​It's that time of year again, so I'm going to take the stress out of your Christmas shopping chaos and suggest you find everything at your local bookshop. After all the pleasure of a book lasts a lifetime, unlike that of a comedy apron or a scented candle. Here are some recommendations for the stockings of all kinds of book lovers:

​FOR LITERARY ECO-WARRIERS
 
​For those undaunted by doorstep sized literary novels, then Annie Proulx's BARKSKINS is one of my books of the year. Spanning more than three hundred years and depicting numerous generations of characters it tells the story of the sacrifice of the world's forests in the name of progress.

​FOR POLITICOS
 
For clever friends who prefer political non-fiction then you can't go wrong with BLOOD AND SAND, the latest book from historian, Alex Von Tunzelman, on the sixteen days in 1956 that pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict with crises in Hungary and Suez.

​FOR CRIME ADDICTS
 
For lovers of crime fiction series there's Antonia Hodgson's DEATH AT FOUNTAIN'S ABBEY, set in 1728, it follows Jack Hawkins to Yorkshire on a mission to uncover a murder; or MJ Carter's THE DEVIL'S FEAST, set in 1842, in which Captain William Avery must uncover a horrible death at The Reform Club. Both are the third books in their series, so if you were feeling generous you might want to offer all three.

FOR STRONG WOMEN AND SPIES
 For those who like novels about strong women there's Katherine Webb's 1950s set, THE ENGLISH GIRL, about a woman who longs to escape the rigid boundaries of her life and marriage but finds more than she'd bargained for on a desert adventure. Or for a less exotic setting but equally strong women is Elizabeth Buchan's THE NEW MRS CLIFTON, set in London in the wake of WW2, when a brother, to his sisters' dismay, returns from the war with a German bride.

​FOR WW2 BUFFS
 
These two gripping novels tell of soldiers devastated by their experiences war. Jason Hewitt's DEVASTATION ROAD follows a broken English soldier trying to find his way home in the dying days of the war. William Ryan's THE CONSTANT SOLDIER offers another perspective depicting a German soldier, badly injured, who returns home to find his eyes are opened about the Nazis who have taken over his village.

​FOR SECRET GOTHICS
 
For those with a yearning for dark victoriana Anna Mazzola's debut THE UNSEEING tells of a woman who is about to hang for a gruesome murder but there's more to her story than meets the eye. Your could offer it alongside Waterstone's pick, Sarah Perry's acclaimed victorian gothic novel THE ESSEX SERPENT.

​FOR PEPYS PEOPLE
 
The Stuart period is having a moment. This year marked the 350th year since London's great fire and how about Rebecca Rideal's excellent non-fiction, 1666: PLAGUE, WAR AND HELLFIRE, which gives an overview of the world-shaking events of that year. You could give it together with Andrew Taylor's novel about  a murder uncovered in the wake of the great fire THE ASHES OF LONDON

​FOR FAMOUS FEMALES
 
Themes of fame and the female run through Katherine Clement's and Essie Fox's latest novels. Still with the Stuarts THE SILVERED HEART, tells of a notorious highway-woman during the chaos of the English Civil War. THE LAST DAYS OF LEDA GREY slips between the heatwave of 1976 and the Edwardian era to reveal the secrets of a silent movie star.

​FOR TUDOR FANS
 
For those who have read everything there is to read about the Tudors, Sarah Gristwoods far-reaching non-fiction work, GAME OF QUEENS, contextualises the lives of the Tudors by exploring the network of powerful women throughout sixteenth century Europe. Another little-known Elizabethan and Stuart woman is the subject to (ahem – cheekiness alert) my own novel. THE GIRL IN THE GLASS TOWER is Arbella Stuart, raised to be heir to Elizabeth I and the novel tells of her attempts to escape the life fate and politics has prescribed.

​FOR WITCHES
 
Witchcraft, or accusations of it in the Medieval period tie these novels together. Maitland's west country setting is the scene for dark and mysterious happenings in THE PLAGUE CHARMER and Manda Scott's, INTO THE FIRE explodes myths about Joan of Arc in a thrilling tale of a political cover up that spans hundreds of years. 

