Hugh and Bess by Susan Higginbotham

Forced to marry Hugh le Despenser, the son and grandson of disgraced traitors, Bess de Montacute, just 13 years old, is appalled at his less-than-desirable past. Meanwhile, Hugh must give up the woman he really loves in order to marry the reluctant Bess. Far apart in age and haunted by the past, can Hugh and Bess somehow make their marriage work?


Just as walls break down and love begins to grow, the merciless plague endangers all whom the couple holds dear, threatening the life and love they have built.

I've heard much about Susan Higginbotham's books but I had never tried any when this Hugh and Bess attracted my attention. I know that it is not her first book and that the first - The Traitor's Wife - is a sort of prequel to this story but since I already had this one I couldn't resist picking it up.

I did find it a nice, fast read. It is mostly a romance but with a strong historical background that gives you an idea of what was happening in England at the time. Besides the main families here - Montacute and Le Despenser - we see bit of the king, of Joan the Fair Maid of Kent and even of Isabella, the She-Wolf of France. Those parts were interesting and I was sorry not to have more historical detail.

Still, this is a sweet story of two people falling in love after they marry, much against the bride's wishes. How they get to know each other and start trusting each other before they manage to make their marriage work.

After reading this one I got curious about The Traitor's Wife and I have now added it to my WL.

Grade: 4/5

Susan Higginbotham on Why I Love Research

Today we are pleased to welcome back author Susan Higginbotham whose latest book, The Queen of Last Hopes has recently been released.

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When I was in high school and undergraduate school, fighting off saber-toothed tigers on the way to my classes, there were few words that struck more dread in my heart than these: “research paper.” Most often, this meant going to the library to find out what I could about a topic that held no interest for me, checking out the library’s meager holdings on the topic, consulting my trusty World Book encyclopedia, and then cobbling together a paper which consisted chiefly of paraphrased sources and a lame concluding section where I struggled to present my own thoughts on the subject (other than my real thoughts, which generally ran in the direction of “Thank God I’ve almost done with that BS. Now I can listen to my new Jackson Browne LP.”). To add insult to injury, the thing then had to be typed on a typewriter (yes, a typewriter), a production which involved copious amounts of Liquid Paper, onion-skinned paper, and Coca-Cola.

But the world has evolved, and so I have I. Now I love researching my novels—and the deeper I delve, the happier I am.

Why is research so fun? Let me count the ways. First, when a novelist uses primary sources in doing research—such as wills and letters—she can “meet” a character in a way that’s not possible just through reading a biography. In researching my newest novel, The Queen of Last Hopes, I came across William de la Pole’s heartbreaking last letter to his little son, Margaret of Anjou’s starkly simple will, and René of Anjou’s lovely romance, The Book of the Love-Smitten Heart. All of these documents played their part in my conception of my characters.

Research also allows a novelist to separate historical myth from historical fact. In researching The Stolen Crown, my last novel, I found that a number of stories about the Woodville family—for instance, that Katherine Woodville was twice the age of her husband Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham—were myths, unsupported by contemporary sources and often created by modern-day admirers of Richard III. Likewise, in researching The Queen of Last Hopes, I realized that stories about Margaret’s vengeance-crazed nature and sexual promiscuity were largely the product of Yorkist propaganda, brought to dramatic life by Shakespeare and mindlessly recycled by modern novelists. True, it’s disheartening to realize how many myths, half-truths, and assumptions unsupported by fact have collected around historical figures—but it’s also exhilarating to sort out the truth for oneself and to present maligned historical figures in a fresh light.

Doing research can also lead to fascinating surprises. For instance, in a notorious letter, Louis XI demanded that Margaret of Anjou’s dogs—the only possessions she owned that he considered to be of any interest to him—be brought to him. Historians writing in English have reported that this letter was written after Margaret’s death, but when I looked up the letter in the French source in which it appears, I learned that it was dated before Margaret’s death. Similarly, in Googling through French sources, I found a description of Margaret’s funeral and a listing of her goods—relics and cloth—that went to the Church after her death. Only one English historian whom I know of mentions the funeral, and only in passing, while none whom I have found mentions the list of goods. The relics in particular confirmed my belief that Margaret was a religious woman, who may have found comfort in her faith in her last years.

And finally, historical research allows me to buy books about my favorite historical subjects and write them off on my income taxes as business expenses. For a reader, that’s heaven.

