Well you know me, I’m a sucker for Tudor fiction. The best part is, I know I’m not alone! So for all you Tudor fiction fans out there, I’ve got an interview with Brandy Purdy I know you are going to enjoy!

I’m a complete Tudor fiction nut, so I was pleasantly surprised to stumble up on the various books you’ve written. Is there a favorite work you’ve completed so far?

Thank you very much. Every book I write is different, each one has its unique personality and problems, rather like children. Each one is special to me in its own way for different reasons. For instance, my first novel The Confession of Piers Gaveston, I often say is the book that saved my sanity, it helped me through a very difficult time after my mother’s death, it was the first book I ever wrote and no one really took me seriously or thought I would amount to anything, so even though it gets the least attention of my books I have a particular loyalty to my Gaveston. And my curiosity about Lady Rochford’s motives in accusing her husband George Boleyn and his sister Anne of incest and the effects of guilt on a person who does something like that, led me to write The Boleyn Wife (published as The Tudor Wife by Emily Purdy in the UK) and also helped me through a difficult time in my life. But sometimes it goes the other way around, the book I am writing now, about Amy Robsart, was a book I always wanted to write ever since I first read about the mystery surrounding her death in a book of unsolved mysteries I got from the library when I was a little girl. I was so excited when my publisher approved the project and when Chris Skidmore’s book Death and The Virgin came out which contained evidence long lost. It felt like the perfect time to write this book. But as I was writing it a relationship that meant the world to me, and I had such great hopes for, ended and left me completely devastated, eerily mirroring the chapters I had already written several months previously about the relationship between Robert and Amy Dudley, so the book that I thought was going to be my favorite will always symbolize a very painful loss and betrayal to me.

You mention on your website that you write “historical fiction from a unique perspective.” Tell us a little bit more about that.

I love the challenge of taking a historical figure who is largely silent in the historical record, someone whose voice and personality and perhaps even their appearance have been lost in the mists of history and trying to give them a voice as I have done with Piers Gaveston, Lady Rochford, and in my work in progress Amy Robsart. I am a very emotional person and writer, so with me, its not all about facts and figures and the intricacies of politics but rather the head and heart of the subject. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, or a little of both, but I always try to tell a good story that will inspire a reader not already well versed in the subject to want to learn more. When I first discovered historical fiction, the books I enjoyed always lead me to the biography and non-fiction sections of the library to learn the facts behind the fiction, and I hope my books do that for others as well. I believe historical fiction often embroiders on the framework of bare fact and knowing those facts often leads me to appreciate a novelist’s creativity even more.

What’s next for you?

My current work in progress, which if all goes well, I will finish this month and meet my deadline, is a novel about the love triangle between Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth I, and his wife, Amy Robsart Dudley who died under mysterious circumstances.

Where can we learn more about you?

I have a website and two blogs, my main one where I review books I read and post updates about my writing career and another one about real people in historical fiction and I am on Facebook as Brandy Purdy – Emily Purdy.

Books by Brandy Purdy:

• The Tudor Throne
• The Boleyn Wife
• The Confession of Piers Gaveston
• Vengeance Is Mine: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard, and Lady Rochford–the woman who helped destroy them both.

More on writing historical fiction:

• The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction: Researching and Writing Historical Fiction
• How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries: The Art and Adventure of Sleuthing Through the Past
• Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England

I’ve read a lot of Tudor fiction books but haven’t so far come across one where Bessie Blount was the central character. I enjoyed Diane Haeger’s book about Henry VIII’s sister Mary, The Secret Bride: In The Court of Henry VIII, and so I was anxious to see how she pulled off a story about Blount’s affair with Henry. (Note: I also interviewed Diane here at Working Writers. She was delightful!)

Blount has never been portrayed as an innocent from what I’ve read, or a true love for Henry. Still, Haeger makes both these cases in her fictional account, The Queen’s Rival: In the Court of Henry VIII. The rivalry refers to Blount giving birth to a son when Henry’s then wife, Katherine of Aragon, had not. Henry is so overjoyed that he basically makes their son, Harry, the second most powerful person (boy) in all of England.

