The Forbidden Queen

Leaving teaching—but not my love of history—I wrote my first historical romance, a Regency, which was published by Mills & Boon in 2005. To date ten historical novels and a novella, ranging from medieval through the English Civil War and Restoration and back to Regency, have been published in the UK, North America and Australia, as well as in translation throughout Europe and in Japan.

I now live with my husband in an eighteenth-century timber-framed cottage in the depths of the Welsh Marches in Herefordshire. It is a wild, beautiful place on the borders between England and Wales, renowned for its black-and-white timbered houses, ruined castles and priories and magnificent churches. It is steeped in history, famous people and bloody deeds, as well as ghosts and folklore, all of which give me inspiration and sources for my writing, particularly in medieval times.

My two previous historical novels:

Devil’s Consort: the marvellous story of a medieval Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who fought to hold her own power in a world dominated by men. Dynamic, charismatic, she divorced one husband to claim another. As for going on Crusade…

Virgin Widow, the story of Anne Neville, wife of Richard III. What if there truly was an emotional connection between Anne and Richard…?

The King’s Concubine, the dramatic ‘rags to riches’ tale of Alice Perrers, infamous mistress to King Edward III.

The King’s Concubine

was the first novel in a series of Wives and Mistresses in the years of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The Forbidden Queen, telling the story of beautiful yet tragic Katherine de Valois, wife of Henry V and Owen Tudor, is the second.

I am now working on a novel of a royal mistress, the most famous of them all, who simply could not be omitted: Katherine Swynford and her famously passionate love affair with John, Duke of Lancaster.

WHY I WRITE…

I recall the days, when I was still teaching history, when I wanted to write but found it difficult. What to write, how to construct a plot, how to make it interesting—I never seemed to make any progress. What do I write about? That was the real problem. I felt an urge to write, but the subject matter defeated me. When I did, short stories were as much as I could cope with, and I admit to still finding it hard to write stories set in contemporary situations. The inspiration hit me when I realised that I could use what I knew: when I discovered the rich vein of history as subject matter, my imagination was fired. Now I find writing a compulsive necessity in my life, the ideas springing from a combination of events, characters and conflicts that enable me to visualise a situation. When my interest is caught, I feel a need to breathe life into a scene or situation by allowing the characters to speak. I particularly enjoy writing about medieval women. Their lives may be very different from our own, the pressures of family and politics and religion, the place they are expected to occupy in society, yet their emotions are no different. What a delight it is to make these women come alive again.

I write because I enjoy the experience—both the process of it and its end result.

Q&A ON WRITING

What do you love the most about being a writer?

I think it is the control factor. Manipulating and directing characters to allow them—or sometimes to force them—to tell the story so that distant historical events come alive through conversation and the interaction of characters, proving that in some ways we are not too different today from our ancestors. We are driven by the same ambitions and motivations. I love seeing the scenes develop as the characters speak.

Where do you go for inspiration?

In general, my garden. Weeding a flower bed or picking raspberries frees the mind to allow ideas to flow. But ideas come in the most unlikely places. I once plotted the whole of an historical whodunnit on a motorway in a traffic jam. If I need a specific atmosphere I might visit a place associated with the character. When researching Anne Neville I visited Tewkesbury Abbey and the adjacent battle field—Tewkesbury is quite close to where I live. I know Middleham Castle well from my days of living in Yorkshire. Eleanor of Aquitaine presented me with some difficulties, but a visit to Goodrich Castle gave me the atmosphere of a small border fortress in the early twelfth century. I have also visited the magnificent Angevin tombs at Fontrevault, as well as the castle at Chinon and the remarkable ruins of Old Sarum, both fortresses where Henry kept Eleanor imprisoned.