So what’s not to love about doing historical research?

Susan's latest book The Queen of Last Hopes was released by Sourcebooks in January 2011. To find out more about this book, about Susan, or her previous books, explore Susan's website, read her blog, find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Stay tuned for our next post which is a review of Hugh and Bess, one of Susan's earlier books!

The Stolen Crown by Susan Higginbotham

As an historical fiction lover, Susan Higginbotham has been on my "to be read" list for a long time. When Danielle at Sourcebooks had The Stolen Crown on offer for review, I couldn't refuse and I'm glad I didn't.

When Katherine Woodville's sister Elizabeth marries King Edward IV, her entire life changes. Life was no longer carefree and simple. Kate is betrothed and married to Harry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham when she was just seven years old and he was nine. They really liked one and other and by the time they were old enough to consummate their marriage, they were deeply in love.

We follow Kate and Harry from childhood through adulthood with their alternating points of view. We get to know a lot of details about both of them and who their friends and foes were. Harry becomes fast friends with Richard, Duke of Gloucester and remains loyal to him for many years. However, when Richard's brother, King Edward dies, he decides he should be king and Harry stick with him. Richard ends up killing some of Kate's family members and others, to make this happen and Kate and Harry's marriage becomes at odd and is deeply tested.

Susan Higginbotham made the War of the Roses come alive. I loved the character of Kate and enjoyed following her through her life. Higginbotham deftly fleshed out all the characters and made them come to life. I felt as if I were there. She kept true to the period and included an Author's Note in the back of the book, where she explained why she took the path she did with the story and what was historically accurate and what she changed. This added to my enjoyment of the book.

As I said above, this was my first time reading Susan Higginbotham, but it certainly won't be my last! Highly recommended to historical fiction lovers and for those who can't get enough of the War of the Roses. Higgbotham's perspective on it is very refreshing.

4/5

Hugh and Bess: A Love Story by Susan Higginbotham

"A delightful novel full of chivalry, romance, and real-life terrors."
Historical Novels Review

Forced to marry Hugh le Despenser, the son and grandson of disgraced traitors, Bess de Montacute, just 13 years old, is appalled at his less-than-desirable past. Meanwhile, Hugh must give up the woman he really loves in order to marry the reluctant Bess. Far apart in age and haunted by the past, can Hugh and Bess somehow make their marriage work?

Just as walls break down and love begins to grow, the merciless plague endangers all whom the couple holds dear, threatening the life and love they have built.

Award-winning author Susan Higginbotham's impeccable research will delight avid historical fiction readers, and her enchanting characters will surely capture every reader's heart. Fans of her first novel, The Traitor's Wife, will be thrilled to find that this story follows the next generation of the Despenser family.

Marg's thoughts:


I am sure that I am not the only reader around who has authors that they have been meaning to read for a while but it just hasn't happened. For me, Susan Higginbotham is one of those authors. I can not tell you how long I had Susan's first book sitting on my nightstand unread, until I finally decided to clear off the nightand and reshelve the pile that was there. The big question for me now is not so much why, because I know that it is because I kept on having other books get in the way, but rather how can I reorganise my reading calendar so that I can now read The Traitor's Wife sooner rather than later?

When young Bess de Montacute finds out she is to be married again, she is not happy. At fourteen she is already a widow, having been married to a young boy who died before they truly began married life. She doesn't want to be a wife again especially to Hugh le Despenser. Not only is he significantly older than her, but he also comes from a line of le Despenser men who have been found to be traitors in the past and therefore his family doesn't have the best name. The current Hugh le Despenser is however loyal through and through to the current king.

It's fair to say that Hugh is also not overly thrilled when the King suggests this match but given how hard he has worked at trying to redeem the family name he decides to go ahead with the betrothal, even though it means giving up the woman that he loves - a woman who would not be a suitable wife for a man of his stature.

Hugh and Bess struggle through their early days of married life, feeling their way through a veritable minefield of emotions, not least of all resentment and loneliness, but over time they come to find a bond of love much stronger than either could have imagined possible.

One of the highlights of this novel for me was the dialogue between the characters, especially between Bess and her friends - relaxed and almost gossipy, but above all dialogue that feels like it would really happy between young girls such as those featured in the book. I found it interesting to contrast the fates of two young girls who had very different experiences of arranged marriages. I was also impressed with the way that Higginbotham chose to end this book. Given the historical facts, it could have been possible to end the book much earlier, and much more abruptly than she did, and I appreciated the extra few pages that sets up a very hopeful ending.