While I enjoyed Haeger’s writing immensely, I didn’t totally buy that Blount and Henry genuinely cared for each other. What I did find believable was that Henry basically “moved on” from Blount when she got pregnant. While he did give their son a lot of honor, he also discounted Blount’s feelings about how her son should be raised. But he was Henry VIII and we would expect no less!

I also liked Haeger’s take on Henry’s possible feelings for Anne Boleyn. Overall, I think Tudor fiction fans will enjoy it.

More books by Diane Haeger:

• Courtesan: A Novel
• The Perfect Royal Mistress: A Novel
• The Queen’s Mistake: In the Court of Henry VIII

and more!

Just finished Elizabeth I: A Novel by Margaret George (who we had the pleasure to interview here) and I have to say I was just so impressed. You know, I’ve read so many Tudor fiction books that before I start another one I wonder how that writer can give a unique take on the situation. Margaret George does this by giving a complete sense of what the time period was like and just how many wonderful (real life) characters were around in Elizabeth’s time. People like Grace O’Malley (the Irish pirate), Walter Raleigh, Will Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and heck, even Ivan the Terrible are all mentioned.

This is a “classic” George work in that it is thorough and thick. At almost 700 pages, you’d think George would be telling the story from the whole of Elizabeth’s reign. Instead, however, we see Elizabeth during the last 25 years of her monarchy. We meet Elizabeth as she become middle-aged, battling hot flashes, forgetfulness, and the heartbreak in outliving her friends and loved ones. I loved this detail. So often Elizabeth is written as larger than life, and she surely was, but she was also human.

The story is told mainly from Elizabeth’s perspective, but alternates occasionally to her cousin (and rival) Lettice Knollys. Knollys descended from Mary Boleyn and obviously inherited her ability to turn heads, because she married three times, her second husband being Elizabeth’s great love, Robert Dudley. Elizabeth had a hard time anytime one of her ladies had an affair or found love, but Knollys marriage was something Elizabeth never forgave her for. Elizabeth’s pettiness toward Knollys helps illustrate the monarch as the vain and stubborn woman she must have been. And that is perhaps what is so great about this book, is that you get the true sense of Elizabeth as a person. She isn’t a character from history or an un-relatable, larger than life, individual. She’s human.

I recommend this for any Tudor history fan. I loved it, and so will you.

More Books by Margaret George:

• The Memoirs of Cleopatra: A Novel
• The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
• Mary Queen of Scotland & The Isles: A Novel
• Helen of Troy
• Mary, Called Magdalene

How to Write Historical Fiction:

• The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction: Researching and Writing Historical Fiction
• How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries: The Art and Adventure of Sleuthing Through the Past
• Write Your Own Historical Fiction Story (Write Your Own series)

I read Vanora Bennett‘s book, Portrait of an Unknown Woman and immediately started looking up her other books. You know how when you discover a new author, you just want to go back and read everything they have written? It was like that with her. She has a wonderful writing style, and gives some valuable advice for other writers out there.

Enjoy this interview.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from and how long have you been writing?

I’m a Londoner, though I spent the whole of my early adult life living somewhere else – university at Oxford, studying French and Russian, then working as a journalist for Reuters in Paris for a couple of years, southern Africa for a couple more, a bit of south-east Asia, and most of the 1990s in post-Communist Russia and around. I ended up working in Russia for the Los Angeles Times, which was a brilliant introduction to America! and loved my colleagues there. But eventually it came to feel like time to go home. So, one way or another, I’ve always been writing. When I came home, I wrote editorials for The Times of London. And I wrote two non-fiction books about Russia, which gave me my first lessons in how to organise a big piece of writing (it’s all in the thinking beforehand, really). But I always wanted to try my hand at writing a novel, but didn’t, because I was nervous, because it seemed so different from non-fiction, and I didn’t like feeling like a beginner, and … well, all kinds of excuses. Eventually, what pushed me into trying was getting a new job I didn’t like. I complained so much my kind husband hit on the answer – you’ve talked about it for years, but perhaps this is the time to write that novel? And then he went and booked me a week at a hotel in Bloomsbury (like Virginia Woolf), and said, come back in a week, with four chapters. And I did!

