves were becoming more elongated and boyish, rather than the pinched Gibson Girl look of the early 1900s that Ebony still wears – a bit like wearing 90s clothing today. For Frankie I was inspired by the music hall male impersonators of the era. I think it is a terrible shame that this tradition has died out in mainstream culture, for we still have the figure of the pantomime dame. I love the idea that genders can poke fun at and celebrate each other’s stereotypes – I think that is healthy, if it’s two-sided. Putting all these elements together I wanted to try to create three very distinct women: Ebony, who expresses herself through traditional strength, and for whom the corset is a kind of body armour; Frankie, who expresses herself through masculine style which complements her attempts to survive in the cutthroat world of journalism; and Milly for whom freedom means the ability to celebrate the body’s sensual side, through sheer, loose clothing and nudity. It was just really a way of trying to present a plural view of women and how you can be a fashionable woman in very different ways. 

What made you start writing historical fiction? 

As above, I was studying for my masters at the Globe and while I loved placing Early Modern plays in a historical context, I found myself yearning to do something creative with the material, rather than academic. I distinctly remember writing an essay on the persecution of perceived witches during the Jacobean era and thinking it would be way more fun and stimulating to write a short story about it instead. I’m glad to have studied the period from an academic point of view, and I think the masters taught me a lot about research in general, but I realised then that I would far rather explore my interests through fiction, than try to package up and articulate a historical analytical narrative. I think both are creative disciplines but I prefer the former. 

Which authors have inspired or influenced your writing?

I have really eclectic tastes in reading, and this changes all the time. For Hourglass I was inspired partly by wacky Edwardian authors like GK Chesterton, and for Amber Shadows I loved getting to grips with the wealth of brilliant 30s and 40s female authors writing at the time, like Ethel Lina White, EM Delafield (absolutely hilarious) Stevie Smith, Daphne du Maurier and of course my favourite, Agatha Christie, whose careful social commentary is hugely overlooked in favour of her flashy twists and puzzles (see N or M and After the Flood for wartime issues, from the treatment of refugees to post-war anti-climax in young people). I also absolutely love Anais Nin and Angela Carter. And my Scottish Book Trust mentor Linda Cracknell has hugely influenced my short story writing. I would really recommend her stories and her beautiful novel Call of the Undertow. She builds structure with precision and makes it seem so naturally done, you’re always left thumped in the heart. 

Could you recommend us a novel that has stayed with you? 

Ooooo God I have so many! No, it’s got to be Wise Children. I love that book to the moon and back. Angela Carter takes no prisoners when it comes to pretensions. Her books, that one in particular, really taught me about the glory of our tradition in popular entertainment, and how snobbery has driven a wedge down the middle of British culture. 

And finally, are you working on a new project? 

Yes! But I can’t tell you about it. (everything is a secret until at least the second draft). I was recently very honoured to receive a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship from The Scottish Book Trust, to enable me to go and work on it in France during July, so I’m planning on hauling a stash of research books out with me and I will know more about where I’m going after that.

The next guest on my Historical Fiction Week is Natalie Meg Evans, author of The Dress Thief, The Milliner's Secret and A Gown of Thorns. Read all about her writing, her novels and her love for vintage fashion in this interview:

Hello Natalie and welcome to Alba in Bookland. First of all could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi Alba, thanks for hosting me and asking juicy questions!

I’m a writer with three passions; history, clothes and being nosy about people. I stir it into the books I write which are emotional journeys, full of intrigue and with a bone-meltingly attractive man or two. 

Actually, I have to confess to a fourth passion, a love of dogs and horses and these creatures often find their way into my books as minor characters. 

Basic biog goes something like this: born in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) to parents who’d emigrated from England. We returned to England, to the east Midlands when I was very tiny. Dad died when I was six, a real life-changer. Miss him still. Educated at Loughborough High School, went to Art College, left abruptly to go to London to be an actress. Started writing. Got work in public relations, had a son, got married. Kept writing. Eventually moved from the southeast to rural Suffolk. Finally got published. Got divorced last year, now happily single with two beloved Labradors. Currently down-sizing to another house in the same village. It will be a ‘move by wheelbarrow’, no Pickford’s lorry needed.