‘Prepare to be welcomed into the coveted world of power and privilege....the leaders of an empire await,’  states the blurb on Netflix about The Crown. Whether or not you subscribe to the streaming service you will doubtless be aware of the eagerly anticipated new series about the reign of Elizabeth II from Peter Morgan, (of The Queen and The Audience fame) if only because, with a reputed budget of a hundred million, it is the most expensive series yet to grace the small screen.
 
Morgan seems to have cornered the market on our monarch and is light-hearted about his seeming obsession with the enigmatic woman, saying it happened ‘by accident’ through his interest in politics, power and the press, themes he has returned to throughout his career. He has tellingly also written about Nixon, Tony Blair, Idi Amin and Henry VIII. When interviewed by Andrew Marr who suggested he must have developed a deep affection for the Queen he joked that perhaps it was ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. He has often been quoted as saying that he has no interest in meeting her as he feels it would compromise his project to seek royal approval. It is a sentiment I applaud and one that makes for a better, richer and more honest drama.
 
Morgan is a subtle writer who doesn’t spoon feed the viewer and this works well for material that might have become mawkish in the hands of another. This is no scurrilous soap opera about the royals; it is a subtle and impressive exploration of a strangely fascinating and archaic institution. The research is meticulous and the pacing measured, refusing to resort to the cheap cliff-hangers and explosive sex scenes we have become used to in television drama, allowing the performances to take centre stage. Clare Foy’s Elizabeth is a masterful portrayal, her accent perfectly pitched and the sense of buttoned up shyness and vulnerability she conveys is touching. Her dialogue is spare and she uses long and meaningful pauses to great effect.

As the drama progresses we come to understand that it is not the Queen but the crown that is the central character and she merely its embodiment, constantly tugged between her public and private selves, making Foy’s quiet portrayal all the more powerful.  Another compelling performance comes from Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret, the foil to her sister, who spills over with barely repressed libido, her dresses seeming about to slip off and expose her, compared to Elizabeth’s demure cardigans and brooches. Though each episode works as its own complete narrative, Margaret’s scandalous affair with the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend provides one of the main narrative threads stitched through the series as a whole.
 
The romance itself comes secondary to its political implications. The example of Margaret’s outcast uncle looms, played with a louche precision by Alex Jennings whose flat vowels, presumably an affectation caught from his American wife, cause unmasked disapproval from his relatives, particularly Queen Mary, who is herself wont to burst into German, a telling detail that is pure taboo. We see history repeating and understand the glacial pace of change within this institution. Almost twenty years have passed, a world war has been and gone, the country has changed beyond recognition, yet still a royal princess cannot marry a divorcee. Margaret’s inappropriate love becomes the catalyst for Elizabeth’s slow realisation that her duty to the crown must come before everything, including her loyalty to her sister. It is an understanding hard won.
 
Morgan uses pairs of characters, working against one another to create drama: Elizabeth and Margaret, Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, Edward VII and George VI and Churchill and Eden, whose rivalry occupies another primary narrative thread. Indeed Churchill too stubbornly resists change, living in the past, like the royal family. These pairs are all in some ways deeply connected and yet exposed to betrayal by the uncompromising force of duty. Morgan employs flashbacks to the past to emphasise the pressure of history and responsibility weighing down on the shoulders of a young woman quite unprepared for the role that is thrust on her by the premature death of her father from lung cancer.
 
She may be Queen but we understand that she hasn’t even the power to choose her Private Secretary. Tommy Lascelles is foisted on her, exquisitely brought to life by a saturnine and moustachioed Pip Torrens, who comes to represent the pedantry of the royal institution. Protocol and precedence dictate everything. Morgan’s spare and precise writing allows us to see this in a powerful scene in which Elizabeth first encounters her family as Queen. Her sister kisses her on the cheek in intimate close-up and they make for the stairs, the camera drawing back. ‘Wait,’ says the Queen Mother to Margaret. Her sister must go first from now on. Prince Phillip gives her a look, a minuscule, knowing smile and we, like Margaret, begin to understand the new dynamic and how it will impact on their personal relationships: Elizabeth in chilly isolation and her husband, mother and sister always in her wake.
 