If you want to read accessible historical fiction or perhaps a lovely romantic novel with a historical setting, then this is certainly a book to pick up and enjoy

Now I am off to find out which bookshelf The Traitor's Wife is on.

Thanks to Sourcebooks for sending me a review copy of this book.


Kailana's thoughts:


Fiction or non-fiction? Genre? Historical Fiction.

What led you to pick up this book? Received a review copy, but have been meaning to read this book for a while.

Summarize the plot, but don’t give away the ending! See above...

What did you like most about the book? I think the thing that really struck me about this novel was that even though it was rather short page-wise, I found myself becoming very drawn to the characters. Even though I roughly knew what was going to happen, when it actually happened I felt how I was supposed to about the events as they played out. Susan writes characters that I could easily relate to. I wanted more when the book was done, but obviously she was limited by the facts and could only tell the story that we think actually happened. I really enjoyed the book overall.

What did you like least? I didn't have any major problems with this book. I found it readable and enjoyed the story overall. I think it struck me as young adultish and I wouldn't mind a bit more adult, but considering that the book starts when Bess was rather young it worked for the book. So, really, I don't have anything overly bad to complain about.

Have you read any other books by this author? What did you think of those books? Nope. I plan to read her other book, though. I have owned it for a while, but haven't had a chance to read it.

What did you think of the main character? I really liked Hugh. He had a rough life, but he grew into his character well. Was he perfect? Of course not. He tried to be the best person he could be, though, and I found myself really liking him. Susan wrote him well, too, so that helped. Bess, on the other hand, got on my nerves once in a while. She was okay once she grew up a bit and became more matured, but in the beginning I didn't think I was going to like her. She was acting her age, though, so I suppose it is not really any ones fault. By the end of the book I liked her. I suppose that is the important thing. I really felt for both Hugh and Bess.

What about the ending? The ending is not really anything to do with the author. She was limited to what happened in real life, so what can I complain about. I think that she chose a good time in Bess' life to end it, though. Anymore than that would've been taking away from the overall story. The historical notes helped answer any questions that you might have, but they were not things that she needed to cover in the novel. It was the story of Hugh and Bess, which is what is covered.

I recommend this book! I am determined to read her other book now.

Marg's review originally posted at Reading Adventures as part of the Hugh and Bess blog tour.

Hugh and Bess: A Love Story by Susan Higginbotham

"A delightful novel full of chivalry, romance, and real-life terrors."
Historical Novels Review

Forced to marry Hugh le Despenser, the son and grandson of disgraced traitors, Bess de Montacute, just 13 years old, is appalled at his less-than-desirable past. Meanwhile, Hugh must give up the woman he really loves in order to marry the reluctant Bess. Far apart in age and haunted by the past, can Hugh and Bess somehow make their marriage work?

Just as walls break down and love begins to grow, the merciless plague endangers all whom the couple holds dear, threatening the life and love they have built.

Award-winning author Susan Higginbotham's impeccable research will delight avid historical fiction readers, and her enchanting characters will surely capture every reader's heart. Fans of her first novel, The Traitor's Wife, will be thrilled to find that this story follows the next generation of the Despenser family.

Fiction or non-fiction? Genre? Historical Fiction.

What led you to pick up this book? Received a review copy, but have been meaning to read this book for a while.

Summarize the plot, but don’t give away the ending! See above...

What did you like most about the book? I think the thing that really struck me about this novel was that even though it was rather short page-wise, I found myself becoming very drawn to the characters. Even though I roughly knew what was going to happen, when it actually happened I felt how I was supposed to about the events as they played out. Susan writes characters that I could easily relate to. I wanted more when the book was done, but obviously she was limited by the facts and could only tell the story that we think actually happened. I really enjoyed the book overall.

What did you like least? I didn't have any major problems with this book. I found it readable and enjoyed the story overall. I think it struck me as young adultish and I wouldn't mind a bit more adult, but considering that the book starts when Bess was rather young it worked for the book. So, really, I don't have anything overly bad to complain about.

Have you read any other books by this author? What did you think of those books? Nope. I plan to read her other book, though. I have owned it for a while, but haven't had a chance to read it.