I loved your book, Portrait of an Unknown Woman. How did you first come up with the idea for the book?

A fluke. Back in my Russia days, when I was fascinated by all the tough types who were muscling their way into becoming the new rich of Russia, I came home to London for a weekend and went to an exhibition of drawings by the 16th-century German artist Hans Holbein. They were of the new rich of 16th-century England under the Tudors – another anything-goes, get-rich-quick period. The faces looked quite like the scary Russians I kept seeing in Moscow, driving BMWs. So I bought the catalogue. And there, somewhere in a footnote, there was a brief reference to an obscure but ingenious theory about why an extra person had been painted into a second version of one of the pictures. There was a whole elaborate conspiracy theory attached that fascinated me. It stayed in a corner of my mind for years. Eventually I realised I’d read enough about it, half-accidentally, that I’d become a bit of an expert. I hadn’t exactly intentionally prepared myself for it – but by the time I came to write, I found I was ready.

I find that when I stumble across a book I really enjoy, I immediately look up the rest of the books the author has written. I’m doing this now with your works. Do you find that happens as well? Do new readers find you and then absorb your earlier works?

I certainly do that with books I enjoy – I go and hunt the rest of them out. I’m often flattered to find that people write to me saying they’ve enjoyed one and are going to read the others. I can only hope they enjoy them as much!

In your opinion, what’s the best thing about writing?

I love the architectural side of it. What comes to my mind naturally is snapshots – a person at this particular moment, doing a particular thing. But with a book you have to join up the dots – work out how they got from one snapshot to the next, and why they’d have changed as a result of the thing that happened yesterday to start doing the thing they do today. There’s so much thinking – so much ordering of each of the individual building blocks of the story, so they work together properly and make a structure that won’t fall down at the first

breath. In Portrait of an Unknown Woman, for instance, the Holbein of the early paintings is intelligent but pretty much unlettered. By the end, he is quite educated and sophisticated in his thinking. Plus which, the conspiracy theory that I was making the plot turn on required him to be able to make puns, in French, when he was a German speaker. It worried me for ages – how did that all happen? So I read a lot about his middle period, when he was painting a double portrait of the French ambassadors to London. And I realised that could have been a very big and fast learning curve for him – where he’d have heard a lot of very sophisticated talk, both about politics and religion, and that most likely all the conversation would have been in French. So I came to think of, and describe that as, Holbein’s equivalent of a university period – when he “clevered up” and learned to think, allowing him to paint the later portrait that, at least in my book, provides all the answers.

Please share some of your writing goals.

Mostly I’d like to get better at the planning stage of the story I talked about above – learn to make that a natural part of my thinking from the first. I’d also like to learn to write very briefly – my books have a tendency to get too fat! I read about my writing heroine, Beryl Bainbridge, that she would write 12 pages, then, painstakingly, whittle it down to one paragraph. In my dreams, at least, I’d like to be able to write with that haiku-like brevity. Not sure it will happen, of course. But we can hope!

Is there a specific time of day you like to write?

Well, I have young children, so school hours are when I get most opportunity. But before I had them I was a night owl and did lots of work late at night. I love working at night – when everyone’s quiet and you feel you’ve been given a gift of extra time. So perhaps one day I will go back to having the energy for that.

What’s the most interesting book you’ve ever read?

Oh, so many! One of my favourites is Dickens’ Bleak House. It has everything – comedy, satire, lawyer jokes, a romantic story, a spontaneous combustion (yes, really!), and brilliant descriptions of London.