Every episode is shot through with themes of sacrifice and duty, exposing what seems an arcane and illogical system that has a country in its thrall. This is emphasised by the scenes set in the impersonal spaces of the palace, its hushed carpeted acres bathed in cool blue light with staff moving through them silently. This is cast into sharp relief by glimpses into Margaret’s wild parties, seen mainly from a servant’s eye view, through half opened doors, lit with tantalising warmth, and Prince Philip’s escapades with his male friends, whizzing around London’s night spots in his sports car. He too, like his glamorous sister-in-law, is depicted as a charismatic individual sacrificed to a system beyond his control.
 
There is barely a hair out of place in this impressive drama and I found myself watching it compulsively. My criticisms are few; an unnecessarily silly episode with a rogue elephant and the occasional anachronistic idiom, which only a pedant like me might notice, stood out, perhaps more so because everything else was so carefully rendered. The greatest pity for me is that was The Crown on the BBC we would all be talking and tweeting simultaneously about each episode, and together impatiently awaiting the next. That is the downfall of streaming sites like Netflix but had it been a BBC production it certainly wouldn’t have had such a stratospheric budget and high production values and would have been the poorer for it – nor would I have been able to binge watch the entire first series over two days.

​Images: Netflix
First published on Historia – the place to go for the best in historical writing.
 
Elizabeth Fremantle’s latest novel The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin.

A chance encounter with Toby Litt the other day made me go back and take a look at his essay titled Against Historical Fiction. It is an oft-quoted and gently provocative piece that frequently puts the noses of historical fiction writers out of joint by calling their work ‘deeply bogus’ and suggesting the term historical fiction is an ‘oxymoron’. But, though Litt is clearly not a fan of historical fiction, it is easy to take what he says out of context. 

He suggests historical fiction is created in ‘bad faith’. Though it is clearly a critical point it is not intended to be insulting or derogatory but to describe the function of fiction about the past and the contract between reader and writer. He takes the term ‘bad faith’, in a philosophical sense, from Sartre, as to mean the vacillation between what is known to be fact and what is purely speculative. He opposes this with history books, which he deems are ‘written in good faith’, meaning by this that they aspire to truthfulness.

It would be tempting to argue that even documented historical ‘fact’ can be subject to unreliability and misinterpretation. We know ‘the truth’ is a slippery concept and that the writers of history often have their own political agendas at play in their work, but it is Litt’s statement about it being only, as it were, ‘proper’ history that seeks, ‘in an honest way,’ to say something ‘useful or truthful about the past’ that interests me more. 

What he seems to be saying is that the intentions of the ‘proper’ historical writer and the historical novelist are in opposition to one another. This is tricky territory as it lumps together the aims of all those who set their fiction in the past. Each novelist surely has a different, subjective, aim for his or her fiction. Some may indeed be simply be using history as an exotic screen on which to project stories with contemporary sensibilities, wilfully flouting known 'truths' for the sake of the aims of their particular narrative. Others, though, might be seeking to exploit the imaginative space between the known 'facts' of the past as a way to tell the untold stories, or as attempting to use historical parallels as a way to better understand the present. 

​Acclaimed historical biographer, Linda Porter, has turned to the children of Charles I and the English Civil Wars for her latest book. 

An ambitious project with daunting scope Royal Renegades shines a light on a royal family swept away by political forces ultimately beyond their control. The combination of Porter's impeccable research, sharp sense of irony and fluent writing style transforms a period of history renowned for its dryness and impenetrability. The political and martial narrative is cast in a new light when set against the intimacy of the family story, which takes us out into parallel events in France and the Netherlands, allowing us to understand  the wider European impact of the conflict.

Both fascinating and, at times, deeply poignant, Royal Renegades will have you in its thrall until the final page.