Your latest work, A Gown of Thorns, is a novella about a girl who moves to the south of France to work as an au pair and finds there a link to the past thanks to a vintage dress. What sparkled this idea? 

Some time ago, I read a biography of the designer Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish fashion designer who worked in Paris. He created the ‘Delphos Gown’ - a classic silk tube designed worn pretty much on the naked form. These gowns mould to the body like wet tissue paper, being constructed of pleats as fine as mushroom gills. Bursting on to the fashion scene in an era when women were still heavily corseted, the Delphos helped push female fashion towards the loose silhouette that came in after the Great War. Later generations have a lot to be thankful for! I love the role that fashion plays in politics. Fashion creates shock, or responds to shock but it never stays still. Lift the hem, look under the hat, and you find people’s life stories. That’s why my books draw on a fashion motif.

I’m not a seamstress myself (too impatient, though bizarrely, I own four sewing machines) but I love to know how things are put together. Fortuny’s technique is still shrouded in mystery. It’s said you can roll a Delphos gown like a sausage, throw it into a suitcase and take it out later, and find it perfect. That, for me, is genius. Making a Fortuny gown the mysterious heart of a story was irresistible. 

Why the dress in the novel was called the ‘Gown of Thorns?’ Well, because nothing is perfect. Something as desirable as a Fortuny gown comes with a price, and the price may be the prickings of sorrow.

This novella is a time slip with strong connections between the past and the present. Why did you chose that and how did you make it work?

I’ve wanted to write a time slip novel ever since reading Barbara Erskine’s ‘Lady of Hay’ years ago. Having decided to mess with the space-time continuum, you decide what your eras are to be. For me, it was World War Two meets the recent present. Both my previous novels, The Dress Thief and The Milliner’s Secret were set in Paris in the run up to and during world war two. For A Gown of Thorns, I shifted the action to rural southwest France. What else but to set it on a wine estate, and delve into the fascinating, complex world of grapes, fermentation and bottling? My travels through France have taken me to some remote corners, and I’ve been made aware how the wartime struggles of the country are imprinted on the landscape. In a Gown of Thorns, I strove to bring the passion and danger of the Resistance alive, through the eyes of a vanished generation (Henri and Yvonne) and also through the modern eyes of my hero and heroine, Laurent and Shauna.

Your debut novel, The Dress Thief, also centers on dresses and fashion. Are you a vintage fashion enthusiast? How do you research this part of your novels?

My love of vintage fashion was sparked by my mother, who brought beautiful clothes back from Paris. She was there in the late 1940s and early 50’s, just when Paris fashion was flowering again after the restrictions of wartime occupation. She wasn’t rich, just an au-pair teaching English to the children of a wealthy family. The clothes were hand-me-downs. She also brought fashion magazines back and two decades later, she and I leafed through them. I fell in love with the super-elegant shapes of the era; the hourglass figure, the detailed tailoring. A totally different vibe to the fashions of the 70’s and 80’s. For a start, the models were older women, elegantly posed and beautifully groomed. I never believed I could be like them, but I fell for the look. My style of dressing is very informal. But in my dreams, I’m a well-to-do Parisienne in 1950, with an account at a fashion house on Rue Cambon, and I’m dropped off there by my chauffeur twice a week to be fitted for exquisite clothes. Dream on, honey.

Research begins with pictures, lots of them. Thank heavens for ‘t’internet’ which is a resource that was unimaginable when I first started writing. I read biographies of the couturiers, and I’m always in second hand bookshops, looking for those unsung gems, the memoirs and diaries of totally forgotten people who lived through the eras I write about. Professional biographers write about events and feelings. Amateur diarists write about things (how much it cost to take a taxi in 1938). So much more useful!

What made you start writing historical fiction? 