When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

Hm. It was something I think I always knew. I certainly remember being 11 or 12 and being taught about the Brontes at school, and taking careful note of the fact that they were all scribbling away at early novels and inventing imaginary lands for themselves from their earliest childhood, and thinking, well, better hurry up, then! But I must say I also thought it was cloud-cuckoo territory – something I’d never be able to do, because I’d have to earn my living, have a proper job, etc. I remember being quite unbelievably surprised when my agent and publisher first said, “but you can earn your living from writing – you really can.” Now I’m just crossing fingers that goes on.

Favorite authors?

Lots of Russian authors (well, that’s my past) – especially Bulgakov’s magical Master and Margarita, an extraordinary, funny, dark about the Devil coming to Soviet Moscow. I loved Anna Karenina and War and Peace. I love the Brontes. Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre. I like John Irving a lot. As I write, I see these are all huge fat books, not at all the slim volumes I’ve just been saying I’d like to write. So: Beryl Bainbridge’s novel about the Titanic, Every Man for Himself. Hilary Mantel’s novel about a spiritualist working on the edge of London, Beyond Black. Ronan Bennett’s novel, Havoc in the Third Year. And Alexander Pushkin’s long short story, The Queen of Spades.

Book you’re currently reading.

I’m reading an odd one at the moment: Andrei Bely’s novel about a plot by peasant spiritualists in pre-revolutionary Russia, The Silver Dove. The sect it describes have lured away a young gentleman from his life. He’s fallen wildly in love with the “pock-marked peasant woman” who will be his downfall (in Russian, this sounds much better, “ryabaya baba”). It will end badly for him, I know (from sneaking a look further on). I’m fascinated by the description of the peasant sect, which fits in with the novel I’m currently researching, about Rasputin and life in Russia just before the Revolution of 1917.

Any type of writing ritual you have?

Coffee! At the coop I have a desk in, coffee is included in the price of the rent. And they are equipped with fabulously sophisticated coffee-making machines. It’s become part of my daily ritual to make myself the most foamy, bouncy cappuccino the world has ever seen, every morning, before I start. I’ve never been so hyper as since I started working here, either.

Do you believe in writer’s block? If so, how did you get past it? If not, why not?

I do. It’s happened to me, in a way. I think it’s your subconscious telling you you’ve taken a wrong turning. I think the answer is to take a big step back and ask yourself lots of hard questions about what that wrong turning might be. I don’t think there are any easy answers.

What’s the measure of a successful writer?

There are external measures – sales, prizes, whatever. But I think the important thing is to be writing what you want, and not what you’ve been pressured into. I think there’s a happiness that comes on to the page when that happens that readers feel and appreciate.

Advice for other writers?

Don’t be afraid – don’t make excuses – they’re probably all very real reasons why writing today is quite impossible, but they also don’t matter. Just start. It’s much easier to go on once you’ve got something on the page. And keep thinking. Most of writing is in your head.

Where can we learn more about you?

I have a website – www.vanorabennett.com.

Additional Writing Resources:

• Freelance Writers Needed
• How to Write Your Own Ebook in 7 Days
• Freelance Writing Jobs

Also:

• Free ebook on work at home success strategies

I love all books, really, but especially enjoy historical fiction. My favorites have to do with the Tudors, but as you can see from the list below I also dig a few outside the realm of crazy ole Henry VIII. Coming up with a “favorites” list is very hard, because you just know you’re going to leave one or two books off. I hope I remember them all! If you like historical fiction, here are my all-time favorites in no particular order. Maybe one or two of these books will tickle your fancy as well. If you’ve got a few favorites you’d like to share, please do! List them in the comments so we can all enjoy.

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The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
by Sandra Gulland

This book starts a wonderful trilogy about Josephine Bonaparte. (The next two are Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe and The Last Great Dance on Earth.) I’m not always a fan of books that are written in diary form, but these books are so well done I didn’t even notice. I remember reading them until late into the night, thinking about them during the day, and rushing out to get the next one. They are that good.