INTERVIEW WITH  LINDA PORTER

EF: As with your previous bookCrown of Thistles, the scope ofRoyal Renegades is vast, covering not only the period running up to the English Civil Wars, the wars themselves and the protectorate that followed, but also parallel events in both France and the Netherlands. Do you enjoy the challenge of depicting the ‘big picture’?

LP: Yes, I do. I think it is important to convey the wider backdrop of the story. Events in Europe had a significant impact on the lives of the Stuart royal children, especially after their father’s execution. It is also important to remember that their mother was French – their Bourbon inheritance is often overlooked. I also wanted to convey something of the complexity of the period, both within Charles I’s three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland, and beyond. It is a wonderful period to write about, perhaps the richest in our history. I would have liked to write more about the eleven years of the English republic but it was beyond the scope of this book. However, I felt it necessary to include a chapter on the background to the restoration of Charles II because I had never really understood what happened in England after the death of Oliver Cromwell. I now feel that I do and hopefully readers of my book will as well.

EF: With your focus on the Royal children you manage to make the political highly personal and very poignant. What inspired you to approach this period of history in such a way?

LP: I think because it is very much an untold story. Most people I have spoken to about the book are unaware of the fact that Charles I had six children living at the time of his death, and know nothing about their fates, beyond the fact that Charles II was restored in 1660. It is also a story that mirrors that of many families during the Civil Wars – of dislocation and loss, of a world turned upside down. I don’t think even I had realized quite how sad it was before I began to work on it.

EF: I have the impression that you didn’t warm to Queen Henrietta. I wonder if you could explain why this is and whether you developed particular favourites from your cast of characters.

LP: You are right, I don’t care much for Henrietta Maria. This may be a little harsh. She has had a bad press – then and subsequently – but she is not an easy woman to like, though her husband came to adore her after a very rocky start to their marriage. In portraits of her in her twenties you can see something of the youthful charm that won him over. But she had no political sense at all, was always, at heart, contemptuous of the English and she was a very difficult mother. Her treatment of Prince Henry, her youngest son, was utterly deplorable. She was, however, a loyal wife and her many years in exile were stoically born.

EF: The Civil Wars are notorious for their complexity, yet you have managed to write about them in a way that is so clear. What were the particular challenges of achieving this?

LP: The main challenge was to digest a great mass of material without getting sucked into years of research. When I first had the idea for Royal Renegades I thought it would be an easier topic than my previous book, Crown of Thistles, which was on the rivalry between the Tudors and the Stewarts in the previous century. After all, a book about six royal children should be relatively straightforward, or so I thought. This was naïve, to say the least. Nothing about the Civil Wars is straightforward. And I had not worked on the 17th century since I was an undergraduate, when I did my long essay (a seemingly quaint term these days for something that was actually not really the same as an undergraduate dissertation) on the Civil Wars. Scholarship on the period has changed beyond recognition in the years since then, and I like to reflect the latest scholarship in my books. I think it is something I owe to the reader.

EF: I have the sense that people are turning from the Tudors to the Stuarts. As someone who has written acclaimed works about Tudor figures would you agree with this and why do you think it is the case?

LP: Yes, I think there is a change. I certainly hope so. Charles Spencer has written about Prince Rupert and about the regicides to great effect. Anna Keay’s biography of the duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son, has led the way on reviving interest in the 17th century among women writers. It has previously been very much a male preserve. Leanda de Lisle, Anna Whitelock and Jessie Childs are also moving away from the Tudors. I think that we have just about reached saturation point with Tudormania though it may take a while before the media and even the general public catch on to this. The effect of Tudormania has been to give a very Anglocentric view of our history but the truth of the matter is that England was not a major player on the international stage in Tudor times and the compulsive fascination of Henry VIII and his six wives has skewed our understanding of our past. Having said that, I’ve just been working as historical consultant on Lucy Worsley’s upcoming BBC I series on Henry and his wives and it has quite a novel approach to the topic, which is what you would expect from Lucy, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing the end product.
​
EF: What’s next for you as a writer?