As a kid, history was my reading of choice. I can’t really explain what gives me the urge to reach back and connect with times past. I feel a rev in the stomach when I see the ruined towers of a castle, or walk through a market town with lopsided timber framed buildings. I want to know the stories they contain, and where there is no information available, I invent it myself.

You are a multi award winning and bestseller author. What did it mean for you to get so much attention on your work? And what do you think makes your books stand out?

It took me thirty years from writing my first (crazily bad) novel to being published. In that time, I kept telling myself I could make it, but self-belief grew ragged and I had so many disappointments, I often felt I’d shackled myself to a millstone. Success, when it finally came, felt like a long line of dominoes falling. Everything happened at once and in the three years since The Dress Thief came out, I have won awards, sold quite a lot of books and seen myself in the New York top 100 and all three books at once in the Amazon historical top ten.

Those moments send me back to the struggle, to the tears and failures. I want to go back to my younger self, put an arm round her and say, ‘You’ll get there, sausage.’ So, while I enjoy the success, I never take it for granted. Amazon rankings can plummet to earth from the dizzy heights, like a lump of frozen washroom waste from a jumbo jet! 

I’m an emotional person and I still have to learn to be confident and thicker skinned. 

What makes my books stand out? Well, firstly, thank you for suggesting that they do! Huge credit goes to my publishers, agent, editors and the cover designs created by their talented artists. People love my covers, which are the inspired creativity of other people. 

The stories I write are my own, however, and I tend to ‘do my own thing.’ I like to give my readers something immersive and powerful. Reading the reviews (when I’m brave enough!) suggests that it’s what brings people to my books. 

Do you think that in historical fiction, the time period and setting is as important as the story itself?

Absolutely. The period should be as much a character as the hero and heroine. A historical should, in my view, be more than a story of contemporary values with long dresses thrown in. People ‘back then’ had different values and aspirations to us. Yes, they wanted love, happiness, security, wealth, power, what you will... but how they gained what they wanted and expressed their needs sets them apart from us. Location, era, setting are crucial ingredients, characters in their own right. A historical novel should grow out of its era as an oak tree grows from its soil. 

Could you recommend us a novel that has stayed with you? 

I have read and listened to so many books in my life (I’m a big fan of audio books, particularly in the car) that singling out one is hard. This I can safely say is a novel that set me on the road to becoming the kind of writer I am; Drum roll... it’s Margaret Mitchell’s epic Gone with the Wind. You know the film, but have you read the book, folks? It has everything. Gutsy writing, a plot that treats its readers as adults (no schmaltzy concessions to sentiment). The scenes of the Battle of Atlanta are among the best heart-gripping war scenes anywhere. And Scarlett, one of the most flawed females in literature, is also one of the most memorable. 

A shorter, more contemporary book I love to recommend is Nora Ephron’s ‘Heartburn.’ Ephron was the screenwriter of ‘When Harry Met Sally’ so you’re assured of laughter and wit. This novel also hands you a roller-coaster ride of revenge and recipes.

And finally, are you working on a new project? 

I am currently writing The Wardrobe Mistress, in which my love of all things clothes-y shifts to the London theatre. It’s currently ‘in progress’ but here’s a little blurb: 

“It is 1946, the war has ended but the worst winter in two hundred years is just around the corner. Young war widow Vanessa Kingcourt has been hired as wardrobe mistress at the Farren theatre in London. Working backstage there is not just a lifelong ambition, it feels like her destiny. Not only is she looking to mend her heartbreak and rediscover the sense of purpose that her war work gave her, she needs to understand what caused her father to take his own life just as war came to an end. The Farren Theatre and its mysterious, vanished former wardrobe mistress Eva, seem to be implicated in his death. As she takes over the wardrobe room backstage, Vanessa struggles to meet the twin demands of curating costumes for a glittering production of a play by Oscar Wilde while also digging down into the past. But when she becomes romantically entangled with the Farren’s married owner – enigmatic Alistair Redenhall – her career, happiness and her very survival are put on the line.”