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The Other Boleyn Girl
by Philippa Gregory

This was the book that started my Tudor fiction craze. I had never read historical fiction before. Can you believe it? When I picked this book up, I was hooked. I started reading everything having to do with the time period. I read several fiction books but also delved into the nonfiction area. I rented documentaries and movies, and I’ve been hooked every since. The Other Boleyn Girl is told from Mary Boleyn’s perspective. Mary is an extremely interesting character in history (in my opinion) and Gregory does a great job with her story.

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To the Tower Born
by Robin Maxwell

I read this one recently, but confess that Robin is one of my favorites when it comes to historical fiction. I really enjoy her take on things, and her latest, O, Juliet, is sure to show up on an upcoming favorites list. Not to give away the plot or ending, but To the Tower Born appealed to me because it was the first one I’d read that drew the conclusion it drew about the mystery of the princes in the Tower.

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The Last Queen
by C.W. Gortner

I enjoyed The Last Queen for many reasons, not the least of which is because it created a very level-headed and realistic take on Queen Juana of Castile that I had not encountered before. Juana, as you know, was the older sister of Princess Catalina, who became Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII’s first wife.

She’s also known as being a bit nutty (to say the least) and in love with her husband, Philip of Flanders, heir to the Hapsburg Empire. She unexpectedly becomes next in line to head up Spain, and from there her life seems to go sour. Juana also figures prominently in history as being the mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who is an important figure when it comes to Henry VIII’s divorce fiasco. Gortner’s narrative brings all these historic characters to life.

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Portrait of an Unknown Woman
by Vanora Bennett

This book features the Thomas More family and his daughter Meg. It also has Hans Holbein, who has yet to become the famous court painter. Holbein gets a commission to the More family at their country home in Chelsea. It’s a love story, with Meg falling for her tutor, John Clement, and it’s also a statement on the times, with Meg becoming horrified at her father’s treatment of Protestant heretics. The paintings Holbein completes start to unravel a mystery about John Clement. I loved the detail in this one especially.

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The Poyson Garden
by Karen Harper

Karen Harper has a lot of really wonderful books about Elizabeth I and Henry VIII, but I especially loved her mystery series, which starts with The Poyson Garden. It has all the political, romantic, and historic details of other historical fiction books, but also has a genuine mystery in each one. The refreshing thing about a mystery in this time period, is that you can’t solve the crime with all the gadgets and technology that we have today. The rest of the books in this series are: The Tidal Poole, The Twylight Tower, The Queene’s Cure, The Thorne Maze, The Queene’s Christmas, The Fyre Mirror, The Fatal Fashione, and The Hooded Hawke.

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The Queen’s Man
by Sharon Kay Penman

If I have a second favorite period of history (the Tudor being my first) it would be the reign of Henry II. His family (wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, sons John and Richard) is truly fascinating. Henry II is very underrated in terms of what he did for establishing English laws, but I’m getting beside the point here. This book begins when King Richard comes back from the crusades. He’s been gone for a couple months, so you know in a family like this one his younger brother John wastes no time in trying to get his older brother’s throne. Mom Eleanor hires Justin de Quincy, (illegitimate son of a bishop) to help solve a mystery. The Queen’s Man, is the first in a series and truly wonderful. I haven’t read the next book in the series yet, but you can be sure they are on my TBR (to be read) pile.

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Death Comes As Epiphany: A Catherine LeVendeur Mystery
by Sharan Newman

I first read this one in a mystery book group. I would have never picked up this type of book, so it goes to show you that being in a book group can broaden your horizons. This book is set in 12th century France, and has a wonderful main character, Catherine LeVendeur. Catherine is smart (always a requirement for the books I like) and best of all, clumsy. I just find this so endearing about her. (Could be because I’m a klutz myself. Just saying.) Catherine starts out in a nunnery with the famous Heloise, but ends up falling for Edgar. All the characters in this book are wonderful, and the detail of Paris and the surrounding areas is great. Religion plays a prominent part in these books, as it does in so many historical fiction works. This one is the first in a series, then comes: The Devil’s Door, The Wandering Arm, Strong as Death, Cursed in the Blood, The Difficult Saint, To Wear the White Cloak, Heresy, The Outcast Dove, and The Witch in the Well.