LP: I’m starting work on a companion volume to Royal Renegades with the working title of Godly People: the family and friends of Oliver Cromwell. And you haven’t asked, but, yes, I am at heart, a supporter of the other side. This is my chance to give them their due.

Royal Renegades is out now in hardback and published by Macmillan.

It is unsurprising that there seems to be a new appetite for the Stuart period, given the seventeenth century brought us some of the best and most enduring drama ever written, a regicide, a civil war, a republic, a restoration and, in the aftermath of all this, one of the most dramatically eventful and devastating years in England’s history. 1666 is, like 1066, a date that even those who weren’t listening in history class remember. It was, of course, the year London was burned to the ground. This cataclysmic event came in the wake of a significant and humiliating naval defeat against the Dutch at Bergen and an epidemic of bubonic plague, the virulence of which hadn’t been experienced in England for hundreds of years.

Rebecca Rideal’s book 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire skilfully contextualises these events in a way that allows us to understand how they touched society from top to bottom. With a cinematic eye for detail Rideal throws us into the action, circulating between vivid descriptions of the cityscape and those bustling through it, before sweeping us out into the English Channel, into the naval action against the Dutch, and back again to teeming London. Rideal’s style is vivid and fluent, dextrously incorporating a multitude of quotes from primary material, demonstrating that the London she describes is not the work of her imagination but a patchwork vision stitched entirely from fragments of contemporary commentary.

Rideal’s London pulsates with humanity. We feel bustled along the narrow streets, fighting for a safe path close to the wall, the stench of ordure all around us with the cries of the hawkers and the scurry of sedan chairs. The rendition of the many personal stories of the city dwellers, and the minutiae of their lives, through all strata of society, lends the narrative a touching richness. The diarists Pepys and Evelyn are a constant presence, offering commentary as events unfold.
​
We witness the Earl of Rochester, better known as the pox-ridden rake of fable, aged sixteen, demonstrating enormous courage aboard ship whilst pounded by artillery at Bergen. We have a glimpse, too, of Aphra Behn’s career as a female spy, long before her great success as a playwright and see Newton sitting in his rural orchard and Milton at his desk. The womanising Charles II is vibrantly depicted, as is his Catholic brother and heir, James, both out fighting the inferno shoulder-to-shoulder with their subjects. We also learn of a multitude of other Londoners, like the Mitchells, a family of Westminster booksellers, following their individual fates as the devastating events unfold. Rideal has excavated entries in parish registers and the anecdotes of contemporary commentators to animate her city with those who might otherwise have been forgotten.

We come to understand how the plague crept up on the population, the death toll increasing week by week, and the way in which it disproportionately affected the poor who hadn’t the means to leave the capital for cleaner air. These people were so devastated by the epidemic they can barely have been aware of England’s catastrophic defeat at Bergen.

Rideal describes the second Dutch War in detail, demonstrating the impact of human failing and poor communication that led to England’s humiliation. If the book has a weakness perhaps it lies in the exhaustive rendering of the sea campaign, which becomes a little over-complicated at times. Though Rideal deftly remedies this by frequently returning to parallel events. In London the plague was receding. Those who had fled the epidemic were returning to the capital, to grieve their dead and resume their lives, when the famous conflagration took hold in Pudding Lane.

Restoration Londoners sought ways to explain this relentless series of misfortunes. Some saw it as God’s punishment for the regicide of Charles I, an act that even seventeen years on continued to hang heavily over the English psyche. Millenarist cults had long associated the year with the demonic connotations of the number 1666, identifying it as marking the final destruction of the world. Others, in a way that is grimly familiar, blamed England’s enemies, particularly for the fire, and raging xenophobia raised its head. Dutch and French were assaulted in the streets and stories abounded of foreign operatives flinging fireballs through windows. The truth about the fire was simply too prosaic to be believable. But the quality that shines through the pages is the resilience of the human spirit, that sense of grace under fire that can only be found in the darkest of times.

It is Rideal’s vivid and confident style, teamed with meticulous research and a curiosity for the quotidian that makes 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire a memorable, gripping and very satisfying read.