You can find out more about Natalie Meg Evans and her books on:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NatalieMegEvans/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/natmegevans

Webpage: http://nataliemegevans.com/

About the book:

Title: A Gown of Thorns

Author: Natalie Meg Evans

Published: March 30th 2016 by Bookouture

Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb: Hidden within the wardrobe’s embrace, she rifled through the folds of cloth until her fingers stopped at a gown of violet, lavender and silver-grey pleats. She lifted it off its hanger and turned towards the mirror… 

Shauna Vincent arrives in the little French village of Chemignac after accepting an offer to be an au pair to the grandchildren of an old family friend. 

As she begins to explore her new home at the ancient Chateau de Chemignac with it’s beautiful vineyards, she discovers a locked tower room where she unearths a treasure trove of exquisite vintage dresses. One gown feels unsettlingly familiar. 

When Shauna falls asleep one afternoon in a valley full of birdsong, she has a strange dream of a vintage aircraft circling threateningly overhead. So when she suddenly awakes to find charming local landowner Laurent standing over her - Shauna wonders if he might be just the person to help her untangle this unexpected message from the past. 

A Gown of Thorns draws you into a richly evocative world steeped in secrets that will mesmerize fans of Rachel Hauck’s The Wedding Dress, Kristen Hannah’s The Nightingale and Adriani Trigiani.

The next guest on my Historical Fiction Week is Lenora Bell, Piatkus author of How the Duke Was Won (May, 2016). Read all about her writing, her novels and her inspiration in this interview and don't forget to enter the giveaway to win a paperback of How the Duke Was Won for yourself. Also, everyone who answers Lenora's question will be entered to win an ebook copy! 

Hello Lenora and welcome to Alba in Bookland. First, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi Alba! Thanks for having me here at Alba in Bookland (love that name). I’m an avid reader and a longtime historical romance fangirl. My favorite authors include Eloisa James, Lisa Kleypas, Lorraine Heath, Sarah MacLean and Tessa Dare (among many, many others). I have an MFA in creative writing and I’ve taught English around the world. I’m currently living in Switzerland with Mr. Bell and two very naughty adopted kitties. 

You've recently published your debut, How the Duke Was Won, a story about a wild duke looking for a suitable wife for a strictly business arrangement. What sparked this idea?

One Christmas holiday I was browsing in a used bookstore and I came across Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl and I thought to myself, this would make a great romance novel plot! The rich magnate who requires an heir for his fortune and invites a bunch of people to compete for him. I immediately thought of a title: Charlene and the Duchess Factory. The book went on to win RWA’s Golden Heart contest and How the Duke Was Won was born!

How the Duke Was Won is loosely inspired by the classic tale of CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and the next books in the series were inspired by THE WIZARD OF OZ and ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Can you tell us a bit more about how these classics inspired you?

I love rereading favorite books multiple times. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice the delight is fresh. I laugh, I cry, and sigh with pleasure when Darcy finally declares that Elizabeth has bewitched him body and soul. 

I also love revisiting childhood classics like The Wizard of Oz to recapture the wonder of living in the world of make-believe and imagination. At the heart of all three of these classics is a quest. Charlie has the chance to raise his family out of poverty. Dorothy is trying to find her way home and learns the value of self-reliance along the way. And Alice tumbles through the rabbit hole into a new awareness of the strength of her creative identity. These universal journeys are at the heart of the Disgraceful Dukes series as well.

What made you start writing historical fiction? 

I write historical fiction because I love reading it so much. After I read Eloisa James’s debut novel Potent Pleasures I decided I wanted to become a romance novelist. She’s been so very gracious with me and with so many other aspiring writers. 

Sometimes I wonder what Jane Austen would say if she knew her books were still so popular 200 years later and served as the inspiration for so many novels, plays, and movies. She’s the patron saint of romantic fiction!

Do you think that in historical fiction, the time period and setting is as important as the story itself?

