Discussion Leaders: Sharon Kay Penman Mail List

NOTE: This is an archive of our 2002 website. For current information, please see our updated site for 2003.

Mary Grant Bruce - Billabong series. A Little Bush Maid and Mates at Billabong- -dreams of the past ie the past the way we want it to be, not the way it was.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Tracy Chevalier) Life of a servant in 17thC Delft.

The Champion (Elizabeth Chadwick) - Female camp followers.
Other Elizabeth Chadwick books:

• The Wild Hunt
• The Running Vixen
• The Leopard Unleashed
• Daughter's of the Grail
• Shields of Pride
• The Conquest
• The Love Knot
• The Marsh King's Daughter
• The Lords of the White Castle
• The Winter Mantle

Lymond Chronicles & House of Niccolo series (Dorothy Dunnett) - Strong men 'tamed' by even stronger women.

Roselynde Chronicles - Alinor (Roberta Gellis) - "...a heroine who was of her time and yet 'feisty' and independent enough to reach out to a modern audience. I would nominate Gellis' novel Alinor as being an excellent example of what intelligently written Medieval Romance can be. Unfortunately it's out of print - so perhaps that in itself says something about the current state of the genre!"

A Respectable Trade (Philippa Gregory) "A wealthy merchant buys some black slaves and his wife is supposed to housetrain them. She ends up falling in love with one of the men and having his child."

Norah Lofts: The Town House. Rise from peasant to middle class family. Also Knight's Acre, The Silver Nutmeg (17th century nutmeg plantation--a glove-marriage and its consequence), and Crown of Aloes (Isabella of Spain). Variety of social classes.

The White Queen (Lesley Nickell) - Anne Neville. She is portrayed as prone to motion sickness and headaches and with frequent colds--this seems possible and realistic to me, and could explain the reputation she has gained for "sickliness". It isn't my favorite portrayal, but I found it believable and human.

Catherine LeVendeur series (Sharan Newman) 12thC mystery novels - Positive portrayal of women.

• The Difficult Saint
• Cursed in the Blood
• Strong as Death
• The Wandering Arm
• The Devil's Door
• Death Comes as Epiphany
• To Wear the White Cloak

Here be Dragons (Sharon Penman) - Baseborn child of royalty and her importance.
Other Sharon Penman books:

• The Sunne in Splendour
• Falls the Shadow
• The Reckoning
• When Christ and His Saints Slept
• The Queen's Man
• Cruel as the Grave

Katherine (Anya Seton) - non royalty marrying royalty, the objections to or for?

Negative portrayals

Heroines fall in love with the man who raped them:

The Wolf And The Dove (Kathleen Woodiwiss)

Medieval Romance By Arrangement (Madeline Hunter)

Bertrice Small

• Character traits that make a likeable versus unlikable character in historical fiction.
• Expectations of modern readers with regards to feminism in historical fiction. i.e., how much feminism can there be in a time when it didn't exist?
• Ways we don't like women being shown historically.
• Writing is not just read, it is also a creation and implies an interaction with the past.
• Is a preference for reading about noble/royal women and if so, why? Is it because they are better at fitting our expectations for the Middle Ages? Or maybe because they seem more powerful because of their positions and so they fit the views of the modern woman more? Or not?
• Sometimes even professors, who should know better, try to impose values/cultural traits from our modern times, on times past.
• Dreams of the past; i.e., the past the way we want it to be.
• Generalisations ie how realistic is it to say "women" as a group did one thing or another? It isn't very useful to make generalisations about a group which includes both Eleanor of Aquitaine and a cottar's daughter, is it?
• Historical fiction as much more important to the way the general public frames its views of the past than the vast bulk of work produced by historians. Historians don't (mostly) work with the general public, after all, and have all these in-built restrictions (like a higher level of proof and having to cite sources) which tend to make stuff hard-to-read.
• How authors do their research, especially on females who lack the documentation that men do.
• How HF leads to true historical revelations.
• If heroes are the focus for many writers, then what *does* that mean for our perception of women's history?
• An ideal past may not be one that is good for women to live in.
• Uneasy portrayals of women, e.g., The Wolf And The Dove (Kathleen Woodiwiss). Normans and Saxons in immediate post Conquest England. Historical accuracy was dead in the water, the behaviour of the hero and heroine unpalatable to me as I got older. A more recent version of the same (worrying) relationship style is in Madeline Hunter's Medieval Romance By Arrangement - Which authors we think do this well and not so well.
• Women who are too passive are boring, but I've seen numerous reviews criticising novelists for creating heroines who are too modern-seeming.
• " I don't think the hero is much of a hero if he has to rape the heroine. And she usually ends up falling in love with him after that - huh???"
• "Billabong" books gave Australian women images of an Australian past in the same way that Anne of Green Gables does for Canada or Laura Ingalls Wilder for the US (interesting that all three are women writers). They have a girl as main character and every other character is part of her life, one way or another. They show up a lot of our national prejudices in the way certain minorities are treated. While they were not written as historical fiction, that tends to be the way they are read, and by girls aged 8-15, which means they are pretty influential and have been for several generations.
• "I usually choose my novels by the men in them rather than the women!! Female protagonists don't tend to stick in my mind - apart from Alinor in Roberta Gellis' Roselynde Chronicles."
• "We create our own Middle Ages in some ways!" An outline of British history (at least up to Queen Anne's time) as read in historical novels. - How we go about evaluating the historical and/or cultural accuracy of the books.

Sharon Kay Penman's Web Site

On Reshaping History (by Sharon Kay Penman)

Reading Group Guides: The Queen's Man

Reading Group Guides: Cruel as the Grave

Home page of Sharan Newman, Author of the Catherine Levendeur Medieval Mysteries

Historical Fiction or Fictionalized History? Problems for Writers of Historical Novels for Young Adults

Foregrounding Women in History in Children's and Young Adult Books

Images of Women in Historical Young Adult Fiction: Seeking Role Models

Notable/Notorious Women in Historical Fiction

Contemporary Women Fiction Writers

Soon's Historical Fiction Site

The Historical Novel Society

ORB: A List of Fiction for Students of History