1666: Plague, War and Hellfire is published in hardback on 25th August, 2016 by John Murray.

Elizabeth Buchan’s latest novel, The New Mrs Clifton, depicts London in 1945 in the aftermath of war. The fractured city, its buildings blasted open, symbolises the psychological scarring and fragmentation of her characters. Everyone is in some way bereaved and seeking something, anything, to dampen the pain. 

But when Gus Clifton returns from Berlin to the family house with a German bride on his arm his sisters, the widowed Julia and the wild Tilly, must hide their shock and hostility. Unbeknownst to Gus’s new bride he had left for the war engaged to his childhood sweetheart, the beautiful, loyal Nella and this betrayal is the catalyst for the two families, once happily interwoven, to unravel painfully with devastating effects.

It soon becomes clear that the German Krista, with her skeletal body and haunted looks, who flinches when touched, is more damaged by far than any of the women she encounters in London. But the enmity she faces in London is nothing compared to her experiences in Berlin at the hands of the Russian occupiers. Though we soon learn that extreme hardship and the brutality she has encountered have made her stronger than she appears and she has many secrets, which are slowly revealed as the narrative progresses.

The novel is shot through with mystery: why did Gus marry his strange, cold wife who is neither pregnant, nor apparently in love with him; what happened in Berlin; and who was the woman discovered thirty years later enmeshed within the roots of a large sycamore tree in the adjacent garden? The latter hangs darkly over the narrative like the tolling of a death knell. 

The writing is beautifully fluent, moving from scene to scene, peeling away the layers of English formality in a way that demonstrates a deft and invisible authorial control. Buchan has a gift for understanding the complexity and ambiguity of human emotions and also for creating a quiet and sinister tension, which gives the sense, as the narrative passes through the heads of its damaged
characters, that everything is slipping inevitably towards catastrophe.

The New Mrs Clifton is a captivating and gripping read that seduces utterly, until its final page, leaving a deep imprint on the imagination long after. 

The New Mrs Clifton is published in hardback by Michael Joseph.

INTERVIEW WITH ELIZABETH BUCHAN

​EF: There is a very strong sense of place in the novel. Did you have a particular house in mind when you were writing and is there a significance to the part of London in which it is set? 

EB: I have been lucky enough to have brought up my family near Clapham Common and I love it – particularly in the summer when everyone surges onto it to picnic, play games, lunge the children and exercise. The Common has a long and honourable history, not least as a centre for William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect while they fighting to abolish slavery – so it has a whiff of dissent about it. While researching The New Mrs Clifton, I got hold of the bomb maps published by the GLC which, area by area, showed the individual houses and buildings that had been damaged during the war and how badly. Since I walk past some of those sites every day, I was able to imagine the houses as they might have been without too much difficulty. 

EF: One of the great strengths of your writing is in articulating complex family relationships. In both I Can’t Begin to Tell You and The New Mrs Clifton you have created central female characters who are outsiders. What is it about the outsider that most interests you? 

EB: As an eight-year-old, I was sent off to boarding school because my parents had been posted abroad. I did not see them, or my two sisters, for a year. We took a bit of getting to know each other again when we did meet! I hasten to say that my parents were very loving ones and I was not the only child in that position but I have never forgotten the bewilderment and the loneliness which I felt and I know I call on that profound conviction of being an exile and apart when I am writing. How a man or a woman, or a child, negotiates their way out of their perceived isolation fascinates me because I remember it so well but, each time I write about it, I find a different aspect to it. For obvious reasons, war offers a very good theatre in which to fictionalize situations where a character is one side of the fence or the other. 

EF: One of the messages of the novel is that war creates complicated moral situations that defy straightforward moral explanations. Can you explain how you confronted some of the darker elements of your story? 