Great question! I actually wrote a piece about that for the awesome romance site Heroes and Heartbreakers (check it out here). I’ll read any historical time period - Medieval Scotland, Victorian England, or Jazz Age Harlem – but what I’m truly looking for are strong-yet-sensitive heroes and powerful heroines to fall in love with. I do crave rich historical details but I want them seamlessly woven into the fabric of the narrative in a way that adds texture, yet doesn’t take away from the heart of the story – the tentative, easily crushed emotional intimacy developing between the protagonists. 

Who would be your historical book boyfriend?

Speaking of strong-yet-sensitive heroes, my latest book boyfriend would definitely have to be Captain Logan MacKenzie from Tessa Dare’s When a Scot Ties the Knot. I mean, come on! The guy rocks a kilt and has ginger hair so I can’t help but picture Jamie from Outlander. Am I right?

Logan insists he “dinna do cuddling” (tough and strong – check!) and then proceeds to read Pride and Prejudice in bed (be still my wildly beating heart). 

Question for readers: Who’s your current book boyfriend? 

xoxo

Lenora 

You can find out more about Lenora Bell and her books on: 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lenora.bell.90/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lenora_bell

Webpage: http://lenorabell.com/

About the book

Title: How the Duke Was Won (The Disgraceful Dukes #1)

Author: Lenora Bell

Published: May 26th 2016 by Piatkus

Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb: The pleasure of your company is requested at Warbury Park. Four lovely ladies will arrive… but only one can become a duchess.

Thanks to the publisher, I've got a few copies of How the Duke Was Won to giveaway to some lucky winners. The Giveaway is open to Europe and the winners will be contacted via email and will have 48h to claim their prize. Also, if you answer Lenora's question, you can win an ecopy of the book: 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The next guest on my Historical Fiction Week is Kate Thompson, author of the fantastic Secrets of the Singer Girls (March, 2015) and Secrets of the Sewing Bee (March, 2016). I've had the pleasure of reading both and I highly recommend them. Today she stops by to talk about how she researched her novels, both set in the East End during WWII:

Hello Alba,

Firstly, thank-you for including me in your historical fiction week. There seems to be so much talk these days of the loss of community. The days where you could leave your door open, kids played out on the street and everyone in that street knew your name are alas, for the most part, long gone. 

However, when I look on your site, I am heartened to see another community springing into life, albeit it an on line one and I love that you encourage like-minded readers to come together and share their passion for books. 

Community is something I try to address constantly in my writing, and features heavily in both in Secrets of the Singer Girls, my debut novel for Pan Macmillan and the prequel, Secrets of the Sewing Bee, published in March. 

The books focus on the lives of East End seamstresses, whose work sewing Army and Navy uniforms in a Bethnal Green factory in wartime throws them headlong into some extraordinary situations. In order to research this fully, I spent many absorbing hours interviewing women who I came to call my ‘real life Singer Girls’. 

It all started with Kathy. Nudging 90 and still line-dancing, this sprightly octogenarian told me in detail about her fears on the first night of the Blitz and her raw anguish at seeing the destruction of her community at the hands of the Luftwaffe. After the moving interview I went to leave, but she called me back. 

‘I nearly forgot, love,’ she said. ‘I knitted you something.’ How sweet, I thought, as she took out something in soft white wool from her knitting bag, she’s knitted something for my baby son. On closer examination, it turned out to be not a pair of baby booties, but a willy-warmer! Kathy and her friend Vera took one look at my shocked face and fell about in raucous howls of laughter. 

​Kathy was a former seamstress, and told me all about the long lost world of the wartime rag trade. I listened rapt, as she filled my head with stories.

Today, the East End is unrecognisable from its former self, but during the war, the streets of Bethnal Green, Bow, Spitalfields, Stepney and Whitechapel were teeming with garment factories, all crowded with women working ‘in the rag’. The blistering poverty of those times was brutal. The Welfare State hadn’t been dreamt up and the streets were filled with the poor and hungry. Children walked about with bare feet or in shoes patched up with cardboard. But from great poverty springs ingenuity, and the Cockney rag-trade worker, was nothing if not resourceful. 