What did you think of the main character? I really liked Hugh. He had a rough life, but he grew into his character well. Was he perfect? Of course not. He tried to be the best person he could be, though, and I found myself really liking him. Susan wrote him well, too, so that helped. Bess, on the other hand, got on my nerves once in a while. She was okay once she grew up a bit and became more matured, but in the beginning I didn't think I was going to like her. She was acting her age, though, so I suppose it is not really any ones fault. By the end of the book I liked her. I suppose that is the important thing. I really felt for both Hugh and Bess.

What about the ending? The ending is not really anything to do with the author. She was limited to what happened in real life, so what can I complain about. I think that she chose a good time in Bess' life to end it, though. Anymore than that would've been taking away from the overall story. The historical notes helped answer any questions that you might have, but they were not things that she needed to cover in the novel. It was the story of Hugh and Bess, which is what is covered.

I recommend this book! I am determined to read her other book now.

My First Jean Plaidy Novel by Susan Higginbotham

When I get interested in a historical figure, I like to read everything I can about him or her, so when I first became interested in Edward II, I promptly began to look for novels about him. The first I happened upon was The Follies of the King by Jean Plaidy.

Amazingly, this was the first time I’d heard of Jean Plaidy, probably because I came to historical fiction relatively late in life. To think of all those mass market Jean Plaidy paperbacks I could have bought in the 1970’s and 1980’s, if only I’d had the gift of foresight! Unfortunately, after I got out of college I tended to read only the classics, which was fine, and contemporary literary fiction, most of which was completely forgettable but which I dutifully read anyway. In fairness, the covers of a lot of Plaidy novels in those days were enough to scare off even non-literary-snobs: generically beautiful women in clinging garments being embraced by ruggedly handsome men against backdrops that often bore no resemblance at all to the contents of the book. If I saw the books at all, I probably dismissed them as historical romance and passed them by.

But with my first Jean Plaidy, The Follies of the King, I was hooked—and I was delighted when I soon learned that this was part of a whole series about the Plantagenets, including figures like Eleanor of Provence who seldom figure into historical fiction. Soon I was cruising for Plaidys on Amazon and e-Bay, and to my delight I found that some of her novels about the Tudors, like The Rose Without a Thorn and The Lady in the Tower, were back in print and that more were on the way.

Why did my first Jean Plaidy lead me to more and more? Plaidy isn’t a showy writer: those who want fireworks and gimmicks and snappy dialogue will be disappointed. Some of her novels indeed feel somewhat rushed; Plaidy, after all, was only one of several pennames used by the very prolific Eleanor Hibbert, and sometimes it’s all too clear that these books, especially some of the earlier Plantagenet ones, were written quickly. No, what I think draws me to Plaidy the most is the sympathy she manages to evoke for all of her characters, even the ones of whom I suspect she doesn’t approve of very much—like the characters in The Follies of the King. You can tolerate a lot from a writer who’s tolerant of her characters. It also helps that Plaidy wrote not only about ubiquitous figures like Anne Boleyn, but about less popular subjects such as the Georgian kings and their families.

Back around 2003, I had one Plaidy novel on my shelf; now I have over forty, from one of the earliest, Beyond the Blue Mountains (which turned up, of all places, in a stack of used books in my mother-in-law’s house), to my favorite Plaidy title, Gay Lord Robert. There are still a number of Plaidy novels I’ve yet to buy and/or read, for although I think fondly of my first Plaidy, I’ll be rather sad when I’ve finally read my last one.

*******

Susan Higginbotham is author of The Traitor's Wife and Hugh and Bess. You can visit Susan's blog at Medieval Woman. Thanks for guest posting for us during Jean Plaidy Season.

Winners!

First of all, we have been very lucky to be awarded the Premio Dardas award by Annie from Reading, Writing and Ranting!



Annie said:

These lovely bloggers run a fantastic historical fiction review blog and work hard to keep it updated. Their reviews are in-depth and fascinating. If you love HF, you have to check it out!

Thanks so much for those lovely words Annie!

Anyway, I know that there are a whole bunch of people who are waiting to hear whether they have won the giveaway of Susan Higginbotham's The Traitor's Wife. Originally we thought that we had two copies of the book to give away, but Susan has generously agreed to give away 4 copies of the book to our lucky winners!