EB: I was thinking about endurance and compassion when I was writing this novel – and of finding the energy and faith to carry on after something so catastrophic as a war. Everything I had read in doing the research pointed to truly black things that were done during those years, sometimes by ordinary people who felt they had no option. Again and again, I was reminded that we have to remember the lessons from the past, otherwise we will repeat the wrongs. Of course, in peacetime, it is much easier to adopt straightforward moral positions. In war, and when faced with violence, deprivation and disease, it is almost impossible. Like Krista, you can still strive to feel love over hate, forgiveness over blame and compassion over brutality and still find yourself agreeing to do things which are morally questionable. 

EF: You write vividly on the societal changes brought about by war. Do you intend to write another novel set in this specific period or are you moving to different pastures? 

EB: I am not sure yet. I am still waiting for the light bulb to light up in the chest moment to find out what I am going to write about next. Mind you, I have just read a fascinating account of marriage bureau that was set up in 1939 and flourished during the war. It occurred to me that it just might have been a convincing cover for something else going on behind the scenes…. 

Who knows? ​

I am a voracious reader and in some ways everything I have ever read has given something to my writing so it is hard to pin down only five and on any given day I might choose five completely different books. Consequently there are some glaring absences on this list, like Conrad and Nabokov, whose novels are master-classes in prose styling. Nevertheless I have whittled it down for today.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Hardy’s prose is dauntingly beautiful and his descriptions of the countryside, its beauty and brutality, have remained with me since I first read it as a child. I still remember Tess’s frozen fingers, the great clods of mud clinging to her shoes during her relentless winter digging beets. Tess is an extraordinary creation and the sense of terrible injustice in the novel is a theme I have often explored in my own.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

To breathe life into the demonised figure of Bertha in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre was a stroke of brilliance. In Wide Sargasso Sea we are given a new lens through which to understand Bertha’s madness and her actions. It tells of a woman appropriated and crushed for her fortune and made me reassess the novel from which it sprang and see Bertha Mason as a victim rather than a monster, as well as inspiring me to look more deeply into the stories of women on the margins.

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig

It was a close call between this novel and another of Zweig’s, The Post Office Girl, which specifically inspired my latest novel [The Girl in the Glass Tower] and gave me its epigraph. Beware of Pity though is a longer, more complete and ambitious work that epitomises the author’s style. He has a way of understanding human weakness and moral ambiguity that particularly interests me. This novel is set just before the outbreak of WW1 and focuses around a single act, a small mistake, which has life-changing consequences for the protagonist.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

I first read Rebecca when I was very young and the terrifying figure of Mrs Danvers stayed with me. Her presence creates extraordinary tension in the novel and the way du Maurier describes the poor nameless heroine, on first arriving at Manderlay, so timid and out of place, resonated greatly with me. But it is how the timorous heroine manages to overcome adversity, in spite of her lack of obvious spirit, that makes it such a memorable novel.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

It’s no secret that I’m a huge Waters fan and particularly of her rich and precise use of descriptive vocabulary. But I think Fingersmith is my favourite of her novels because of its ingenious structure and absolutely unexpected plot twist. It is that rare thing, a literary novel with serious themes that is also a gripping page-turner. When I set out to write a novel this is always my aim but it is more difficult than Waters makes it seem.

​There is no story about the Tudor dynasty left untold and perhaps this is the reason for the rediscovery of their equally fascinating and controversial cousins The Stuarts. 
 
The Stuart period was torn by dark sectarian troubles, the thwarted Gunpowder Plot an event that, had it succeeded, would have been as dramatic as the attack on the Twin Towers and would have wiped out the new dynasty. It was a time of witch hunts, espionage, the exploration of the globe and a royal court with an openly homosexual king, a complex, flawed and unpopular individual whose son would be tried and executed in Cromwell’s revolution – an event that would irrevocably change the path of English history.

​2016 sees the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 1616 and with it many celebratory exhibitions and productions throughout the year, and particularly The Globe’s season of his late plays. We think of the bard as an Elizabethan phenomenon but as James Shapiro in his recent, and brilliant, 1606, The Year of Lear, points out, his best work fell in the Jacobean period, a rich time for some of the bloodiest and most enduring dramas ever written. 
 