One has to admire the women who worked out how to fuse their sewing machines by holding the wheel and keeping their foot down on the treadle, craftily earning themselves an extra ten-minute break, or the lady who proudly told me that she didn’t regard herself as a proper machinist until she had accidentally impaled her finger on the sewing machine needle three times! 

These women, like every other machinist I spoke with, calmly worked their way through the raids of the Blitz until the bombs got too close for comfort and they were forced to seek shelter. The Luftwaffe weren’t going to stop their sewing machines from humming, if they could help it!

​From those first stories, Secrets of the Singer Girls was born. Secrets of the Sewing Bee is set two years earlier during the Blitz and my research took me to some fascinating places, not least Bethnal Green Underground, where a lady named Gladys, pointed to the exact spot on the platform where she slept nightly to shelter from the bombs. Hard to conceive with a steady stream of commuters rushing past, but that’s what’s wonderful about history isn’t it? It contains so many surprises.

Like the fact that the same underground station also had triple bunks for five thousand, a library, a theatre built over the tracks and even a crèche to enable mothers to work – all built 70 feet below ground! Setting a story in and amongst the camaraderie of a secret wartime village seemed so obvious once I knew of its existence.

​I find it fascinating how the war changed women’s lives in deeply profound ways. There is a perception that women were the gentler sex back then, tending to home and hearth, but on digging deeper I discovered a very different woman to the one presented to us though nostalgic dramas, stoically waiting for her husband to return home from the battlefields. 

My characters, in keeping with the women of Britain, behaved in extraordinary and uncharacteristic ways. Shocked out of their rhythms by fear, necessity and freedom, they indulged in affairs, took part in protests, lynch mobs, stormed from stifling jobs and took on exciting and dangerous new ones. 

As one woman told me whilst I was researching the book, “Women found their soul. It was the very best time to be alive”. This was confirmed by another lady who confessed: “I ought not to say this, but I found it exciting”. Another woman proudly told me she finally found freedom from her abusive husband, and got a job painting huge ships down the docks. Her eyes still sparkled at the memory. I’m not trying to diminish the fear and heartache experienced by so many, but highlight the ways in which women discovered what they were truly capable of.

Discovering that sense of freedom and the huge evolution it brought about in women's lives was very exciting.

​It is often the quiet voices of history, which are the most revealing. These women and their unassuming thoughts and feelings tell us so much about how difficult, but also how rewarding it was to be a woman in war-torn Britain.

Thank so much for such an interesting post Kate, I always find it fascinating to read about the role of women during the war and to discover how strong and brave these women were. 

​ 

Find out more about Kate Thompson and her books on: 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KateThompsonAuthor/

Twitter: @katethompson380

Webpage: www.katethompsonmedia.co.uk

About the book: 

Title: Secrets of the Sewing Bee

Author: Kate Thompson

Published: March 10th 2016 by Macmillan

Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb: Orphan Flossy Brown arrives at Trout's garment factory in Bethnal Green amidst the uncertainty of the Second World War. In 1940s London, each cobbled street is strewn with ghosts of soldiers past, all struggling to make ends meet. For the women of the East End, their battles are on the home front.

Flossy is quickly embraced by the colourful mix of characters working at Trout's, who have turned their sewing expertise to vital war work. They fast become the family that Flossy has always longed for. Dolly Doolaney, darling of the East End, and infamous tea lady, gives her a particularly warm welcome and helps Flossy settle into wartime life.

Things aren't so easy for Peggy Piper, another new recruit at the factory. She's used to the high life working as a nippie in the West End, and is not best pleased to find herself bent over a sewing machine. But war has the ability to break down all sorts of class barriers and soon Peggy finds the generosity and spirit of her fellow workers difficult to resist.

Dolly sets up a sewing circle and the ladies at Trout's play their part in defending the frontline as they arm themselves with their needles and set about stitching their way to victory. But as the full force of the Blitz hits London, the sewing bee are forced to shelter in the underground tube stations on a nightly basis.

In such close quarters, can Dolly manage to contain the secret that binds them all? And how will Peggy and Flossy cope as their lives are shaped and moved by forces outside of their control?