Our question was what eras do you like to read about in historical fiction. Here are our winners, and their answers:

• Okibi-Insanity (Sue) - I love historical books. The Tudor dynasty is of course one of my favorites. I mean who cannot love all those political roller coaster. I also love reading about the medieval times and the times of cleopatra.
• LadyDoc - I can't think of an era I don't like reading about, although the medieval Plantagenets are not my favorites. Maybe a little William & Mary?
• Anne Gilbert - Well, I am currently in the middle of Sharon Penman's The Devil's Brood, which I never thought I'd be reading! It's a fascinating story, and Ms.Penman characterizes all of the participants very, very well. My favorite historical period is medieval, but I'll read about almost any historical period, as long as it's well-written and engaging, and doesn't "mess" too much with what is known(or what I know about it).
• AndreaZ - I am really interested in this era as there are does not seem to be as many books about this era in British history in comparison with the Tudor era. Looking forward to reading this book and thanks for the opportunity to win it!

Winners were chosen using the random number generator from random.org. Winners have five days to send their full postal address through to us. Our email address is historical.tapestry@gmail.com. If anyone has not sent their details to us within the five days we will redraw.

Giveaway: The Traitor's Wife by Susan Higginbotham

Thanks to the very generous Susan Higginbotham, we have two copies of The Traitor's Wife to giveaway.

When Susan guest posted for us last week, she offered up another alternative watching The Tudors, by suggesting that the Plantagenets would be interesting reads. In order to enter the giveaway, we would like you to tell us what other eras/families etc you like to read about, and yes, you can say the Tudors if you like!

Unfortunately, due to high postage costs, this giveaway is restricted to US/Canada addresses. The winner will be chosen randomly from all entries received by Monday 13 April.

Also, stay tuned as we will have another exciting giveaway this week as well.

Whilst we are not officially part of the blog tour that Susan is participating in to celebrate the Sourcebooks release of The Traitor's Wife, we will definitely be reading along as Susan stops by at the following blogs:

6 April Carla Nayland's Blog
7 April A Reader's Respite
7 April Passages to the Past
7 April Reading Extravaganza
7 April S. Krishna's Books
8 April Historical Novels
10 April The Tome Traveller's Weblog
13 April Jennifer's Random Musings
13 April Medieval Bookworm
13 April Steven Till.com
14 April Peeking Between the Pages
14 April A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore
15 and 16 April Savvy Verse & Wit
16 April Sam's Book Blog
17 and 20 April Diary of An Eccentric
17 April My Friend Amy

Guest Post by Susan Higginbotham

1st April is release date for a new edition of The Traitor's Wife by Susan Higginbotham, and to help celebrate we have a guest post from Susan, and also will be hosting a giveaway! Details of the giveaway will be posted on Monday of next week. Thanks Susan, for guest posting for us.


Over here in the United States, another season of “The Tudors” will soon be starting. If the past two seasons are any indication, we’ll see lots of sex, a few beheadings, treachery, and betrayal. Its myriad inaccuracies aside, “The Tudors” is a vastly entertaining show, and I’ll be planted in my wing chair faithfully each week, Boswell the cairn terrier sitting on my lap, watching it.


But in a few weeks, “The Tudors” will have run its course for the year, and you’ll need another source to get your share of human beings at their worst and even at their best. You could always pick up a novel about the Tudors—I suppose you might be able to find one or two if you look hard enough—but might I suggest the Plantagenets? Even more specifically, might I suggest the reign of Edward II? Though he had five fewer wives than Henry—one did quite enough damage—his reign was eventful enough to suit any Tudor fan.


Edward II was very much unlike his mighty, warlike father, Edward I. He wasn’t a coward, a weakling, or a fop—to the contrary, he fought sturdily at Bannockburn and in his father’s wars, and he was an outdoorsman who enjoyed vigorous physical activity such as rowing, swimming, and digging ditches. But he lacked his father’s gift for commanding the respect of his nobles, and one of his most attractive qualities—his unswerving loyalty to those he loved—proved to be his undoing.


There were two great favorites in Edward II’s life: Piers Gaveston and Hugh le Despenser the younger. The men are usually portrayed as being Edward II’s lovers, but at this juncture, we can’t know this for sure. What we do know for certain is that Edward cared for them deeply and showered them with favors, to the immense annoyance of the rest of the nobility—and of Edward’s queen, Isabella.