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The White Queen
by Philippa Gregory

Another interesting period in time is the cousin’s war, or War of the Roses. This was the struggle for power between the Houses of Lancaster and York. Hey, if you thought Henry VIII was interesting, wait until you hear about his grandmother and mother. Gregory did a wonderful job with this book, and it has all the intrigue, political fighting, backstabbing, and romance to make your head swoon (in a good way.) As a writer, I also appreciated her marketing approach by putting Elizabeth Woodville’s dialog on Twitter.

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A Rose for Virtue
by Norah Lofts

Norah Lofts is such a gem, I could list quite a few books of hers, but this one stuck with me the most. First of all, Hortense de Beauharnais is an extremely interesting character in history, and yet so few books are written about her. Hortense was Queen Consort of Holland, daughter of Josephine, stepdaughter of Napoleon, wife of Louis Bonaparte (King of Holland) and mother of Napoleon III. This book is hard to find these days, but you can still pick it up at used bookstores or on Amazon.

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Cleopatra’s Daughter
by Michelle Moran

Okay, am I the only one in history that didn’t know Cleopatra’s kids actually lived? I had no idea until I read this book. (Too much time spent in Tudor history and not enough in other parts of the world perhaps.) Michelle is a wonderful storyteller, and I love that fact that she tells this from the daughter’s perspective.

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The Secret Bride: In The Court of Henry VIII
by Diane Haeger

What’s that? A woman that stands up to Henry VIII? (And it isn’t Anne Boleyn?) That’s right, it’s Mary, Henry’s sister. She went along with Henry’s insistence that she marry Louis XII of France (and become queen consort) but when he died she took matters into her own hands and married Henry’s pal, the handsome Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. This is a wonderful book that is rich in historical detail.

That’s my list, and I know as soon as I hit “publish” I’m going to think of a few more. What would you add to this list?

Additional Writing Resources:

• Make Money From Home – Real Jobs You Can Do by Telecommuting
• Create Multiple Articles from Just One
• How to Write Your Own Ebook in 7 Days
• Freelance Writing Jobs

We interviewed Jeane Westin recently, and she talked at length about her fascination with Queen Elizabeth I. She did a great deal of research to pen The Virgin’s Daughters: In the Court of Elizabeth I and it shows. It’s a wonderful read.  And best of all?  I have a brand new copy all set to give away to one lucky reader!

If you’d like to win, just leave a comment on this post by Monday, October 12th. I’ll choose a winner at random and announce the lucky guy or gal the next day.

I just finished The Last Queen by C. W. Gortner, and let me tell you, it was a treat. I’ve been an historical fiction buff for years, with most of the titles falling into the Tudor and Elizabethan story lines. Juana of Castile is often talked about in these other works as the sister of Catalina, or Queen Katherine of Aragon (and Henry the VIII’s first wife.)

In other books, the description of Juana is usually brief and consisting mostly of the fact that she went mad (literally) for love. That’s why I loved the fact that C. W. Gortner tackled this real life historical figure, and did it with such a wonderful story that it was very difficult to put down. Cortner’s Juana is a spirited woman, true to herself and her convictions. She is trying to make her way in a world that is ruled by men, and she learns that the two men she trusted and depended on most (her husband and father) have put their interests above her own.

However, the madness that reigns in her blood has been well documented. I’ve often wondered if these women of history (Juana’s grandmother, her niece Bloody Mary, and Juana herself) were really that mad, or simply refused to take their lumps sitting down. Certainly Juana’s story (and even that of Mary Tudor) is filled with tremendous injustice and disappointment. Readers will be fascinated by the political situation in Spain, especially after the death of Juana’s mother, Queen Isabella.

I was moved by the story of Juana’s life, and feel it is a must read for anyone who has enjoyed Tudor or historical fiction.

Book purchased by reviewer.