"Secrets of the Sewing Bee is a touching story that will surprise you more than once. With complex characters, secrets, love, friendship and tears, it has it all. I cannot wait to see what Kate Thompson comes out with next."

Read my full review here

This week I'm celebrating Historical Fiction Week on the blog, so I thought it would be the perfect time to read and review this novel set London after the Great War. Have a look at my thoughts here:

Title: The Girl from the Savoy

Author: Hazel Gaynor

Published: June 7th 2016 by Harper 

Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb: Presenting a dazzling new historical novel… The Girl From The Savoy is as sparkling as champagne and as thrilling as the era itself.

Sometimes life gives you cotton stockings. Sometimes it gives you a Chanel gown…

Dolly Lane is a dreamer; a downtrodden maid who longs to dance on the London stage, but her life has been fractured by the Great War. Memories of the soldier she loved, of secret shame and profound loss, by turns pull her back and spur her on to make a better life.

When she finds employment as a chambermaid at London’s grandest hotel, The Savoy, Dolly takes a step closer to the glittering lives of the Bright Young Things who thrive on champagne, jazz and rebellion. Right now, she must exist on the fringes of power, wealth and glamor—she must remain invisible and unimportant.

But her fortunes take an unexpected turn when she responds to a struggling songwriter’s advertisement for a ‘muse’ and finds herself thrust into London’s exhilarating theatre scene and into the lives of celebrated actress, Loretta May, and her brother, Perry. Loretta and Perry may have the life Dolly aspires to, but they too are searching for something.

Now, at the precipice of the life she has and the one she longs for, the girl from The Savoy must make difficult choices: between two men; between two classes, between everything she knows and everything she dreams of. A brighter future is tantalizingly close—but can a girl like Dolly ever truly leave her past behind?

The paperback edition will be available in the UK from September 8th

First of all I would like to thank the publishers for sending me a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.*

Review: The Girl from the Savoy is a fascinating story with captivating characters and a stunning setting and it goes directly to my top read of the year. I think there was not a thing I didn't love about this book. Seriously, historical fiction at its best.

The story revolves around Dolly, a maid who has just started working at The Savoy. But she has big dreams and aspirations: she wants to be the next big thing and star in all the plays and musicals, just like her idols Loretta May and Tallulah Bankhead. So imagine her excitement when she meets Perry by chance and Perry turns out to be Loretta's brother. Soon the three of them become close friends and it looks like Dolly's dreams are not as far-fetched as everyone thought. 

I found Dolly to be a fascinating character. From the beginning, you could sense that there was so much more to her than you might first thing. She had secrets and ghosts from her past that still haunted her and I loved discovering them and knowing more about her life before the Savoy. At the same time though, she was like a ray of sunshine, making everyone happier and brightening their day with just a smile. I really wanted all her dreams to come true and I rooted for her through the whole story. She kept surprising me and I'm sure she will be one of those characters who will stay with me for a long time.

And then there were Perry and Loretta. They both had their own stories to tell and their own ghosts and I ended up really caring for them. I even shade a tear or two while reading their stories. Perry was a joy to read, and as the story progressed and he started feeling happier, it was difficult not to fall a bit in love with him. And Loretta had such a presence. I could totally picture her owning the stage and making the public go mad. I was really intrigued by her as she seemed to have it all but felt like she had nothing. 

Something that Hazel Gaynor managed to capture perfectly in this story was the glamorous world surrounding the Savoy and its guests and the contrast with the simple and poor world of its workers and of all the girls who dreamed of being a guest one day. I've always been fascinated by that decade, a decade of contrasts, of Charleston and beautiful dresses but also of hard times, especially for women, who had been working and keeping the country afloat during the war and were now expected to go back to their old roles. While reading this book, I felt like I was there myself, following Loretta and Dolly's adventures around London. 

The Girl from the Savoy is a book you don't want to miss. It's a very well researched story with many layers that delivers a lot more than you might expect. A gem of a book. 

Rating: 5 stars

Read my Interview with Hazel Gaynor and enter to win a copy of the book here