I’d been meaning to visit the former home of the Brontë sisters in Haworth ever since I got the germ of an idea for an alternative version of Jane Eyre. Last Monday, two years after that initial impetus, I finally made it. I’d been as a child, on a family visit inspired by my mother’s…
Marked on 22 April each year, Earth Day is a reminder to celebrate the natural environment and to pat ourselves on the back for our efforts to protect it. Alongside the usual recycling, composting and picking up other people’s litter, I spent it admiring the early blooms in our garden wildflower meadows and the newts…
Alongside the humour in my novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, Matty’s story tugs at the heartstrings. But readers differ in what they find particularly poignant. One early reader told me, I was all right until I got to the nuns. The most tragic part for me came when I was researching ballroom dancing for…
My previous post was about the female friendship at the heart of my novella, Stolen Summers. This is about my character Matilda’s short-lived friendship with a male patient and the surprising discovery I made when I was researching his background. I made Eustace a Black World War I veteran, partly to do my small bit…
I came across the name Anne Lister as I was researching my novel-in-progress, a subversive retelling of Jane Eyre. Born in 1791, Anne Lister was a pioneering Yorkshire landowner, businesswoman, traveller and mountaineer. She was also a secret diarist commonly considered the first modern lesbian, unkindly nicknamed Gentleman Jack. Although her sexuality, and her independent…
Women in nineteenth-century novels spend a lot of time sewing. They might comment on their embroidery or the shirt they are making or, like the orphaned narrator of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, lament the bluntness of the needles, but I’ve never come across a character marvelling at the feat of engineering that pulls the thread…