Thanks to Christopher Marlowe’s famous play Edward the Second, Gaveston has become by far the better known of Edward II’s favorites. Yet it was the lesser known Hugh who in many ways is the more colorful of the two men. It was Hugh—who had a brief and quite successful career as a pirate—whose greed for land and power, fueled by an accommodating king, would bring the reign to its final, tragic crisis.


Hugh also had a wife, Edward II’s favorite niece, Eleanor de Clare. She doesn’t even appear in Marlowe’s play, yet her life was a dramatic one. A lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabella, she was also a sister-in-law of Piers Gaveston. She was twice imprisoned in the Tower of London. She was accused of stealing from the crown. One of the richest women in England, for a time she was penniless, stripped of all of her great estates. In the last few years of her life, two men waged a legal battle in the papal courts as to which one was her husband. She was also an eyewitness to her uncle’s tragic reign and to its aftermath—and it is mostly through her eyes that I chose to tell its story in The Traitor’s Wife. I believe you’ll find it an interesting one.


And you’ll never have to worry about Jonathan Rhys-Meyers showing up in a fat suit.



***Release details***

The Traitor's Wife is being released by Sourcebooks on 1 April. For more details, including details of the follow up to this book, Hugh and Bess, which is being released in August, visit Susan's website.

Susan Higginbotham on Why I Love Writing About Women Whose Husbands Die Horrible Deaths

I’ve written two historical novels set in medieval England and am in the process of writing another one, and all three of my heroines have one thing in common: their husbands die miserably. Each woman then remarries. Fortunately, I’ve never been one to follow the adage, “Write what you know”; otherwise, I’d have a seriously worried spouse on my hands.

So what drew me to these heroines? Not a desire to wallow in misery, for all my heroines, grim as their circumstances are at times, ultimately succeed in making new, fulfilling lives for themselves. Not an innate taste for blood and gore, for as my family can tell you, I’m about as squeamish as a gal can get. No, it’s my liking for strong women.

When some people hear “strong heroine,” they think of the “kick-ass heroine,” or, as Sarah Palin so memorably put it in a different context, “a pit bull with lipstick.” (For medieval times, I suppose, that would be a pit bull with a hennin.) You’ve met her: she can fight better than a man, cuss better than a man, and outwit any man, and by God, she’s drop-dead gorgeous as well. All very well and nice, but she’s not the type of heroine I write about, and she’s not one I care to read about either. No, when I think of a strong heroine, it’s a woman who can face adversity with grace, courage, and even humor.

And my heroines—Eleanor de Clare of The Traitor’s Wife, Elizabeth de Montacute of Hugh and Bess, and Katherine Woodville in my novel in progress, set during the Wars of the Roses, face plenty of adversity. Eleanor and Katherine’s husbands destroy themselves through their own ambition and leave their families disgraced and dispossessed. Eleanor not only is twice imprisoned in the Tower, but faces the imprisonment of her eldest son and the forced veilings of her three young daughters. Katherine loses her father, two of her brothers, and one of her nephews to the axe; two of her other nephews disappear without a trace. (Guess who they are?) Her mother and her sister are accused of witchcraft. Elizabeth de Montacute’s happy, comfortable world crashes around her when the Black Death pays its first visit to England.

How did these women—and all the others like them who saw their lives shattered by war, rebellion, and disease—cope with these tragedies? Medieval England did not have support groups, grief counselors, or psychotherapists. These women had to go on with their lives under circumstances that would paralyze many a modern, “liberated” woman. In many cases, it was religious faith that pulled such women through their difficulties and gave them the courage to face the next day. In others, it was probably determination, pride, a sense of duty, or sheer cussedness. Whatever type of strength got them through, it did, and I admire and stand in awe of them.

Moving centuries ahead, there’s a passage in one book in particular that to me embodies the essence of a strong heroine. Katie, the mother in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is far from being perfect. She has a fractious relationship with her daughter, Francie, the heroine, and she’s brusque, stubborn, and not always likable. Normally sensible and practical, she makes one great mistake in life: she rushes into marriage with Johnny, a charming and handsome young man who turns out to be a hopeless alcoholic, leaving Katie as the family’s chief breadwinner and authority figure. But she—like her mother, her sisters, and her daughter Francie—is up to the task. As the narrator tells us:

Those were the Rommely women: Mary, the mother, Evy, Sissy, and Katie, her daughters, and Francie, who would grow up to be a Rommely woman even though her name was Nolan. They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices.