The cultural flourishing that began in Elizabeth’s  reign reached it’s zenith at this time, only to be wiped out with Cromwell, who closed the playhouses. But it returned with the restoration of Charles II, the most charismatic of the Stuarts,

 whose reign saw and actresses on the stage, and in the King’s bed, for the first time. The exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution thoroughly explores the events of the period as does Rebecca Rideal’s forthcoming book 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire.  ​​The intrigue of the Stuart century is endless, so it is unsurprising that acclaimed Tudor biographers have had their heads turned: Linda Porter will publish a book about the children of Charles I in the autumn and Leanda de Lisle’s next book, The King’s Story, will unravel the enigma of Charles I. Also to come this year are Andrea Zuvich’s A year in the Life of Stuart Britain is coming in April and Andrew Lacey’s The Stuarts: A Very British Dynasty.

​Where the historians go the fiction writers inevitably follow and I predict a spate of Stuart novels. I am working on a Stuart Quartet, with the first, The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart, who might have been England’s first Stuart Queen regnant, out in June, and in paperback in May comes Katherine Clement’s The Silvered Heart about a legendary female highwayman of the Civil War.

Elizabeth Fremantle's The Girl in the Glass Tower is out now.
 

In advance of the publication of my new novel I thought I'd introduce my extraordinary protagonist, Lady Arbella Stuart.

Through her great grandmother Margaret Tudor, and as the nice of Mary Queen of Scots, Arbella had a strong claim to the English crown and was raised in the belief that she would be the heir of Elizabeth I.

In the final years of Elizabeth's long reign there was much covert political jostling to establish who would eventually take the throne. But the fear of being usurped meant that the ageing Queen refused to publicly name her successor. The nearest she came to doing so was to say of Arbella, 'One day she will be even as I am.'

Arbella's position as presumed, though unofficial heir, made her a potential focus for Catholic plots. Though she was raised a Protestant the prevailing fear was that she might be kidnapped and encouraged to convert whilst still young so the plotters could then launch a coup to place her on the throne as a Catholic puppet queen. For this reason she spent her youth in virtual imprisonment, cloistered away at the magnificent Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire under the strict rule of her ambitious grandmother Bess of Hardwick.

It's all about The Bard at the moment. In fact it's always all about The Bard when it comes to my writing as my books are set in and around his world. He even makes an appearance in Watch the Lady and one of his circle, the poetess Aemilia Lanyer, is one of my narrators in The Girl in the Glass Tower. But it is the sheer inventiveness of his language that inspires me more than anything. Here are some of the best terms he coined:

WEARING YOUR HEART ON YOUR SLEEVE
​This has come to mean being emotionally open but in fact Iago, one of Shakespeare’s most duplicitous characters, said it in Othello. When he says ‘I will wear my heart upon my sleeve,’ he means that he will appear to reveal his true feelings.

 A PIECE OF WORK
Nowadays when someone is described as ‘a piece of work’ it usually suggests they are spoiled and difficult but the meaning has changed over the years. When Hamlet says ‘what a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!’ he’s musing on the complexities of God’s creation and the irony that all man amounts to in the end is dust.

A LAUGHING STOCK
This comes from a comic exchange between Sir Hugh Evans and Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Its meaning has remained the same to this day. No one wants to be a laughing stock.
 
BATED BREATH
​This comes from The Merchant of Venice. Bated is a short form of abated, so the term means talking with in a subdued manner. When Shylock says to Antonio, ‘Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,/with bated breath and whispering humbleness,/Say this:’ he is asking why he should stoop to those who have ill treated him.

VANISH INTO THIN AIR
A very familiar phrase that was not quite coined by Shakespeare, though in Othello we can find the phrase ‘Go vanish into air, away!’ and in The Tempest, ‘we melted into air, into thin air,’ the term as a whole was not put into print until 1822.
 
IN A PICKLE
Said by Alonso to the hopelessly drunk jester Trinculo in The Tempest – ‘How camest thou in this pickle.’ Trinculo had become involved in a disastrous, drunken, attempt to overthrow Prospero, thereby getting himself in a complete pickle.