But they were made out of thin invisible steel.

If that doesn’t define a strong heroine, I don’t know what does. And that is the type of woman whose story I want to read—and write about—in all of its incarnations over the centuries.

Susan Higginbotham is the author of The Traitor's Wife and Hugh and Bess, and she blogs at Reading, Raving and Writing by a Historical Fiction Writer. Her first book, The Traitor's Wife is due to be rereleased by Sourcebooks on 1 April, and is available for preorder.

Author Interview: Susan Higginbotham

We are very excited to have an interview with Susan Higginbotham here. Susan's book, The Traitor's Wife, won the silver award for historical fiction in ForeWord Magazine's 2005 Book of the Year Awards, and she has an Amazon short available to those in the US called The Justiciar's Wife.

Susan is also a very active blogger, with four blogs on the go! She is part of a group of historical fiction authors who blog at Yesterday Revisited, and then she also blogs at Plenty About Plaidy (about Jean Plaidy), about Richard III at Unromantic Richard III and then there is her personal blog.




What attracted you to write about the particular characters or period of history featured in your book?


I had read Christopher Marlowe's play Edward the Second years ago in graduate school and had liked it well enough, but one day while surfing the Internet, I ran across an online version of the play and re-read it in one sitting. I became fascinated by the historical background to the story and started researching it. As my research became more in depth, I learned about Eleanor de Clare, Edward II's favorite niece and the wife of his very powerful and very hated favorite, Hugh le Despenser. Soon I was looking for everything I could find out about her, and as I did, I realized that her story was made for a novel. So I wrote it.

If you had to change from writing HF, what genre would you like to give a go?

Probably popular history. There are so many great stories out there that are waiting to be told, one way or another.

Are you working on another book now? Will you continue to write about this same period/character or a different period?

I'm working on a novel featuring Eleanor's oldest son, Hugh, and his wife. It's rather different from The Traitor's Wife, though—it focuses more on the love story between the two main characters than on the historical events of the time, since Hugh, very wisely in light of his family history, served his king on the battlefield rather than as a courtier. The Hundred Years War and the Black Death, however, do play an important role in the story. After that, I've been pondering the idea of a novel set during the Wars of the Roses. I've read so many historical novels where Richard III is a virtual saint, I'd love to write one where he isn't the good guy for a change--or at least where he isn't so romanticized.

How did you get into writing?

I've been writing since I was a small girl, beginning with stories about my kitty cats and never stopping except for a hiatus when I was in law school.

What comes first, the story idea or the characters?

The characters, for me—I find someone who intrigues me and who I want to write more about. Since I prefer to write about historical figures, the plot is pretty much ready-made, with just some gaps to be filled in.

What is the one thing that you couldn't live without while you were writing and why?

My computer. I can no longer write in longhand—it's as if my whole brain shuts down when I try.

Every review I have read is really positive about your book. How hard is it to drum up excitement and sales? How has self publishing benefited you and how has it hindered?

It's been a challenge! Since I knew that most of my sales would have to come from the Internet, one thing I did was to build a website that had a lot of historical information in it, one that would draw in people interested in fourteenth-century England. And Amazon, fortunately, has a lot of free features that help with marketing--Search Inside the book, Amazon lists, etc.

There's a misconception, one that's regularly repeated online, that people who self-publish do so only to see their name in print and to hold a printed book in their hands. That's nonsense. We self-publish for precisely the same reason that other authors publish--to get readers. Self-publishing got me readers where otherwise my manuscript might still be sitting in some agent's or publisher's slush pile, and I've been pleased with the results so far. There have been negatives, of course--most brick-and-mortar bookstores won't handle self-published books, and there are always going to be people who refuse to even look inside a self-published book because they "know" it's going to be bad--but they're outweighed by the knowledge that people are reading the book and enjoying it. So to you folks who have taken or will take a chance on a self-published book by an unknown author, thank you!

Will you go the self published route for your next book?

Probably, yes, because it's a little short for a straight historical novel. (I thought of changing the focus to add some word count, but wasn't happy with the direction in which that would have taken it.) Or I may just sell it in installments on Amazon Shorts. I think with the third novel I may try to go the traditional route, though.

And thank you, ladies, for the opportunity to appear here!